“Fruitcake isn’t made with nuts!”

A stinging rebuke from my father, Joe Pastry Senior, over the weekend, getting after me for my inclusion of nutmeats in last week’s recipe. “If fruitcake were meant to have nuts in it,” he said, ” it would be called fruit AND nut cake.” All I can say is that if he were to share his top secret recipe with me (and his booze-injecting horse needle), these sorts of oversights wouldn’t happen.