Offer anyone a piece of fruitcake and watch them search for a way to decline without seeming rude. Mention giving fruitcakes as gifts and at least one irreverent comment will ensue. Therefore, it is with trepidation that I confess to people that baking fruitcakes is a part of my family’s holiday baking traditions.  I’m not sure how far back on the family tree that this fruitcake business extends, but I have fond memories of my maternal grandmother’s fruitcakes and of my mom spending hours baking them each winter. Like most daughters, she felt the need to put her own personal stamp on the tradition, and so the fruitcakes that I bake are my mom’s recipe, not my grandmother’s  Confection Fruitcake recipe.

Baking these cakes is not so much an event as it is a process drawn out over a month’s time. First, you must find just the right fruit and purchase the preferred alcoholic beverage in which to soak the fruit. Whiskey, brandy, or rum can be used, but I prefer a good dark rum. The rum also goes into the sauce that the cakes will steep in for several weeks once they are baked.

One of the Food Network’s chefs said once that no one should use an ingredient that they don’t consider good enough to eat or drink (he was referring to wine). The same goes for the fruit and nuts that I choose. Fresh Medjool dates, plump golden raisins, dried premium sweetened cherries and pineapple chunks. Plump pecan and California walnut halves are added to the dough with the rum-infused fruit.

On baking day, I mix together a rich, fluffy pound cake batter with real butter, fresh eggs, flour, and sugar that will bind the fruit together. Once again, the daughter has chosen to put her own original stamp on the tradition. I altered my mom’s batter recipe this year with regular sugar rather than the powdered confectioners sugar her recipe calls for in an effort to make healthier (?) cakes. I know, I know…   I also made a simple syrup rather than use corn syrup in the rum sauce, as I have taken the pledge to eliminate corn syrup from our diet.

Baking the cakes has its own traditions. We cut brown paper to fit the loaf pans (Thank goodness HEB still offers paper grocery bags.) and then oil the brown paper before topping it with parchment paper also cut to size. Once the pans are ready, the batter bakes for approximately two hours at 300 degrees with a shallow pan of water on a lower rack.

The cakes have cooled, the sauce has simmered and been drizzled over the cakes. The foil wrapped cakes are resting in a cool place for the next couple of weeks until it’s time to give them as gifts and slice one for holiday eating.

Fruitcake, anyone?