Cake # 10 Country Fruit Cake

I'm not going to lie, when I first read "Fruit Cake" I was pretty disappointed. When I think of fruit cake, I think of all the stigma of the Christmas Fruit Cake and how this just might be the one food that even the starving children in Ethiopia might not eat. Maybe the fruit cake's bad image is all Johnny Carson's fault - at least I can say for sure that there is not only one fruit cake in the world being passed along from family to family.  Don't get me wrong, the Christmas Fruit Cake certainly has its purposes. For instance, I could use it as a pencil holder or a paper weight in my classroom, Ted could use it as a doorstop for our basement door,and both of us will need a good work out after all of these cakes, and the fruit cake would surely replace the average free weights. So when I read "Country Fruit Cake" I was hoping the different 'C' adjective before the word Fruit, would make all of the difference. The first difference I noticed right away when I was mixing the batter, that it would not have the consistency of jellified crust that canned fruit cake does. Furthermore, my fruit cake batter did not have nuts as traditional American fruit cakes do, nor did it have alcohol to preserve it in anyway (really why would someone want to preserve a fruit cake?)

The Country Fruit Cake consisted of butter, flour (whole - wheat and all - purpose), baking powder, nutmeg, light brown sugar, eggs, vanilla, milk, mixed dried fruit, and raw brown sugar. For the dried fruit, I thought change it up a bit and not use raisins at all, instead I choose dried coconuts, bananas, pineapples, cantaloupes, and papayas. Maybe I was trying to get as far away as possible from this idea of the Christmas Fruit Cake with more tropical fruit flavors.

However cruel Ted and I may be towards the troubled fruit cake, I can honestly say I have never eaten a full slice of one in my life. So, come what may, today I vowed I would eat my first slice of fruit cake without judgment! Imagine - some sappy, cliched, inspirational music, maybe coming right to a crescendo as I take my first bite, then the vibrations of the cymbals, then silence.   

Here is what the Country Fruit Cake looks like:

Here is what my more Tropical Country Fruit Cake looks like:

Note to anyone who would like to make this cake- skip the banana chips...they are hard to bite into!

Happy Baking!