Every holiday season, we are inundated with fruitcake jokes and cartoons, dissing fruitcake, and complaining about how terrible it is, how inedible, etc. One cartoon recently suggested that fruit cake could substitute for cement overshoes when gangsters were about to drown their victims. Well, those naysayers never tasted my mom’s fruitcakes!
Each November, Mom and I would begin fruitcake preparations. We made two distinctly different kinds of fruitcake, a light one from a recipe in a Betty Crocker cookbook, and a dark molasses-laced fruitcake. The light fruitcake was studded with candied citrus peel, pecans, and candied cherries while the dark fruitcake included fruit juice or apple sauce to moisten the dough and featured walnuts and raisins. We would bake the light fruitcake in an angel food cake pan, giving a shape very similar to that on the left while the dark fruitcake would be baked in a regular bread loaf pan, giving the shape on the right. Whether light or dark, the fruitcakes would be anointed with rum flavoring, or even-gasp!-real rum, wrapped in cheese cloth, and allowed to age for several weeks. (Our household was generally alcohol-free apart from rum for fruitcakes and the communion wine at the local Lutheran church, but the alcohol evaporated. We were not contributing to the delinquency of anybody.) The result was food for angels-light cake that would melt in your mouth and rejoice your heart- and it made its appearance during our family Thanksgiving and Christmas celebrations.
In those days, many people baked fruitcakes. The local grocery stores stocked all the necessary ingredients and finding them was simple. Piles of the proper ingredients would appear during the last week of October.
When Mom died in 1980, my brother Rus took over the fruitcake baking duties, featuring mostly dark fruitcake. Sadly, Rus died in 2021 just before the Christmas season started. Although I was an accomplished baker, nine years of surgery residency left little time or inclination to bake fruitcake. Now I live in a country where candied fruit and pecans are unavailable, and raisins and walnuts are hideously expensive, even when available. Occasionally, we have found small fruitcakes on offer at specialty stores in the bigger cities, but they are no match for Mom’s or Rus’s.
What made those fruitcakes so good? There’s no doubt that Mom, Rus, and I were all excellent bakers, but one of the ingredients unavailable in any store was the love we put into each bowl of batter. Creating fruitcakes was a way of celebrating the Christmas season and the love our family shared. Each time we anointed the fruitcakes, we were adding love to them. Little wonder then, that when the fruitcakes made their appearance, they were consumed down to the last crumb.
Baking things at home is complicated, messy, and now, also expensive, but well worth it. No matter how delicious a bakery confection is, the one thing it will always lack is the love and care you put into your own baking. Perhaps fruitcake will never become your specialty, but find something you do enjoy making. While you are creating food for your family, you are also making memories that will last a lifetime. And even if the results of your efforts are less than perfect, the love will still be there.
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