Fruitcake: Love or Hate?

For a second there, I thought those were mealworms.

OP is really my Aunt Peggy.

I love, love, LOVE fruitcake, even the varieties with candied citrus peel. Yes, I know I'm an outlier. I'm not particularly fond of brown raisins, so I only use the goldens when I make it.

Jamaican fruitcake is actually quite good. I kind of have a thing about fruitcake since that’s what my grandpa used to call me

I buy Assumption Abbey fruitcake this time of the year. They're made by virgin (allegedly) nuns. The fruitcake gets soaked in 1-2 cups brandy, vacuum packed for several weeks, then unwrapped in time for Christmas dinner.

This isn’t Barbara Bush’s grandmother’s recipe. This is young, sassy and bitch’n!

more suggestions for GOOD mail order ones, please without the fluorescent-green, lemon-peel bits or whatever

Your poll sucks.

R8 Indifferent goes to Vivian Vance.

I do mine with rum and diced, dried pineapple, mango, apricot, raisins and walnuts.

You can really do them with anything you want. Hickory Farms used to put out one with cherries and chocolate chips, so I did a dried cherries version one year. Too sweet.

I like this one from Collin Street Bakery. Not sure if this counts as fruitcake though, and it’s not boozy, but I’m sure you could add your own.

R10 Yes, you can pretty much use any dried fruit you want.

The article posted by OP talks about year old fruitcake. My granny used to make her fruitcake on boxing day for the following christmas....hers would make you drunk from eating it by the time it got to christmas.

My mother, who's from the deep South, used to make "candy orange slice cake". It was an old southern recipe. The special ingredient was candy orange slices. Brachs used to make medium-sized bags that held just the orange flavored pieces. My mom would chop them up and add them to the batter. I know it sounds like it would taste awful, but it was actually very good.

I love a good, boozy fruitcake. My mom once bought me a fruitcake from a department store (which are generally the worst kind) but this one was surprisingly delicious. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find anything like it since.

The Gethsemane Farms fruit cake is OK, but not worth the price.

The Whole Foods fruit cake has a molasses flavor (which doesn't belong in a fruit cake) and is a little overly sweet, but it's not bad and not too expensive.

The one from the Arizmendi Bakery in San Francisco wasn't that great.

I may try the Assumption Abbey fruitcake mentioned above.

I usually purchase a Trappist Monastery fruitcake around this time of year. I love to have a slice with my morning tea.

r3=Raisin Racist

It's a good novelty treat around the holidays. The rest of the year, no.

R13, my dad loved those candy orange slices, and we always had them around the house when I was growing up. I think they still make them, I saw them at some store recently, probably Ace Hardware. The one by me has a lot of old school candy, and caters to Hawaiians, so maybe that’s why.

In the 80’s, my high school marching band sold fruitcakes door-to-door as a fundraiser. The band director had us all taste the cake so that we could provide positive reviews to our potential customers.

Damn, that cake was delicious. I can still taste it! It wasn’t boozy but it was moist and flavorful. I would roll my eyes at the idiots who recoiled in horror at the thought of eating fruitcake. They missed out.

I wish that I could remember the brand name of that damn good cake.

Yes, but only with fondant icing.

^ Philistine.

I love a well made fruitcake. I make a Japanese fruitcake every year or 2 at the holidays. It always seems to go over well even with people who don't care for fruitcake.

My grandma, who was Danish and an expert baker, would make fruitcake every Christmas. She would make it almost a month a head of time and have my grandfather "water it" with some type of booze daily. Probably brandy? It was fucking fantastic! I've always been looking for a recipe that might help me recreate it.

R23, maybe she used a base similar to this. This is a common WWII rationing cake recipe.

During the war, and for a few years after in Europe, it was very hard to get baking ingredients. This rationing cake recipe is made without milk or eggs. The recipe calls for citron as the only dried fruit in the cake.

This could make a good cake to be shipped in a tin overseas for soldiers, since it would keep.

I used this as a fruitcake base, removed the citron, and put in dried apricots, pineapples, dates, mangos and walnuts, with a few pecans, and soaked it in rum. It’s super rich, but really good.

It gets hard to stir though. You need strong arms to mix it, after the fruit goes in.

Every fruitcake we had at Christmas was always a year old. My mother would make a new fruitcake every Christmas, wrap it in an MD202 soaked cheesecloth (the ONLY thing MD2020 is good for), then Saran Wrap, then heavy duty foil, and put it in the freezer to be taken out the next Christmas. Those year old soaked fruitcakes were fabulous.

