Registered: 02/03/06
Posts: 6800
Loc: Gateway to Columbia Gorge
Brown sugar plus butter (not Crisco!) plus brandy or rum = hard sauce. Great way to make the Christmas fruit cake more edible (steam the cake for a few minutes before adding the hard sauce). Yummy!
Also helps to sample the rum or brandy before and after.
Edited by OregonMouse (12/04/1004:20 PM)
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May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view--E. Abbey
Registered: 02/03/06
Posts: 6800
Loc: Gateway to Columbia Gorge
Actually, not just seasonal! Fruit cake plus hard sauce has lots of calories, fruit, nuts, fat.... Maybe pop the Christmas fruit cake in the freezer and save it for backpacking?
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May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view--E. Abbey
Seems ironic to think of fruitcake as "lite food"! Most commercial fruitcakes really are beyond eating. I have made my own for many years using my mother's recipe. However, that was complicated and long. I now use the recipe presented by Alton Brown of the Food Network who gives a brilliantly simple but moist and tasty recipe (search alton brown fruit cake on foodtv.com) which can only be improved by soaking with a little rum (or brandy if you're posh). It'll keep you hiking for hours. The rum butter would obviously improve it, but difficult to stop going rancid on a summer hike.
Seems ironic to think of fruitcake as "lite food"!
Seems ironic to think of fruitcake as food at all.. Can't *stand* the stuff.. the last bite of it I ate was my wedding cake 21 years ago (my wife and I both hate fruitcake, don't ask how this happned) - my wife didn't have to eat it as I got cute and shoved it in her face so she took the opportunity to spit it out when wiping her face... and brags to me to this day that she didn't have to eat the vile stuff...
My weight saving idea if eating fruitcake is to not take it, and go on a trail shared by horses.. then I can pick up things left on the trail by horses that I will enjoy eating more than fruitcake...
Registered: 01/04/02
Posts: 1228
Loc: Eastern MA, USA
Too funny! Thanks for the laugh.
One Christmas, about 35 years ago, I was making pumpkin nut bread and threw in some mixed candied fruit, along with raisins, etc. Most people SAID they liked it. My mother, who really does like fruitcake, LOVED the "jeweled pumpkin bread." It MIGHT be good for a trail food...
@phat - more evidence that people this side of the Atlantic have never had the great pleasure of "proper" fruit cake. The commercial offerings I have tried , both over here and back in the U.K., are as terrible as you suggest, but the real thing is a heavenly ambrosia - O.K. a really heavy heavenly ambrosia. As for calorific content, my mother's recipe used beef suet (makes lard seem like a wimp option). I have to admit that I use vegetable oil instead, but the finished product is loaded, and, IMHO, delicious. Think of it as trail mix with a fat laden binder.
My MIL sent me their family fruitcake recipe a couple years back (I guess that meant they accepted me....hah!) that they have been making for a good 100 years or so. Anyhow, it actually is really good.
The key thing is I don't use any of that nasty dyed "fruit" or "peel" in ours. I use raisins, cranberries, etc so it is all natural. And booze. Lots and lots of booze.
The recipe was "fun" to use though - it was a very random recipe written by an old lady - who I am sure years ago they cornered her to cough it up. I had tasted his Grandmothers version so I had an idea of what it should taste like. Then I made it better
Btw, I do a bunch of them in muffin tins so I have portable cakes. And they freeze well.
Thanks fer reminding me I need to go make some!
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