We pause now for a musical interlude, with fruitcake.
Fri 2004-11-19 20:01:21 (in context)
- 27,731 words (if poetry, lines) long
- 0.00 hrs. revised
It's time for my thousand word blogging break. Readers - all two of you - rejoice!
So I have this fruitcake recipe. Someone sweet sent it to me a few years back on the condition that after I followed it I send her a slice. Which I did. And then I never did it again. Make the fruitcake, I mean.
But now the Tea Spot (I never get tired of linking them!) is selling little slices of the stuff, heavy in cherries and walnut, and you know what? I gotta do it again.
So yesterday when I went to Whole Foods to pick up the ingredients for cat food (about this, more later) I also started in on fruitcake preparations. This is both the fun and the obnoxious part: bopping up and down the bulk goods aisle, deciding which dried and/or candied fruits to include, scooping them into little baggies with PLU numbered twist-ties, and weighing them to see if I'm adding up to 3.75 lbs yet. I got...
- pecans
- walnuts
- almonds
- currants
- bing cherries
- sour cherries
- black mission figs
- dates
- cranberries
- candied ginger
- and sweetened papaya spears.
Now. About chopping up dried fruits. Dried fruits are sticky. I don't care how much your friendly Pampered Chef Dealer hyped the Food Chopper, it is useless for chopping dried fruit. Dried fruit sticks to the blades at the very first slice and then rides them clear of ever getting sliced again. Besides, you don't want randomly minced fruit; you want cubed cherries and quartered dates. So stick with the knife. It's old fashioned but it works.
By the way - here's a little bit of trivia for you. True or false: "It is safe to leave bags of dried fruit out on the kitchen counter in a cat-infested household." False! I came back from retrieving the second load of groceries to find Uno and Null regarding a scattering of black mission figs, occasionally batting them to watch how they rolled. Bad kitty-owner!
So now I have a bowl of chopped-up dried fruit sitting in a covered bowl and happily getting drunk on half a cup of cognac. Tomorrow there will be the mixing of the batter, the baking of the cake, and the beginning of the process of curing the cake in more cognac in my big round Tupperware™. I plan to let that sucker pickle right up until Solstice. Yes, yes, I know. "Waste of good cognac." Well, you know what? It's just as much a waste to leave the stuff sitting on the kitchen counter until it spontaneously quadruple-distills itself. Which is what would happen. Believe me, the last third of a cup of brandy from the bottle I used on my last fruitcake was still hanging around as of yesterday. So, deal.
Next entry: A musical interlude, with homemade cat food. You (all two of you) may want to skip it, as it involves baked chicken liver.