Chow Down: How to Ruin a Holiday with Fruitcake

BY HEATHER HAMILTON-POST

If you Google “fruitcake”,

one of the top suggested results is “How to Make the World’s Best Fruitcake”, a concept I’d never actually considered possible.

Memorialized for its yuckiness in many a television show and film, fruitcake isn’t exactly on my list of goodies for holiday baking, especially because a pandemic holiday promises to be depressing enough. In that way, this is perhaps the best time to make one. So, in this season of unknowns, I decided to do the unthinkable--to make, to the dismay of my family, the much-maligned fruitcake. I began, as many of us do, with the guidance of an overenthusiastic blogger and a 4.5 star recipe.

The first step is undoubtedly the most fun, since it involves gathering dried fruit and soaking it in dark rum while you either do the same or, I guess, otherwise occupy your time watching fruit get drunk. I used two kinds of raisins that my kids left almost untouched in the pantry and dried pears, apricots, figs, cherries, and prunes. You let this compote sit for 12-24 hours, depending on how loaded you’d like the fruit, and how much time you need to drink the remaining rum.

Then, you mix a bunch of normal cake ingredients like flour, cinnamon, butter, brown sugar, and a bunch of other regular stuff. (You can Google a hundred recipes if you’re smitten, but trust me when I say chocolate chip cookies are a no-fail way to delight your loved ones.) Once you’ve got everything mixed and poured into the pan, the fruitcake will bake for around 90 minutes, which is a great time to catch up on the last season of Schitt’s Creek if you’re a slow drinker.

And this is where fruitcake gets appropriately bizarre for 2020--once out of the oven, you wrap it in a booze -(sherry or triple sec) soaked cloth, cover in wax paper, protect in aluminum foil, and sequester in a ziplock bag so it is really, truly, in quarantine. I read that it is “best” (a relative term) after at least one week, although storage strangely takes some upkeep. Once a week, resoak the cloth and wrap it back up. This can go on for up to eight weeks, so you may conveniently need more bottles of booze. This time-capsule technique also quells the urge to gobble down your brick-called-dessert.

Don’t get me wrong- I like fruit, and I don’t mind cake. But marrying the two- and I mean no disrespect to fruitcake lovers out there- is like planning a kegger in a pandemic. This combo is hazardous to your health and sobriety.