What is the black Christmas cake in the Caribbean?
Caribbean Black Cake (or Christmas Cake) is a rich, dense, and moist fruitcake deeply rooted in West Indian tradition, often served during Christmas and weddings. It is made by blending dried fruits (raisins, prunes, currants) soaked in rum and wine for weeks, mixed into a batter, and colored with burnt sugar or browning.
Black cake (also known as Christmas cake or rum cake) is essentially a fruit cake made with dried fruit soaked in spirits, but it's nothing like the firm, bread-like loaves you may be familiar with. Because the rehydrated fruit is puréed before stirring into the batter, the result is a rich, incredibly moist cake.
The result looks deceptively like chocolate cake. But taste is way different – imagine a rich, dense ginger-spice cake with lots of fruity raisin bits. “Come Christmas time, this is what everyone in the islands loves. It's tradition,” says Velma Baker behind the counter.
The black cake is the family's emblem and most treasured delicacy. It symbolizes their various backgrounds, identities, and who they are rooted as a family moving forward.
Though the characters in Black Cake are fiction, the author, Charmaine Wilkerson was inspired by her own upbringing in Jamaica, and traditions such as making black cake with her family.
Christmas Fruit Cake, Black Cake, Rum Cake, Super Moist & Delicious!
Is the book of Negroes a real document?
The original Book of Negroes has been digitized and can be viewed online on the Nova Scotia Archives website at African Nova Scotians: in the Age of Slavery and Abolition. A full transcription of the Book of Negroes is presented on the Black Loyalists: Our History, Our People website.
Banned by the South African Government during the Apartheid era because of the word 'Black' in the title. Banned in the Hunan province of China in the 1930s for portraying animals as acting on the same level as humans. Banned in Nazi Germany for portraying the German military forces in a bad light.
Black cake has its roots in British plum pudding, a dense, steamed holiday dessert made with dried fruits, spices, and alcohol. When European colonizers brought their traditions to the Caribbean, enslaved Africans and local communities adapted those recipes using local ingredients and island spirits.
Many prefer to buy the cake from an experienced baker, rather than make it themselves, as the ingredients required — currants, raisins, candied cherries, citron and prunes soaked in rum, cherry wine or brandy — can be costly.
A rum cake or black cake is a type of dessert cake which contains rum. In most of the Caribbean, rum cakes are a traditional holiday season dessert, descended from the holiday puddings (such as figgy pudding).
Black cake, also known as Caribbean fruit cake or rum cake, is a rich, decadent dessert traditionally made for holidays, weddings, and special occasions in the Caribbean. It is made by soaking dried fruits like raisins, currants, and prunes in rum and sometimes wine for several days or even weeks.
Churchill's fruit cake. This cake was one of Winston Churchill's favourites. It was baked by his longstanding cook, Georgina Landemare, who catered for him during the Second World War at Downing Street and then at his family home, Chartwell in Kent.
What is the difference between black cake and fruitcake?
Jamaican fruitcake, also known as black cake, is deep, dark, and rich, thanks to an abundance of rum-soaked fruits and molasses. Unlike American fruitcake, which is often known for its bright candied fruits, this cake is nearly black in color and packed with bold, boozy flavor.
Sweet T's Jamaican Black Cakes are not only delicious they are also healthy for you too. All of these natural ingredients have been use from hundreds of years ago to make the original plum pudding. The Benefits of consuming these ingredients are still important and maybe even more so today.
CAKE FACTS: One of the world's most expensive cakes ever made was a whopping $75 million, sold to a secret buyer in the UAE. Only the finest ingredients were used and the cake depicted a fashion runway, lined with nothing other than diamonds (over 4000 of them!).
This is a cake recipe that can be made in bulk, and black cake can keep for up to three months if you give it a generous “feed” of rum after it has been baked (although I've never tested the theory as it tends to get eaten—or it leaves the kitchen in doggy bags—in a week or so in my house).
These days, it's becoming more common to see recipes use dessert wine for this infusion rather than spirits. Manischewitz grape wine or a red dessert wine may change the flavor slightly, but they impart a delicious sweetness to the cake while leaving its essence intact.
The story is narrated in the first person as an autobiographical memoir told by the titular horse named Black Beauty—beginning with his carefree days as a foal on an English farm with his mother, known as Duchess, to his difficult life pulling cabs in London, to his happy retirement in the country.
