Share your best fruit cake recipes, please!
C’mon, I can’t be the only one who really likes the stuff.
This year I want to bake some (but I promise to only share with fellow True Believers in the Goodness of Fruitcake) but I’m looking for a good recipe.
I’d prefer one where the cake part is dark colored, and very moist rather than the dry ‘blond’ colored type. Though maybe the moistness come from being dosed with brandy or rum or whatever every week? Am I too late to start?
Alton Brown’s Free-Range Fruitcake. You can find it on the Food Network’s website. It’s amazing.
We’re making this one for the second year in a row - actually they’re made, just in the “ripening” stage. I zeroed in on this last year when attempting to find a nut-free version (I dislike them, and my son is allergic). They have that rich ripened flavor that I remember from the fruitcakes we used to have at Christmas without growing up, without those pesky nuts I used to pick out. I remember loving the fact that the cakes (as a kid) had lots of the glace fruits.
The only thing I do not like about this recipe was that last year, they didn’t slice - when I tried, they simply crumbled into chunks. Tasted yummy, but it would have been nice if we’d been able to cut them into slices. I don’t know if it was a problem with the recipe itself, or that I soaked 'em too much with brandy during the ripening period.
I will try Alton’s recipe at some point as it gets so many raves - it’s low on the nut quantities so I figure I can throw in more fruit instead (I didn’t want to try that with a regular recipe, as I feared it would affect the baking time or soaking time too much).
FYI - as vile and nasty as glace fruits are by themselves, when baked into fruitcake and properly alcoholized and ripened, they turn into quite nice tidbits.
I’m just checking the Dope before work, but when I get home tonight I’ll post my family recipe for fruitcake. It’s said to come from a newspaper in Buffalo, New York, in the 1940’s. We like it a lot.
I think you might be too late…the ladies here at work made their cakes late October and have been dousing them with alcohol ever since 
Technically, for enjoying around Christmas, yes, you should have already been well into the aging stage. However, that’s not to say you can’t bake one now to enjoy later or bake now and still enjoy it at Christmas anyway (it just won’t be the same quality).