Samantha Makes Holiday Fruitcake

Chris, do you even like fruitcake?

This is my thing, like, when we talk about fruit cake,

what are we talking about?

Do you want me to tell you about it or do you want to-

Oh wait, holy crap,

oh God, you guys, I'm not recording.

I paused it.

This sucks.

[upbeat music]

Hi, I'm Samantha Seneviratne,

and today I'm going to show you how

to make an almond gingerbread fruitcake.

Fruitcakes, unfortunately, are much maligned.

I think there are a lot of bad ones out there,

but there are also a lot of good ones.

It's just a basic gingerbread cake,

which I folded in some rum-soaked fruit,

and then added an extra crumble that sort of falls in

and leaves a delicious ring in the center.

And I sent Chris Morocco a fruitcake

and he's going to taste it later.

I can't wait.

Actually, I'm a little nervous, but we'll see.

I just have a feeling he doesn't like almond extract.

I don't know that for a fact,

but I just have a feeling.

We'll see.

I love it.

So, the first thing we have to do is butter and flour

a tube pan.

This is a really sticky cake,

so you want to make sure you butter your pan really,

really well.

You could also do this in a Bundt pan if you have one handy,

but you have to be sure to really,

really grease the hell out of it.

Always make sure you get that center.

I'm going to flour it, even more insurance.

Get the center, and then I'm going to dump it out.

And I also, just for extra insurance,

have this little ring of parchment paper that I'm going

to put in the bottom.

So now we can make this almond crumble.

And it's the main ingredient to that is almond paste.

So this is store-bought almond paste.

You can make it yourself

if you just combine equal parts almond flour

and confectioner's sugar,

and then add a little bit of egg white

until you get this sort of paste.

But, I just buy it from the store.

It's fine store bought.

Into that, I'm adding softened butter,

all-purpose flour, and some brown sugar.

And basically, I'm just making a crumble

like you would put on top of a crisp or something like that.

Super easy.

You can sort of hear it.

When the sound changes, you know it's sort of ready.

It's off.

Look, it's nice and combined.

I'm just gonna whiz in some more almonds.

So this is half a cup of sliced almonds.

So now the almonds are mixed in

and we can just set this aside,

kind of just looks like wet sand,

delicious, wet sand.

So in my little pot, I have a half a cup of dried cherries

that I've chopped really finely,

and then a quarter cup of really good rum.

And that's going to go in with my cherries.

I'm not soaking the dried pears

because they're really moist already.

And the flavor is really delicate,

so I wanted to just soak the cherries to plump them up

and give them a little more flavor.

Almost every culture, it feels like,

has their version of a fruitcake.

And I think, if you just fill your fruitcake

with things that you like to eat,

so forget about those green cherries, use nice,

beautiful, sour cherries and really good rum,

you can make a delicious fruitcake

that people will enjoy eating.

You can see the rum is almost gone.

It's like all soaked into the cherries.

Woo!

And now it's flambe.

Oops. [hands clapping]

I don't think I've done that since culinary school.

Glad you were here to witness that.

Now we can add our pear.

If you don't find dried pear or you don't like dried pear,

you could use apricots would be really good

with the cherries and the almonds.

Okay, fruit's done.

Now, we can make the batter.

So now, we have to just mix our dry ingredients.

So that's one-and-a-half cups of flour.

I have some ground cinnamon, ground ginger,

and ground cloves,

plus some baking soda, some kosher salt,

and whisk that together.

And now, we can make our batter

for our gingerbread, [buzzer ringing]

fruitcake.

I keep forgetting what we're making.

[upbeat music]

Now, we just make our cake, standard creaming methods.

So I have a stick of butter, some granulated sugar,

and some brown sugar.

Whisk that up until it's creamy.

[mixer running]

So now, I'm going to add some fresh, chopped ginger

and some crystallized ginger,

two room-temperature eggs, one at a time.

I'm going to add some molasses,

golden syrup, a delicious cane syrup.

It's usually imported, I think, from England.

It smells really good already.

So I made a fruitcake for Chris

and I sent it to him two days ago.

Hey Chris, here's your fruitcake.

I'm packing it up

and I'm showing you what it looks like now,

because I have no idea what it's going to look like

when it gets to you.

Look at that little face.

Can you say Chris, enjoy your fruitcake?

Chris, enjoy fruitcake.

So now, I just added half of my dry ingredients.

Now I have my room-temperature milk, all in.

Fruit cake ages, supposedly.

This fruitcake, I don't have instructions

on how to age it, but you could brush it with rum,

rap it in cheese cloth, and then just sort of brush it

with rum every other day for a while and see what happens.

I think they can last a really long time.

I saw in a museum, once, a wedding cake

from a 100 years ago,

so I bet there's probably old fruitcakes

that have been, like, preserved somewhere.

Wouldn't that be fun to see?

And the batter is ready.

[Man] Do you remember the Seinfeld episode

where Elaine discovered the really old wedding cake

in the museum?

Is that, is that?

Did I just make that up?

Did I think that happened to me

but really it happened to Elaine on Seinfeld?

It's possible. That is possible.

[Seinfeld theme] [canned laughter]

Okay, now I'm just putting my batter in the pan.

And you can see the batter's really loose.

I'm adding the fruit mixture in now on top of the batter.

I'm going to swirl it in like so, just because I forgot

to add it into the mixer when I was beating the batter.

It really doesn't matter where you add it

as long as it gets in there sometime.

And now, this goes in the oven for 12 minutes.

