Fruitcake gets a bad rap. There are all kinds of old jokes about it that circulate especially this time of year. Stuff like how there’s only been one fruitcake ever made and it just keeps getting passed from person to person each holiday season getting harder and harder each year.
Then there’s the fruitcakes that we saw at Costco today. Big, brawny fruitcakes that cost $15 each—which really isn’t bad in the world of fruitcake prices. I saw a flyer recently wanting $32.99 for a small, round fruitcake. And that’s the stuff that hasn’t been soaked in enough booze to make it illegal to drive after one slice.
And one of my favorite all time Jimmy Buffet songs is “Fruitcakes”. Yes indeed folks, there is “a little bit of fruitcake in every one of us.”
I’ve been threatening to bake fruitcake for years. So far the last 2 or 3 weeks, Mrs. CB and I have had fun with me trying to get a recipe that makes a good fruitcake, is sufficiently “dense” but not too “dense” and which can meet the “Cheap Bastid” test—except in the case of fruitcake it’s kind of relative.
According to Mrs. CB, “If it’s overly sweet, sits like a brick in your tummy, and it’s clumpy then you’ve done it right.”
Well after 3 tries, I think I have it right. Here’s the result:
Recipe: Cheap Bastid’s Holiday Fruitcake
Summary: A holiday tradition gets embraced by Cheap Bastid. Here’s a tasty, easy recipe for a Holiday classic.
Ingredients
- 2 1/3 cups flour (divided)
- 1 tsp baking powder
- 1 cup brown sugar
- ¾ tsp salt
- ½ cup softened margarine or butter
- 2 eggs
- 1/3 cup molasses
- 1/3 cup orange juice
- 2 tsp grated orange peel
- 1 tsp vanilla
- ½ tsp cinnamon
- ½ tsp nutmeg
- ½ tsp clove
- ½ tsp mace
- 1 tsp all spice
- 1 cup chopped pecans or walnuts
- 1 lb mixed candied fruit (like Fruitcake Mix from Sunripe Fruit Products of Plant City, FL)
Instructions
- Get out a couple of mixing bowls, wooden spoons, your hand mixer and a loaf pan.
- In 1 bowl put the dry ingredients—flour, baking powder, salt, brown sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, clove, mace and all spice. Stir/whisk together well.
- In 2nd bowl put the o.j., orange peel, molasses, vanilla, margarine/butter and eggs. Stir/beat until well combined.
- Add the contents of the “wet bowl” into the “dry bowl” and mix well with the hand mixer for 2-3 minutes.
- Turn the oven on to 325 to pre-heat.
- Clean the 2nd bowl and put the fruit in it. Shake the 1/3 cup of flour over it and stir well to get a light dusting of flour all over the fruit.
- If using half pecans or walnuts, put them in a 1 quart bag and then gently break them with your knuckles or a meat mallet (just break them, don’t beat them to death).
- Add fruit and nuts to batter mix and mix thoroughly by hand or with mixer.
- Prep the loaf pan by spraying the bottom and sides with cooking spray or by rubbing some margarine on the bottom and sides with a paper napkin.
- Line the pan with aluminum foil.
- Pour the batter into the pan and smooth it out.
- Put the loaf pan of batter into the heated oven. Turn the temperature down to 300 for about an hour. (Check for doneness with a toothpick—fruitcake is done when the toothpick inserted into the middle of the cake comes out “clean”.
- Remove from oven (at maximum 1 hr. 15 minutes). Lift out of pan by the foil. Put the cake on a cooling rack.
Preparation time: 1 hour(s)
Cooking time: 1 hour(s) 15 minute(s)
Number of servings (yield): 12
If you can resist the temptation, wrap the fruitcake in plastic wrap after it cools and let it sit for a couple of days. The flavors will become more subtle and deeper. I’m just sayin’! We can’t wait that long.
Be patient with this. And give it a chance. Fruitcake is kind of a cool tradition and it’s even cooler if you make it yourself. A couple of options on this is to take this recipe and make it in a couple of mini-loaf pans then wrap them and give them as gifts. This is somewhere around 2 ½-3 lbs of fruitcake! So you can do it in small pans.
Or you can double the recipe and bake it in a tube pan (or a bundt pan would work too). This will create a holiday ring or wreath fruitcake. Make a double batch and bake up a half dozen mini loaf cakes for gifts. Imagine the “joy” on the face of your kids’ 2nd grade teacher when presented with a homemade fruitcake and your kid “helped”. Who says you can’t have fun at Christmas.
Actually this is pretty good stuff and not very hard to make. You just have to spend about an hour prepping it and another hour to hour and 15 minutes baking it. Plus, it’s way cheaper to do it this way than to buy it.
Yep, there’s a little bit of fruitcake in every one of us—and this recipe proves it. It’s going to become a regular part of our Christmas tradition. The biggest reason is that it really is part of Christmas—a holiday cake, that you make yourself with just a little pinch of love in every bite.
The Cheap Bastid Test: Well, this isn’t the cheapest thing that Cheap Bastid has ever made. It weighed in at a whopping 2 lbs 14 oz.! The flour, brown sugar and other dry ingredients cost less than $1. The eggs were $.30. The orange juice cost $.35 (navel oranges were $.77/lb and I bought 2 so I could get orange peel and fresh, cheap juice). I used maybe $.20 of margarine. The expensive part is the fruit and the nuts. The fruit cost $3 and the nuts about $3.50. So what’s the total? $8.35 is what I come up with. Not cheap, but not bad by any stretch of the imagination for Holiday Fruitcake.
Walter, do you think it will hold up if I soak it in rum, or will I end up with colorful rum slushy?
Thanks Rae, many recipes I’ve checked talk about soaking fruitcake in rum or brandy. You can substitute rum for the orange juice in the recipe. And you can soak the finished cake in rum and wrap it in cheesecloth, then re-soak it every few days. Good luck to you.
Me grandma always soaked it in rum.. but this looks like a really moist cake. I have made Simnel Cake which is close to this only darker.
This is good–the molasses darkens it of course. My next holiday cake project (not until next year) will be a “Stollen” or “Julekakke”–more “cakey” and less fruit.