From Colonial Kitchens to Kerala Plantations: The story of India’s first Christmas cake

In 1880s Kerala, a plum cake baked for a homesick British planter is said to have been India’s first.

With exposure to European culture and the advantage of home-grown spices, Plantation families took European plum cake recipes and Indianised them using locally available ingredients “Women baked at home, learning through butlers, social clubs, and European missionaries,” says Deepa Gopalakrishnan, assistant professor of history and author of Kerala Bhakshana Charithram - Food History Of Kerala.

This fusion of European technique and plantation produce eventually shaped Kerala’s signature Christmas fruit cake.

“When we came home from our hostel for the Christmas holidays, we would wake up to the scent of baking from my mother’s kitchen,” says the 65-year-old Nimmy Paul. She went on to start one of the plantation community’s first home-baking enterprises for Christmas plum cakes, starting in 1991 with 100 kilos using her mother’s recipe, sourced from the Rotary Club, where her father was an active member. “Rotary clubs then had British managers, so magazines were easy to find, and my mother kept paper cuttings of the recipes in it,” she recalls. Nimmy baked the old-world way, eventually stopping the sales in 2001 after reaching 1,001 kilos.

At Kallivayalil Bakes, Sheela Tomy has been running her home-based Christmas cake venture for 20 years, using a recipe blended from her mother’s and mother-in-law’s. What began as 30 cakes for a relative in Chennai has grown into 3,500 this year, with the recipe evolving as new ingredients became accessible and better tools helped meet rising demand. Though the 70-year-old doesn’t know how the family first got the recipe, she says that in Pala and Kanjirappally, strongholds of Kerala’s plantation communities, “every family used to bake back then. It was just the norm.”

As the younger generation left the plantations for better education and a more connected life, the baking culture began to fade, observes Nimmy. “But I think it’s reversing now,” she adds.

The revival Nimmy speaks of is already taking shape. Fifth-generation planter Mathew Vallikkapan and his wife Silu Joseph are debuting their family Christmas cake this year as a limited-edition batch of 300 Planter’s Fruit Cakes, baked at Taranaki, the in-house bakery at their homestay, Vanilla County at Vagamon.

The recipe, once his grandmother Chinnamma Dominic’s pride, can be traced back to her aunt, a nun who learned it from European missionaries. “In my childhood, the moment the cake cooled, it went straight into the palahara petti (the wooden snack box) and the keys stayed with the women in the family,” he recalls. “They opened it only for Christmas, which made it feel like a special treat.” Though this is his first commercial batch, Mathew, trained in culinary arts in New Zealand, has been baking for years, a passion he believes began with watching his mother bake. 

A home grown recipe

For Nimmy, the charm of those baking days was that only the rum and black raisins were bought from outside. “My mother gathered fruits in season and preserved them until soaking began,” she remembers. Papaya and ash gourd went into sugar preserves, while damson plums were preserved in slaked lime water. Cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, tender ginger, citrus peels and cashew nuts came straight from their plantation and kitchen backyard. Butter and eggs were from their own cows and hens, and the sugar powder and flour were always ground fresh. “That’s what made a planter’s fruit cake special. It was entirely home-grown and hand-touched from scratch,” she says.

Soaking began in August, with the fruits immersed in rum and stored in a bharani, the ceramic jar kept in the ara, the cool inner room of the house. Nimmy recalls her mother always choosing rum over brandy, saying caramelised sugar paired better with it. By October, the baking would begin, with the mixing done in a big uruli (wide-mouthed bowl) using the mathu (the wooden hand-masher). She remembers her mother’s modern oven, while her older siblings recall the clay ovens that came before it. Heritage recipes are not infallible, of course: Nimmy switched to honey instead of liquid glucose to keep the cake moist.

The planter’s fruit cake

For Mathew, the Planter’s Fruit Cake is less a business and more a tribute to his parents and grandparents, a way of keeping their community tradition alive. Hence, he follows his grandmother’s recipe faithfully. Scaling it from the 15–20 cakes his mother once baked to 300 on a commercial scale has been his biggest challenge. He began with a 200-cake trial last year, fine-tuning the measurements and working out the right temperature for the oven.

The process begins with dates, raisins and cranberries set to rest in Old Monk rum. “It takes two weeks for the flavours to develop, but we let it sit for up to one-and-a-half months and start baking in November,” he says, a choice that gives the cake its deep rum note and a generous three-month shelf life. All the spices — nutmeg, clove, cinnamon — come from their farm, and unlike commercial bakeries, he uses their own real vanilla extract instead of essence.

“Though these spices go in small quantities, using high-quality ones has a way of lifting the whole cake,” Mathew says. For nuts, he uses cashews and walnuts, along with pineapple cooked into a marmalade and orange peel, and he works with freshly ground flour and sugar, caramelising the latter for a toasty flavour. Since eggs coagulate in heat, he takes advantage of the plantation hills’ cool mornings, starting his mixing at 5am to 6am. 

The only upgrade he has made is in the tools, drawing from his culinary training to use the right spatula and contemporary panning techniques that make the work more efficient. When it comes to mixing, he still romanticises the idea of hand-mixed batter. And though he uses a modern oven now, he wants to return to his grandmother’s old-school method with borma (a traditional, coconut-shell fired oven) ovens for next year’s Christmas batches.

The borma advantage

For Sheela, the recipe she inherited has evolved with time, turning into an almost year-long process. What was once a mix of local fruits soaked for a month has grown into a 13-fruit medley that is soaked for six months starting from April. She bakes three kinds of cakes. The Rich Fruit Cake (₹1,500) and Super Rich Fruit Cake (₹1,800) that use local fruits like dates, figs, raisins, orange peel and ginger soaked in wine and rum. The Exquisite Fruit Cake (₹3,800), made in small numbers, adds exotic fruits like apricot, strawberry, blueberry and cranberry, all soaked in rum and packaged in a gifting-style wooden box.

Apart from the fruits and the long soak, the defining feature of her cake is that it is borma-baked. “I didn’t have a borma at first,” she says. “I used a bakery’s borma in Kanjirappally on Sundays because my numbers were small. When demand increased, my husband built one for me.” The work is messy, with ash clinging to every tin that must be scrubbed down, but the taste, she says, makes it worth it. She finishes baking by early November, allowing the cakes to mature in time for Christmas. “Earlier, people wanted fresh cakes, but now they prefer matured ones,” she says. “They’ve begun to understand the difference in taste.”