All Cakes Considered - Melissa Gray [49]
5. In a medium bowl, dry whisk the salt and flour together.
6. Add half the flour mixture and half the buttermilk mixture alternately, beating well after each addition, and repeat.
7. Using a strong wooden spoon, fold in the fruit and nut mixture.
8. Pour the batter into the prepared pans and bake for 1 hour and 45 minutes if you’re using a tube pan, and 1 hour and 20 minutes for the loaf pans.
TO MAKE THE GLAZE
9. About 10 minutes before the cake is ready to come out of the oven, combine the orange juice and confectioners’ sugar in the bowl of a mixer, beating until smooth.
TO FINISH THE CAKE
10. Once the cake is out of the oven and still hot, use a skewer to poke small holes through the top of the cake. Pour the glaze over the cake. Allow it to fully absorb the glaze, then carefully unmold onto a cake rack to cool. The cake will be sticky.
Carl Kasell isn’t one of them. Our veteran newscaster loves fruitcake. But he’s in the minority among those of us who typically work the holidays at NPR.
We get double-time-and-a-half on Christmas and New Year’s, and usually they’re each a snoozer of a news day. But like firemen and police, we have to staff the holidays anyway, just in case. Just in case Boris Yeltsin resigns (which he did New Year’s Eve 1999) or James Brown dies (which he did Christmas 2006). We sit around our computers, all casual in jeans and sweaters or sweatshirts, and even though we’re at work, we do try to enjoy the day. And that means going on a movable feast. Actually, it’s more like a movable graze: we spend the entire day noshing from unit to unit. It starts with Morning Edition, where someone like editor Doreen MaCallister will have a Crock-Pot set up with creamed corn beef or a spread of crackers, cheese, and summer sausage. Then between Newscast and All Things Considered, someone has cider or eggnog, someone else has more smoked sausage and an array of cheeses and crackers, and there are plenty of cakes and cookies to share with the IT guys and the engineers, not to mention Hershey’s Kisses and candy canes. ATC usually gets Chinese food for lunch, and by the time the work day is over, we’re all just as overstuffed and lethargic as if we’d spent the day at home with our blood relations.
I always bake cookies for work during the holidays—sugar cookies, Cowboy Cookies (page 137), gingersnaps, Oatmeal Cherry Cookies (page 139)—but sometimes I bake Faux Fruitcake, if only to get the NPR holiday staffers to renounce their fruitcake-hating ways. Even though I’ve got a sterling reputation as far as baking goes, I was surprised how many people I had to browbeat into trying this cake. They kept thinking it was like the typical fruitcake of yore: hard as a brickbat, sticky as the glue NASA uses on the tiles of the space shuttle, and preserved better than Twinkies. But the people who tried it were surprised at how much they liked it.
I had the same reaction when my Aunt Janet first gave me this recipe. My only quibble is with the quality of the candy orange slices I used: I think they were kind of old, because they were rather hard. This made cutting the cake an exercise in how-to-properly-use-a-fulcrum. So, tip number 1 is to feel your candy orange slices through the bag before you buy them and make sure they’re not rock hard. Tip number 2: Use a good pair of kitchen shears to cut the orange candy, dusting the blades with flour about every third snip. Tip number 3: Use a sharp knife to slice your finished cake, and please cut THIN slices: you don’t want to effect a sugar coma on your guests or coworkers.
This cake serves as many as you can sweet-talk into eating it.
Martha Washington’s Great Cake
The Cake That Launched The Cake Project and This Here Book!
I live about five miles from Mount Vernon, and about every other fall, my husband, Jimmy, and I do the candlelight tour. The docents, dressed in period costumes, take you through what would have been a typical Christmas holiday with George and Martha. The two were besieged