make love, not fruitcake

It all started just 10 years ago, and so innocently, as a joke. My friend Sean and I were discussing the logistics of fruitcake - we had this theory where no one ever ate fruitcake, they just re-gifted it. We wanted to see how long it would take if we started making fruitcake, before we recieved one of our own fruitcakes back. And we decided that we would mostly only give the fruitcake to people we didn't like. The plan has backfired horribly for 2 reasons: 1) people assume since we make fruitcake, we must like fruitcake and 2) people eat the fruitcake. So not only does the fruitcake not get re-gifted, people give us other fruitcake. My Dad will eat one of the smaller ones in one sitting. God.

So this is 10 years running - we missed a year when I was living in New Zealand, Sean thought it just wouldn't be right to make it without me, and frankly, I'd have been upset if he did. We've been on double batches ever since, and my suggestion to go back to single batches this year was quickly vetoed. We're remarkably efficient fruitcake makers now, not like in the beginning when we just didn't know what we didn't know. We didn't know you could buy candied citrus peel, so when the recipe called for peel, we peeled oranges, grapefruits and lemons, and chucked the peel in the bowl. Sean didn't know that when the recipe called for a lemon, peel and juice, you were supposed to zest the lemon, and then squeeze the juice, he just chucked an entire lemon into the mixer. It blended rather nicely, I must admit. We didn't know you were supposed to make your fruitcakes like months in advance, and soak them in brandy. I think we made them around Dec 23rd one year.

Now it happens so fast if you blink, you'd think the fruitcake just appeared out of nowhere. You'd hardly see Sean and I waltzing into the bulk food store and picking up 4lbs of raisins, 4 lbs of currents, 3 lbs of dates, 1 lb of peel, 1/2 lb of red and green cherries, 1 lb of walnuts, 2 lbs of sugar, 2 lbs of butter, 6 cups of flour, and 16 eggs. For the rest of the ingredients, we just raid Seans Mom's pantry. Being a retired home ec teacher, she's pretty stocked, and the only person we know with a bowl big enough to mix this crap up. The recipe calls for 1 cup of pineapple juice, but we basically use whatever Pat has in the fridge - this year we even considered V8, but turns out that Sean cares about the quality of the fruitcake too much for that, so cranberry cocktail it was.

Last year, something shocking and upsetting happened. Sean broke our vow to never EVER try the fruitcake. He got a little drunk one night, and broke down and tried a bite. He called me right away and confessed, and he says it isn't good. How can it be, it's friggen fruicake? Apparantly there was a 4th wiseman who got turned away for bringing the stuff!

But still, people love it. My Dad starts pestering me for it in early December, and I even get calls from my ex boyfriend's family around October, wondering whether they'll still get a fruitcake this year, even though Doug and I have been broken up nearly 3 years. Rest assured, they'll get a big one.

The above picture is Sean with the giant bowl of crap (it was my year to mix it, so I was elbow deep in gunk. He got the date chopping job though, and that's not nice either).