Fruitcake...Five years old

(even after all that time, the cake had remained moist, but not soggy, perhaps because i doused the cake every four months or so with a bottle of rum.)

About 5 years ago today, I made this fruitcake while on sem-break during my freshman year at medical school. I graduated last year. I passed my licensure exams two months ago. And this fruitcake is still in my ref. No, it is not spoiled. It is actually delicious and quite intoxicating!

I had no intention of curing this cake this long when I baked it. I was trying out several fruitcake recipes that time and this was my third one, and the one that beat the other two. I used only dried fruits that were soaked in red wine for this recipe, and none of the candied citron peel that people still call candied dried fruits (ehem, it’s actually the PEEL of only ONE fruit). Being the third cake of the same category in a period of 10 days, people at home were pretty tired of fruitcake, a good two months ahead of the Christmas season. So I cut up the cake, placed it in an air-tight container and drowned it in a full liter of rum and cherry brandy. See you on December 25, I said.

I opened the tub on Christmas day and a waft of sweet fruity alcohol greeted my nose. The most of the liquid had evaporated and somehow escaped and the cake was now sitting on a puddle of brown syrup. I took as slice and tasted it. It was sweet but still had a very strong alcohol taste to it. The syrup, on the other hand was heavenly! It was as if I were licking fruity honey, with a hint of rum! Superb! But thinking the alcohol taste was still too strong for the octogenarians in my family, I put back the lid and saved it for New Year’s.

I forgot about this cake, until around February. The cake had aged and developed a sweet fruity mellow flavor. But there was no one to appreciate it. Everyone was tired of fruitcake. So I got a new bottle of rum, poured everything in and stored it in the ref again. This cycle went on for the next years, with me pouring a new bottle every four to six months.

It had survived all these years! The flavor had remained the same, perhaps preserved by the copious amounts of alcohol. And it wields the utmost fruitiness because I only used dried fruits – dried apples, pears, apricots, cherries, golden raisins and blueberries. I also added some walnuts and pecans. Surprisingly, the texture is quite good, too. The area that remain soaked in syrup was a bit soggy, but the upper areas were soft and moist!

I’ll be posting this recipe soon. (I obviously need to search my files as I haven’t done fruit cake in years!) I’ll be doing a fresh batch of fruitcake that I’ll store and eat perhaps when I finish residency training! Haha!

(the cake had developed a brown syrup - ffuity and intoxicating- made from semi evaporated rum.)