A Solid Mouthful of Christmas

That’s what our friend Hugo calls it, but really it’s just my chocolate fruitcake. I invented it in Baltimore in 1981. All my friends had warned me about fruitcake, but like the rebellious brat I was, I ignored them because during my senior year at Peabody, I found a recipe for chocolate fruitcake and how could that not be good? It waaaaas. That first fruitcake was heart-meltingly delicious, full of home-candied dried fruit and toasted nuts and rum and so chocolatey, complicated, soft and sweet. Yuuuuuuuuuummm.

Like many voice students at Peabody, I paid my rent by singing in a church choir. So for me, Christmas meant performing in what seemed like dozens of church and church-related programs. The Advent concert. The annual rendition of Schubert’s Ave Maria for the Men’s Club at St. David’s Episcopal Church in Roland Park. (The pay was a bottle of sherry in a gold box. I drank the sherry and made Christmas ornaments out of the gold box.) Christmas at St. David’s itself was a huge production – as paid choristers, my friends and I sang the Christmas Eve services, including the midnight Mass, gathered in my apartment afterwards about 2:00 a.m., ate potluck around my three-foot-tall, listing-to-one-side tree that I’d decorated in sherry bottle cardboard and popcorn, sang some more, and got back to the church by 7:00 a.m. to rehearse before the 8:00 and 11:00 morning services. Hey, who needs sleep when you’re twenty-two, eh?

So the year after I graduated, I decided I would make my new fruitcake for the all-night party. I’d prove to the world (at least to my friends) that fruitcake can be good. It’d start a whole new tradition.

After two hours of looking through every cooking magazine and scrap of paper I had in my recipe box (I have recipe boxes like other people have tax files), I had to admit that I had lost the recipe. Oh no! Now what’ll I do?

I’ll just re-create it. How hard could it be?

That was twenty-nine years ago. Thank goodness for the 1959 version of the Betty Crocker cookbook, because that’s where the basic recipe came from. Cooking is chemistry and you can’t just guess at ratios for leavening to liquid and flour. Then I started tinkering with the add-ins. The first few versions established that I like dried papaya and pineapple, more for the stained-glass window look than anything else, and that little dried green bits of citron were right out. By 1985 I was in a groove, the proportions and types of fruit and macerating liquid and nuts fairly well set, although the recipe was still scribbled (in pen!) in the margins of Betty’s fruitcake page. (I didn’t claim the recipe for my own and move it out of the cookbook until well into the computer age when I typed it out on my Mac Mini sometime in the late 1990s.)

But as I only made the cake once a year, tweaking just one or two ingredients each time, changes were slow to come. Each year I went through the same laborious process. Re-read the fruitcake story in Truman Capote’s A Christmas Memory. Make the pilgrimage to Sheridan Fruit to buy dried fruit and nuts in bulk. (Although when I was in grad school, I cheated and bought bags of pre-chopped fruit from Trader Joe’s. I still feel bad about that.) Dice and snip until my hands seize up and then warm the fruit gently in orange juice or rum and let it all sit for a day or three. Chop the nuts. Prepare the pans (this can take a couple of hours, but luckily I married a man a third of the way into my Fruitcake Life who took on this part of the job). Finally, finally make the cake itself, and this is where I kept trying to achieve the Perfect Chocolate Fruitcake Flavor. Some years I would come tantalizingly close to the intense chocolatey-ness I remembered, but then the cake wouldn’t quite stay together. Then I’d back off the chocolate the following year and get a more traditionally solid fruitcake, still okay but just…not…quite…right…

I made fruitcake through three divorces, two children, a Master’s degree, careers in singing and teaching, years as a private school administrator and grant writer and housewife-and-mother. I made fruitcake during the last years of the Cold War and in the days following 9/11 and through melting arctic and Antarctic poles and the disappearing ozone layer. Maybe the world didn’t get better each year, but the fruitcake did.

Last month, I read Truman Capote aloud to my children, my high-school-Junior son and my 27-year-old daughter. The three of us decided upon the ingredients for this year’s cake, dried apricots, cherries, and papaya. (They wanted hazelnuts, not almonds, but I forgot and in the actual baking, put in almonds instead. They are good children and forgave me.) Rum, instant espresso powder, and LOTS of chocolate. Maybe if we use chocolate extract to bump up the chocolate index, it won’t make the cake fall apart like the chocolate chips did that time. No pineapple this year and definitely no dried blueberries. The dried blueberries had been a little strange.

The next day, son Robin and I rode our bikes four miles each way to Sheridan Fruit to buy the fruit and nuts. We got a little lost because of the construction along 99 East, but we got there after overshooting and backtracking twice. And it cost more than I expected because of the bulk Jelly Belly display. You must suffer for your fruitcake. We stopped at the liquor store on the way home and bought a pint of rum, too.

The ingredients went into the dried fruit cupboard, stored inside a springform pan, which means don’t touch, this means you, this is the fruitcake stuff. Everybody in my family respects the fruitcake stuff.

