Time for Fruitcake!

Yes, ladies and gents, it’s that time of year again. The weather has turned nasty (or, in our case, is continuing to be Glasgow weather) or will be doing so soon. We’ve begun to think about whether to give in to wearing gloves and scarves. We’ll probably hold off on that for another few weeks, but we couldn’t hold off on the annual production of the fruitcake.

This year we’ve done up a double recipe (based loosely on Alton’s Recipe) so that we can share with Scottish friends, my classmates, a coworker or two, and so that we’ll have at least one to take home for Christmas.

For alcohol, instead of rum, we macerated our fruit in 2 pints of pear cider, 2 cups red wine, and 2 cups vodka, and 1/4 cup of homemade vanilla extract.

Homemade Vanilla Extract:

• 1 large bottle vodka, some missing
• Vanilla pods, after you’ve scraped their guts out

1. Put pod into vodka.
2. Repeat as often as you have vanilla pods in the course of cooking.
3. When it starts smelling of vanilla (even if it’s not strongly colored), use as you would vanilla extract.

Instead of the spices listed, we used our own Garam Masala, to the tune of about 2 tablespoons. Instead of using eggs, we used ground flaxseed (1 Tbsp = 1 egg, more or less), because it works just as well as a binder in baked goods, and this way we won’t have eggs sitting about at room temperature for the next 2+ months (and now this is a vegan recipe). We also left out the butter, in favor of a couple tablespoons of olive oil. It doesn’t really need as much fat as is called for, we’ve found. Truly. And we used almonds and sunflower seeds instead of walnuts (bleh!), and we used whatever dried fruit we had on hand. So, ok, it’s not Alton’s recipe, is it?

We ended up with 8 cups of macerated fruit (they sat for something like 3 days), plus whatever alcohol they hadn’t absorbed (about 2 cups). We topped up our liquid to 4 cups (more red wine & vodka), and were ready to throw everything together. All in all, this is a very easy cake to make.

After mixing everything together (without any boiling, as Alton suggests) it went into two 5×9 loaf pans plus 8 small, pyrex dishes. They baked at 350F (150C), more or less, for about an hour and a half. We then pulled them out to cool overnight, and baked them a second time (out of their pans) at 215F (100C) for another hour.

One was devoured sacrificed after the second bake, so that we’d know how everything turned out. They weren’t at all boozy, except in some of the larger chunks of fruit, so everything is well on its way.

So. Now, for the next few weeks, they’ll be liberally doused with fortified wine (Port is what we’d ordinarily use, but this year we’re going with a Shiraz/Cabernet/vodka mixture) every few days, until the bottle runs out. At that point we’ll let them sit out (beneath a kitchen towel) for several weeks, until the booze has all evaporated. By that time it should be near the holidays, and the cakes will be very short for this world, indeed!

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.