Originally published May 2017.

Well, I did a dumb thing. I created a *real* website (asweetercourse.com), kept it pretty active for a couple years, and then let everything lapse– all the stories and pictures I wrote and posted were permanently deleted. I got very sidetracked by work, so that’s the only excuse I have. But as a result, I lost some important stories. Luckily, I had pieces of drafts saved and I’ve been able to put the three most important blogposts together. Here is the first one: Yolanda’s Fruitcake, just in time for the holidays.

“Fruit cake is easily the most hated cake in the existence of baking.” So sayeth the Huffington Post.

I had never tried fruitcake before this one, so my opinion is clearly that of a fruitcake novice. But this particular recipe made a very delicious cake, and I am honored to share both this recipe and some stories about Yolanda by way of her daughter, Monica, whose work centers around children with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Our Skype date took place on Mother’s day. Just as we started to cream the butter and sugar, Monica told me, “I’m going to channel my mother. She always just kind of did things.” This was in response to a realization that she didn’t have her mother’s recipe on hand at that moment. So we started throwing things together from there, and Monica informed me that she was using her mother’s old Mixmaster.

Later, she also told me how gleeful her mother had been when she started using it years ago. “She loved that Mixmaster. She’d be like, ‘Oh, look how beautifully this is being creamed!’”

It’s important to note that this creaming business is not the actual first step in the fruitcake-making process. About a week before making the cake, you have to start soaking your dried fruit in alcohol. Yolanda’s recipe calls for brandy, but I didn’t know that when I began. After the fruit had been soaking for a few days, I reached out to Monica to let her know I was using rum and she told me that one of the rules was to use whatever you have lying around. Perfect!

Next we added in our four eggs, one at a time, followed by baking soda, baking powder, a pinch of salt, and the molasses. After that, we added all the spices, vanilla, and zest to taste (extra cinnamon because we both wanted extra cinnamon). And then Monica suggested we alternate adding in the flour and the milk. At this point, she informed me, “This is not going to make just one fruit cake.” There would be multiple cakes– two as it turned out. But she told me her mother always used to make far more cake than that.

“We would do this… at a production level. Producing two fruitcakes was woefully inadequate.” Yolanda would make a dozen fruitcakes and mail them out. “And you see how heavy these things are,” Monica added.

Fruitcake is heavy. There’s a lot of fruit in there and it’s dense, so… I mean, that’s the situation. That’s the whole point. Maybe that’s why people are put off by it? I have no idea. “My mother was making fruitcake in a culture that mocks and thinks fruitcake is terrible. It’s like a perfect metaphor for my mother: how other we were,” Monica shared. “She could not conceive of the fact that this fruitcake would not be met by great joy by everyone.”

Yolanda began fruitcake preparation in early December because, according to Monica, if you’re really making it the best way possible, it spends around three weeks curing in brandy. And there’s all the prep before you can even start to make the cake batter. Monica noted that a big part of the process was gathering all the ingredients together. “It was a big deal because I was growing up in 1960s America, and their version of everything was terrible,” she explained. “Nothing was fresh. Nothing was natural. And my parents were all about fresh ingredients because that was how they’d grown up in Argentina.” Yolanda would go to the Conte di Savoia in Chicago, where she could find the candied fruits she needed imported from Italy. “My mother just couldn’t believe– every recipe back then was like open a jar, open a can, defrost.” But not Yolanda’s fruitcake.

At this point, it was time for us to mix our dried fruit and pecans into the batter. The types of dried fruit you use are up to you, but suggestions include candied citron, figs, cherries, apricots, cranberries, raisins, and currents. I scooped my fruit out and placed the leftover rum aside for later use.

We poured the batter into our well greased pans (I used 1 loaf and 1 bundt), and the cakes were ready for the oven.

So we set our timers for 45 minutes and hung out with this guy:

While the cakes baked, I asked Monica to tell me a little bit more about her mother.

Yolanda was born in Argentina to a Sicilian father and a Spanish mother.”She was always by far the smartest person in the room,” Monica stated. At sixteen, Yolanda and her best friend read every book in their four-walled library, starting from the bottom lefthand corner.

She met Monica’s father at medical school. They got married and came to the United States on Yolanda’s Argentine quota. When she began her residency, she didn’t speak any English.

When they finished their residencies, Monica’s father was going to be drafted, so he volunteered for the Air force. They were sent to Ankara, Turkey, where Yolanda was told she could have a job working in the hospital there. But the job disappeared when they arrived. Monica’s father worked while her mother stayed home. After giving birth to Monica in Turkey, they returned to United States. Yolanda was, at this time, pregnant with Monica’s sister. They moved to Highland, Indiana. “It was a cul de sac of us and hardcore Americans and our next door neighbors, who were a German and very Catholic family… And then there’s this kind of wacky Argentine family living next door.” Monica recalled that someone she went to school with used to refer to her house as the United Nations.

Later, the family moved to Chicago, where Yolanda was the only divorced professional woman in Monica’s circle of friends. “She was trying to make it all come together. She was rabidly pro-choice [when abortions were illegal] and really worked politically [as a physician] on those kinds of issues.”

