The best thing about ‘all in one’ recipes is that they are fault – prove. You would really need to try hard to get this type of cake wrong! It’s handy that you only need just one bowl for mixing, and there is no need to faff around with mixer or other specialist baking equipment. All you need to do is to gradually add all the ingredients, mix it well as you go, stick it in a tin and bake!

My marmalade fruit cake is precisely this kind of simple recipe. It’s also delicious and moist cake with just the right amount of fruit in it.

I have to say, I’m not a great fan of traditional fruit cakes. They are way too sweet and sticky for my liking, but this cake is something completely different. The twist comes in a form of adding Seville Orange Marmalade and cinnamon spice and drastically reducing the amount of dry fruit in the cake (like from 350g to 100g).

Marmalade Making Resources & Recipes

I also like that you can also make variations of this cake. Depending on what type of sugar you use, you will end up with a slightly different cake. The darker the sugar is, the deeper the flavour is going to be (and the cake will be also slightly darker in colour).

In the past, I’ve tried to replace the butter with other fats (like a spreadable butter or margarine), but to be honest, it’s not worth it! Butter is butter, and you can’t replace the flavour! If you don’t have unsalted butter, just use salted butter, but don’t add the pinch of salt into your cake mix.

I’ve used plain flour with baking powder, but if you only have self-raising flour, it’s O.K to use that too. Use the same amount of self-raising flour as the plain flour in the recipe, but leave out the baking powder.

As for the milk, you can use pretty much anything you have at hand. I tend to use semi-skimmed milk, but you can use dairy-free milk or full-fat, it really doesn’t matter much. The flavour of the other ingredients will overpower the taste of the milk (if you are, for example, using soya milk). The milk is there just as a binding ingredient.

I usually make my own Seville Orange Marmalade and then use it in my cake, but you can, of course, use shop-bought one. One of the reasons why I started to bake this recipe, is because I had copious amounts of marmalade and I was looking for a recipe that would use marmalade as one of the ingredients. Every time I bake this marmalade fruit cake I tend to add more marmalade in it to see how far I can take it, but I’ve noticed that I need to adjust the other wet ingredients to make sure that the recipe is not too wet and ends up underbaked.

Anyway, I hope you’ll enjoy baking this simple marmalade fruit cake recipe and as ever do let me know how you get on in the comments below.

Happy Baking!

Magdalena