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<\/a>Ok, I admit it.\u00a0 I am one of the few people in the world who likes fruitcake. There must be others of us but I\u2019m hard pressed to name any of my current family or friends who will admit it, except for one.\u00a0 I like pretty much any fruitcake \u2013 I’m not very particular although it does need to be moist.\u00a0 I don\u2019t know where I got this apparently rare taste, although I remember my mother eating fruitcake.\u00a0 She would get a round one in a tin box around Thanksgiving and parcel it out in December.\u00a0 Maybe my grandparents sent it to her from Texas.\u00a0 Some years there was fruitcake left to be eaten on New Year\u2019s Eve.\u00a0 One of my favorites.<\/p>\nAnyway, I do like it.\u00a0 Years ago a friend discovered this and suggested we make our own.\u00a0 I was in, although I\u2019d never thought about making it myself until she suggested it.\u00a0 She comes from a Southern family on her mother\u2019s side, and has great recipes from the Southern ladies who had to learn to cook\/bake certain things as part of their upbringing.\u00a0 There are great cheese straws, for example.\u00a0 And in her family fruitcake was another required specialty.\u00a0 So we started Louise\u2019s notes say that the recipe we used was developed by her grandmother in the 1930s and is unusual in two ways.\u00a0 First it doesn\u2019t include any fruit rinds, only candied fruits.\u00a0 And second, while it does include a small amount of rum for flavor, you age it by seasoning it in apple cider.\u00a0 It comes out nice and moist but not overly \u201cspirited\u201d. We\u2019d get together on Then while the cakes were baking, and they take a long time in a slow oven, we\u2019d do something fun.\u00a0 This usually involved a trip out for lunch and to look at stores someplace like Rockport or Marblehead, MA (wonderful little towns on the ocean) since we had the time.\u00a0 Now I\u2019m talking about 30 years ago, before shopping Thanksgiving weekend became a competitive sport.<\/p>\n Then somehow we lost touch with each other for a number of years and the fruitcake tradition was lost.\u00a0 Jobs and where we were living changed.\u00a0 Happily, a few years ago we reconnected and last year the fruitcake tradition was re-instated.\u00a0 Or at least she let me come help her.\u00a0 We made enough to fill 4 loaf pans and the resulting cakes were beautiful.\u00a0 Unfortunately our timing was bad, and I had to leave before they were finished baking, so she sent me a picture of one later so I\u2019d know they came out as good as ever.\u00a0 (And she was the one who had to keep basting them with cider until Christmas!)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [This post is preempting my usual beginning of the month to-do list. The one for December is likely to be pretty sparse since with the short amount of time between Thanksgiving and Christmas I don’t expect to accomplish much this …<\/p>\n<\/a>our own tradition of making fruitcake the weekend after Thanksgiving.\u00a0 You have to make them far enough in advance to let them age, and add the cider (or rum or bourbon or whatever) to keep them moist.\u00a0 We learned through doing that we could make little muffin-fruitcakes and small loaf fruitcakes and bigger loaf fruitcakes.\u00a0 They were all good.\u00a0 We also had both a dark fruitcake recipe and a white fruitcake recipe (I think the white one was the more traditional Southern one but I may be wrong).\u00a0 The dark is my favorite; it\u2019s the one I grew up with.<\/p>\n<\/a>the Saturday after Thanksgiving and with a very large roasting pan or soup pot start the process of mixing up the batter.\u00a0 The goal was to make enough for each of us to have some for ourselves and some for gifts.\u00a0 The batter is a very stiff, heavy one and you can\u2019t use an electric mixer to stir it \u2013 unless maybe you have an industrial size mixer but neither of us did or does.\u00a0 So we would take turns putting our muscle into it, until the batter was fully mixed and ready to put into the baking pans.<\/a><\/p>\n