[Sca-cooks] Fruitcakes

[Bill Fisher]

On Fri, 26 Nov 2004 16:06:31 -0500, Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius
<adamantius.magister at verizon.net> wrote:
> Possibly me. I'm a fan of the standard Irish Christmas Cake, which
> has a lot of dried fruit and nuts, a little bit of candied peel (I
> believe the recipe I have someplace specifies orange and lemon peel,
> and doesn't mention citron, which is probably what people who
> complain about fruitcake hate the most). The actual cake portion is
> actually quite good: largely indistinguishable from pound cake. It
> turns somewhat dark from the raisins and such, though. You can make
> it in advance and "feed" it a drop or two of something for medicinal
> purposes if you want, but before serving it gets a spackling of
> almond paste or a thin coating of marzipan, and then a very thin
> layer of Royal Icing.

I like fruitcake as well.  I'll have to look into that Irish Christmas Cake 
recipe.  Cakes are a definite area of non-experience for me.  I 
think I have made maybe three my entire life.

The cake my Mom used to make resembles that style of cake
but with the candied fruit instead of dried fruit. I remember her telling
me that her Mom made it with dried fruit (my family is Scots/Irish).

But it had the consistency of a dense poundcake, not the chewy 
ultra-dense consistency of the "storage" English versions I have seen.

> In general, I'm not a big fan of the darker, heavier fruitcakes,
> although I think I had something that was, I think, an English-style
> fruitcake that may have been tampered with by some Jamaicans, and
> that was quite good...

I've had a  "rum cake" which is an english style fruitcake with rum added
to the batter and rum added when it was served.  That was really good.

I also had a hard version of a fruitcake, but it was "loosened" with a bit
of Jameson's before serving.   Very nice.

> "Do we baaaake the cake? No, no, no, no! Do we steeeeaaaam the cake?
> No, no, no..."
> 
> (50 extra super special points for the first person to get _that_
> obscure reference.)
> 
> Adamantius

Reference sounds familiar, not sure.  No points for me



Cadoc

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