My very first mistake (of many) was that I took one look at how much it cost to buy glacéed fruit online and decided that it would be more economical to make my own. And so, in early September, I bought many pounds of oranges and lemons for this process.
Now I was raised to never waste any food - EVER - and the idea of using only the peels from all of this fruit made a part of me die on the inside. Not to worry dear friends, I ended up juicing the leftover fruit and using it in other things. Having fresh lemon juice on hand has ended up being really helpful.
The process of making glacéed fruit involves boiling the fruit in sugar-water and then gradually adding more and more sugar to the water over the course of several days. This causes the fruit to absorb the sugar and release its natural liquid, resulting in a pretty much non-perishable fruit candy. That sounded pretty authoritative right? Well it's all bullshit because I have no idea what I'm talking about. But I do know that orange peels are strangely pretty to look at.
I did some cherries as well, but there were far fewer pictures of the cherries since they were considerably not-as-pretty.
So this is all of the fruit after about three weeks of being slowly glacéed. The whole process was what I would describe as completely unpleasant. There were trays of fruit sitting around my tiny apartment for nearly a month, resulting in something of a logistical nightmare whenever I had to use the kitchen. Things would have also gone much faster if I had owned a food dehydrator, but I do not, and so the drained fruit had to air-dry for days, which was even more of a nightmare. This was taken in October.
As I said above, I hate wasting food, and so all of the fruit-flavored sugar syrup that was left over after drying the fruit really sent me into total freak-out mode. Fortunately, I had a few of those cheapo squeeze bottles sitting around, ready to take the syrup. I've mixing the cherry syrup in drinks, making my own cherry coke and cherry-flavored milk. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with the orange syrup yet.
Those three huge bags of oranges and lemons from above? Well they eventually broke down into this tiny jar of candied citrus peel. It's surprisingly tasty and retained a lot of its fruit flavor. Unfortunately, I destroyed my hand using a knife to chop these pieces up before realizing at the last possible second that it would be so much easier to use my kitchen scissors. If this entire process has proved anything, it has proved that I am dumb. So dumb.
The fruit was joined in a jar by some wonderful raisins and rum for about a week.
And finally, in mid-October, the day of cooking arrived. I obviously was completely unprepared for the ridiculous amount of nuts that this recipe calls for. Four cups of pecans and two cups of walnuts. That is completely nuts.
Hahahaha.
Get it?
Nuts!
Hahahaha.
If anything, my sad attempt at humor reflects how completely unhinged I had become at this point. I was toasting two pounds of nuts and getting ready to throw them into a cake.
Like with most cakes, the basic ingredients weren't too out of the ordinary. Flour, brown sugar, eggs, etc. It's the fruit and the nuts that made this so intensely difficult and the rum which made it horrible.
It may be difficult to tell in this picture, but the completed batter for this cake came almost to the top of my 5-quart mixing bowl. And that bowl was heavy by the time I was done. It must have weighed at least ten pounds. I somehow managed to stagger over to the baking pans and slop this horrible mixture into them.
I have to say, this looks pretty gross before baking. But many of my cakes haven't looked like they would win any awards pre-baking so that didn't concern me too much.
And after baking they actually didn't look too bad. Perhaps they could have used a little more festive color, but there's nothing to complain about with these loaves.
And it was at this point that the loaves got wrapped in cheesecloth, plastic wrap, and aluminum foil for a two-month rest in the cupboard.
Now eagle-eyed readers will have noticed that I made a horrible mistake at the beginning of the baking process. Namely, my choice of rum for this project was questionable at best and super-dumb at worst. The Kraken? Really? I chose a strong dark spiced rum for my cakes? And I emptied the bottle? What was I thinking? Well hindsight is 20-20 my friends, and while I love the Kraken in drinks and on its own, and I've used it in small quantities in baked goods before, it was the completely wrong choice for this project. When I finally unwrapped the first cake to taste it two months later, all I could taste or smell was rum. The cake tasted like someone had taken a dirty sponge, soaked it in rum, and then squeezed it into my mouth and it was not good.
So as of December, the cakes remained tightly wrapped and stored away in my pantry like some kind of secret shame; hidden but unable to be forgotten.
As a prologue to this adventure: A few days ago (early February), I suddenly remembered that I had these horrible bricks in my pantry. I decided to unwrap one and see if anything had changed. As many people know, fruit cake is typically aged for anywhere from six months to several years and the aging changes the flavors. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the flavor of the rum had subsided a bit. It was still there, but not nearly as overpowering as it had been.
When people complain about fruit cake they usually complain about how it's hard, dry, flavorless, and any number of other things. In fact, this cake was actually pretty good. It was exceptionally moist and tender, and it certainly wasn't lacking in flavor. The only problem is, because of the massive quantity of stuff in there, the cake is ridiculously crumbly. There is no way to cut this thing into serve-able pieces. It just falls apart into tasty chunks.
All in all, this could have been a good cake, but I pretty much ruined it by being dumb. If there is a next time, there is a pretty large list of things that I will be doing differently.
Meanwhile, it's February and I still have one and a half loaves of fruit cake in my pantry. Fruit cake anyone?
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