World's Best Fruitcake!

Maybe you’re thinking, “Ew, I hate fruitcake.” Too bad for you! Because with an attitude like that, you’ll miss out on something spectacular.

Today I’m celebrating a genuinely superlative fruitcake. The kind to swoon over. The kind to completely hide from people who “don’t like” fruitcake (pearls before swine) . . . and the kind to hide from people who like fruitcakes, too (’cuz no, it’s mine, all mine!). The kind you hide from everybody, because you want every crumb for yourself.

. . . To savor.

We are so happy to have an annual cross-continent gift exchange with our dear friends Steve and Sherri, who live in Seattle. We send them an assortment of my homemade cookies, and they send us one of Sherri’s homemade, made-from-scratch fruitcakes.

It’s totally not a fair exchange. What Sherri sends us is far, far beyond my feeble cookie gifts. (Sherri? Me dilettante, you master.)

I remember the few winters we spent together as neighbors in Montana. Steve and Sherri lived next door to us in an elderly duplex in Helena, midway between downtown and the capitol complex, the last house on South Raleigh as it ascended Sugarloaf Hill. I’ve never had such fun neighbors. One winter, after endless bitter cold, it finally, albeit prematurely, got up above freezing. At almost the same moment, Steve and I both emerged from our respective front doors, glanced at each other, and laughed at each others’ shorts. Look, it’s a heat wave! Steve grinned and purred, “Ahh, another balmy day in beautiful Helena, Montana!”

They are epicures, and they don’t take life too heavily. Steve mountain-biked all over town as well as in the nearby mountains. Sherri created lovely, elaborate dishes, apparently with complete ease, and the four of us had many meals together—often in our shared backyard, or on the front porch, with its gorgeous view of the sunsets behind Mount Helena.

Well, one winter, Sherri decided to put her formal culinary training (yes!) to use in making fruitcake from scratch.

Do you have any idea what that means? It was days in the making, because she candied her own fruit! Orange and lemon peel, apricots, pineapple, pears, cherries, you name it. Their apartment smelled like magic after Sherri spent whole days simmering fruits in sugar syrup. And Sherri used perfect, fresh, whole nuts—hazelnuts, almonds, walnuts, you name it. And luscious prunes, figs, and dates. All this was in preparation for the actual construction and baking of the cakes.

These are works of art. There’s just enough cake batter to hold the gorgeous, colorful, translucent fruits and nuts together. If you slice it thinly enough, it looks like a stained glass window.

It really does.

And the flavor. Mercy!

I’ve been meaning to write again about fruits at Christmas, and how our parents and grandparents, and everyone before them, considered fruits at Christmas a real treat. It wasn’t that long ago that you couldn’t get all kinds of fresh produce in midwinter. Winter was for cabbage, meat, and potatoes, over and over again. So dried fruits at Christmas were a treasure. They were expensive. Apricots, pears, apples, plums, cherries, grapes, strawberries. And fruitcakes celebrate that.

And so I celebrate fruitcake, specifically Sherri’s fruitcake, which we’ve been enjoying annually for several years now. Sherri, you’ve perfected it. In our humble opinion, you could serve this to the queen. You could sell this for about a million dollars. Nobody does it better. You rock.

So on December 25, once again, breakfast will be a slice of Sherri’s beautiful, precious fruitcake and coffee. Maybe the coffee will be elevated by a little Bailey’s Irish Cream, or Kahlua, Grand Marnier, or some such. It’ll have to be good to pair with the fruitcake.

Merry Christmas!

P.S. This year Sherri also sent us some homemade plum chutney! Her modest little comment on the card noted that the chutney was from their plum tree and that it is “pretty good with some blue cheese on a cracker.” . . . “Pretty good,” she says. When Julia Child or Jacques Pépin says something is “pretty good,” it’s time to sit up and take notice, because to us mere mortals, it means, “Try this, it’ll knock your socks off!” I can’t wait!

Gift Idea: TV B Gone

Okay: Let’s say you’ve decided to go out for dinner someplace. Maybe you’ve been driving all day and you want to relax and get a bite to eat. Or maybe you’ve got someone you want to visit with. Like, an out-of-town friend you rarely get to see, but hooray, she’s visiting, and you get to have dinner together. Or maybe you’re lunching alone and are relishing the chance to collect your thoughts for the afternoon’s work. Or maybe you’re having an important conversation with someone, like a client.

And there’s this ignorant television hanging up in the corner of this otherwise quite nice restaurant, flickering and flashing, showing some godawful sad, sensationalistic trash, or some talking-head politics guy whose every word gives you a sour feeling in your stomach.

You know, television programs and the advertising they exist to serve are designed to grab your attention—the change of camera angle every five seconds or less; the rate of flashing; the emphasis on “big” (never subtle) emotions; the pacing of dialogue, the tone of voice. It plays with your monkey mind in ways you’re scarcely aware of—all you know is, it’s hard to get your eyes off the screen.

