it's about this time of the year again

... well I might have been a bit late again.



I have been lagging behind in blogging many recent developments, but here I'm making this a note to self; last week I got around to soaking dried fruits in liquors in preparation for making fruit cake for Christmas. Last year I didn't need to do this as I had some leftover mincemeat from the year before, but well, this year, I had nothing, so I made it from scratch.

That said, I decided not to make traditional mincemeat this year. Instead, I just soaked fruits directly in liquors, without adding sugar or fat, which is what I used to do before. This time I had semi-dried black figs, large white figs, prunes, mirabelles (a kind of plum), and pears, all of which are from France. I also had some sultana raisins and candied zest of bitter oranges from Spain, plus candied zest of lemon for which I don't know where it is from.

I chopped up everything (except raisins), threw them altogether into a large jar, and poured some French rum and brandy - from A. Legoll and Cognac Frapin, respectively. I seem to have soaked something like 2.5lb of dried fruits in total in 10-12 oz. of rum and 3 oz. of cognac. This should be a plenty for this year's cakes, and probably for the next year as well.

Now my jar of fruitcake fruits is sitting in the kitchen (not by the windows, though) and getting ready to be used in a month's time or so. Ideally, in order for my fruits cakes to fully develop their flavors, I would have liked to soak my fruits a few months before baking them into cakes and then let sit the cakes for another month or two before they're eaten, but I'll have to live with what I have to live with; I've only got a month for my fruits to get liquor-steeped and another month for the cakes to sit before Christmas this year. Not too bad, as long as I manage to bake cake in time, a month from now. Let's see how it goes...