This winter, try your hand at baking a fruitcake with local ingredients

Fruitcake is a holiday tradition — though not a positive one for many people. Mail-order and supermarket versions give fruitcakes a bad name.

Longtime “Tonight Show” host Johnny Carson is said to have joked that “there is only one fruitcake in the entire world, and people keep sending it to each other.” A fruitcake left in Antarctica by Robert Falcon Scott in 1910 was retrieved in 2017; the tin had deteriorated but the fruitcake inside the tin was in near-perfect condition.

Each December in my family, my grandmother poured alcohol over a fruitcake sent by a client of my grandfather, stored it for one year in a barely accessible closet shelf, and served the one she had put away a year earlier on Christmas Day, which was my grandfather’s birthday.

My grandparents’ annual fruitcake was a family joke. Even a year spent soaking in alcohol couldn’t hide the overly sweet and sticky chunks of dried fruit.

Fruitcake wasn’t always the subject of ridicule. Medieval Europeans were proud to bake with their new-found availability of sugar and rum from the American colonies that enabled preservation of the fruit, as well as availability of exotic spices to flavor the cake like cinnamon from South Asia and nutmeg from Southeast Asia. Plum cake in England, stollen in Germany and panettone in Italy are all pleasing variations of fruitcake.

Each year, we bake fruitcakes for the awesome MOON Co-op staff, using only ingredients available at the store. Keeping this simple, given all the baking and other distractions this time of year, we start with an organic non-GMO cake mix from MOON called Namaste Spice Cake Mix. By all means, make your own batter from scratch, but we find it’s not worth the added time and effort given that the fruit and spices will dominate the fruitcake.

Rather than wait a year like my grandmother, for each box of cake mix we soak 4 cups of dried fruit for several days in 1 cup of local wine from Hanover Winery. The choice of dried fruit varies each year, depending on availability at the co-op. This year, we used organic apricots, blueberries, cherries, cranberries and currants from MOON Co-op’s bulk bins and from suppliers of organic products. Use any combination that appeals.

For each box of batter, we use seven or eight small (6-inch) loaf pans. Butter the surfaces and cover the bottom of the pans with buttered parchment paper. Add to the batter the soaked fruit, plus 1 cup chopped walnuts, 1 teaspoon ground nutmeg, 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon and 1/4 teaspoon allspice.

The key with any spices, but especially with spicy food like fruitcake, is to use fresh spices. MOON Co-op keeps around 50 jars of herbs and spices in the bulk food section. They come from Frontier, a co-op that sources organic herbs and spices. Buying from bulk jars in small quantities means you don’t have large bottles in your pantry filled with stale herbs and spices.

Bake for around 45-50 minutes at 300 degrees and cool on wire racks for one hour before removing the cakes from the pans. Store in a tin at room temperature — not in the fridge, and definitely not in the freezer. If you don’t want to enjoy your creation on a holiday, serve it on National Fruitcake Day, Dec. 27.

Or, like my grandmother, you can always hide it until next year.

James Rubenstein is president of the Board of Directors for the Oxford Free Press and professor emeritus of geography at Miami University.