Fruitcake... it's not just for Christmas.

Okay, so here's my confession. I love fruitcake. I love how it smells when I bake it. I love how my friends and family respond to it around the Holidays. I love everything about it. This, though, I DO NOT love:This is an abomination to the name fruitcake. This is not a fruitcake, it's a well colored door-stop. I think this may be the most appalling thing in culinary history, tied with "fruit salad" that gets served at church functions. (You know the one... Perfectly good fruit encased in molded and cloudy jello, usually lime, and kind of slithers off the platter during whatever function it may be attending.)
Every Christmas, I make goody boxes for friends and family. This is an easy way to give me the needed bake time during Christmas, give my friends a delicious (and mostly inexpensive) gift from the heart, and open their eyes to good baking. Almost everyone finds something in the box they love and can't live without. My hope is that it's fruitcake. This is me in the midst of the fruitcake bake-a-thon of 2009.Good fruitcake starts with 2 key ingredients. Dried (but not neon colored!) fruit and alcohol. I prefer rum for bringing out the flavor of the fruit. Today, mostly because my hubby's been asking for it, I decided to make fruitcake. And I still had my 2 key ingredients from the 2009 bake-a-thon. If you bake, imagine dried fruit macerated in rum for six months and tell me the horrors of fruitcake to come.

The fruit, plus all the other ingredients get boiled down in a pot. If I had the ability for scratch and sniff web browsing, you'd think you were in heaven. At this stage my kitchen is filled with the aroma of fruit and spice and rum and other stuff (because I'm not planning on sharing my recipe here. Sorry.) The smell alone is worth the time and preparation for fruitcake.

Now for those of you confused by the term "macerate," let me explain. To macerate is to let dried fruits enjoy a luxurious bath of alcohol and juice and rehydrate themselves for the next step in dried fruit life. It's like a spa. Sort of. For a better explanation, look to the picture on the right. Six months ago those were raisins. Now, they're plump, unwrinkled and ready for cake. I guess it's kind of like botox.

So, to sum up, from this point, I finished with ingredients and got them in pans to bake. Baking doesn't emit such glorious smells as the boiling does, so we'll glaze that over. Then out they come, warm and delicious. But don't dig in quite yet! Remember the 2 key ingredients? Re-recruit that alcohol and baste the top. If you refer back to the photo at the top, I imagine you might possibly be able to tolerate it if it was soaked in rum. But even better, if it was soaked in rum, it wouldn't require the preservatives that ensure it will be around for cockroaches to munch after the bomb goes off. All natural fruitcake with all natural and great tasting preservatives. Yum.