Fruitcake is in the Oven!

After a month of candying pineapple, cherries, lemon peel and orange peel, the Christmas fruitcake is finally in the oven. It's only two weeks late!  I can't wait to try it!  This year I candied everything but the citron - that came from the Kroger.

It takes the big bread bowl in the foreground to mix the batter into all the fruit and nuts!

This year's cake will have an extra hint of orange.  When  candying the orange peel you toss it in sugar as it comes out of the hot syrup.  The sugar gets a lowly orange flavor, so I saved it to use in the cake batter.  I tasted some batter and its was nicely flavored with a little extra orange.  I think it will be wonderful!  Orange is a nice complement to the Sherry in the cake - and the Sherry I will doused the cake with when its out of the oven and cool.  

In the baking oven with the heat shield at the top to keep the temperature about 275 degrees. The cake will bake for close to four hours. 

Poinsettia Update

Remember those poinsettias I saved from last Christmas?  Here's a couple of pictures of them today. The biggest  is the one that didn't loose its leaves in the spring. It has longer branches.

The poinsettia that didn't loose it leaves in the spring. Its leaves are smaller than those of the other plant.

The smaller plant started loosing its leaves in April so I cut it back as my gardening books advised.  Then I set both of them outside in their original pots. I sunk the pots about halfway into the ground and watered them good.  They were placed in a flower bed on the east side of the house and received good morning sun and light shade in the afternoon. They did very well and were healthy beautiful green plants all summer

The plant that lost its leaves in the spring. It now has larger leaves but is a smaller plant,.

I brought both of the plants indoors in late October when we started getting heavy frosts.  I realize now I should have re-potted both of the plants before I put them out for the summer as each had roots that had grown out of the pots and four or five inches into the soil. Tearing them out of the soil was very stressful for them.  They are also both really too big for the little pots.  Another mistake was not feeding them more. 

I brought the plants inside and placed them in south facing windows with sheer curtains filtering the  light. Immediately their leaves started drying up and dropping off the plants. Still, they continued to have healthy green leaves so I just kept them watered.

One of my garden club friends told me not to worry about making sure they had twelve hours of light each day. She said they would turn red regardless, and I guess she was right. Granted these still have mostly green leaves, but I don't mind the red and green theme. After all, those are traditional Christmas colors. 

Making Candied Fruit for Fruitcake

Fruitcake seems to be one of those sweets that most folks just tolerate for the holidays.  I've tasted those red and green cherry studded loaves and they really don't taste like much of anything but corn syrup with an overlay of something that just isn't quite right.

Pineapple chucks drying after candying process.

Years ago, my mother and sister and I began making fruitcake from a Ladies Home Journal recipe. It's a white fruit cake and is full of store bought candied fruit. We love it. We baked the weekend after Thanksgiving and made several cakes baked in angel food cake pans. That's a big cake but we had a bigger family then and all the old folks loved the fruitcake.

 When they were cool we wrapped them in a piece of old sheet and stored them in a round tin, dousing them a couple of times a week with Sherry until Christmas.

When I grew up and moved away from home I missed the fruit cake baking and decided to bake my own.  I was horrified to see how much candied fruit cost, particularly the pineapple. That lead me to try candying my own pineapple.  It was such a success that I've made homemade candied fruit a part of my November ever since.

Candied pineapple just off the stove

I get my recipes for the candied fruit  from a favorite cookbook of mine called Better Than Store-Bought by Helen Witty and Elizabeth Schneider Colchie.

It's an easy recipe of sugar and corn syrup and canned pineapple chunks.  I have a large shallow pan that fits perfectly on my Aga's boiling pad and it works great for two 20 oz cans of good quality pineapple.  I usually get Dole pineapple.

This year for the first time I'll be able to candy cherries from our own trees. There are no green cherries in my fruit cake just red tart ones that are used for pies.  I tried candying sweet cherries one year but they were too sweet.

Last year I started candying lemon and orange peel. They both make a delicious sugar plum like candy treat. I make extra for that purpose.

That leaves only Citron to purchase along with golden raisins, currents and slivered almonds. It's a little time consuming to make the pineapple, cherries, lemon and orange peel but it is so worth it.  The flavor is wonderful. You taste the good white cake and each of the fruit's flavor as well.  Maybe next year I'll grow Citron melons and candy them. Currents, golden raisins, why not. Too bad we can't grow almonds around here!


Transferring candied pineapple chunks to drying rack