Preparation:

• Extract fresh orange juice and keep aside. Instead of orange juice, you can use fresh apple juice or grape juice for soaking the nuts and fruits.
• Chop cashews and almonds into small pieces. You can use walnuts and pista pieces also.
• For fruits and dry fruits, I used glazed cherries, dates, black dry grapes, yellow dry grapes, and tutty-fruity.

Recipe to make Eggless Christmas fruit cake without alcohol:

How to soak nuts and dry fruits:

• In a bowl, take orange juice, lemon juice and add all chopped nuts and dry fruits.
• Leave for soaking. I left them soaked for a day in the refrigerator. If you are in a hurry you can skip the soaking part and proceed with just mixing and baking. But soaking the nuts and fruits in juice gives a nice taste and texture to the Christmas cake. You can soak for just an hour.

How to make caramel sauce:

• Keep a pan on the stove, add brown sugar with a tbsp of water and let it dissolve in low heat.
• Stir continuously for few minutes until sugar dissolves completely. Do not let the liquid to become sticky syrup. Just dissolve the sugar and switch off the stove immediately.
• Add fresh milk cream and mix with the sugar water.

Cake batter:

• Transfer the contents to a bowl, add melted butter, oil and mix well.
• Now add the soaked ingredients along with the juice.
• Sieve flour into a large mixing bowl, add baking salt, baking powder, salt.
• Also, I added a tsp of coco powder along with a pinch of cinnamon powder.
• Gradually add the wet ingredients along with the soaked nuts & fruits into the flour bowl.
• Combine wet and dry ingredients to make a thick cake batter. Actually, my cake batter became little more watery because of more liquid. Hence I got moist and dense fruit cake. If you like light fluffy cake, reduce the liquid quantity, use either oil or butter.
• Use a spatula and mix the batter gently.
• Grease a cake tin or line the baking tin with a parchment paper.
• Preheat the oven to 160°C.
• Pour the cake batter into greased bake tin, bake the plum cake for 50mins to 1 hour.
• Check the finished stage by inserting a tooth pick.
• After completion, take out from the oven, let the cake cool down for 30minutes.
• You may get dark brown crust or slightly burnt top dome. But do not worry, just let the cake to bake fully until the middle portion of the cake is cooked well.
• Do not be on a hurry to stop baking when you see darkened crust. If the top layer is darkened, just slice it out. I Sliced off the browned crust of my cake but forgot to take the picture.
• You can see the perfectly cooked middle portion and the slice of dense fruit cake.