I love this time of year. There are of course the gifts, but there are all those other things as well; the sights, the sounds, the bright and festive nature of almost everything, and oh my, the many smells of things cooked and baked. On the home page of this edition I mentioned that I’m excited about baking cakes for the holidays. If you’ve got a particular recipe that your like, the more exotic the better, I’d like to give it a try.
Speaking of cake, the mysterious fruit cake has made its appearance from dark pantries and onto tables and store shelves once again. What’s up with that? Why is fruit cake only available once a year? Is there a rule? I’ve never tried making a fruit cake. Is it difficult? Is that why it’s so seldom seen outside this time of year? As a kid I absolutely hated fruit cake. Now I can’t get enough of it. There is nothing like fruit cake and coffee or tea in the morning.
Check this little bit of trivia I copied from Wikipedia:
The earliest recipe from ancient Rome lists pomegranate seeds, pine nuts, and raisins that were mixed into barley mash. In the Middle Ages, honey, spices, and preserved fruits were added.
Fruit cakes soon proliferated all over Europe. Recipes varied greatly in different countries throughout the ages, depending on the available ingredients as well as (in some instances) church regulations forbidding the use of butter, regarding the observance of fast. Pope Innocent VIII (1432–1492) finally granted the use of butter, in a written permission known as the ‘Butter Letter' or Butterbrief in 1490, giving permission to Saxony to use milk and butter in the North German Stollen fruit cakes.[1]
This same source lists 16 countries as having their own unique recipes for fruit cake.