h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I made a rich fruit cake yesterday - the first one I think I've made since I got to Texas. I left it for so long because I couldn't find a decent cake tin, but then I thought whatthehell, I'll just use a bread tin.

You're supposed to let those things mature for at least a week but I've already eaten close to a quarter of it . I guess I'll have to make another one tomorrow so that it'll have matured for a couple of days - I should have this one finished by Sunday

You like fruitcake!
I have never heard anyone say that!
You make them too!
*impressed*

Sure I do - rich fruit/Dundee cake is my favourite kind of cake, and so easy to make too

My mother's recipe calls for soaking it for weeks in rum or brandy. She wraps it in a good damask napkin and puts that in a Tupperware container, and pour in the alcohol, topping it up weekly.

We came back from a ski trip with 1 1/2 fruitcakes. She had them wrapped in J-Cloths and in their Tupperware container. We unpacked the car and Mom went to get the fruitcakes from the livingroom where she had put them. The Tupperware container was there, but no fruitcakes.

A while later, she found our Saint Bernard lying passed out in the basement.

Her theory about who stole the fruitcakes was confirmed when the dog left digested J-Cloths in the yard during a call of nature.

Oh My! Did he have a gut ache too or just a long nap?

I like fruitcake and I've made them before too... Never did the soaking thing though - Mom never did with hers, so it's not something I ever got used to in a fruitcake.

Gosho, if you keep eating that much fruitcake, you'll end up as fat as me!

I have my own special fruitcake recipe that cuts
way back on the sugar, so I don't have to feel as
guilty about eating it. I enjoy making it and
eating it every Christmas.

I don't know how you are Lady Scott but I reckon I'm well on the way there already, and I don't mind it too much if it's as a result of fruit

My mum never soaked the fruit Mudhooks but I have had cakes made that way (and Christmas puds of course). Before I made this one I did suggest to Mrs Gosho that I should soak the fruit in some of the cheap (I mean, *really* cheap Mexican) tequila we've got, but since it's my first I figured I'd wait and see how it came out before before I go wasting any booze on it. Good thing too - since I made it in a small bread tin instead of a big ole cake tin, it cooked in about half the time, and if I hadn't checked it when I did it might have burned to a crisp

Mom always soaked the fruit AND cake. Once the cake "aired a bit, the alcohol wasn't very potent, but it left a WONDERFUL flavour.

Mom made the friutcake for my wedding and the booze oozed out of it. We got a lot of pleasure eating the remains.

The dog, as I recall, just slept.....

Yum. Do we get a recipe(s)? I love fruitcake, but have never made it before. I also love rum.

Funny story: my Grandma feels that fruitcake is a traditional gift to give at Christmas time, so she use to give some of that store bought stuff to all the family. My Mum is very, hmm, how do I put it, ‘frugal’. So this is how it goes. Grandma (who doesn’t like eating fruit cake) gives Mum fruitcake at Christmas. Mum puts fruitcake in bottom of huge freezer, and the following Christmas, gets it out and gives it to Grandma. This being Christmas #2 in the cycle, Grandma gives us a 2nd fruitcake. This goes on for some 10 years or so, until hungry little me goes hunting for something sweet, and finding the cake at the bottom of the freezer I proceed to unwrap it with the intention of eating it. Until…. I look at the label. It’s from a store that closed out around Christmas #2. Grandma had been doing the same thing that Mum had, and in effect we had been exchanging the same 2 fruitcakes back and forth for about 10 years. Hmmm. Don’t you just love family?

Ebert

A recipe? Certainly

8oz plain flour
1 level tsp baking powder
1/2 level tsp salt
6oz soft brown sugar
5oz softened butter or pastry fat
3 eggs
2 tblsp milk (1 tblsp of treacle can be used instead)
7oz currants
7oz raisins
7oz sultanas
3oz glace cherries

Grease an 8" round cake tin & line it with greaseproof paper, parchment, or waxed paper. Sift the flour, salt, baking powder, and sugar into a bowl, add the butter/fat, milk, & unbeaten eggs, and stir until smooth and creamy. Stir in the mixed fruit and turn the mixture in the lined tin. Bake in the centre of slow oven (300ºF, gas mk 2) for 3 hours. If the top starts to burn turn down the heat a little and cover the cake with a circle of aluminium foil. The cake is ready when a knife or skewer inserted into the centre comes out clean. Cool on a ire rack then wrap the cake in foil for a week to mature... if you can

You know Ebert, rich fruit cakes will keep a *long* time, especially the ones with booze in. I got a birthday cake when I was 8 (no booze in that one ), and a year later we found some of it at the back of the pantry. It was still perfectly edible since my mum had wrapped it up tightly

I’m not opposed to eating 10-year-old cake. (Does this make me a bad person?) It’s the freezing and unfreezing and refreezing and unfreezing … &c. that worries me.

Thanks for the recipe. I think I know what the family is getting for Christmas this year. He. He. He. (did you say you made only ½ of this recipe and cooked it in a bread tin?)

Ebert

Yes, but I think next time I'll make 2/3 the amount.

There are lots of good recipes on the web - I Googled <"rich fruit cake" currants sultanas site:.co.uk> yesterday and turned up all sorts of yumminess (although I'd've thought that the Womens Institute would have more cake recipes than that ). I found one that included crystallised ginger Of course, I didn't bookmark the page so I'll have to search for it again

My recipe is *not* on the Internet.
This is because it's an original recipe, of which
the only copy is at home (I'm at work now )

I'll post it later.

My mother was raised in Scotland before the advent of refridgeration. She naturally assumes that because food kept perfectly well unrefridgerated then, it will keep just as well her... Forgetting, of course, that just as there was no refridgeration, there was also no central heating, and people's pantries were generally a lot cooler.

She complains when a turkey goes "off" after being left in the cold oven all night and when people turn their noses up at eggs left out of the fridge for 4 or 5 days or left in the freezer for 15 years.

"For Heaven's sake, 1931 I...."....

I still remember the ruckus over a frozen trout that had been in the freezer so long that 2/3 of its weight had been lost to freezer burn. "It's perfectly good. If you won't eat it, I will!"

And to make her point, she did..... You could tell it was NOT perfectly good, but she was not going to let anyone prove her wrong.

Mom also has a short memory when it comes to when she bought something. She gets really bent out of shape if something she "bought last month" (in fact the sell-by date says it was around the previous Christmas) is moldy. The number of times she has said she was going to take something back to the store because it went off too quickly....

... And with *that* post, this conversations has gone from "Yum" to "Yuk"...



Oh please, will someone come along and correct that situation?

Lady Scott, I would gladly post my yummy
fruitcake recipe, but I still have a couple more
hours I have to be at w**k .

Then it looks like we're stuck with "Yuk" for a while, unless someone else can do something to change it!

Turkey, lobster, sweet potato pie,
Lamb cakes piled up till they reach the sky,
Funniculi, funnicula, funniculi, funnicula,
Joly is everywhere, funniculi, funncula.