I’m not joking—and I do encourage us all to educate ourselves about television and how it manipulates our attention, feeds our thoughts, and (I believe) pollutes our culture and damages our democracy. To everyone, I recommend this book: Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, by Jerry Mander. It’s not a new book at all, but what is says is just as relevant today as when it was written. If you don’t believe me, read the Amazon reviews.

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THAT was my prologue. The gift idea mentioned in the title of this post, now, should need no explanation, beyond this: It is a handy, keychain-sized universal remote control that only does one thing: It works as a power button on all different types of televisions. It is an “off” switch! Of your very own.

They’re about twenty bucks, batteries are included, and you can get them online here: Cornfield Electronics.

Look, how many times do I tell you to “buy” stuff? Never. But here I am, telling you: You will love having the power to turn off those offensive TVs wherever they may be: The doctor’s office. An otherwise decent restaurant. The waiting room at the service department at your car dealer’s. At the laundromat. Maybe even in the gate area at the airport!

Oh, joy!




I got mine and tried it out at Ruby Thursday’s! I was kind of worried a riot might break out, with people deprived of their TV teats, but no one even noticed the TV had gone black.

And yes, these would make great stocking stuffers!

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Special thanks and an Op Op Hurray! to Jane Phillips, who told me about this lovely product and reports great success with it in places ranging from restaurants to the DMV!

Santa Dropped By Early!

It’s a good thing I haven’t made my springerles yet, because this weekend I got a new springerle roller!

Sue and I went to Hermann’s annual Kristkindl Markt—basically a citywide Christmas sale, with craft, antique, and Christmas-doodad vendors at the usual local feste spaces (Hermannhof Festehall, etc.).




While there, we also stopped at one of Hermann’s antique stores, poked around . . . and found each other’s Christmas presents! I found an antique springerle roller—you know, the kind made out of real wood, and carved with actual pretty pictures of recognizable things! (More on this subject soon.)

This one even has a picture of a bug on it! How cool is that!? (Yeah, I think it must be a bee or wasp or some other kind of hymenopteran . . .)




Sue saw it first and showed it to me. She knew I’d been wanting an old springerle roller. Wow, it was kind of pricey, but then it was marked as being circa 1900. (Who knows.) But it’s in good shape, and it’s something I’ll use for years hence.




She got it for me as my Christmas present!

. . . Meanwhile, something had caught Sue’s eye, too: a Voigtländer Vitessa camera, from the 1950s. It was inside a locked display case, so Sue had to get one of the clerks to let her see it. It had the original box and all the original paperwork and instructions and stuff with it. It passed muster—and so that became my gift to Sue!




I don’t generally tell you too much about Sue—because I’m not sure how much she wants you to know about her doin’s. In recent years, her photography skills (which were already excellent) have increased dramatically. She’s always been interested in cameras and photography, and because of her work, she’s become an expert with Photoshop and Lightroom. But her knowledge of photography has been growing in leaps and bounds. I mean, for fun, she reads NAPP publications, Ansel Adams’s books, and all kinds of photography manuals.

Most recently she’s become more interested in film photography. I didn’t realize it, but there’s a bunch of people in the world who are seriously pursuing film photography. I guess, like a lot of other ways of doing things (typing with a typewriter, printing with a letterpress, etc.), now that it’s an obsolete technology, it’s become an art form.

So Sue’s acquired a small collection of old cameras, including twin-lens reflex (like Vivian Maier used), some 35mm cameras, etc. Sue can easily and cheaply develop black-and-white film herself; then, she can scan it, digitally turn it into a positive image, and do miscellaneous corrections with Lightroom and Photoshop.

She’s also been having fun with Lomographic film. So this nifty-cool 1950s German Voigtländer camera will provide her with loads of fun!

I think this camera is especially cool because the lens folds down into the camera body and is protected by two doors that close around it. Pretty nifty, huh?




Truth be told, “gifts” aren’t really my thing. Honestly, my least favorite part of Christmas is the unwrapping of gifts, of things, particularly of store-bought things. I’m pretty bad at picking out gifts for people, and I feel awkward receiving them, especially when there are lots and lots. I guess it’s because I feel like a pretty awful gift-giver, and I feel like I should reciprocate better.

My thing—in case you couldn’t tell—is doing stuff for people. Entertaining, fixing dinners, baking and giving away cookies, and so on. Some people say “I love you,” directly, verbally tell you it and speak it in so many ways; other people give gifts to say it, so giving and receiving gifts is something they understand; some show love by spending quality time with the people who matter to them; some show it through physical touch in all its forms; and others do things, they serve, to express their love.* . . . I guess, at this point in my life at least, the last is my style.

But last weekend, I was more like Santa Claus, and Sue was, too. Fun presents!




Okay, now, back to the cooking . . .

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* By the way, these ideas about how people express love aren't my own--they come from Dr. Gary Chapman's bestselling book The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love that Lasts. Perhaps this would be good reading for you over the holidays.