Not Your Mother's Fruitcake

As an American, I get a very specific image in my head when I hear the word fruitcake. It's an image of a very dense and dry yellow cake with big chunks of candied fruit in radioactive shades of red, green, and orange among the more familiar dark raisins. Like this:

I remember fruitcakes that looked like this.

Image from: http://www.calraisins.org/recipes/recipe.cfm?id=103

As a kid, I never new what those colors were about. I figured the red was maraschino cherries (we always had them in the house because my dad drank Manhattans), but I had no idea what those other bizarre fruits were. As it happens, the recipe for the cake I've shown above calls for dried apricots and jars of red and green maraschino cherries. Mystery solved. Still, the cakes I ate didn't taste all that good. The fruit was too chewy or something and it never really tasted like fruit.

My array of fruits and nuts for fruitcake.

But last year, an Australian friend of ours gave us a fruitcake she had made from an old family recipe. The cake was moist and dark brown. It smelled delicately of spice. There were no odd colors at all. After tasting the cake, I felt bad about having told our friend the old fruitcake-as-doorstop joke.

After we devoured the cake, I asked her for her recipe and she gladly shared it. So this year I've made my version of (Susan's) Daisy's Best Boiled Fruit Cake. It's not quite as good as Susan's was, but it's close. I suppose it all comes down to the ingredients you have on hand; there are many options in the cake recipe.

The delicious resulting fruitcake.

I used toasted pecans for the nuts. I was prepared to use walnuts but realized too late that our nutcracker had broken last year (it's on the shopping list now). I also had dried apricots and raisins, both very traditional.

My twist on the recipe was to add chopped prunes, candied ginger, and dried cranberries to the mix. I used maple syrup instead of English golden syrup (it's only a tablespoon's worth). A tawny port was my wine of choice.

C'mon and have a slice!

I got two loaves from the recipe. We cut into one right away, once they had cooled. I've not imbibed it, but we may begin sprinkling a little kirsch on top as we go. The second loaf went into the freezer for later.