mrteapot ([info]mrteapot) wrote,
@ 2008-02-16 09:14:00
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Entry tags:cooking, crock pot, dulce de leche, food, fruitcake, yumminess to effort ratio

Excellent reason for owning a crock pot #311,542
Around Christmas time, Amber complained that she hadn't ever had a proper fruitcake. This prompted buying an extremely cheap and disappointing grocery store fruitcake, which failed to satisfy this desire. And had weird green rubbery fruit things in it.


So for Valentine's Day (well, the day afterward, when I had an afternoon off) I baked a fruitcake for Amber, utilizing the copious quantities of dried fruit that we have around the house.

It was a variation on this recipe(EDIT: Fixed link: http://www.foodnetwork.com/food/recipes/recipe/0,1977,FOOD_9936_35301,00.html), with extra vanilla and added raspberry and cinnamon extract. And the candies replaced with mostly dried apricots, some prunes, dried apples, one dried pear and about half a cup of chopped almonds. This is, by itself, a good fruitcake, though it is not terribly authentic as it has not been soaked in rum for several months.


But it becomes an amazingly good fruitcake when the homemade dulce de leche is added on top. This is where the crock pot comes in: dulce de leche requires hours of cooking at low heat, so a crock pot is the perfect tool for the job. All we did was put a can of sweetened condensed milk in a bit of water (we opened a hole with a can opener, to let out pressure, but no recipes I can find make any mention of this) and set the crock pot to "Low". The food's yumminess is way disproportionate to the effort involved in making it.


The fruitcake's yumminess to effort ratio is much more proportionate, in that it is extremely yummy but required a lot of effort. Making the batter took me longer than expected, and in the process I broke a spatula, possibly burned out the motor on the food processor and generally made a mess. I am reminded why I prefer cooking to baking. The results, though, are worth it.


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[info]scholarinexile
2008-02-16 03:22 pm UTC (link)
I think you might be the first human being I've known to craft a fruitcake and have the results come out pleasing. My dad's family was known to produce traditional Christmas fruitcakes from time to time back in the day, and they were traditionally bad as well.

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[info]little__one
2008-02-16 04:18 pm UTC (link)
This fruitcake is super yummy. Nick wins at baking (despite very nearly destroying our kitchen!)

According to Alton Brown, a big key to good fruitcake is good ingredients. It's possible that your dad's family used the awful, cheap, rubbery fruit mix that the grocery store sells for that purpose, and therefore doomed their cakes before they were even done. Nick used good ingredients, and it seemed to make a world of difference.

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[info]scholarinexile
2008-02-16 05:54 pm UTC (link)
Actually, I think the problem is more that my Aunt Agnes insists on cooking everything from scratch in spite of a complete inability to do so, and likely started with raw fruit and did it totally wrong. She's infamous in our family for an apple pie that came out with a gray filling and a pumpkin pie that still had visible chunks of pumpkin flesh in it.

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[info]mrteapot
2008-02-16 06:05 pm UTC (link)
I considered using fresh fruit in the cake, since we also have a plethora of fresh fruits available. But I determined that I wasn't sure how the liquid or the additional acidity of the fruit would affect the baking: probably for the worse. Dried fruit coated in flour behaved much like the candy that the recipe actually called for: it sat there in the batter, pleasantly inert during baking but giving weight, texture and flavor to the baked cake.

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[info]mrteapot
2008-02-16 06:09 pm UTC (link)
Really, I don't understand how a fruitcake could turn out badly, if you're a competent baker: delicious baked good, with yummy fruits and nuts inside? And sometimes soaked in pleasing alcohols? That sounds like an excellent idea. Any problem with the fruitcake must be not in the cake so much as in the baker.

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[info]andres_s_p_b
2008-02-17 08:08 am UTC (link)
Dulce de leche needs no hole if the can is completely submerged. As long as it's covered by water, it'll limit the temperature inside the can to the boiling point of water, which keeps is safely below the wants-to-explode point. By keeping the can sealed, you turn it into a pressure cooker, yielding sticky brown goodness.

I just toss a sealed can of sweetened condensed milk into a pot of boiling water and monitor it periodically to make sure the water level is in no danger of reaching the can. Two hours is supposedly enough for runny dulce de leche, but I normally let it run four hours, reaching a nice solid-yet-spreadable state. After it's done, let it sit in the pot of water overnight to cool down and allow safe decanting of the substance.

If one has no better idea at this stage, might I suggest the idea I tried at our last party of simply slicing up some crisp Granny Smith apples and dipping them into the dulce de leche.

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