Black cake is not baked so much as assembled over months. The fruit goes into rum and port and sits there, in a jar at the back of a cupboard, soaking and darkening, sometimes from one Christmas nearly to the next. By the time it meets flour it is barely fruit any more. It is something denser and slower, halfway to the cake it is about to become. The waiting is the recipe.
Ebang Treats makes one this way on St. Kitts. The fruit, currants, prunes, glacé cherries, raisins, and citrus peel, soaks for months in dark Kittitian rum and port before any of it sees the oven. The crumb comes out dense, dark, and damp the way a proper black cake should be, and a thin rum-and-sugar wash over the top keeps it for weeks. A slice is less a dessert than a long afternoon.
The cake belongs to a particular time of year. At Sugar Mas there is black cake on every table, the way there is sorrel in every glass, and for the families who left, it is one of the things the federation means when it means home. That is the difficulty with a Christmas cake, though. The people who most want it in December are the ones furthest from the kitchen that makes it.
Which is where the tin earns its place. Ebang builds its sweets for the carry-on rather than the supermarket shelf, and a 4oz tin of black cake is the rare festival food that survives a transatlantic flight without surrendering anything. It travels in checked luggage or it posts to Brooklyn or Birmingham, and what comes out the other end is the same dense, rum-dark crumb that left Basseterre.
The same kitchen makes the rest of the sweet table. Fudge, the old way, brown sugar and condensed milk and butter beaten by hand until it loses its shine and turns soft. Guava cheese set from pink Kittitian guava and cane sugar, firm enough to slice for a cheese board or a breakfast bread. None of it is complicated. All of it is the kind of thing a grandmother made and a tin can now carry across an ocean for you.
The cake contains alcohol, which is the other reason it keeps, and which makes it an adult gift. Pour Old Road Rum Cream over a slice if you want to finish the thought the way the island does.
Shop this story: Ebang Fruit Cake Gift Tin · Ebang Fudge Tin · Ebang Guava Cheese
Pair with: Old Road Rum Cream