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 […]
READ ONThis is American stollen, mind you. Which is to say it tried hard to be the real German article, but not being truly German, it isn’t. My shape isn’t perfect (I left a little too much lip down below), and I used things like cherries and dark raisins which are verboten among the purist crowd. […]
READ ONA wealth of information comes our way via Mexico Bob. Apparently the citron has quite a pedigree. In the ancient world it was employed both as an emetic and as a mouthwash. Here’s this from Theophrastus: In the east and south there are special plants… i.e. in Media and Persia there are many types of […]
READ ONIt ain’t a make of French car, if that was your answer. It’s a fruit, the candied rind of which is frequently called for in Christmas fruitcake recipes. It’s a head-scratcher for many people, since outside of fruitcake-making, few people ever encounter it. But the reality is that outside of fruitcake-making, there are very few […]
READ ONI adapted it, actually. This is a variation on a formula I came across a few years ago and loved. Notice that the dried and candied fruits are all light in color. No raisins or currants, not even any brown-skinned nuts. This is intentional, since unlike an English-style fruitcake, a light, golden crumb is part […]
READ ONSo then, to continue the Seinfeld-esque theme we’ve established: what’s the deal with stollen? Well it’s German, that much you probably know already. It hails from Dresden, the capital city of the German state of Saxony, which is located far in the east of the country on the border with Poland. Like I care, Joe, […]
READ ONReader Thomas weighs in from the Continent: Interesting to read about fruitcakes… there is no such thing over here in Austria (and to my knowledge, in Germany). Well, there are some fruitbreads and yes, there is stollen… but all with no booze. I take it that your fruitcake is an offspring of the “drunken” english […]
READ ONCreate that transparent neon color you mean? The color comes of course from food coloring which is added as the fruit pieces are tumbled in syrup (I mean, how else could the pineapple possibly be green?). The transparency is a factor of the fruit flesh being suffused with clear sugar syrup, which allows more light […]
READ ONIf Jerry Seinfeld were doing a stand-up routine on fruitcake (and I’m certain he has at some point), it would surely begin: so what is that funky colored fruit all about? Earlier I wrote that fruitcake makers of old used dried fruit, and indeed they did. The trouble with dried fruit, though, is that once […]
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