Fruitcake Is No Joke
Welcome to the “Twelve Cakes of Christmas,” written by Michelle Rizzolo of Big Sur Bakery with original illustrations from Wendy MacNaughton.
“You will swoon at the aroma,” says the country’s preeminent jam maker June Taylor about her Berkeley-based commercial kitchen The Still Room, which at this time of year is filled with trays of shriveled Muscat, Flame, and Zante grapes being dehydrated for her traditional Christmas cake. She reflects on a freshly dried Zante being made into a currant: “It is an amazing revelation how beautiful dried fruit is when you dry it yourself.” This is just one of many meticulous steps taken throughout the year as she prepares her version of traditional English fruitcake.
At its simplest and best, fruitcake is heaving with dried fruit, candied citrus peels, and nuts, soaked in brandy, and served in slivers. At its worst, it’s the dreaded holiday gift: “There is only one fruitcake in the entire world,” Johnny Carson joked, “and people keep sending it to each other.” June Taylor will have none of that complaining. She is on a mission to restore the cake’s glory, and thanks to her extensive knowledge of fruit and its conservation, has turned the familiar seasonal loaf into a monument to its core ingredient.
The British ex-pat regards her holiday cake as the culmination of twenty-plus years spent tirelessly refining centuries-old cooking traditions and techniques. It “encapsulates the beauty of the entire year,” she says. “It has candied citrus peel from winter, stone fruit dried from summer, grapes dried in autumn, and port wines and brandies that are aged fruit liquors. It’s a celebration of fruit.”
Once a year, towards the end of October, June sets aside the space in her tiny kitchen that’s usually reserved for candying citrus peels, or making syrups and jam, and gives it over to Christmas cake production. She dusts off her baking pans, fills her larder with flour, butter, and eggs, gathers her stores of candied and dried fruits, and starts her yearly baking duties. “I’m a preserve maker, not a baker,” she admits. “But I like baking Christmas cake—my one dabbling in baking all year. It’s just an excuse to eat a solid piece of fruit bound together with cake and boozed with port wine and brandy. It is a very cool cake to make.” Cool, and old: hers is a very traditional recipe, researched from books dating back 100 to 200 years.
She begins, not surprisingly, with the fruit. With the precision of an expert winemaker, she seeks out varietals that can lend new levels of sweetness and tartness, and she often varies the ratios of fruit within each new batch. “I just looked at recipes with fruits that sounded delicious,” she says. “I nixed the ones with pineapple as too ‘New World’—they didn’t sit right with my rather stuffy British perspective—and went from there. I keep exploring variations and might finally like just one combination, or I continue being a vagabond. I cannot just stick to a recipe,” she laughs.
This year she’s chosen candied Seville orange peel (a classic English fruitcake choice that’s distinguished by its tanginess and pleasantly bitter note), and brought in dried Elephant Heart plums, Bing cherries, Royal Benin apricots, Red Cloud apricots, and for extra tartness, Santa Rosa plums. Her dried-grape collection includes Sweet Muscat, Flame, and Thompsons, and the currants are Zanes. Starting with those grapes when they’re fresh, she allows each type of fruit to dehydrate in the oven at very low heat for a week or more, according to size. This extracts moisture and concentrates the produce’s natural sugars to intensify its flavor and sweetness. In the final steps of this long process, she de-stems each piece of fruit by hand (it’s all kept intact to prevent molding).
The next phase involves macerating and rehydrating the dried fruits and candied peel in port; the wine lends yet another layer of complexity to the already deeply concentrated fruit. Her basic but dense cake requires beating the butter and sugar together before incorporating the eggs, then folding in flour. She perfumes the thick foundation with such traditional British spices as cinnamon, nutmeg, and clove, along with molasses and aged Chardonnay brandy.
With a pound of the sodden fruit mixture per loaf pan, there’s room enough for only the smallest amount of batter. A low and slow bake ensures the lovingly prepared fruit doesn’t burn, and once it’s ready, the cake is washed in more aged brandy and enrobed in cheesecloth to guarantee a moist loaf for months to come. The outermost layer is a hand-painted piece of wrapping paper—June applies watercolors to each herself. It’s almost too pretty to eat.
But once that paper has been torn into, it becomes nearly impossible not to dig in. June cautions recipients to practice restraint. “Just cut a very thin slice, one-fourth of an inch,” she warns. “It is plenty rich.”
Reflecting on the time and care taken to make her cake, June laments the stigma attached to this venerable holiday delicacy. “It’s amazing to me that things went so far down some technological-industrial tube,” she sighs. The only answer, for her, is to keep doing what she does.
“I have to make Christmas cake,” she concludes. “I embrace it more and become a better baker. It acknowledges we’ve survived the dark days and are honoring the harvest to share with our community. This binds us together—it encapsulates the year in a batter. These recipes have such a deep cultural connection to where we come from and who we are; how we live off the land, how we preserve. We’ve come a long way, but I like to bring these foods back into focus because they are incredible. They are worthy of our constantly refining our ability to make them.”
