Dad has mentioned to me many times over the years how much he LOVES fruit cake. Hard to believe, huh? With all those bouncy little cubes of fake fruit, I could never imagine how that could be possible. Ugh!
But, since I aspire to be a good daughter, this year I thought I'd give Dad a special treat and bake him a fruit cake... one with REAL fruit and nuts instead of those jellied red and green mystery bits. I had seen an interesting recipe in a magazine that included all kinds of crock pot recipes and thought I'd give it a try.
After picking up a pound of pecan halves, a pound of dried mixed fruits and some golden raisins from the store, I carefully followed the recipe. After combining the ingredients, I poured the fruit cake batter into the souffle dish and placed the dish into my crock pot. I set the crock pot to high and the timer to 6 hours.
About 4 hours later the entire house smelled wonderful, a combination of warm fruit, nuts and rum. YUM! Two hours after that, as directed in the recipe, I removed my fruity creation from the crock. But instead of the delicious masterpiece depicted in the magazine, I discovered a cross between a charcoal briquette and a hockey puck!!! Twenty dollars worth of ingredients had been tranformed into something that could be used as a weapon!
Mike and I tried our best to salvage the cake by cutting off the burned portions, much as you might do to a burnt piece of toast. But unfortunately, what was left was only the size of a baseball. Not something I could proudly give to my Dad, the fruit cake connoisseur.
So, against the advice of all my friends at work (one who has a culinary degree), I decided to try again, this time cutting back the cooking time significantly.
Hallelujah!!! Four hours did the trick (well almost... if I lop off another 30 minutes, I think next year's cake will be perfect). So anyway, I presented the second fruit cake to Dad on Christmas Eve and I think it was a hit! Dad said he really liked it and Mom did too. And to my surprise I found that I like fruit cake after all... as long as it contains real fruit and hasn't been cooked into a chunk of blacktop.
So, Happy Fruit Cake, Dad!! I hope you enjoyed it! It was defintely a labor of love! :-)
3 comments:
Sandy you really out did your self on the fruitcake debacle.But your persistance and determination on the second time around was worthy of a master chef.
I really appreciate your effort,as well as the big half of the fruit cake thats in my frig.Yum Yum .How lucky can one guy get to have a daughter That goes all out for her Dad.I love YOU.
And he didn't even bring me any when he came up here today!
Okay, I really want to try that fruitcake!
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