Around the turn of the century, Mary Jane MacNeil’s great-great-grandmother, who had settled in North Sydney, N.S., became well-known for her fruitcakes.
She would start in January when she’d obtain a molasses/whisky barrel. Then she’d start to add fruit and fruit peels (like lemons, limes and oranges) from her husband’s travels from North Sydney to Newfoundland and France.
She’d do the same with fruit gifts from travellers staying at their hotel, once known as The Verdun, but later called Hotel Albert in North Sydney, says MacNeil.
Her recipe was made by weighing all the ingredients and baking the fruitcakes by mid-October, says MacNeil, who lives in Halifax, N.S. It would then be wrapped in brandy-soaked cheesecloth, buried in sugar, and stored until Christmastime when it would be unwrapped, heavily moistened with brandy, and then served to hotel guests and family members.
Sometimes, says MacNeil, on special occasions, individual slices would be put on serving plates and more brandy would be added to the sliced cake before it was lit on fire.
Here on the East Coast, at least, Edna Reid of Charlottetown, P.E.I. believes fruitcake is just as popular today as it was in years gone by. She still avidly makes them and has donated several over the years to benefit fundraisers for families who have a loved one who is ill or other charity auctions. Most times, she says, her fruitcakes are auctioned for in excess of $200 or $250.
Barry Parsons, who runs Rock Recipes - a cooking and baking blog ranked as one of the most popular food blogs in the country - from his kitchen in St. John’s, N.L., agrees that fruitcakes are absolutely still popular.
“Searches for fruitcake recipes on my blog start in September. During the last holiday season, fruitcake recipes were viewed almost a quarter of a million times on RockRecipes.com,” says Parsons.
What recipe to use?
When looking for a recipe to use, there are many choices to take into consideration.
The first thing to consider is the difference between an English Christmas pudding and a fruitcake. Parsons says they are very similar.
“We steam almost all of our traditional puddings as opposed to baking fruitcake. Puddings are often served warm,” he adds.
Adrian Bligh owner of Birkinshaw’s Tea Room in Amherst, N.S., says there are several types of fruitcakes and just as many ways to make them.
Dark fruitcake, says Bligh, is a traditional English method made mostly of fruit, fed with alcohol. For this cake, he says, using rum or brandy to soak the fruit for 12 weeks prior to baking is a must. Bligh says they actually use port these days for their cakes at Birkinshaw’s.
“This is necessary not for the alcohol, which cooks off, but for the depth of flavour,” says Bligh.
The alcohol provides the moisture because as the cakes are cooked so long and slowly, they need that moisture, says Bligh.
And as Parsons’ father says, with any good dark fruitcake, there should be only enough cake to hold the fruit together.
Light fruit cake, Bligh says, is a bit crumblier and has a higher percentage of cake than fruit. This, he says, is more of a French style of cake.
Reid says many people enjoy a tropical fruitcake, which uses tropical dried and candied fruits like mango, papaya, pineapple, almonds, and coconut rum.
Baking tips
Fruitcakes, says Bligh, are not hard to make - they just require time and need to be ‘fed’ each week until matured.
When making and baking a fruitcake, Parsons says it’s essential to only use good quality ingredients, do not overbake, and cook them at a lower heat than most cakes. And, as his dad says, don't skimp on the fruit.
One of the tips Reid learned from her mom was to steam the fruitcake in a roaster of water in the oven, at a low temperature, and then remove it from the water about half an hour before it is ready to come out of the oven.
“This method always results in a cake that is a beautiful, dense texture with flavour that is just incredibly delicious,” says Reid, noting that with this method, she never gets a cake that is hard or soggy.
MacNeil, who uses an adapted version of her great-great grandmother’s recipe, says she bakes her fruitcakes in loaf pans. When she removed them fresh from the oven, she immediately pours another one ounce of the same 151 per cent proof rum that she used to soak the fruit in over the top of the cakes.
The loaves are then stored in air-tight containers and, once a week, about five millilitres of the same 151 per cent proof rum is drizzled over the loaves, in what MacNeil refers to as the “marinating stage.”
Many others, like MacNeil’s mother, soak some cheesecloth in brandy and wrap the fruitcakes up to store them, while drizzling more brandy over them each week.
How to serve
When serving Christmas pudding, Parsons recommends a great rum or toffee sauce. Reid likes a nice white buttercream frosting on fruitcake but says frosted or not, the cakes are delicious. MacNeil, meanwhile, suggests eating it with ice cream or with a marzipan frosting like her mother used to make.
“On Christmas Eve, she’d roll out marzipan, drape her cake with it, make a rum-butter icing (tinted green) and frost the cake,” says MacNeil.
MacNeil loves making fruitcakes to give as Christmas presents to people, but says they can be quite boozy, which have resulted in some funny stories.
When buying alcohol for her cakes while visibly pregnant, a liquor store employee commented on her consumption, not believing her that some people did use rum and not brandy for their cakes. At the same time, neighbours were concerned with the number of rum bottles in MacNeil’s recycling that month.
Another time, MacNeil had given a fruitcake to her colleague, who had opened, but not eaten, the cake in his car. He was pulled over for a routine police check, and the aroma of rum had engulfed the car. It wasn’t until the officer actually smelled the cake himself that he finally believed him and sent him off with a warning not to eat the cake until he got home.
More from around the web
- Check out the full list of the top fruitcakes on Barry Parsons’ Rock Recipes site
- Birkinshaw’s Tea Room
