Monday, November 24, 2003
The full recipe makes 10 pounds of fruitcake; most years I only make a half recipe, 5 pounds, which is 3 largish loaf pans. Here goes:
1 cup seeded raisins*
2 cups seedless raisins* (*I usually use all seedless, mixing golden and brown raisins)
1 cup chopped dates
1 cup halved candied cherries
2 cups candied citron
1/2 cup candied lemon peel
1/2 cup candied orange peel
1.5 cups walnut or pecan pieces
-------
a note about all this fruit: it adds up to 10 cups. I usually don't stick to the exact list here - and I add dried cherries and/or cranberries to the raisins. So I usually wind up with about 12 cups altogether of fruit and nuts, frequently: 3 cups mixed candied fruit, 1 cup citron, 1 cup candied cherry pieces, 3 cups assorted dried raisins and cherries, 1 cup chopped dried apricots, 1 cup chopped dates, and 2 cups chopped nuts - pecans, usually, since I've been in Texas. Feel free to adjust this to your family's tastes - no citron, candied or dried pineapple instead of cherries, more orange peel, fewer raisins... as long as you have between 10 and 12 cups of dried or candied fruit and nuts, it will work. We now return you to your recipe...
-------
1/2 Tbsp grated orange rind
1/4 cup fruit juice- any kind you have around, grape, orange, pomegranate...
2.5 cups sifted flour
optional: half tsp salt (I've left this out for decades, and no one has ever complained)
1.5 tsp baking powder (I use the calcium-based baking powder substitute)
2 sticks (1/2 pound total) unsalted butter (note - you can substitute a cup of shortening for this, but the butter really tastes better)
1 cup white sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
2 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp cloves
1 tsp allspice
1 tsp mace
1/4 tsp ginger
5 eggs, well beaten (Scramblettes/powdered eggs work just fine)
2 tsp vanilla extract
Make sure that there are no pits in any of the fruit, and no shells in the nuts; rinse all the fruit and pat dry. Combine fruit, nuts and grated orange rind. You need a HUGE bowl for this- a punch bowl works well. Pour fruit juice over fruits. In a separate bowl, sift flour, salt, and baking powder together. In yet another bowl, cream the butter (it helps if you microwave each stick for 10 seconds first) both sugars and all the spices, then beat in the eggs. Add the butter mixture to the fruit, then all the flour mixture, and mix THOROUGHLY. Make sure there's no clumps of dry flour there, and that ever piece of fruit has at least a very thin film of batter on it.
Line 3 loaf pans with non-stick parchment paper, or brown butcher paper, heavily oiled. Divide batter between the three pans- it will fill all of them all the way to the top and maybe a little rounded up in the middle. Smoothe the tops with a scraper. Decorate tops of cake with halves of candied cherries, chunks of candied pineapple, and/or almond slivers, as desired. (You can do none of those, or any one, or all. I like making almond-sliver snowflakes/stars.) Bake in a slow oven (275 to 285 degrees F, or 135-140 degrees C) for about 2 hours - depending on the size of your loaf pans. Check first at 1.5 hours, and keep checking at 15 minute intervals after that, till toothpick comes out clean. Remove from oven and let cool in pan, on rack, for at least a half hour. Remove from pan by lifting edges of parchment paper, then peel off the paper.
Now the fun part: once the cakes are completely cool, wrap each in a double layer of unbleached muslin. Pour cheap brandy over the top- about 1/4 cup per cake, soaking it into the muslin well. Wrap the muslin-covered cakes in tightly crimped aluminum foil. Then put the loaf, with its wrappings, in an airtight container- a heavy Ziploc freezer bag will do, or a nice decorative tin with a tight lid. Then, at least once every 2 weeks, haul out the entire arrangement, take off the aluminum foil, pour another 1/4 cup brandy over the muslin, and rewrap and return to tin. Ideally, you should start the fruitcakes the week after Easter, so that they will be 90% brandy by Christmas, but they'll be adequate if you make them 6 weeks before Christmas, and remember to brandy them about every 10 days. Unwrap the foil and muslin, wrap in decorative cling wrap or cellophane, and present to the recipients, with a warning about serving it to underage people or designated drivers :-)
1 cup seeded raisins*
2 cups seedless raisins* (*I usually use all seedless, mixing golden and brown raisins)
1 cup chopped dates
1 cup halved candied cherries
2 cups candied citron
1/2 cup candied lemon peel
1/2 cup candied orange peel
1.5 cups walnut or pecan pieces
-------
a note about all this fruit: it adds up to 10 cups. I usually don't stick to the exact list here - and I add dried cherries and/or cranberries to the raisins. So I usually wind up with about 12 cups altogether of fruit and nuts, frequently: 3 cups mixed candied fruit, 1 cup citron, 1 cup candied cherry pieces, 3 cups assorted dried raisins and cherries, 1 cup chopped dried apricots, 1 cup chopped dates, and 2 cups chopped nuts - pecans, usually, since I've been in Texas. Feel free to adjust this to your family's tastes - no citron, candied or dried pineapple instead of cherries, more orange peel, fewer raisins... as long as you have between 10 and 12 cups of dried or candied fruit and nuts, it will work. We now return you to your recipe...
