Guest post (mostly) by Jeanne Marie
My First Fruitcakes
B-Twin’s post on her luscious wedding fruitcakes, and some of the subsequent forum remarks on wedding cakes* in particular and fruitcakes in general, took me back to my first year living in Memphis, Tennessee. It was my first year living on my own post-college, and I was big into fancy experimental cooking. In that vein, I decided around August that I wanted to make some fancy brandied fruitcakes for the coming Christmas.**
I looked up a few recipes for fruitcakes, and found several options. I particularly wanted one that needed to soak in liquor and “age,” and at last decided on one that I thought would be a good choice. But, I was not a fan of lots of candied fruits, so I decided to sub out ALL the candied fruits the recipe included for simple dried fruits. I made twelve mini-loaf cakes, which baked up like little bricks. I wasn’t worried, though, the recipe had warned that they’d bake up very hard, but would moisten up over a few months with some brandy. I followed the recipe specifications, wrapping them in cloth and then pouring on “some” brandy (I think the recipe called for a few tablespoons, but I was feeling generous), and left them in the bottom of my fridge in ziploc bags. I checked them periodically, and usually when I checked them, I’d add more brandy. Over the months between August baking and Christmas, I added an entire fifth of brandy to those twelve mini-loaves!***
Finally, the first of many Christmas parties arrived – the faculty afternoon luncheon party for the elementary school where I was working as the music teacher! I took two of the loaves with me. At the time, I noticed that they were rather redolent of brandy, but mentally shrugged, and figured that they were supposed to be that way. When the time for the Christmas luncheon arrived, I ate a smallish piece of my fruitcake and was OVERWHLEMED by just how potent my little fruitcakes were! YIKES, I started worrying about breathing too close to the festive candles on the table! I myself was only able to handle a very small piece – I’m a bit of a light-weight in terms of liquor capacity – but, two other teachers in particular, a second grade teacher and a fifth grade teacher, were VERY happy that I had brought the “brandycakes”… and, they were even happier after dividing the cakes between them!! Both were decidedly flushed and wobbly when they headed back to their respective classrooms!!
I’ve wondered – if I had stuck with the candied fruit, would the cakes have been quite so potent? Did the dried fruit simply suck up way more brandy than candied fruit would have? Or, did I just overkill on adding way more brandy than any poor fruitcake needed? I’ve never tried to experiment with fruitcakes again, but at least those two teachers remember me fondly…if they remember that luncheon at all, that is!!
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*HOLY CATS, I’m gonna NEED one of those!! gulp ^
^ Yes you are
**::cue ominous music::
***you see it coming, don’t you…
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The hellgoddess continues:
Since Jeanne Marie has been so CARELESS as to lose this legendary fruitcake recipe and since of course reading about fruitcakes, with this audience, is going to lead to a lot of jonesing for fruitcakes†, I thought I’d offer one of mine. I seem to have quite a few. We had this conversation on the forum—most of us don’t like the candied-fruit-stuck-together-with-superglue style of fruitcake, but quite a few of us like the dried-fruit, brown-sugar-and-spices kind. I will spare you the defense of good candied fruit—the problem with maraschino cherries isn’t the maraschino, it’s the red food dye—and go (almost) straight to a dried-fruits-with booze recipe. I may post some of the others at a later date.†† The only way I like bourbon is in a pecan cake, for example.†††
And with reference to the conversation on the forum about fruitcakes for weddings, with several Americans saying they’ve never heard of such a thing and me saying er um, I’d have said at least half the American weddings I’ve attended had fruitcake under the white enamel and the plastic figures . . . my FANNY FARMER (copyright 1965) contains a ‘wedding fruitcake’ which is described as ‘the traditional dark rich fruit cake’, and even the alternative sponge cake (‘Bride’s cake’) is assumed to have a fruitcake top layer. Furthermore in my eternal quest to waste more time dorking around on the internet, I discover that good old bartleby.com has the 1918 FF on line and their ‘cake’ section is loaded with fruitcakes including not one but two ‘wedding cakes’ which are in fact fruitcakes. http://www.bartleby.com/87/0031.html (the wedding cakes are almost last, and don’t bother with the ‘search’, which is a baleful fraud and will keep trying to dump you in amazon).
Meanwhile.