Panforte is sort of an Italian fruitcake and is delicious. I made it one time.

R23, sorry, here’s the War Cake recipe. I read that a lot of women of that era had this recipe and used it. I’ve also read that something similar was used during the Depression because it’s not many ingredients.

I'm a fruitcake!

Amazon sells the Assumption Abbey fruit cake. Here's the link with 200+ reviews, FWIW. IMO, the fruit cake should have more cake than fruit. The ingredients are actually expensive. My mom would pour brandy on them for several days in a row, before wrapping them and gifting them.

R28 He loves his fruitcakes with plenty of nuts.

I've mentioned this in previous threads about fruitcakes: Tomato Soup Cake is absolutely delicious, and a great alternative to the more traditional fruitcake recipes. It's more cake than fruit, and nicely spiced. Can be made months ahead, boozed up if you prefer it that way, but even freshly-made it it quite tasty. And it makes the house smell great while it's baking!

I am not a fan of the type that resembles a piece of stained glass when it's been sliced. Too much fruit is overkill.

Let the stones fly.

My father always soaked a tea towel in bourbon and wrapped the fruitcake for at least a day before cutting.

Ha ! R31 I remember carefully trying to remove the fruit from my mother's cakes , just trying to get to some REAL cake, NO luck . it was just fruit , stuck to fruit , stuck to more fruit and occasional nut!

Best comment, R30

Maybe one piece per year. Except if it is soaked in booze then maybe a couple.

One of the few truly detestable foods in the world that isn't a cruciferous vegetable.

I hate raisins and other dried and candied fruit (except for orange peel, weirdly) so it always seemed a waste of a perfectly good cake. I can stomach it if it's boozy enough, but I won't enjoy it. I've been thinking of doing the same kind of batter with only nuts in it, and maybe some candied peel, but no dried fruit.

I love it. Raisins, sultanas, currants, almonds, candied peel all soaked in rum and sherry then baked into a dense cake that is left to develop after the addition of more rum or sherry or whiskey. I use this recipe.

[quote] I am not a fan of the type that resembles a piece of stained glass when it's been sliced. Too much fruit is overkill.

I agree. Those types of fruitcakes are more candy than cake.

In college I worked for the Ward Baking Company, bakers of Ward's Paradise Fruitcake, and whatever didn't sell would go right back into the warehouse until the following November when it was time to put it back into the stores. The old-timers swore that it wasn't even fit to eat until it had aged at least 3 years.

The dairies did it too. Any unsold egg nog would go back into the freezer come January.

If you like a fruitcake that is more cake than fruit you really should try the Japanese fruitcake. There are all sorts of varieties from typical multiple fruits to citrus style, but they're all good.

Psychopaths who clicked "love it" need to do the right thing and have a friend lash them securely to a chair so they cannot harm themselves or others.

Liking fruitcake. For fuck's sake.

You just haven't met the right fruitcake, r42.

Fruitcakes can be freaks under the duvet.

I like fruitcake, but Plum pudding is miles ahead of it.

R20, fondant would be OK, but for fruitcake the way to go is hard sauce.

Some of us only eat fruitcakes in Europe, r43.

Fruitcake: Looks bad, tastes good.

Missing having Fruitcake this year

You need to try Caribbean style fruitcake or even better blackcake. They are both generally eaten around Christmastime. Only difference is there is a better ratio of fruit to cake batter which makes it more of a cake than a granola bar. The blackcake is sorry if life Christmas pudding but again it is more of a cake texture. I'm from the islands, so I know the difference in taste between the two and why I detest "fruitcake" AND Christmas pudding, but love their "relatives"...

I think I don't like it, but I haven't had it since I was a kid 30 years ago and I have no idea what the quality of that one was like.

I'm not really a fan of nuts in cakes, but I would try the linked recipe if someone made it

That looks really good, R50.

Same-Sex Loving Baked Good is more appropriate.

R52 it's a staple in Caribbean homes during Christmastime, only you will be eating an actual rum-soaked, fruity slice of cake instead of a sickeningly sweet piece of hard candied fruit and nut.

I love the German version - Stollen

I buy an Assumption Abbey fruitcake every year. I then proceed to spend the following month eating it, bit by bit. For me, it’s the perfect fruitcake.

Good fruitcake" Claxton County Georgia Fruitcake. Years and years ago a one-pound bar was 99¢. Today it's $10.00 ..... $7.00 if you buy five. Buy from plant or Verizon. I've done eight so far.