Holiday Fancy, or Practice Makes Pretty

(Hey kids, did you know that December 27 is National Fruit Cake day? I found out halfway through typing up this post.)

First of all, Americans, why y'all gotta diss the fruit cake? Are you born hardwired to hate, or do you absorb the loathing through media alongside other important cultural constructs? All one needs to do is mention fruitcake in the company of a handful of people or just one, if you're Feeling Lucky (tm), pause, and there it is. A joke or comment about its inedibility, its texture, its taste, its durability... The person who jumps first on the Fruit Cake Hate Wagon may not have even eaten any, and most certainly not a quality one. Sure, store-bough fruitcakes are mediocre, but no more than store-bought cookies or vanilla sheet cakes (that pure shortening buttercream, ew). But nobody finds those funny.

Perhaps in a gesture of protest, I decided I was going to give my fruit cake so much love it would make up for centuries of persecution. This was to be a series of "firsts".

It began with Mary Berry's Classic Fruit Cake, baked on November 2, fed weekly with a brandy and sherry mixture. We both knew we liked fruit cake, but this was our first time making it. The recipe made two rectangular cakes (I used 1.25 lb loaf pans). I already marked my calendar to begin soaking the fruit ahead of time, too. For reasons I cannot quite justify, I decided I was going to go all out and decorate the fruit cake with marzipan and royal icing. Maybe because I had just discovered such a thing was done; growing up, I saw perhaps one fruit cake with a thin layer of what I now assume was marzipan. Every other exemplar was naked. I knew Nate would have none of that nonsense, so a compromise was reached: about half of one of the two fruit cakes would be sacrificed to my decorating ambitions. Two weeks before Christmas, I stopped feeding the fruit cakes and carved a 4 x 4" piece.

A week before Christmas, I made my own marzipan - a first as well. To counter concerns about the use of raw eggs, I used the microwave method by Karen Ahmed of Kravings. She had serendipitously posted a Christmas Fruitcake video featuring this method around the same time I was plotting my tribute to fruit cake. Not content to just roll out and cover the cake in a single sheet (which I had done exactly once before with fondant, with questionable results), I tried a method that requires measuring and cutting out every single side in order to achieve sharp edges. By the time I had smoothed out all the seams, the edges were... round. FTR, I do much neater drywall corners and seams. But I was proud nonetheless. Note to self: use strained marmalade instead of apricot jam next time.

While the marzipan was drying out for about 48 hours, I asked around some baking circles for decorating ideas for the royal icing step. I wasn't really digging the snowy peaks or the cutesy holiday-themed marzipan characters. The idea of fondant using simple cut-out shapes was thrown around. I was much more excited by this idea which a) matched my skill level better, b) would give me an excuse to try making a marshmallow fondant (another first, having only used the gelatin, glycerin, etc. approach once before). Through some stroke of luck I found this recipe that would have me not only deviate from past experiences by using marshmallow, but by also including butter. After making a test batch with a mini bag of somewhat stale marshmallows, I was sold. I'm not a kneader. If something needs kneading, it's probably bread, and therefore Nate's territory. But knead I did. And it was worth it.

I made two batches of this fondant, for a total of almost 1 lb of marshmallows used, one left in its original pale ivory shade and the other... purple. Because it's the least Christmas-y color I could conjure. I wasn't sure what kind of extracts would make sense with the fruitcake so I improvised: for a single 10.5 oz batch, I used 2 t clear vanilla, 1 t clear butter, and about 1/4 t almond extracts. This was ridiculously delicious. I would make confectionery out of this, any day. I am fairly certain I ate about 15-20% of the fondant throughout the entire process from kneading to decorating the cake.

Constrained to my diminutive selection of cookie cutters and refusing to freehand or use stencils (I know my limitations), I opted for star shaped cut-outs. I even planned out my design with paper templates (now you can see why I didn't consider cutting out custom shapes). I never do this sort of stuff. My baking does not normally require measurements, sketches, or dry runs.

And then I went to town. And I created, by golly, something that was... "pretty". The most important of these firsts. Any kind of attention to presentation is a relatively new thing for me. By the time I've researched, planned, and executed a bake, I am done and ready to walk away. Spending multiple evenings just to make something eminently edible... merely pretty? Yeah. That's for people who have an AC Moore rewards card. If it feels like I doth protest too much my distaste of teh pretteh, consider how I felt compelled to tell you about my drywalling skills. There might be a gendered element at play.

Isn't she gorgeous? Sure, I can see all the ways in which I feel short of perfection, a standard to which I unrealistically hold myself, no matter what I am doing. But for once this didn't bother me. This is my first fruit cake, my first marzipan, my first buttery marshmallow rolled fondant decorating job, and my first edible chunk of pretty. I was merely proud. Perhaps excessively so, but I decided to just ride that high and broadcast it to the world (read: Facebook).

It took me a few days to muster the courage to cut into something so pretty. (Ask my parents about my reluctance to eat the marzipan animals they would get me for my birthday.) I finally did on Christmas proper and ate it all, decoration included, within the next 24 hours. By myself. No shame. No regrets. It was the proper thing to do after pouring all this love and care into it.

It was everything I hoped it would be, and more (because that fondant is just that good). There's a reason my calendar is marked with all sorts of dates for fruit cake making. I am exercising a tremendous amount of restraint not to make more marzipan (how about cashews? pistachio? oooh boy) and make more fondant with what's left of the marshmallows. I can make pretty things. I'm not sure you will find me piping rosettes anytime soon, but this made me vow to make 2018 the year where I practice my presentation skills. It makes sense. Going through all this work to bake something and dumping it on a plate is selling my passion short. Besides, desserts are no more solid substances for ingesting than houses are machines for living in.

#sweet #splurge #recipetesting