By: Marlene Oxender
Curiosity recently got the best of me when an article entitled White Christmas Recipes came through my online newsfeed. The title was intriguing, so I clicked on to it.
Included in the article were tips on how to make our holidays sparkle. How to add festive flavors and crowd-pleasing dishes to our holiday menu.
But all I wanted to know was what makes a recipe a “White Christmas” recipe. Turns out, the story was about food that’s white in color. Vanilla cake. Potato soup. Sugar cookies. White fruitcake.
I’d never heard of a white fruitcake, but it sounded better than a brown fruitcake. There began my search through fruitcake recipes, and I decided the baking of a fruitcake is something I ought to do at least once in my lifetime. I’d make a white fruitcake.
And if my family likes the cake, they’ll remember it as the best fruitcake ever. If they don’t like it, it’ll be one of those “remember that time” stories. That time when Grandma made a fruitcake, and everyone took one bite.
My friend Barb refers to her mother’s fruitcake recipe as “The Thirty-Ingredient Cake.” After reading her handwritten recipe, I thought about changing my mind. I would not be baking a fruitcake.
The next best thing would be ordering a cake from a company that’ll ship it to me. I found an online bakery that describes their fruitcake as delightfully dense. A moist texture and warm flavors.
Their cakes are studded with dried fruits, organic walnuts, and candied orange peels. They make their holiday fruitcakes with top-shelf rum, and they even used exclamation points to describe their cakes.
As the days in December ticked by, and I told others about my search for a Christmas fruitcake recipe, I found the poor fruitcake doesn’t get the respect that other desserts do.
Donuts are bought by the dozens. Cakes and pies – we have our favorites. Cookies – all good. But the poor fruitcake. It doesn’t help that another definition for fruitcake is “someone who is insane, nuts, or loopy.”
I learned there are recipes for fruitcake scones, donuts, and cookies. There are entire cookbooks dedicated to the making of a perfect fruitcake.
When I told my daughter that I’d like to make a fruitcake, her reaction included making the face I need not describe to you. We’ve all seen that look before. She was in disbelief.
She told me it’d be a waste of time and money. She brought up all the reasons to not make a fruitcake. All I could do was explain it all started when I decided to write about a white fruitcake.
She told me it’d take time to find all those ingredients, and in the end, none of us are going to like the cake. I couldn’t help but agree with her.
I explained I’d shopped online in search of an already-baked perfect fruitcake. I found a company that wraps the cake in brandy-soaked cheesecloth and ships it in a holiday tin wrapped with a festive bow.
I told her I came across a recipe for figgy pudding. It seems to be true that hardly anyone knows what figgy pudding is, other than we sang about it as a child, and we won’t go until we get some.
Sugar plums are another holiday food that we’re familiar with only through a poem written long ago. There were visions of sugar plums dancing in heads.
I think back to that day in autumn last year when I clicked on to the article about white Christmas recipes that led to spending time researching fruitcake. To reading about figgy pudding and sugar plums.
To reading the words in ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas. To asking myself if I knew anything about Charles Dickens. To ordering a copy of Great Expectations.
A few days before Christmas last year, I found an online bakery that makes a chocolate cherry fruitcake with organic ingredients. I went to their website but found they’d stopped taking orders for the season.
National Fruitcake Day is December 27, and I plan to be ready for the 2025 season. I’ll have time to work on a fruitcake recipe and decide on which fruits, nuts, and spices I’d like to include.
At a recent writers’ group meeting at the Bryan Library, extra copies of The Budget, a newspaper published in Sugarcreek, Ohio, were distributed by one of the members. We were welcome to take a copy home.
I chuckled as I read the recipe column “Cookin’ with Maudie” and found a recipe for fruitcake that incorporated chocolate. It appears to be a keeper of a recipe. If you stir up a batch of Chocolate Fruitcake Nibbles, please let me know what your volunteer taste-testers have to say about them.
Chocolate Fruitcake Nibbles
½ cup butter, softened
1 egg, beaten
1 cup granulated sugar
2 tsp vanilla extract
1 ½ cups cake flour
½ tsp baking soda
¼ tsp salt
1 ounce unsweetened chocolate
1 cup mixed candied fruit, finely chopped
1 egg white, beaten
In a mixing bowl, beat together butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in egg and vanilla extract.
In a separate bowl, sift together flour, baking soda, and salt. Stir into butter mixture until well blended. Set aside 1/3 of the dough and place in another mixing bowl.
In the top of a double boiler over hot (not boiling) water, melt chocolate. Stir melted chocolate into 1/3 of dough. Stir candied fruit into remaining 2/3 of dough and form into a 2”-thick roll. Refrigerate about 2 hours.
On a lightly floured surface or between 2 sheets of waxed paper, roll chocolate dough into 1/8”-thick square. Brush lightly with beaten egg white.
Place roll of white dough with fruit at 1 end of the chocolate dough and roll up so that the chocolate dough covers the white dough. Refrigerate the double roll about 2 hours.
Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Remove dough from refrigerator and slice into ¼” slices. Place on ungreased cookie sheet and bake about 10 minutes.
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Marlene Oxender is a writer, speaker, and author. She writes about growing up in the small town of Edgerton, her ten siblings, the memorabilia in her parents’ estate, and her late younger brother, Stevie Kimpel, who was born with Down syndrome. Her two recently published books, Picket Fences and Stevie, are available on Amazon. Marlene can be reached at mpoxender@gmail.com
