Happy 2011 !

Happy New Year everyone ! This is a dried fruit cake I made for New Year's dinner. It's called a Zelten and it comes from the Trentino region of Italy. It is rich and wintery, but not too sweet and still very fluffy. The story is that a couple of friends had brought dried fruits as gifts to monday night dinners and so I went looking for a way to turn them into a cake. This recipe I found on the Giallo Zafferano web site, an often very useful italian cooking site. I modified/simplified a bit maybe since I did not put nuts inside or raisins, I just used dried figs and apricots, didn't have rum to soak them in so used a bit of leftover brandy from the fish filling of the ravioli (see below) and some very nice moscato wine. I have the feeling that this is a pretty flexible recipe that will tolerate many vairations.