A few years ago, our daughter Gina decided to revive my mother's practice of making fruit cake as gifts for friends and family at Chistmas time. Soon daughter Amy had joined the cause, and an annual annual tradition was born.
Every year, they've continued to crank out dozens of fruit cakes wrapped in colorful Christmas paper. It rapidly became a family favorite, especially with my sister Darlene, her husband Brooks and their son Brooks.
Some years, the production line burgeoned to include more family members. With Jay and Sasha flying in from California to join a pre-Thanksgiving gathering this year, we put plenty of shoulders to the wheel when Gina spread out the pre-sorted and prepped ingredients under a new set of directives. It should be noted that as always, Gina bought all of the ingredients, which definitely adds up to be a significant contribution. The new mission for 2021 was layed out in this e-mail from the Fruit Cake Roller In Chief (FCRIC) unveiling a design and production overhaul for 2021:
Hi Sasha and Amy,
I thought I would share with the two of you (and I'm cc'ing the blogger and award-winning cherry chopper who has preserved our legacy of fruitroll innovation) my current plans for 2021 fruitroll experimentation. We can further improvise when we're all together, but to the extent I can I'll get the shopping and perhaps chopping done in early November (and where linked below, I've already ordered some stuff), so thought I'd share.
Reformulation goal: Cherry reduction
Variations: Full cherries both colors, reduce both colors to 1/2, replace red 1/2 with craisins, no cherries.
(I'll shop with the original recipe in mind, except substituting GF graham crackers and reducing to 0.5 lb red and 0.75 lb green candied cherries -- to be prepared as 4 half batches)
Roll goal: Attractive bite-sized energy balls
Variations: Hand rolled, Sasha's candy molds, my metal baller and stackable meatball kit
(I just received the linked items from amazon along with this spray that I thought might help)
Coating goal: Add crunch, sweetness, visual appeal, and/or ease of serving and eating
Variations: GF graham cracker crumbs, cinnamon+coconut sugar mix, cocoa powder, powdered sugar, crushed cereal
(I'm not sure if this should be on day 1 or day 2 after refrigerating; also cereal is a new idea -- maybe chex or rice crispies?)
Packaging goal: Freezer and travel friendly yet pretty under a tree
Variations: Packed in wax paper or mini-muffin cup lined tins or boxes with cute tags
(We could also just see if traveling with tupperware and then repackaging on site for gifting is a better plan)
Almost certainly one or more of the above variations will be eliminated as we go, but it should be fun, and we still have Thanksgiving weekend to fall back on if we feel a more traditional prep would help, especially with Gifford gifts.
Gina
I must confess that as a traditionalist, I was skeptical, but given the task of operating a cool meatball mold to crank out 16 fruit roll balls at a time drew me in.
That's one of the FCRIC's supervisorial tricks, to implement policies that engage her elves in a team effort.
This year, Amy took on the muscle flexing task of stirring in all of the ingredients on the stove top. She then dishing out gloops of hot dough to be molded into balls by the rest of us.
My mold got a big glop the first time, which proved less than optimal, thereby replaced by 16 individual dollops more the size of the finished products. Jay manned the single meatball tongs.
Julie, Emma and Sasha would take our rough shapes and hand roll them into more perfect spheres. Sasha and Emma also took some glops of dough to form their own spheres.
Taking one for the team, I ate a hot sphere and thought that they might be too sweet. It tasted like a chunkier, non-chocolate hot fudge. After they cooled, however, they proved to be just right.
The team proceeded to roll the balls in various coatings.
Sasha, who has never been the world's biggest fan of fruitcake, suggested replacing proposed crushed cereal topping with decorative candy sprinkles, which added crunch as well as color. She smiled saying those festive sprinkles reminded her of Christmas projects when she was a child.
The assortment of toppings --- straight cinnamon is my favorite --- and some plain ones make them look very much like Dunkin Donut Munchkins. My only concern is that someone might eat them and be surprised that they aren't airy donuts before realizing they're something even better: fruit cake.
My mother Mary is smiling down from heaven, proud that her granddaughters have taken a labor of love completed alone in her kitchen to new heights, with her great-grandaughter Emma's involvement signalling a bright future for family fruit cakes.
We toyed around with different names suitable for the re-engineered appearance, but none won approval before I wrote this blog, so I have temporarily dubbed them Proud Marys, a product of the team that had been rollin near the Schuykill River.
And hopefully in a deep base like Ike Turner's voice, you can hear, "Rollin' on the river."
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