Miniature Dundee Cakes: With Optional Chocolate Chips
Light fruit cakes made even more delicious with a wee dram of Scottish whisky and fresh orange juice. This recipe for miniature versions of Dundee cakes have a wonderful texture and are a complete delight. Make a batch to give away as Christmas gifts. Your neighbours, friends and family will be delighted.
Getting a Christmas hamper of goodies together has been my task this month. Among the components I wanted to include were some miniature Christmas cakes.
Miniature Dundee Cakes
On browsing the wonderful blog Lavender and Lovage one day, I was inspired by Karen’s recipe for Wee Whisky Doused Hogmanay Dundee Cakes. Well mine are even weeer. I used a different method and some different ingredients – like chocolate 😉
When it comes to soaking dried fruit, our storage heater really comes into its own. I can place a large bowl directly on the top and the heat really helps the fruit to soak up all that delicious orange and whisky in a relatively short time. For this recipe, I only needed to soak the fruit for a couple of hours.
However, if you don’t have something similar and don’t want to turn the oven on, you can soak the fruit overnight instead.
I added a couple of teaspoons of orange syrup which I had leftover from making candied peel, but this isn’t at all necessary.
I was expecting good things from these miniature Dundee cakes and I wasn’t disappointed. These little cakes are nothing like a traditional Christmas cake, but they are festive. They’re only lightly studded with fruit, so that even CT finds them delicious. They’re beautifully moist from the orange juice, whisky and ground almonds and they taste phenomenal.
Miniature Dundee Cakes As Gifts
All I needed to do was wrap up the cakes and present in gift form. To do this you’ll need bags, tags and ties.
I’ve bought some nice Christmassy ribbon to border the edges when the time comes for presenting them. See if you can guess which one it will be?
Well I won’t leave you guessing for long. Here are some of the finished miniature Dundee cakes all wrapped up and ready to roll.
Other Fruit Cakes You Might Like
- Chocolate ale fruit cake
- Cornish hevva cake
- Earl Grey fruit cake with orange icing
- Rock cakes
- Simnel cake
- Vinegar cake: an egg-free fruit cake
Keep in Touch
Thank you for visiting Tin and Thyme. If you make these miniature Dundee cakes, I’d love to hear about it in the comments below. Do you have any recommendations or advice for making fruit cakes?
Please rate the recipe. If you post pictures of your creations on social media, use the hashtag #tinandthyme so I can see them.
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If you’d like more recipes for small cakes, follow the link and you’ll find I have quite a lot of them. All delicious and nutritious, of course.
Choclette x
Miniature Dundee Cakes: With Optional Chocolate Chips
Ingredients
- 300 g dried fruit (I used mostly vine fruit, but a few chopped dates, pineapple, papaya and cranberries)
- 1 orange zest and juice
- 50 ml whisky
- 100 g unsalted butter softened
- 100 g light brown sugar (I used muscovad)
- 2 medium eggs
- 150 g self-raising flour (self-rising flour)
- 50 g wholemeal spelt flour
- ¼ tsp bicarbonate of soda (baking soda)
- 25 g ground almonds
- 50 g dark chocolate optional (I used Green & Black’s 70%)
- 72 blanched almonds
Instructions
- Place the dried fruit in a large bowl.300 g dried fruit
- Add the grated orange zest along with the juice – the juicier the orange the better. Then stir in the whisky.1 orange, 50 ml whisky
- Cover the bowl and place in a low oven for a couple of hours or just leave it out at room temperature overnight.
- Cream the butter and sugar together until pale in colour and light in texture.100 g unsalted butter, 100 g light brown sugar
- Beat in the eggs.2 medium eggs
- Sieve in the flours and bicarbonate of soda, then stir together with the ground almonds until just mixed.150 g self-raising flour (self-rising flour), 50 g wholemeal spelt flour, ¼ tsp bicarbonate of soda (baking soda), 25 g ground almonds
- Add the chocolate, if using and the fruit mixture.50 g dark chocolate
- Mix well and spoon into two buttered six hole muffin moulds.
- Lightly press 6 almonds onto the tops of each one.72 blanched almonds
- Bake for 35 minutes in a preheated oven at 150℃ (130℃ fan, 300℉, Gas 2).
- Leave to cool for half an hour then turn out onto a wire rack to cool completely.
- Wrap them in greaseproof paper and pack them away in a tin or other airtight container.
Johanna – annoyingly, I haven’t tried one of these, but I’ve had very good feedback.
these sound great – having just tried chopped chocolate in fruit cake – I am sold on the ideas and love the look of these little individual ones
Dom – three per person per hour perhaps?
Katie – thank you. Like the idea of baked bean tins, except lining them must be a bit fiddly. Agree, mini things are very cute.
Jude – I’m impressed with all these blue peter baking tins. Trouble with using muffin moulds is that the sides weren’t straight so it was difficult getting the ribbon around.
JW – he he 😉
Kate – thank you. Three recipients got hampers of Choc Log Blog goodies on Friday – I was quite envious!
CaySera – thank you for your kind comments and for following.
Baking Addict – hang on to those ribbons for next year’s hampers and make sure you put some of your hot choc pops in there 😉
Janice – what an ignoramous am I? Sorry about that, I changed it as soon as you pointed it out.
Laura – thank you. The snowflake ribbon looked really good when wrapped around the cakes.
Jill – thank you. I’m sure I will and hope the same is true for you.
Karen – three of my hamper gifts were inspired by your blog posts. You have such lovely ideas.
Little Loaf – thank you. Am not so much restrained as still haven’t worked out who I’m giving what to!
Solange – thank you. Mini sized are especially fun.
Oh lovely, give me anything minature these days and I will love it:)
You are so restrained – I can’t believe you haven’t tried them yet! I’d be very happy to receive one of these as a gift – they’re gorgeous.
OH wonderful! My mum, whose recipe the original one was, will be chuffed to wee whisky doused cakes! LOVELY cakes Choclette and I am so pleased that my post gave you inspiration….I love them! They will make great gifts.
Karen
XX
Love these so much as wee versions and gift wrapped is just the perfect Christmas treat. Beauties! Have a wonderful Christmas time.
I would be over the moon to get hamper full of your delicious treats and these little cakes are quite something. I did like the snowflake ribbon too 🙂 x
Wow these look delicious and with chocolate! Just one thing…I’m going to be a wee bit pedantic but ‘whiskey’ is Irish and ‘whisky’ is how we Scots spell the water of life. Okay will stop now and imagine the smell of your gorgeous cakies.
These look amazing. I love the idea of a homemade hamper. Think I’ll make that next year as have run out of time this year. I have the same white ribbon with the sparkly snowflakes!! I’ve got the red, gold and green one too! I seem to have a whole boxful of ribbons 🙂
first time here……that looks yummy ….thanks for sharing. very interesting blog.
Such a lovely, lovely gift to receive…especially in a gorgeous hamper full of Chocolate Log Blog goodies!!
I love wee things and these wee cakes look fantastic. The blanched almonds are seem to have a hypnotic effect on my stomach 😉
Lovely, I made mini ones as well, like Katie in baked bin tins. Don’t they make wonderful presents.
These look adorable and perfect for going into a hamper. I love how chocolate even finds its way into your Christmas cakes 🙂
I’ve made mini ones in the past in baked bean cans, mini things are always so cute
They are so adorable. I love how small they are. So thats what three per person?