Every year the week after Thanksgiving my now dearly-departed grandfather would mail my family a fruit cake from The Collins Street Bakery in Corsicana, Texas.
Go ahead, drag out the fruitcake jokes and jabs, though I can still hear the thud when our hapless postman plopped a big one on the porch every November.
Without a doubt these are probably the best mass-produced fruit cakes on the market, flush with local pecans, though you’d know at first glance that it’s the product of a factory bakery and (at best) several months old.
We’d all dutifully eat a piece or two and surreptitiously send the rest home with unsuspecting party guests over the next few weeks.
My genuine fruit cake revelation didn’t happen until years later.
Last year during our sojourn in Texas I helped chef friend Libby rustle up a couple of real, honest to Pete fruitcakes for an event she was catering. We of course did one for each of us too.
She dug up a champion of a recipe with roots in ancient Scotland and packed the cakes to the gills with spirit-soaked fruits, top-notch ingredients and good rum; we baked them for three hours (plus some) one painfully warm afternoon last December in Austin.
Dark and rich, these fruitcakes were like nothing either of us had ever seen or tasted before and forever changed our perception of what a holiday fruit cake was meant to be. Libby and I pledged to make every year in reverent memory of that first taste.
Round up the ingredients and bake one next week. And keep sprinkling that rum over the next several weeks…..this one just gets better and better.
2 cups dark raisins
2 and 1/2 cups golden raisins
1 and 3/4 cups dried currants
3/4 cup candied orange peel, chopped
1 and 3/4 cups glaceed fruits (cherries, pineapple, apricots, ginger)
1/2 cup water
1 cup nice dark rum (and probably more)
2 tbs grated orange peel
2 tbs grated lemon peel
1 tsp molasses
1 tsp baking soda2 cups plus 2 tbs all purpose flour
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup plus 2 tbs (2 and 1/4 sticks) unsalted butter, softened
1 and 1/2 cups dark brown sugar (packed)
5 large eggs
Rum the fruit. Combine the first 6 ingredients in a large saucepan, add 1/2 cup rum. Bring to a simmer over medium heat, stirring frequently. Remove from the heat, add the grated peels, molasses and baking soda. Let stand until all moisture is absorbed, at least an hour, stirring every 10 minutes or so.
Batter up. Preheat your trusty oven to 325. Butter a 10-inch springform pan, then line the bottom and sides with parchment. Butter the parchment.
Whisk the flour and salt together. In a large mixer bowl beat the butter and sugar together until smooth; beat the eggs in one at a time, combining well after each. Add the flour mixture on low speed, mix until just combined. Stir in the fruit mixture and pour into the prepared pan. Cover tightly with foil.
Now the long bake. Bake two hours at 325 then reduce the oven to 275 and bake until tester inserted into the middle comes out clean but moist (anywhere from 30 to 60 additional minutes for us).
Place on a rack, remove the foil and pierce the cake all over the top with a skewer. Drizzle another 1/2 cup of run very slowly all over the cake surface. (More rum is good by the way…)
Cool completely in the pan, then run a knife around the edge to loosen, remove the pan sides. Wrap tightly in foil and store in the fridge – some keep drizzling run every week until it’s all gone…….
Enjoy.
