Rich, dark and toothsome, plum cakes are the flavour of Christmas in most homes in Kerala. Delectable symbols of nostalgia, fruit cakes being baked at home by busy mothers and grandmothers usher in the season of festivities. Today, on Christmas Day no dining table would be complete without that luscious, plump cake flush with raisins, nuts, candied fruits and spices.
It was no different in Sheela Tomy’s home in rural Pala in Kottayam district. Sheela depended on her mom’s hand-me-down recipe to make her fruit cake, which was given to friends and members of her extended family. The feedback was ecstatic and gradually Sheela began baking more. Fifteen years ago, she started selling it to some of her neighbours and friends who wanted more of her plum cake.
This year, the number crossed 2,000. “It is homemade. That must be the reason for its popularity. Fruits and nuts sourced from farms are soaked in wine, fruit juice or spirits six months before I begin baking the cakes. But there is no secret ingredient,” she says modestly. Although she sells her plum cakes mostly to her relatives and friends in Kerala, many of them make their way to places outside and inside India.
“These plum cakes are made only during Christmas and it is a must in almost all Catholic homes in Kerala,” Sheela adds.
Yes, bake houses and pastry shops sell plum cakes all the year around. But come December, almost every bake house in town stop making mundane stuff like bread and puffs. For nearly a week or more, it is cakes, cakes and more cakes with the fruit cakes getting a plum place on the counters.
“We also make Yuletide logs, fresh cream cakes and soft cakes too but during Christmas the plum cakes sell like, well, hot cakes! We have corporates and regular clients who order our cakes every year,” says executive chef Jose, Vivanta by Taj, Thycaud.
Corporates decide that their well-wishers and clients must eat cake. Wine-infused or rum-soaked rich cakes are the ones that seem to spread the Christmas cheer the best. Villa Maya has both the traditional plum cake and the plum pudding as well. “The pudding and the cake have the same ingredients. But the pudding is steamed while the cake is baked. The cake will stay fresh for nearly a year,” says Shashi Jacob, vice-president, Food and Beverages Muthoot Skychef and Villa Maya.
Each baker, professional or amateur, has his or her own recipe for the cake and swear by the efficacy of the recipe, usually one that has been handed down in the family. Thrissur-based Rekha Jacob still depends on her aunt’s handwritten recipe book to make the plum cake for Christmas. She makes different kinds of plum cakes with slight variations in the ingredients. But she vouches that nothing can beat the original recipe.
Bloggers writing about the typical dense fruit cake wax eloquent about how the aroma and taste of fruit cake transport them to the Christmases of their childhood. Slice of nostalgia indeed!
What's in a plum
Strangely, there is no plum in the plum cake. A search on the Internet revealed some nuggets of information that seemed to suggest that two centuries ago, plum may have referred to raisins and prunes as well. As the years rolled by, prunes came to be replaced by raisins but the name of the cake remained as ‘plum cake’.
