October 4

How many times do I start a Monday—start any week—by making fruitcake? Also, how many times have I ever made fruitcake so early in the year? (I can count on one thumb). However, this year I am to supply Edible San Diego with my fruitcake recipe, along with a short write-up and photos, for a Christmas post, so it’s time to get to work! I need to cook deliberately and take many photographs.

Visually, a fruitcake can be enticing indeed if you put in glaceed fruits. Yet they often decorate something that many people deride, and I myself dislike intensely: heavy, sticky, damp conglomerations of over-sweet indigestible stuff with a batter to glue it all together. However, I know that many other people adore the stuff, including a friend of ours who loved slices of dark fruit cake toasted and topped with vanilla ice cream.

My fruitcake is based on applesauce cake, a comfortable old standby that my mother also made, so my motions will follow well-fingered, even well-measured paths. As for my personal version, I will stir in chopped apricots, currants, and golden raisins, and the zest and juice of two Valencia oranges from my friend Susie’s tree: this is a California cake.

I’ve cooked for the camera before, for this same online food blog: lemon curd (or lemon butter), trifle, and blueberry muffins. But fruitcake somehow raises the stakes, being as it is, a controversial food, along with the need for it to be at least somewhat aged. Today’s loaves will be swaddled in brandy-soaked linen towels and chilled on a back shelf of the fridge for a week; then I’ll cut one to taste and photograph sliced. I hope it comes out right. I feel rather as though I’ve entered a competition.

One possible outcome: the cake will taste fine but not slice or present well, in which case, I’ll make another batch, with improvements—and only a week to produce. No, my camera lens isn’t the gimlet eye of Paul or Prue on The Great British Baking Show, but still, fruitcake isn’t a pretty product like lemon curd and trifle. Plus no cake allows the cook a pre-taste before serving.

I also feel a certain temerity in putting a fruit cake recipe out there—it’s almost as bad as self-publishing a book. So many fruitcakes, so many cookbooks, so many recipes on the web, so many examples to measure up against. . . and here I come, as though I’ve piped up, “Here’s how I do it!” But such thoughts haven’t stopped me.

October 5

Why all the fuss about something you do once a year? And a recipe that few in my family care for; fruitcake is one of those things known as an acquired taste—and few people have acquired this one.
But its once-a-year nature is exactly what’s important. Like Christmas or Hanukkah or Halloween, fruitcake holds significance. You lead up to it, look forward to this communion with Christmases past. For some of us anyway, fruitcake is one of those talisman foods. A treat that you seldom have, thus you prize it, like a long-held wine.

But I also think of the old saying “Nutty as a fruitcake.” Which is ironic given that I don’t like nuts in fruitcake. I suppose that jokey reference is not so much literally to nuts but to the great variety of rich ingredients that find their way into recipes. However, from a little research, I soon learn that the famous Georgia and Louisiana commercial bakeries added so many nuts (usually pecans) that their cakes became known for high nut content rather than any statement being made about the consumer’s wits, or lack thereof. Or am I “nuts” to be making this?

I also learned that December 27 is National Fruitcake Day—who knew? There’s a national day for almost anything if you search hard enough. Some, however, might label the 27th an anti-holiday.

But then my inner voice says, “Well, be honest, really you like the process and nostalgia of doing it, too!” Yes, I do.
Why? I think it’s that it’s like making big soups from scratch. True, there’s a recipe to follow and I’m not quite as free as with a soup, but I view fruitcake creatively. Every year, I make my own mix of fruits: currants, raisins, apricots, citron, orange, and lemon peel. While I may not put in “everything but the kitchen sink,” I love being the mix-meister in charge!

How does fruitcake taste best? For me, a stolen moment in a busy season: a mug of hot tea and a slice of fruitcake, shared with nobody. I also enjoy serving it as part of a special tea for friends, as part of the treat that is Christmas. Or that time I put on a dessert and liqueurs party for my husband’s Christmas birthday. There’s my fruitcake right in the foreground, though a different version from this present one.

2013

Fruitcake is a celebration thing. The fruits, the variety, the preciousness of it, all stand in for people getting together, for warmth and hospitality. If you assemble that in a cake and throw in a little liquor, you’re offering ampleness. It’s food as an invocation of joy, of times when things are going right. Fruitcake is a sort of “you can have it all!” food.

If fruit cake were a place, it would be New Orleans or Las Vegas or Times Square on New Year’s Eve. (Tradition, yes, but never in my life would I actually go there on New Year’s Eve!)
Fruitcakes a moment in the year. A rich, precious moment—and many steps along the way, moments in the making of it.

October 6

These images remind me how much I enjoy the tactile nature of cooking. I like to mix stuff—no, make that, I love to. I cook by hand and feel and have never gotten around to using a food processor. Most of the time I don’t need one. I like the way this cake’s initial butter/sugar/spice mixture looks like sand, the slight grittiness of it. To me, “creaming” is a misnomer, even as I know it’s the accepted term for that basic combining job. Doing the job with exactly the right, beloved tool.

Ushering the batter into baking pans, I use a favorite red silicon spatula: oh, the pliability of it, the way it so easily scrapes every single dot of batter out of my mixing bowl. It’s as though I never left the sandbox far behind, nor mudpies.

Sniff! A lovely spicy breath of cake travels around the corner of the kitchen and floats down the hall to where I sit at the computer. Such a warm, “comforts of home” fragrance.

Done! A fresh loaf in your hand! Solid, holding together yet not hard. Done! Warm! I take a close deep breath. It’s my baby, this almost-body I’ve made.

October 10
A week in, a momentous occasion: first taste. This is the best fruitcake I’ve ever made! I cut a second piece, even scoff down a third. My efforts to have all the fruit cut small and relatively uniform have paid off, plus the flavor balance and moistness is just lovely. I felt as though I were sipping a beautifully made wine, with its many tastes all in harmony

Today, I also check and recheck the recipe. I’ve taken great pains to state the process and ingredients clearly and get the measurements exactly right. Though something we all take for granted, this is not as easy as it looks. Anyone passing my workroom would see me staring at the screen, muttering. “One-quarter cup, one half . . . are they printed consistently? . . . Is that exactly how to explain this process? Do I do it that way? ‘Chopped’ or ‘minced’? . . . Should I write out the number or is the numeral acceptable?” . . . and such like.
The cake, one of the two I baked, has been sitting for its portraits. These images are the best two out of twenty-four, taken over three sessions. No, I can’t ask a fruitcake to “smile” or “give me a profile, now!” But the photo three sessions reflect that my subject changed its clothes—that is, table setting and serving dish—and for the final set of images, like the one below, I added details and trimmings in the form of ingredients. Just as with a portrait sitting, I tried different angles, took close-ups, and worked at presenting the most attractive version of this fruitcake. Color and accent make a difference; so does the glimpse of my California grandmother’s silver cake knife.

I email the image to a friend. Her reply: “Ooh, I could eat that right now!”

October 19

The loaves are tucked away though I will give them a couple more infusions of brandy over the next two months. Seldom that I have some piece of Christmas done so early, and one which has already given me an idea: for my turn hosting a yearly lunch with some friends, instead I’ll serve them a beautiful tea.
I have something ready already! Something in reserve, a fruity harbinger of things to come, a treasure ahead—Christmas, here I come!