Three weeks later, anxious weeks for my husband Ed who really, really believes that fruitcake should be made in August so it will age and doesn’t want to face the fact that I ALWAYS make fruitcake during the last week of November, I got started. Two days before Thanksgiving, I started chopping, macerating, sniffing and gloating. I love the fruit preparation part. Then the fruit sat in a covered dish out in “Fred,” our name for the uninsulated enclosed porch just off the kitchen that doubles as a second refrigerator, while we got through Thanksgiving Day and the aftermath. Two pumpkin pies, three types of cranberry sauce, two versions of stuffing, one for those who want to court E.coli and a non-fat casserole version, and two kinds of gravy. Fruitcake had to wait.

But finally, finally, the night after Thanksgiving, Ed prepared the pans with Crisco and parchment paper while I melted chocolate in the double boiler. It took awhile, because we had to decide how many fruitcakes and what size to make. You can’t give fruitcake to just anybody. Some people will not appreciate it and it will be wasted. We do have a few friends and family members who ask plaintively each year if they’re going to get one. Hugo, of course, gets one because of the time at the pub sing when I gave him a piece and he sighed blissfully, with that accent from his native England, “Now THAT’S a solid mouthful of Christmas!” And we have to make sure that we have enough. There’s the tree decorating evening, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day to get through, and what if we run out?

Then I had to find the recipe. There’s tension about this, too, because I printed out my recipe a few years ago and now there are multiple copies floating around. Sometimes you can’t find the one with last year’s notes on it and you have to proceed without knowing what worked and didn’t work last year. To my chagrin, this turned out to be one of those years. Oh well. I’m sure the 2007 fruitcake was good enough, although I remember last year’s as being pretty good. Have faith in the process and forge ahead. This year, I added another tablespoon of cocoa and some chocolate extract, a new addition. I beat the batter until it fluffed up and changed color, a new procedure. Now we’re getting risky. (I can hear Han Solo shouting at Luke Skywalker, “Great, kid! Don’t get cocky!”) Hey, I’ve been making this thing for three-fifths of my life, I can take chances if I want to. Poured the batter over the precious fruit and nuts and called the family for the traditional stir. You must stir the fruitcake batter and make a wish for the coming year. While we were stirring, I stared at an eight-ounce package of Valrhona mini chocolate chips that I’d bought at DeLaurenti’s, a specialty food store in Seattle. THAT would make it chocolatey enough, you bet. Should I put it in? Robin, who works off-and-on as a prep chef in a high-end Italian restaurant, said decisively, NO. His sister Elizabeth, who has ten years on him and who as a prospective actress has more reason to live it up when she can, said yes yes YES. I decided that you can over-think things and dumped the whole container in.

Then I filled one good-sized loaf pan, two middle-sized pans, two small-ish pans and three really cute baby pans that I found at the dump last summer. (Don’t ask.) I put them all in a slow oven along with a big pan of hot water, and settled down with a timer and a bunch of West Wing episodes.

Ed tuned his melodeon. The cats duked it out for each other’s food. The kids went out for garlic fries and peanut-butter-marshmallow milkshakes and then came back to watch some Buffy. It takes a long time to bake fruitcake, and you have to keep checking them because there’s no going back. I usually use up half a box of toothpicks.

At eleven o’clock at night, when I was so tired that I couldn’t remember why I was still conscious, kind of like childbirth, the last fruitcake came out of the oven. The smallest cake had been out for two hours at that point, and was ready for the taste test.

It slid right out of the pan, a good start. The parchment paper peeled off easily, no damage there. No burned edges. The cake looked almost like it had been steamed, softer than in previous years but my finger didn’t leave an indentation when I poked it. Good and solid. It smelled like Christmas. Carefully, I sawed off a slice. I’m alone in the kitchen and it’s MY fruitcake. I put the piece in my mouth.

Yuuuuuuuuuuuuummmmmmm.

That’s it.

After twenty-nine years, that’s IT.

I took Ed a piece. Yuuum. Robin and Elizabeth. Yeeeeesss.

This is the best ever, Mom.

So I will not hug this recipe close to me anymore. It is time to send my Fruitcake Child out into the world. My friends, here is my Christmas gift to you. May it bring you as much joy as it has brought me.

A Solid Mouthful of Christmas Fruitcake

You can change up the kinds of fruit and nuts and liquid, heaven knows I did. But this is the latest version and as far as I’m concerned, the best.

The reading of Truman Capote and the pilgrimage to a bulk store for dried fruit can be dispensed with, I suppose, but it just won’t be the same.

Plan on doing the work over several days, and allow four hours for the baking itself.

