Yay! It's Fruitcake time!
I've heard all the jokes and the snide quips about fruitcake; how inedible it is, how it's so dense it has its own gravity field, how there are only 7 fruitcakes in the world and they just keep getting re-gifted.
Well, I have a confession: I believed all the anti-hype about how bad fruitcake was and how nobody in their right minds would ever actually eat any. That is, until I tried (over strenuous objections, mind you) some fruitcake that a good friend's mother made and shipped over from Newfoundland.
Wow, was that cake ever delicious! Moist, flavourful, tender, it had all the earmarks of a great, dense cake, that just happened to have candied fruit in it.
That fruitcake, eaten over 15 years ago, changed the way I saw baked goods; how one should not just blindly accept other people's opinions on how something tastes, as *taste* is highly subjective...one man's meat is another man's poison, as the saying goes. And, most importantly, I found it's vital to be proactive about the way something tastes, in this case changing the recipe by tweaking the fruit, the spices, and even the marinating liquids, until the flavour profile just..."works".
As many know, I've been developing my own fruitcake recipes for the last few years, and I now think they're nearing what I think of as perfection. I'm really looking forward to baking these gorgeous delights in December, once they have fully marinated in my own concoction of alcohols and juices...I'm already drooling!
If anyone is interested, I'm now taking orders for fruitcake. I've changed the pricing schedule to better reflect my costs, but I still think they're incredibly reasonable compared to my competitors (which, for the record, are *not* Price Choppers or Wal-Mart, lol). Message me for more info.