Aunt Maud was a fine baker who lived in the home town of friends from Canada, who made wedding cakes for most of the weddings in her area. They got the recipe for Peter and I when we got married, and we – or our daughters – have made it every Christmas since then. It is not the nasty American style of fruitcake, but a rich, moist, black “Christmas Cake”- sort of fruitcake without a lot of extra candied fruits, and lots of cognac. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t liked it, even if they don’t generally like fruitcake.
This recipe makes ten pounds of fruitcake – have big pans ready! It makes 4 bread pans and one small round loaf. Or one large, two medium, and two small cakes for piling on top of each other for a wedding cake. We often just do half-bread pan/ small loaf pan ones. This means you will have a lot of cakes to share with family and friends if you like. Then again, you could freeze them, and have them all year.
A day or two before you make the cakes, you need to soak the fruit with cognac or brandy.
3 pounds of raisins
3 pounds of currants
1/2 pound of mixed peel plus
1/2 pound of citron
1/2 cup to one cup cognac
Note on the cognac: The best we ever had used XO from a bottle that Bian Liu Nian gave us. We weren’t drinking it, so why not use it in fruitcake? It was incredible.
Note on the candied fruits: Char doesn’t like mixed candied fruits because the candied lemon peel is too strong. This is true for a lot of people, so we have changed this recipe to a total of 1 pound of mixed fruit – with a variable mix of fruits, including both red and green candied cherries, citron, and often added some dry apricots or cherries that were not candied. As long as everyone is a fan of the dried fruit/candied fruit, it works as a good addition.
Set aside the fruit mixture until the end.
Then on the baking day:
Prepare your pans with greased parchment paper. Have them ready to go, because this way you will be ready to just start plopping the batter in the pans once you have finished mixing the batter and fruits.
Cream:
5 sticks of butter (yes, you read that right)
1 pound of dark brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon of salt
1 cup molasses
1/2 cup cognac or brandy
Then beat
12 eggs in one by one, with additions of a little flour mixed alternately after each egg because otherwise it will curdle.
Flour mix:
4 cups of flour
Someone has to roll up their sleeves in order to get the fruit and the batter all mixed in together. Once everything is mixed together, you add the fruitcake mixture to the pans. It will rise, but not a lot – so don’t fill the pans to the top. The most recent notation I have on baking temperature and time is to bake them at 320 F (160C) for two hours with a pan of water on the bottom shelf of the oven to make some steam. Be careful not to burn your face with the hot steam when you open the oven door to check how they are doing.
There are three frostings you can apply to the cake, which really gilds the lily. I will add those in later. For now, we like it plain.