Cranberry Raisin Cake

I told my friend Beth I would watch her kids this afternoon (my kids love her kids) so that she could pack for her family trip to the Outter Banks. I was more than happy to offer to do so. Suddenly I panicked that I had nothing for the kids to snack on. Her son is highly allergic to peanuts and I was terrified of serving anything potentially dangerous, anything that might contain traces of peanuts -- heck, even anything that might contain traces of traces of peanuts. I thought the best thing to do was to bake something from scratch so that I could have control over all of the ingredients.

I wanted to bake my Blueberry Cake but had neither the blueberries nor the orange juice that the recipe called for. I decided to improvise. I found some raisins and some cranberries. I substituted the orange juice for milk and added a bit more. The result was incredible. So much so that I have less than a quarter of the cake left! I gave a slice to Don, and after his first bite he said "Go get a camera. You need to put this on your blog!" And so here it is.

Ingredients:

3 Cups of all purpose flour
slightly less than 2 cups of sugar, plus
*5 Tbs of sugar mixed with
1 Tbs of ground cinnamon
1 cup of salad oil
1/3 cup of low fat milk
4 eggs
3 tsp vanilla
3 tsp baking powder
3/4 cup of dried cranberries (Use 1 + cup of fresh cranberries if you can!)
1 cup of raisins

-- Place all ingredients in a bowl except the ground cinnamon and sugar mixture, put those in a small bowl separately.

-- Mix all the mixing bowl ingredients together until all is well blended.

-- Grease a bundt pan well with butter and flour or Pam

-- in the small bowl mix the Cinnamon sugar mixture

-- pour batter by large spoonfuls (creating at least 2 layers) with the batter

-- in between each layer spoon generous amounts of Cinnamon sugar mixture, covering the layer completely.

-- spoon in remaining batter and repeat (as necessary) with the Cinnamon sugar to create Cinnamon swirls.


-- Cook in a preheated oven for 1.5 hours

-- Let pan cool completely before trying to remove cake. (Otherwise it will crack and split. It will still be delicious but not as beautiful!)

I have a silicone bundt pan that I adore. This cake comes out beautifully in it. And removing the silicone bundt pan is much easier than removing a regular bundt pan from a cake!