|
You Are Here: IC
Network : Fresh Tastes
: December 2000
Holiday Fruitcake
You know this old joke about fruitcake, don't you? There's only one
fruitcake in the country-- It just gets passed around from one person
to another year after year. Fruitcake, once a holiday tradition in
many homes, has slipped from favor and become a national joke. No
doubt this unfortunate turn of events was helped along by those peculiar
tasting, mealy-textured artificial ingredient-ridden fruitcakes on
the market.
Thanks to the
sheer awfulness of those commercial products, I stopped eating fruitcake
altogether years ago. So when I got IC, I merely had one more reason
to avoid them. Fruitcakes after all, have a lot of things in them
to irritate an IC bladder: Cloves (which has large amounts of irritating
eugenic acid), orange juice, sulfite-preserved and acid-laden candied
fruits, bladder-irritating nuts like pecans and walnuts, sometimes
cranberries, and many fruitcakes are soaked with histamine rich
red wine (often the cheapest kind of wine). Then if they are commercially
baked, these fruitcakes are usually preserved with citric acid,
benzoates or other preservatives that may flare an IC bladder.
My dad always
liked fruitcake though. He remembered how his mother baked them
at home and soaked them for a week or so before Christmas with some
kind of alcoholic beverage... even during Prohibition. Every Christmas
he'd comment on how he missed good fruitcake.
So a couple
of years ago I attempted to reconstruct his mother's fruitcake recipe.
No wonder he liked fruitcake... this one is delicious! It's also
made without a lot of the things that irritate IC bladders. This
is one fruitcake I can actually eat without a bladder-flare-up!
If you too fondly remember good fruitcake, this may be worth a try!
MILD FRUITCAKE
group 1--
1/3 cup molasses (unsulphured, mild)
1/3 cup butter, melted
1/2 cup sugar
2 eggs
group 2--
1 cup plus 1 Tbsp. flour
1/4 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp. ground nutmeg
1/2 tsp. ground allspice
group 3--
1/3 cup chopped dates (no sulfites or other preservatives)
2/3 cup dried currants (no sulfites or other preservatives)
2 cups dried blueberries (no sulfites or other preservatives)
2/3 cup dry-roasted cashews (optional)
1/4 cup Triple Sec or light rum
1/2 tsp. grated fresh lemon peel
1 tsp. grated fresh orange peel
9-inch loaf
pan, (preferably non-stick; or cut parchment to fit bottom)
3 Tbsp. dark or light rum to soak cake in after baking (NOT wine
or brandy. But vodka can be used in a pinch)
-- Directions--
Preheat oven to 275 degrees F. In one medium bowl place the group
1 ingredients and mix thoroughly. Set aside. In another medium bowl
mix together the group 2 ingredients. Set that aside also. In a
third (large size) bowl mix together the group 3 ingredients.
Pour the butter-molasses
mixture (group 1) into the dried fruit mixture (group 3) and stir
to coat. Add the dry ingredients (group 2) and mix thoroughly.
Grease the sides
and bottom of a non-stick loaf pan (or grease sides and bottom of
a regular pan and place parchment in the bottom). Pour in the batter.
Bake at 275 degrees F. for 2 hours. Remove from oven and let cool
10 minutes. When slightly cooled, run a knife around edges and turn
out on a plate. When thoroughly cool, place in an airtight container.
Before sealing, pour or brush the rum over the fruitcake. Seal and
refrigerate for one week. An hour before serving, remove from refrigerator
to warm up but keep covered so it doesn't dry out. I like to serve
the fruit cake warmed (thank goodness for microwaves!) with a hard
sauce made with real butter and rum.
The Interstitial Cystitis Network
http://www.ic-network.com
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2000 |