I had been experimenting with mini fruitcakes for years before Judy Rosenberg’s Rosie’s Chocolate Packed Jam Filled Butter Rich No Holds Barred Cookie Book came out‡. I’ve got two sets of mini bread pans, half size and quarter size, and two or three little loaves of different varieties, wrapped up with different coloured ribbons around each of them, makes a very nice present for a whole lot less effort than making millions of frelling cookies.‡‡ Rosie took it a step farther and made her mini fruitcakes in muffin tins, which is also pretty brilliant, and that hadn’t occurred to me.
It was even more annoying when her recipe turned out to be a lot like mine—it amazes me how many drunken fruitcake recipes don’t tell you to soak your fruit in the booze first for example. She however dilutes hers with water. Bleh—and she likes pecans and almonds. The following recipe is enough like her mini fruitcakes you might think I started there but I didn’t. Great minds think alike in this case.
2 c assorted dried fruit (black and golden raisins, cranberries, blueberries, apricots, cherries, dates, whatever). The big stuff you want to chop to be about raisin/berry sized.
1 c chopped nuts: almonds, pecans and/or hazelnuts
1 c rum or brandy
1 c white all-purpose flour
½ c wholemeal/wholewheat/spelt flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp cinnamon
½ tsp allspice
¼ tsp nutmeg
¼ tsp mace
12 T (1 ½ c) lightly salted soft butter
1 c dark brown sugar
1 tsp (GOOD QUALITY) vanilla extract or ½ tsp orange essence (NOT ‘flavouring’)
1 T grated lemon or orange zest (if you’re using orange essence, I usually use more zest too)
2 large eggs at room temperature
Put the dried fruit in a shallow bowl and pour the rum or brandy over them. Put a plate over the bowl and leave for at least 48 hours and up to about a week. If your bowl isn’t shallow enough that all the fruit is in contact with the booze, stir occasionally.
Preheat oven to 350°F, and grease well your two-loaves-of-bread equivalent pans: so four half-sized loaf tins, eight quarter-sized loaf tins, or approximately 24 muffin cups. (If you’re using muffin cups . . . use paper liners. Life is short.)
Sift the dry stuff together.
Cream butter and sugar thoroughly. Add zest and vanilla or essence, and cream again. Add eggs. BEAT THOROUGHLY. Drain the fruit and add any liquid (not the fruit yet!), if there is any, to the batter. Mix.
Add the flour mixture. Stir in well. Now add the fruit and nuts. Stir again. This is the moment you may have to use your judgement. Flour varies, as does how much liquid there is left after the fruit has been soaking in it. You may need to add a little liquid–orange juice, apple juice or water–or a little flour.
Pour into your pans: depending on the size of the pan your baking time is anywhere from about 20-25 minutes (muffin tins) to about an hour and a quarter (9 x 5 inch normal bread pans). When the middles puff up and start looking solid, stick a toothpick in. When the toothpick comes out dry, etc.
Let cool in the pans half an hour or so. An hour won’t hurt. But don’t try to get them out too soon, they’ll be too fragile. (They would be less fragile if you used less butter. But . . . why would you want to use less butter?)
These don’t need to ripen, although you can turn them into little leglessness bombs if you want to (in theory the baking will have removed all the alcohol) by wrapping them in cheesecloth and dripping a little further rum on them—in which case keep them wrapped up in plastic or tin foil in your refrigerator, like Jeanne Marie did with hers, till wanted. I did this once and . . . wheeeeee. Don’t use an entire fifth, okay? (They’ll probably fall apart if you do, and then you’ll have leglessness bomb pudding.)
And I feel that, when it’s time to eat it, the true perfect drunken fruitcake should also have frosting. Frosting that goes something like: 1 c confectioner’s/icing sugar, 2T butter, cream together till smooth, and then add enough rum/brandy (2-3 T) to make it spreadable. Go for it.
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† B_twin has promised a fruitcake recipe, but at the moment she’s deep in the Australian bush somewhere—with no internet connection—becoming further educated in some arcane Australian-bush skill, so she cannot be applied to in this extremity.
†† I keep meaning to post more recipes like I keep meaning to post some favourite poems (other people’s poems) and I was going to start posting book reports/reviews again this year and it’s the middle of February already and . . .
††† If I’m going to get seriously wasted in some manner that does not involve champagne, it’s going to be single malt Scotch, probably Laphroaig.
‡ Which is the follow up to Rosie’s All Butter Fresh Cream Sugar Packed No Holds Barred Baking Book. If there’s a third one, I don’t want to know.
‡‡ She says feelingly. But I’ve made millions and millions of frelling cookies too. Home made food is the answer when you have too many friends and no money.
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