So we're gonna pull our cake out of the oven,

which is generally a cake no-no, but we're doing it.

And it's, you can see it's very, very lightly set.

And we're going to sprinkle this delicious crumble

all over the cake and it's totally going to sink in,

so don't worry.

It's supposed to sink in.

So now, this goes back in the oven for another 40 minutes,

40, 45 minutes.

Okay, so I'm going to grab it out of the oven.

So you can see all of that delicious almond crumble

sort of fell in.

Those bits that are still exposed are going to be nice,

and crunchy, and chewy.

You could stick a toothpick in to see if it comes out clean.

If you hit the crumb mixture in the middle,

it might come out a little wet,

so you kind of have to check a few places.

But, I actually just like to press it

with my finger gently and you can see it bounces right back.

So, this cake has been resting for a little while.

It's not, it's not too hot anymore.

I'm going to flip it out onto a rack.

Say a little prayer.

Uh-oh. [suspenseful music]

Come on, baby. [suspenseful music]

[hands clapping] That was scary for a second.

And now, while it's still a little bit warm,

I'm going to brush it with a little more rum.

Yum.

It sort of soaks up a little better

when it's still a little bit warm.

And now I'll let this cool completely and I can glaze it.

Okay, so this is just a super,

super simple confectioner's sugar and milk glaze.

If you don't have milk, you can use heavy cream.

You could even use a little bit of citrus juice

or something like that.

I happen to have a little milk that I'm just whisking in,

like so.

And now, I'm adding a little bit of almond extract.

It's very strong.

And now here's my cake, weighs a ton.

And I'm going to glaze it just like that.

This is the fun part.

And, she's done.

Looks cute, right?

Okay, so she is ready.

If I was going to ship this,

I might just wait and let that glaze set a little bit.

I like this cake a lot cause it looks kind of humble

on the outside, but when you get inside,

there's like extra, secret treasures in there.

Don't get to eat it now?

Do I have to wait for Chris?

I have to wait for Chris.

[Chris] I can see you! Hey!

Hi, friend.

How's it going?

Good. How are you?

This is, I mean,

every part of the day is critical,

but I'd say like this part of the day is especially fraught.

Finn, can you please put your coat on and get out?

That is dirty, excuse me.

That came in today.

That's dirty.

Get your head off of it.

This is my thing, like when we talk about fruitcake,

what are we talking about?

So I think there are basically a million different kinds.

This one is my version of a fruitcake,

so it's not at all traditional.

Do you like almond extract?

There's a line after which it, like, becomes just gross

and horrible, but up to a certain point,

I think it's amazing.

You do? I love it.

I'm relieved, okay.

Up to a certain point, and then past that point,

it's just like, it's like when something's too sweet.

You're with it, you're with it,

and then there's a moment that comes,

that's just like, it's too much sugar.

It's, it's like drinking, you know, straight lemon juice,

you know, like it's just, it's, it's unbalanced.

And for me, you know, just not that good.

Now, I'm nervous. But-

Should I go get the box?

Yeah, get the box.

I used a full roll of bubble wrap.

Whoa.

Oh wow, a lot of bubble wrap.

It's like a Russian nesting doll, sorry.

Oh, heavens.

Man, you wrapped this thing for England.

All right.

It arrived in one piece!

Hey, look at that.

Look, it looks just like mine.

Oh wait, should I slice it at the same time?

Should we just taste it together?

Yeah, let's do it.

Let's do it.

Okay, I'm getting in there.

I feel pretty good about that.

Oh, did you do,

did you do like a tube of almond paste or something?

I did an almond crumble that sort of sinks down

into the cake during, during the baking process.

Uh-oh.

His silence is scary.

Is that dried pear?

Yeah.

Wow.

I do a show where I identify things.

You should check it out sometime.

You've like barely made a fruitcake.

I know, I kind of cheated.

Like this one, like, squeaks,

like, into the fruitcake category.

But like, what leaps out are, like, the almonds,

like, even just like the texture of the sliced almonds.

More interesting dried fruit

than just like three kinds, three colors of like raisins

and the [beep] cherries.

I can't even tell you what the flavor of a fruitcake is

because all I can ever remember

is tasting [beep] dried fruit.

Right.

You know, so the fact that you've made a cake that, like,

doesn't taste like [beep] dried fruit,

and the fact that my kids have stayed gone,

I'm declaring this an unequivocal win.

It was amazing! Yay!

Internet's holding out.

Kids are gone.

The only thing I would fault you for-

Tell me, oh no.

No, just the balance is like, it skews a little sweet

to me. It's sweet.

You need a cup of black tea.

But this is wonderful

because like it takes you don't like about fruitcake

and sort of just takes that away.

Thank you.

I basically wanted to just make a cake

that had all the things about holiday baking that I like.

But I wonder maybe it needs more rum.

Or you know what I think it might need

is a little, like, orange zest or something.

Yeah, totally.

Just something to cut the sweetness.

I just love that circle of almond paste that's in there.

It's so special. It's so luxe.

Thanks, Chris.

This was such a pleasure.

You can send me anything, anytime.

That's nice to be able to hang out with you-

Ditto. And like talk food.

Thanks, Sam.

Thanks, Chris.

I hope this fruitcake changes your mind about fruitcake.

I'm having mine right now with a cup of black tea

and it's perfect.

Enjoy.

[upbeat music]

Hi, I'm Samantha Seneviratne,

and today I'm going to show you how

to make my favorite.

I don't know what I'm making.

Oh, fruitcake, okay.