I decided to try something different one Christmas and forego my standard fruit cake recipe and develop my own recipe for a 'Tropical' fruit cake. I spent a fortune on dried fruit (apricots, pineapple, mango and papaya) and macadamia nuts. I chopped all the fruit and soaked it in rum for a couple of hours then made a "white' batter using light syrup and fruit juice and a bit of cinnamon instead of the heavy molasses batter I made for my usual fruitcakes. The batter tasted wonderful! I put it in a slow oven to bake and set a timer to remind me to check it. Or, at least I thought I did! Later that evening we got back from dinner at a friends house and as soon as we walked in the house I could smell my cakes. Amazingly, after having spent eight hours in the oven, they weren't burnt black but they were literally as hard as bricks. From that point on I decided to stick with tradition and went back to my usual recipe. That was over 30 years ago and my husband and I still laugh about it.

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