The Much-Hated Fruitcake Gets a Makeover
By Adam Sachs
I am the worst, most well-intentioned gift giver ever. Distracted by the idea of seeking out that perfectly tailored personal item, I usually end up getting nothing. I’ve never sent a holiday card in my life—though I finally have some cute kids of my own to show off. What I’ve had luck at, and thoroughly enjoyed, is transforming my kitchen into a production-line facility for the manufacture of a little holiday sweetness—English chutney or marmalade, say—to be labeled and given away as party favors or shipped off to faraway friends.
This year, I decided, would be the year of fruitcake. Yes, fruitcake: that perennially regifted sticky-sweet brick packed with electric-green candied “cherries.” The thing is, I really like the idea of fruitcake, but I’d never met one that didn’t freak me out. So the double challenge of rehabilitating this justly maligned holiday punch line and finding a recipe that actually tasted good and could be replicated to deliver to everyone on my gift list was just the kind of immodest, kitchen-destroying, weekend-consuming insanity I live for.
One thing I knew: I couldn’t do it alone. A mission like this required a mentor. So I called pastry chef Christina Tosi, owner of Momofuku Milk Bars in New York and Toronto and my new fruitcake rabbi.
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As the creator of such diabolical deliciousness as cereal milk soft serve and the compost cookie, Tosi seemed a natural to ask for advice. She’s cool and funny and likes to dream up playful takes on traditional sweets. If anyone could make fruitcake lighter, more modern, and actually crave-able, I figured Tosi could.
“In the Midwest, where I was born, fruitcake is one of the most commonly traded gifts,” she said. “Definitely it’s been regifted a minimum of three times. Nobody ever touches it. But no one ever thought, How do we make a good fruitcake?”
Happily, she had an answer to that rarely asked question: A hybrid panettone-stollen meets fruitcake, a Frankencake mash-up of flawed holiday standbys that would incorporate the pleasanter aspect of all. The airy, bready, yeasted lightness of a panettone—but laden with D.I.Y. candied fruit and slathered with pistachio paste for good measure and rolled up like a cinnamon roll. She walked me through the steps as I scribbled.
“Godspeed, fruitcake maker,” Tosi added before hanging up.
The first step was to fix the fruit. Citrus is easy to candy, and it’s in season for winter gifting. I quartered and juiced lemons and oranges, then blanched them twice to remove some of their bitterness. I scooped out the pith and flesh of the fruit and weighed the remaining peels. Next I added an equal amount by weight of sugar and cooked it in a pan until the peels were soft and syrupy but retained a bit of their bite.
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Cherries are naturally sweet and are better dried than candied. I scattered several dozen pitted ones on a sheet tray and let them sit in an oven at the lowest temperature all day. I’d never realized cherries had skins before, but Tosi had advised me to peel them. So now I was attempting to separate the leathery skins from the rest of the shriveled nuggets. Peeling cherries is like knitting a hat for a ladybug. It takes nimble fingers and patience. It’s time-consuming, brainless work, but it felt good doing something for the people I love—while hoping they wouldn’t regift my offering.
And there was the bonus of getting to go a little nuts in the kitchen. Magazines like this one always extol the pleasures of being suavely prepared, of inviting one’s guests into the spotless kitchen to pitch in with last-minute dinner prep. I like a disciplined dinner party as much as the next show-offy home cook. But I also enjoy the behind-the-scenes freneticism. I like setting unrealistic goals, getting in the weeds—then finding my way out.
I plumped the dried cherries, candied citrus peel, and a handful of store-bought candied ginger and raisins in a saucepan of hot bourbon. (Should you decide to tackle this recipe yourself, the combination of fruit and booze is up to you—dried cranberries and/or candied pineapple would work well, as would any kind of whiskey. The point is to give the final product a nice eating-drunken-cakes-for-the-holidays feel.)
Once I’d mixed and proofed and punched down and portioned off several quantities of Tosi’s yeasty dough—more forgiving and easier to use than a typical cake batter involving baking soda or powder—it was time to roll it out and spread on the pistachio paste.
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Basically, the pistachio exists to counter the bread’s tendency toward dryness. I’d planned to roast and crush my own nuts, but wimped out at the last minute and bought countless cans of the stuff from the baking aisle at Whole Foods. Pistachio paste resembles Martian peanut butter, and spreading it evenly across the surface of soft dough heavily laden with bourbon-soaked fruit was not the easiest task. After a lot of gloppy missteps, I abandoned the special frosting spatula and just messily mushed it around with my hands.
No matter. Tosi had taught me well. However much of a mess I made of the filling or mangled the pinching of the ends of the loaves as I squeezed them, seam side down, into their little gift-size pans, they all puffed up beautifully. Brown on top, buttery yet light inside, weighted with boozy fruit and green-nut swirl throughout. This was fruitcake worth holding on to.
But the point of this exercise was to share, which meant it was time to start another batch. The finished products of my cake factory, brushed with melted butter and cloaked in a flurry of powdered sugar, were marked for others, small -tokens of friendship, sugary stand-ins for something more personal. There was -another benefit, too—this one self-serving: The time spent plotting and prepping was itself a little gift for the obsessive-inclined home tinkerer. We don’t normally have room in our schedules to dedicate to these well-meaning, slightly absurd projects.
There’s value in making time, in giving over a day or two to the rhythmic shuffle of baking sheets and the rolling and punching of dough and dunking fruit into bourbon (with a glass on the side for the baker). The ridiculousness of the effort wasn’t lost on me, but there was honor in saving the fruitcake from ridicule. And anyway, there were too many empty pans to fill to linger on the thought for long. There was powdered sugar in the air, cakes browning in the oven, and things to be done long into the night. It was starting to smell like the holidays.
Get the Recipe: The Obsessivore’s Fruitcake
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Holiday Gift Guide 2014: All the Booze You Could Possibly Need
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16 Winter Pasta Recipes to Keep You Warm and Well-Fed
photo: Danny Kim
