by
Irena Chalmers
I really was hoping to get this posted before the holidays. The one
thing about fruitcakes, you cannot make them on the spur of the moment.
They attain their best flavor from a
two weeks rest (in which you
spritz the cake with brandy every few days). I just kept putting it
off, until now; a bit late for the holidays, but hey, where is it written that says you can't serve fruitcake the rest of the year?
When my mother passed away two years ago, my sister and I were reminiscing about family. My dad's mom came up in conversation, and we got to thinking of her fruitcake; she made
the best fruitcake, and the most delicious cookies - they were thin, crisp, sugar-like cookies with a walnut half, pressed in the middle. We were hoping to get the recipe from my uncle. Unfortunately he did not have it. He checked with my aunt (it was a recipe from her home economics class from high school), and she did not have it either.
Sad to say, the recipe is long lost; unless anyone out there reading this went to Acalanes High School in Lafayette, CA - mid to late forties to early fifties, and happened to have saved the recipe booklet from their home economics class..
So I went on a quest to find a fruitcake recipe that mimicked my grandmother's. I came across one by Alton Brown (Food Network) that uses dried fruit that sounded good, it was tempting, but I knew that would not be like grandma's. I'm sure she used those.. what I think are nasty looking.. the colored, candied fruits (my sister does not recall the candied fruit) you see in the produce section around Christmastime. While I was searching for another recipe from this book, I flipped the page, and whoala, "
The Best Fruit Cake". It looked very much like I remember my grandmother's cake to be, and the headline read, "Not one person will make a fruitcake joke when they taste this one - the world's best!" And we have all heard the fruitcake jokes, haven't we?
Once the cake is baked, it is wrapped in foil and stored in the refrigerator. When I unwrapped the cake a week or so later, the scent hit me - ohhh - this is it, though it was not as darkly colored as I remember, and it did not taste like grandma's. This recipe calls for an apple brandy, which I'm sure she did not use. She may have used regular brandy, or maybe even bourbon or rum, which would change up the flavor I'm sure, maybe even the color. This recipe also does not call for you to spritz it with additional liquour - however, I did.
It's too bad that fruitcake gets such a bad rap. This was actually
quite tasty, though not like what I recall my grandmother's tasting like (it has been a
very long time - and our tastes do change over the years - and it has been many). Who knows, I may never find
the fruitcake recipe I recall from my childhood, but at least I'll have the memories.
The recipe calls for golden and dark raisins. I had a pouch of mixed jumbo raisins (a "fancy" mix of golden and red flame grapes) in the pantry I wanted to use up and used those. I could not find Australian (or any other) glacé apricots, so I subbed dried apricots. The other items above include almonds, walnuts, candied pineapple, glacé cherries, and candied lemon rinds.
I halved the recipe, and it made one regular size loaf and two mini loaves.
Is this not a beautiful fruitcake?
By the way, this book also has a recipe for Cinnamon Crisps. They look
extremely similar to grandma's cookies I mentioned at the beginning of this post. Keeping my fingers crossed. ;)
