It’s dead winter in New York. The sky and the sidewalks are pretty much the same color. Except the sidewalks are sometimes icy. So are the streets. Not to mention the people. Today I heard this cozy exchange between an attendant and a customer in a parking garage: “You wrecked my car!” “What are you talking about?” “You backed that other car into it and broke the headlights!” “Oh. That.”
Clearly it’s time for fruitcake.
Well, not those dark, whiskey-soaked clunkers. No, I’m talking about a fruitcake whose creator, the now-legendary cook known as Lollie, sensibly edited the usual scattershot of nuts and dried fruits down to just one of each, then replaced the sometimes harsh bite of liquor with a seemingly outrageous whole bottle of lemon extract, which actually adds only a subtle flavor to the finished loaves.
As you stand in the kitchen, mixing the giant bowl of dense batter rich with sugar, butter, and eggs, exuberant with pecans and raisins, aglow with allspice and lemon, you will get that cheerful, vaguely familial feeling that can come over you when you’re doing holiday baking, but without the dreary fog of obligation.
Not to mention that when you give these happy little loaves to your friends, they’ll be a lot more surprised and delighted than they would have been in December. I’ve even made this fruitcake at the beach in July and—after the expected hoots about making fruitcake at all, much less in mid-summer—the loaves disappeared like so much sidewalk ice in a mid-winter thaw.
RECIPE: Lollie’s Lemon Fruitcake
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