Why must its candied fruit look radioactive? Photo credit: Ringo Ichigo. We hate that fruit cake looks pockmarked and diseased. And yet, it's somehow suppose to look appetizing. Photo credit, Flickr: jeffreyw. Fruit cake is labeled as a cake; and this is incredibly misleading.
No self-respecting cake would ever be this dense. A door stop is a better descriptor -- and what most people use this seasonal baked good for. Photo credit, Flickr: Brett Jordan. But why? Why is it so bad?? Our best guess is because it's aged. You get all the sugar, fat, and calories of cake but none of the "that was so worth it! Let's do everyone a favor and stick to double chocolate , gingerbread , and shortbread. If you soak yours in spirits, that still doesn't make it taste or look any better.
Typically boozy desserts are to die for, but this is the exception to the rule. This thing is worse than a pound cake when it comes to density. Sweet bread is not meant to be this horribly heavy, and the idea of it weighing down your belly after a full holiday dinner is grotesque. The shelf life of this thing is doubly suspect. When you bake and slice a dessert over two decades ago and can still eat it , you should be very suspicious and never want to consume it.
With the advent of home appliances and pre-prepared, freezable foods, many food items became associated with quantity and convenience over quality. People stopped making things from scratch as much, including the fruitcake, and some of those products became synonymous with their generic, uncreative, low-quality, mass-produced versions. In the age of fake news, even the information we have about our desserts may need to be investigated further and not merely accepted at face value.
You must be logged in to post a comment. Candy stores hold a certain magic and youthful nostalgia. Your candy may be sweet and flavorful, but your packaging Everyone you know tells you how delicious your cookies are.
Virginia Glass -- self-schooled pastry purveyor and amateur fruitcake historian -- and NYU professor of food studies and author, Amy Bentley , believe that much of the resentment towards fruitcake stems from the disconnect of what fruitcake actually is, versus what Americans have come to believe it is.
In their opinion, redemption will only happen if the dessert can be redefined. What we envision as fruitcake is a quickly assembled, cheaply constructed facsimile. This is the problem. A fruitcake should be rich, it should taste like dried fruit and spices and alcohol. My fruitcake uses good, single-barrel Scotch, golden raisins, dried sour Michigan cherries, diced dried apricots, candied orange peels, and some honey with dark brown sugar and a bit of salt.
It should be dense and moist. It should be delicious. I'm not sure if the holiday cheer is clouding my judgment, but does that fruitcake recipe actually sound National tastes, like trends, evolve with each generation.
As evidenced by the last decade's artisanal food boom, young people are interested in food and drinks with complex flavor profiles, like dark chocolate, craft beers , strong coffee , and gourmet cheeses.
We're also actively rejecting the unhealthy, processed foods we grew up eating. It was very light, very sweet, and really, the antithesis of fruitcake. Fruitcake is just a taste that fell out of habit, and became really a dessert associated with the old and out of touch.
And as a result, ended up a punchline for jokes around Christmas time. There is room to rediscover the fruitcake. It can be really good.
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