The iced fruitcake looks like something I might have to try this year. As long as it's dark, full of fruit & nuts with not much cake, how can it be anything but delicious? This is my favorite recipe for a dark fruitcake. Over the years, I've substituted all kinds of fruits & nuts & it always turn out great. Maybe the rum helps! RUM CROCK FRUITCAKE Makes 1 Bundt (+ 1 mini loaf pan) or 2 3x5x9 loaf cakes 1 lb dried currants 1 lb dark raisins ½ lb golden raisins ½ lb citron or dried fruit 1 C filberts or almonds or figs ½ lb chopped dates (or pecan halves) 1 C dried or candied cherries (dried cranberries work just as well) ½ C candied citrus peel 3 C (a fifth) of Dark Rum (cheap is okay, but it needs to be dark) ---------------------------- ½ lb sweet butter, softened 2 C packed dark brown sugar 5 large eggs 2 C flour 2 t. baking powder --------------------------- Grind enough whole spices to make these quantities, mix & set aside: 1 t. ground cloves 1 t. ground cinnamon ½ t. ground nutmeg 1 t. ground allspice ½ t. ground mace Mix all the fruits & nuts together in a crock or a ceramic or glass bowl. Stir in the rum (adding more, if needed, to cover), & let stand, loosely covered, in a cool place for at least 3 weeks. (A day or 2 has always been okay for me.) When you are ready to prepare the cake, preheat the oven to 275 F. & place a large shallow pan of water on a lower rack. Prepare pans by greasing, lining with brown paper or parchment, & greasing lightly again. Drain the contents of the rum crock (discard the rum or use in another batch of marinade if making additional fruitcakes) & set aside. Cream the butter with the sugar until fluffy & stir in eggs, one at a time, blending well. Sift together the flour, baking powder & spices. Sift half of the flour into the butter mixture, mixing well. Gradually add the fruits/nuts, alternating with the remaining flour mixture & blending thoroughly. Put batter into pans & bake for about 2 ½ hours (more for a bundt pan) or until a cake tester comes out clean & the edges shrink from the pan. Cover the cake lightly with pieces of foil if it browns too quickly (usually after 1 ½ hours). Remove the cake & cool in pan for about 1 hour. Turn onto a cake rack & remove the paper. When the cake has cooled, wrap in foil & store in an airtight container to age for at least 1 month before serving. (Its also excellent after 1 week of aging as DH is too impatient to wait longer).

There have been some wonderful threads on fruitcake in past years on the Harvest Forum, but not this year, unfortunately, and the really good threads have long dropped off. Food preservers are as interested in mincemeat and fruitcake as they are in jams and chutneys. There were some fabulous recipes posted. There's so much history in them. My mother's dark recipe also makes a huge batch and is a kind of litany of rural America in its ingredients: sugar, honey, lard, butter, hard cider (grape juice for teetotalers), prune butter, cherries, raisins, currants, dates, apricots, candied pineapple, almonds, walnuts, filberts. Bake batter in a slow wood stove 5-6 hours. Yield is 5 7-inch saucepans with pebble-filled Alka-Selzer bottles in the center of each to conduct heat. I love reading that old recipe that way I'd love a good novel. I'd never say what the "perfect" fruitcake is because I've seen how powerful people's preferences are. One person will love the dark fruitcakes while another loathes them. I detest citron but some people just wouldn't consider it fruitcake without it. One of my favorite fruitcakes is a Golden Fruitcake on Epicurious. All kinds of dried apricots, pears, figs, dates and raisins soaked in brandy. Cubes of marzipan in a brown-sugar and cardamom-nutmeg spiced batter and lightly toasted pine nuts folded in at the end. Unforgettable. But a lot of traditionalists feel a sense of loss if you serve them something like that for the holidays. I used the conventional candied fruits in my last batch and just gave a mini-loaf to a friend nearly 80 years old from Louisiana. A dyed-in-the-wool Southerner and fruitcake aficionado. He said it was the best he'd ever tasted in his life. So I wouldn't knock the commercial candied cherries and pineapple. They definitely have their fans. In my recipe (if I'm doing the whole batch as originally written and not making the apricot-pecan variation) I use 1 pound of candied pineapple, 2 pounds of candied cherries (red and green but not the green "mint" flavor just green color), 1 pound of Medjool dates, 1 box of golden raisins, 4 cups of walnuts (toasted) and 4 cups of pecans (toasted). No spices, just vanilla. This would yield about 5 8 1/2x5 loaf pans or 12 3 1/2x5. I've also used brown paper pans and the really tiny petite pans or mini-muffins lined with red and silver foil papers for gifting. I bake at 250 (not pre-heated) anywhere from about 60 minutes for the petite loaves up to 2 1/2 hours or so for the larger loaves. But that was my old non-convection oven. I have not attempted this in my new one yet. I watch the baking times like a hawk. Over-baking is the death of fruitcake. Any more I just do the smaller loaves, double-wrap in Saran and foil then bag and freeze. We love it year-round a little at a time. Once a loaf is thawed I keep it in the refrigerator. It's more like a candy than a cake and chilled it can be sliced in thin "stained-glass window" pieces. AFAIK, I'm the 4th generation to make this, though we've each made changes along the way. I added "instructions," LOL. I inherited it as just a list of ingredients. Originally the recipe called for 1 cup of corn syrup heated and used as a glaze when the cakes come out of the oven, but in generation #2 a baker accidentally added the corn syrup to the batter and we've made it that way ever since. It's more moist and candy-like. Good cooks and their fortuitous errors! Carol

This link is Beatrice Bakery company. I think of it as Grandma's fruitcake company because they make some REALLY GOOD fruit cake and it used to be called that. That's Coming from a person who doesn't like fruitcake, except this companys'. They have SEVERAL to pick from. I buy some for my MIL every year and get some samples for me. Watch the video if you have time. This place is 25 miles from my house too. http://www.beatricebakery.com/

Well, went to take the cakes out of their pans late last night (yes, fully cooled). The one in the loaf pan, came out just fine. Then I tried to remove the one in the tube pan - total disaster! About 1/4 of it just fell to pieces. I had never before made this recipe - I used to make my mother's old dark fruitcake. My mother had made my cousin's fruitcake for me for several years before she died. I think this recipe needs more batter if one is going to bake it in anything other than loaf pans. It has a TON of fruit and nuts in it. All the "broken" stuff was really delicious, even without having "aged". If I make it again, I'll double the amount of batter. Live and learn. I have no idea how my mother made it work. She was known for "changing" a recipe and never telling anyone that she did so when giving them her recipe. She took much to the grave with her... When I got married for the first time in 1966, my mother and I spent the summer baking fruitcake, putting in the little boxes with our names and the wedding date gold stamped on them, and tying 150 little white satin ribbons around them with a nice bow. I still have one tucked away in a drawer somewhere as a souvenir. We didn't go to that much bother for my 2nd marriage, but it's the one that worked...