Step One

Prepare six cups of chopped dried fruit by cooking it over extreme low heat, preferably in a cast iron Dutch oven in two cups of liquid. Although I have included dried pineapple and golden raisins in the past, I recommend this combination:

2 cups dried apricots, diced
2 cups dried Bing cherries, snipped in half
½ cup candied orange peel
2 cups dried papaya, diced
A pint of rum. I like Bacardi’s Gold. Glug glug glug!
A cinnamon stick. This is to be removed after the simmering.

Stir it when you think of it, or when you want to inhale the Christmas smell. After it’s simmered for awhile (one to four hours, say), turn off the heat and let it sit. A day or two is fine. It sat three days this year, but it was out in “Fred,” so that was all right.

Chop a cup, cup-and-a-half of toasted nuts: hazelnuts, almonds, pecans, whatever you like. Put them aside. Once the fruit is done macerating, stir the nuts into the fruit mixture.

Step Two

Prepare the pans. This can be one big tube pan or several smaller loaf pans. If you have batter left over, you can even make cupcakes. Grease the pans with Crisco (I know, I know. Just do it…) and line them with parchment paper. When I line loaf pans, I just use one strip to cover the long axis of the pan and leave bunny ears hanging out on both sides. Then grease the paper. When Ed lines the tube pan, he uses Scotch tape to affix the paper to the inner tube part. Somehow, he does it so the tape is not in contact with the batter. I don’t want to know how.

Step Three

Pre-heat the oven to 300 degrees.

Cream together:

1 cup shortening
2 cups packed brown sugar
4 ounces of melted semi-sweet chocolate (I like Ghirardelli’s 60%, but really any baking chocolate will work)
4 tablespoons cocoa

Beat in:

6 large eggs

Add and beat in:

1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon ground cloves
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon nutmeg
1/8 teaspoon cardamom, if you have any.

Add and beat in:

3 cups WHITE flour. Don’t get all crunchy and sincere and use whole wheat flour. It will not work. Trust me, I know.

Add and beat in until the batter gets fluffy and changes color from dark to light brown, scraping the sides of the bowl from time to time:

2/3 cup apricot preserves
1 tablespoon rum extract
1 tablespoon chocolate extract
1 tablespoon instant espresso powder

Stir the batter into the fruit and nut mixture, and then stir in:

8 ounces of bittersweet, mini chocolate chips.

Really. Elizabeth says to do it and it worked out for us this year.

Make sure everyone in the family stirs it for luck in the coming year. Wishes made at this time have a better chance of coming true than wishes made at other times, except for birthday candle wishes.

Step Four

Boil water in a kettle. Then pour this hot water into a large lasagna-type pan. While you are waiting for the water to boil, pour the batter into prepared pans. Put the hot water pan on the bottom rack of the oven and the cakes on a rack above it.

Get out your timer and a box of toothpicks. The length of time that fruitcakes bake is much more art than science and you will have to rely upon your Curious Nose as much as upon the timer. I’ve found that fruitcakes bake for these approximate durations, but don’t blame the results on me if you get all precise and just use a timer for these treasures instead of paying attention.

Tube pan: four hours
Nine inch loaf pans: 2 ½ - 3 hours
Seven inch loaf pans: 1 ½ - 2 hours
Little pans: About 1 – ½ hours
Really cute tiny pans and cupcakes: I once had an oven that baked them in 45 minutes flat. My oven this year takes more like an hour, maybe even an hour and a quarter.

Check them with toothpicks before you take them out. The toothpick should come out clean when the cake is done, but it might not because of the sticky fruit or if you hit a pocket of chocolate chips. Check it twice.

The cakes will look dry around the edges and should have pulled away from the ends of the pan a tiny bit. Don’t let them brown though.

They should smell like heaven. You can carry one around the house and give everybody a sniff. This always makes me feel like a pre-Christian priestess with a votive offering. Or maybe I’m just being a bit braggy.

As you take out each installment, put the pans on cooling racks. Don’t take the cakes out of the pans, no matter how Curious you are, until they’ve sat for 15 minutes or so. The first tiny one can be a tester, that’s okay. And besides, you need to know if the parchment paper will peel off cleanly, right? Use a serrated knife to slice those first warm, fragile pieces. Be patient and slow in your slicing.

I like to loosen the parchment paper on all the cakes before I go to bed for the night, just to make sure it will not cement itself permanently to the cake, although I’m sure it wouldn’t. Pretty sure, anyway.

Once the cakes have cooled thoroughly (the tube pan will need to sit all night, and I sometimes get all 1950s and invert it on an old-fashioned glass Coke bottle or even a wine bottle), you can peel off the paper and wrap them in aluminum foil. Some years I wrap them in cheese cloth first and douse them in brandy or rum before wrapping them up – this is on the rare occasion that I actually do make them in August or September.

Put them somewhere cool for a month or so to age and meld. Mine used to sit in the cellar until we insulated it. Now we put them in “Fred.” Somewhere that stays above freezing but below fifty degrees would be ideal. Keep an eye on them. Sometimes one of the smaller ones will disappear.

Merry Christmas!