Ingredients:
[1] For maximum richness, soak the fruit in an appropriate alcoholic beverage. I have made people weep with 12oz of dried peaches soaked for a week in peach schnappes. Sultanas take rum and port, and particularly interesting things happen with chocolate liquers, Stone's green ginger wine (Exhibition for preference) or other aromatic liquers. Look for Bundaberg Rum's Royal Liquer. It's not worth using anything alcoholic that doesn't have a strong, distinctive taste.
[2] Again, this can be mixed with rum or port for added flavour. You need to moderate this against how much liquid is left over after your soaking. Here you can give your taste-buds an instant trip to nirvana by decanting the liquer that the fruit has been soaking in and using a cup of ordinary water. Drink the fruit-soaked liquer and be prepared for transportation...
[3] I use wholemeal flour. Not only is it more healty, but it seems to give the cake a much more robust texture, and avoids the soggy bits being completely glutinous.
Method:
If daring, you leave it for five minutes or so, then take it out of the pan and eat it nice and hot (although it will be hard to cut). If you're more in the line of mutual enjoyment, leave it to cool and add whatever alcohol you like. Some people inject this in with syringes, but that tends to squirt down, leaving the base squidgy and the top hard. Pouring over the top works, but the crust often forms an impermeable medium. Try pushing a skewer about half-way down into the cake and then pouring over the top - this allows an even soak. Having a cake that will knock a person out at twenty paces is damn good fun!
An additional technique to cause grovelling and begging en masse is to put half the mixture into the baking tin, pour choc-bits over the middle, and then pour the rest of the mixture in on top. Depending on how much you put in, this will cause a reaction somewhere between 'hmmmm - waitamainute, there's chocolate in there...' to 'we worship, O master' :-)
This used to be a recipe that required boiling the ingredients and adding butter. But since I soak the fruit beforehand I can get away with mixing the whole thing cold, which then means that I don't need to add the butter. So this is a low-fat cake, for what that's worth in these enlightened times.
Have fun with this, and please let me know of your successes with it.