Friendship Fruit Cake {plus Starter Recipe} (2024)

FAQs

What alcohol is best in fruitcake? ›

Evenly pour 1.5 - 2 ounces of your favorite bourbon, rum, brandy, or cognac, over the fruitcake.

In order to ensure your fruitcake tastes fresh, Southern Living suggests leaving your dried fruit to soak in a flavorful liquid like rum or apple juice for a minimum of 24 hours. However, the longer you allow the ingredient to soak, the more moist your cake will be.

Making Friendship Fruit Cake Starter

To make the starter, you combine apricots, peaches, maraschino cherries, and pineapple with brandy and sugar in a large jar or bowl. You stir the mixture a couple of times a week, and by day 20, your concoction is ready.

Whiskey serves as a great substitute for brandy in a fruitcake. Although whiskey comes from fermented grain mash while brandy is made from fermented grape mash, the process is so similar, that the flavor will be similar as well.

Fruitcake with alcohol can last years, and in some rare cases, it can last decades. For those looking to prepare fruitcakes with alcohol for storage, you'll want to make sure to brush the fruitcake with alcohol fairly consistently across its time in storage.

Allow cakes to cool in pans on racks. When cooled, remove cakes from pans and remove parchment paper. Brush cakes generously with sweet sherry, brandy, rum, port, liqueur or fruit juice; do not use wine.

Have you ever had fresh or dried fruit sink to the bottom of a cake or loaf? Don't worry, it's a common problem and generally happens when the cake batter isn't heavy or thick enough to hold the weight of the fruit as it bakes.

Overmixing: Overmixing the batter can lead to the development of gluten, which can result in a dense and tough texture. Overmixing can also introduce more air into the batter, which may cause certain compounds to react and create a bitter taste. Overbaking: Baking the cake for too long can lead to a.

The ratio of wet to dry ingredients determines a cake's moisture level. If there's simply too much flour and not enough butter, a cake will taste dry. On the other hand, if there's too much milk and not enough flour, a cake will taste too wet. Finding the right balance between wet and dry ingredients is key.

An Elvis Presley cake is a single-layer classic yellow cake that's topped with a pineapple glaze. Much like a poke cake, the syrup and juices of the pineapple will seep into the cake through fork holes, resulting in a decadent, ultra-moist cake.

Why is it called friendship cake? ›

A 30-Day Cake, also often referred to as a Friendship Cake due to friends sharing a “starter” made from the leftover juices of a previous cake, is similar in design to the most hated (or beloved?) of Christmas desserts: the fruitcake.

Queen Elizabeth cake is a dessert cake prepared with sugar, flour, dates, eggs, and butter, and topped with a sugary icing infused with shredded coconut. The cake is named after Elizabeth II. It is a popular cake in Canada. The coconut topping is prepared by broiling or grilling.

The trifecta of sugar, low moisture ingredients and some high-proof spirits make fruitcakes some of the longest-lasting foods in the world.

The most common duration to properly age a fruitcake is about three months. Any quicker will limit the development of complex flavors attributed to the maturing process. You can certainly age your cake for much longer than several months if you'd like, but we know how busy everyday life can be.

Soak all your dried fruits in your spirit of choice – whisky or brandy would be the most traditional options, though other aged spirits like rum also work, and sweeter additions like sherry, Cointreau or amaretto will add their own character.

Alcohol: The alcohol is key to the flavor, texture and preserving for this cake. I prefer a high abv slightly sweet alcohol like brandy or rum. You can also use whiskey or bourbon. Don't use lower abv liquid like wine for aging, you need the higher alcohol as a preservative.

We do this by adding alcohol (or fruit juice or even a mix) bit by bit until the fruit is plump, or you can just soak overnight and add the rest of the alcohol after the cake is baked.

Yes, it is absolutely possible to make fruit cake without alcohol. You can replace the alcohol with fruit juice, such as orange juice or apple juice, to soak the dried fruits, adding flavor and moisture to the cake.

Baking with booze—such as bourbon, rum, port and vodka—can add additional flavor, texture and even change the consistency of many baked goods. Take pie dough for example, adding a splash of vodka produces a super flakey dough and develops less gluten in the dough than water.