Spice cake

6. December

There is nothing like the smell of Christmas spices filling up you house to really make it feel like Christmas.
This recipe might seem to have a lot of spices in it, and if you don't have all of them in your cupboard, you should just use a bit more of the ones you have, cooking is all about experimenting and having fun with it, and as long as you use cinnamon in the spice blend you should get a good result.
If you wanted a Rum free cake, you can also just replace the rum with water or orange juice.

100g raisins
75ml Rum
200g sugar
2 eggs
150g dairy free margarine (like Pure's sunflower)
250g plain white flour
zest of one Orange
100ml Orange juice
2 teaspoons ground Cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground Ginger
1 teaspoon ground All Spice
½ teaspoon ground Cardamom
½ teaspoon ground Cloves
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

Preheat the oven to 175°C

In a small pan, heat up the raisins and rum to boiling point, cover and set aside for about ½-1 hour.
Whisk together eggs, margarine and sugar for a few minutes until you get a fluffy texture, mix in orange zest. Don't worry if it curdle, it is almost impossible for it not to when using margarine, and it will still turn out good.
Mix all the dry ingredients together and sift it to make sure you don't get any lumps in the batter.
Add half of the dry ingredients to the bowl with wet ingredients and stir together, add ½ of the orange juice and mix, the rest of the dry ingredients and mix and at the end the last of the orange juice and mix until it has all come together to a thick creamy batter.
Strain the raisins for the excess rum and fold the raisins into the batter.

Bake for 50-60 minutes.

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