-------
1/2 Tbsp grated orange rind
1/4 cup fruit juice- any kind you have around, grape, orange, pomegranate...
2.5 cups sifted flour
optional: half tsp salt (I've left this out for decades, and no one has ever complained)
1.5 tsp baking powder (I use the calcium-based baking powder substitute)
2 sticks (1/2 pound total) unsalted butter (note - you can substitute a cup of shortening for this, but the butter really tastes better)
1 cup white sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
2 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp cloves
1 tsp allspice
1 tsp mace
1/4 tsp ginger
5 eggs, well beaten (Scramblettes/powdered eggs work just fine)
2 tsp vanilla extract
Make sure that there are no pits in any of the fruit, and no shells in the nuts; rinse all the fruit and pat dry. Combine fruit, nuts and grated orange rind. You need a HUGE bowl for this- a punch bowl works well. Pour fruit juice over fruits. In a separate bowl, sift flour, salt, and baking powder together. In yet another bowl, cream the butter (it helps if you microwave each stick for 10 seconds first) both sugars and all the spices, then beat in the eggs. Add the butter mixture to the fruit, then all the flour mixture, and mix THOROUGHLY. Make sure there's no clumps of dry flour there, and that ever piece of fruit has at least a very thin film of batter on it.
Line 3 loaf pans with non-stick parchment paper, or brown butcher paper, heavily oiled. Divide batter between the three pans- it will fill all of them all the way to the top and maybe a little rounded up in the middle. Smoothe the tops with a scraper. Decorate tops of cake with halves of candied cherries, chunks of candied pineapple, and/or almond slivers, as desired. (You can do none of those, or any one, or all. I like making almond-sliver snowflakes/stars.) Bake in a slow oven (275 to 285 degrees F, or 135-140 degrees C) for about 2 hours - depending on the size of your loaf pans. Check first at 1.5 hours, and keep checking at 15 minute intervals after that, till toothpick comes out clean. Remove from oven and let cool in pan, on rack, for at least a half hour. Remove from pan by lifting edges of parchment paper, then peel off the paper.
Now the fun part: once the cakes are completely cool, wrap each in a double layer of unbleached muslin. Pour cheap brandy over the top- about 1/4 cup per cake, soaking it into the muslin well. Wrap the muslin-covered cakes in tightly crimped aluminum foil. Then put the loaf, with its wrappings, in an airtight container- a heavy Ziploc freezer bag will do, or a nice decorative tin with a tight lid. Then, at least once every 2 weeks, haul out the entire arrangement, take off the aluminum foil, pour another 1/4 cup brandy over the muslin, and rewrap and return to tin. Ideally, you should start the fruitcakes the week after Easter, so that they will be 90% brandy by Christmas, but they'll be adequate if you make them 6 weeks before Christmas, and remember to brandy them about every 10 days. Unwrap the foil and muslin, wrap in decorative cling wrap or cellophane, and present to the recipients, with a warning about serving it to underage people or designated drivers :-)
Saturday, November 15, 2003
Yeehah! The state approved my disability pension! Given that I'm unlikely to live to 65 or whatever the retirement age will be by then, I wanted to get SOME of my own money back, and they agreed! This is great, because the paycheck I get from teaching a couple of courses at Sty. Ed's is about what you'd expect for working 6 hours a week, and I don't think I'm capable of trying to do full-time work again - both because of fatigue and because of the stress. The pension means that we can buy presents for the holidays this year, maybe even fly to see my parents (my Dad's got prostate cancer, and surgery, scheduled for next week, should be a breeze; I do want to make sure I see him before either of us gets too sick, though! He lives in Maine.) It means that next summer I can pay the electric bill including air conditioning without having to resort to eating rice and beans for most of August, which is what we seemed to be doing this summer. Not that I have anything against rice and beans, mind you, but even I get sick of garbanzo beans one day, black beans the next, garbanzo beans again... To celebrate, I zipped over to the supermarket and purchased candied fruit, to make fruitcakes- low sodium, low-fat fruitcakes, of course. I didn't make any last year. Really, to make this fruitcake recipe correctly one should make it about the weekend after Easter, and then marinate it in brandy every two weeks until Christmas, so that it's quite flammable. However, local supermarkets don't have candied fruit available in the spring- they only start stocking it around Thanksgiving. So it will be a very mild fruitcake. Or should I say, fruitcakes- the recipe makes about 10 pounds. It's from a 1953 cookbook that my mother was collecting - a volume a week from the supermarket - when she got married and then when she had me. So it's sort of a family heirloom. Besides the usual candied orange peel and citron, and some pineapple and cherries for the top, I have fresh Texas pecans (instead of the walnuts the recipe calls for) - why not use local stuff? And raisins, and chopped up dried apricots, and some dried cranberries to go with the raisins. The recipe makes a cake that is mostly fruit, held together with a cement of cake - sort of a concrete aggregate, if you will - as opposed to mostly cake. I read in some book or another about heart failure that the candied cherries are high in sodium, but I can't see anything on the ingredients label that looks even vaguely sodium-ish, so I must have imagined reading that.
Anyway, off to do some cooking. I will provide the fruitcake recipe as soon as I get a minute to transcribe it.
Anyway, off to do some cooking. I will provide the fruitcake recipe as soon as I get a minute to transcribe it.
