December 6, 2010

• Snow!

  
  illustration by Sandra Suy

  Honest-to-goodness snow. I woke up to a winter wonderland, as the hoary old phrase goes. Every roof is covered and cars glide silently along our unplowed street. It's as beautiful as only snow can be and, for a moment, I don't care about the cold apartment or work or anything. Snow!

  I finally got down to making fruit cakes yesterday. I should have done it weeks ago. Fruit cake is an interesting thing. The mention of it inevitably leads to a grimace or some terrible doorstop joke - and there are very good reasons for that. Most of what passes for fruit cake is an insult to cakes everywhere: ill-considered bricks of red and green maraschino cherries (the most carcinogenic food on earth!) bound by damp wads of too-much batter and imitation brandy and almond extract. And that's the quality kind.

  When I was a kid our neighbour brought us her own version of a Christmas "fruit cake" every year. It was a white pound cake full of jujubes. I shit you not. I remember slicing it open like a science-class frog and marveling at the candy colour bleeding out in pastel rings, each piece a crumbling swatch of Marimekko. There was no question of eating it: as instinct should indicate, chewy candy and dry cake are not complimentary textures.

  The fact is, most people have never tasted a good fruit cake. And I make a very good fruit cake.

  Mine is filled with pecans and cranberries and currants. The dark, fragrant batter is all butter, brown sugar, eggs and brandy, heavily scented with cinnamon and cloves. It's rich, but there's only just enough to bind the fruit. Once it's baked and after it cools, more warmed brandy gets drizzled into tiny holes on top. The cakes are wrapped in liquor soaked linens and packed away in air-tight containers. In the cool and dark, slowly slowly, the fruit absorbs the spice and alcohol. 

  The smell when you unwrap those linens (which are now utterly dry) is magic. The taste is... Christmas.

  This year, for the first time, I made the full recipe rather than halving it. (There is never enough to go around.) The instructions were written in weights (2 1/2 lbs raisins, 2 lbs pecans, etc.) all of which required some rather sketchy conversions. I didn't realize until much too late that none of my mixing bowls were even close to big enough to stir batter that demanded 15 eggs. Eventually I had to unpack my 20 qt chili pot and scoop the mixture into bread tins with a stew ladle. Necessity and invention and all that.

  And today the apartment smells like heaven and there are five brown loaves on my counter.

  And snow!
  g.

   

   

  • 8:03 am
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