Although Yolanda and her husband had been divorced for years, she still sent him a fruitcake during the holidays. Monica remembered one instance in which she brought her father the cake and he responded with, “Say what you like about Yolanda, she makes a kick-ass fruitcake.”

The bundt fruitcake was ready to take out of the oven after 45 minutes and the loaf was done after another ten minutes.

At this point in the process, we left our cakes to cool before turning them out onto cooling racks. Once cool, I drizzled/poured my leftover rum over both cakes and I tried a bite of the loaf. It was like a fruity, alcoholic gingerbread! What’s not to love?

Although I’d already “drizzled” a fair amount of rum over the bundt cake, it was time to cover it in cheesecloth and pour on even more. I then wrapped it loosely and set it in a cool, dark corner to cure for three weeks.

Meanwhile, inspired by the story that follows, I sat and enjoyed the very rum-y cake I had in front of me. When Monica went back to college for her freshman year, her mom sent her back with frozen pizzas and two fruitcakes. “If you touched her between December 15th and January 1st, you left with fruitcake. It was just that straightforward.” She and her eight roommates sat around their dark living room exchanging stories about their parents and their winter breaks. Monica went ahead and broke out the fruitcake. Yolanda had been running low on fruitcake, so this was very fresh. She told her daughter to let it cure for a couple of weeks, during which time some of the alcohol would evaporate. “She had just poured– it must have been a bottle or two of brandy– over these two fruitcakes… We got so trashed. I think at that point, the sugar combined with the brandy was probably more than we could take.”

I had just finished my finals. And I was ready. Bring it on, cake.

“It was just always interesting,” Monica reflected, “[My mother’s] intense competence in the kitchen and this really free flowing style of cooking that didn’t use recipes and was very exuberant compared with sort of the precision required of being a radiologist.” She also taught Monica how to sew, which she demonstrated while we Skyped, repairing a cover that her dog recently chewed up. An amazing, wild cook, and a “hardcore feminist,” Yolanda was a force as a female physician in 1970s America. “I think [about] all of those contradictions about who she was: brilliant, a feminist, a professional, a mother, a divorced woman, but a caregiver still.”

Recent memory difficulties have been particularly hard given Yolanda’s extremely high level of intelligence. “[But] the fingerprints of that really keen intellect are still there.”

Since this is really all about Yolanda (and fruitcake), I won’t detail all of Monica’s successes for you here now. But suffice it to say, she is an extraordinary force in the world, a trait (or collection of traits) it seems she may have picked up from her mother. I am so grateful that she took the time to teach me this recipe and tell me some stories about Yolanda. I will treasure the fruitcake in my refrigerator until it is gone (I give it one more day tops), and I may even make it in bulk over the holidays.

“I think these things really do become symbols,” Monica said of the fruitcake. “They’re touchstones. We mark time with certain ritual things.” Now, the tradition continues: Monica makes the fruitcake during the holidays and takes it to her mother in Chicago. 

Ingredients

For 1 cake:

• 1/2 c butter
• 3/4 c packed brown sugar
• 2 c all-purpose flour
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1/4 tsp baking powder
• vanilla to taste
• cinnamon to tase
• allspice to taste
• nutmeg to taste
• cloves to taste
• a pinch of salt
• lemon or orange zest from 1 lemon or one orange
• 2 eggs
• 1/2 c dark molasses
• 1/2 c milk
• Brandy
• About 1.5 cups assorted dried fruit
• 1/2 c pecans

For 2 cakes (the better option– the point of fruitcake is to share it!):

• 1 c butter
• 1.5 c packed brown sugar
• 4 c all-purpose flour
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp baking powder
• vanilla to taste
• cinnamon to tase
• allspice to taste
• nutmeg to taste
• cloves to taste
• a pinch of salt
• lemon or orange zest from 1 lemon or one orange
• 4 eggs
• 1 c dark molasses
• 3/4 c milk
• Brandy
• About 3 cups assorted dried fruit
• 1 c pecans

Method

1. One week before baking this cake, start soaking your dried fruit in brandy.
2. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees and grease your pan(s)– A bundt or a loaf pan will work for this. I made one of each!
3. Cream together the butter and the brown sugar.
4. Add the eggs one at a time.
5. Beat in the molasses, baking soda, baking powder, salt, vanilla, cinnamon, allspice, nutmeg, cloves, and lemon zest.
6. Alternately add the flour and the milk, beginning and ending with the flour.
7. Stir in the pecans and the dried fruit. You will want to strain the excess brandy before pouring the fruit in. Save this to drizzle on the cake when it is finished.
8. Bake for 40-55 minutes. This will depend on the size of your pan.
9. Cool the cake(s) and then turn out of the pan.
10. Drizzle brandy over the cake and eat OR wrap your cake in cheesecloth and pour a larger amount of brandy over it. Leave it to cure, wrapped in cheesecloth and plastic wrap (loosely). Store it in a cool, dark location for a few weeks and enjoy!