Celia Hayes – The Accidental Texan

It’s too late – with Christmas only a few days away – to make this Caribbean black fruitcake for this year – but it isn’t too early to start on a couple of them for next Christmas …

(This is for a different sort of Christmas fruitcake, for those who didn’t like chewing on lumps of fossilized glace fruit, which was published (re-published?) in the European edition of the Stars & Stripes sometime in the mid-1980ies. I copied it out into my personal recipe book, but did not keep or recall any information on its source. A very dear friend of mine loved the resulting cake very much, and kept several wedges in her deep freeze, where it remained soft and un-frozen, due to the incredibly high alcohol content – she called it Celia’s DWI Fruitcake.)

Moisten with a little rum from a 1-quart bottle of same;
1 lb dark raisins
1 lb dried currents
1 lb pitted prunes
1 lb glace cherries
Put the rum-flavored fruit through a meat-grinder, equipped with a medium blade, and combine with remainder of the quart of rum in a glass jar or other sealable container, and allow to steep for at least two weeks or up to one year.

Cream together:
1 lb butter
1 lb brown sugar
1 lb eggs (about a dozen)
The ground and steeped fruit.

Combine in another bowl, and stir into the butter/sugar mixture

1 lb flour
½ tsp cinnamon
½ tsp nutmeg

Add 3 oz burnt sugar (melt sugar until deeply caramelized, or nearly black, and dissolve with an equal amount of water to make a dark, thin syrup)

Grease and flour 2 10-in spring form pans, divide the batter half into each, and bake in a pre-heated 350° oven for two hours, or until cake-tester comes out clean. You may need to cover the cakes with tinfoil to prevent burning. Remove cakes, and allow to cool. Poor ½ of a 1-quart bottle of tawny port over each cake, and allow to absorb. (You may need to take a bamboo skewer and pierce cakes about an inch apart all over to facilitate absorbing of the port.) When absorbed, pour on remainder of port onto each cake, wrap tightly in plastic (not tinfoil!) and allow to age at room temperature for at least a week or even longer to let the flavor develope. The resulting cake is very heavy, and dense, rather like gingerbread, and might be considered a sort of “pound” cake, since it calls for a pound of just about everything but the spices. Drive at your own risk, after consuming a slice or two.

My daughter and I have emerged, breathless, exhausted and muscle-sore from two months and a bit of schlepping heavy items back and forth between shed and Montero, and Montero to venue every other weekend, or every weekend. If it wasn’t my books, then it was my books and her origami art. This last weekend in Boerne was the last of our winter event schedule. We won’t be breaking out the hot-pink pavilion with the zebra-striped top until spring … unless it will be to set it up on a sunny day this week to dry it all out. Which we should have done on Monday, except that there was too much else to do … empty out the car, decorate the bay-laurel tree in front of the house for Christmas, pay attention to some basic housekeeping and laundry – the sink and the laundry baskets both overflowing – and to carry out a couple of items to the curb for the yearly bulk trash pickup.

Our contributions to bulk trash comprised a pair of cruddy computer speakers, a flat-screen monitor which had developed some pretty distracting areas of damage, a short ornamental garden pedestal of poured plaster, and a metal and fabric lounge chair/foot-stool combination which my daughter brought home from the Marines. It was one of those inexpensive, ugly and futuristic – but surprisingly comfortable items – which had been passed around the Cherry Point enlisted barracks until my daughter snagged it and brought it home, where it took up altogether too much space. I suspect from the distinct whiff from the cushions that the cats and maybe one of the dogs had taken to marking it with their very own essence. So, out on the curb it all went, and – mirabile dictu – all these items promptly vanished, although the enormous city collection trucks have not yet appeared – although the junker trucks have been rotating like turkey vultures over our neighborhood for days.

The plaster pedestal was pretty well decayed by use and weathering. An elderly couple in a very nice late-model station wagon pulled up, even as we were unloading the car of our gypsy-market materials, and the husband asked through the driver-side window, if it was very heavy. Blondie said it was not, and loaded it into the back of their car, as we confessed that … we had actually collected it from the curbside some years ago, when it wasn’t nearly so decayed. Amusingly, a fair number of the pots and ornamental elements in our garden were scrounged from the curbside. Our own haul from the neighborhood curbside this year included a pair of barely-used dog beds and one of those folding Oriental black lacquer screens – a rather nice item, once the hinges were replaced by stout brass hardware and longer screws and assorted dings and scratches repaired by various means. The dog beds were washed in blazingly hot water, of course. They are already popular with the one doggle who had prized the barracks chair.
As for the markets – they have all been so-so, this year. There are a number of possible reasons for this, which may make another blog-post. Still, one way and another, I have come home after some of them with bargains: this weekend, it was a whole cowhide.

No, don’t laugh – I have a set of Colonial-reproduction ladder-back chairs in the dining room, which I bought as kits from a very reputable mail-order catalogue yea on some decades ago. These chairs were designed and supplied to be finished with woven rush seats – that kind of rush made from brown paper, woven in diminishing squares to finish the seats, then varnished to finish. And I wove the rushing seats, and varnished them … but what with one thing and another, the cats just viewed them as handy scratching posts and tore them to shreds. I must refinish the darned things … again … but am just exasperated, contemplating ordering the necessary coils of rushing and reweaving the seats of five chairs for the third, or maybe the fourth time. A few weeks ago I had an inspiration – why not do the seats in cowhide, for a rustic Western look? The more I thought about it, the better I liked the idea, although tanned cowhides looked to be darned expensive, and the brown and white spotted hides would look kind of kitschy … but one of the other vendors last weekend had a booth full of cowhide rugs, runners and hangings – either pieced together, or straight as they came from the cow. Among them was a plain creamy-tan hide … and the vendor and I struck a deal for it. Business was slow at the market, the plain cream hides are not as popular as the more obviously spotted and dappled ones, and he was just tickled to death at the thought that I would be doing something so outrageously creative with it, and explained to me the best way to do the seats, with staples and ornamental nail-heads over a plywood base and a bit of foam rubber. The hide is enormous – the cow it came from must have been as big as a mastodon. There’ll be plenty of hide to do seats for all five chairs and a good bit left over. So – that will be my particular project over the New Year, now that the market events are done.

It may also lead to having to repaint the dining area in a color better calculated to match the cowhide, but that will be another project entirely.

What we started with

My mother always did plates of Christmas cookies as presents for neighbors; she had this down to a science the last couple of years. She would bake up a storm, about a dozen different kinds of cookies, and the last couple of years they were stashed as soon as they cooled in the freezer, until the day when Mom would assemble the plates, and whoever was handy would go around and deliver them. I think the only year that Mom skipped lately was in 2003, the year that the house burned to the ground in the Paradise Mountain fire. The twenty pounds of butter Mom had stashed in the freezer against the days of wholesale baking melted and and the butterfat grease burned for about a week after the rest of the fire was put out, or so Mom insisted later.

I did cookies myself for a good few years – little gift bags for fellow dorm residents, and a gargantuan box for the workplace – but eventually became rather bored of cookie-baking. Likely our neighbors were equally bored with it, because – well, everyone does cookies. I think that most of them have mercifully forgotten the gingerbread drop cookies from a good few years ago – those what were made from an uncharacteristically disastrous  Joy of Cooking recipe which looked (and likely tasted) like ginger-flavored dog turds. We may have been forgiven this disaster thanks to last year’s offering: another recipe for lemon-pecan-coconut bars, but still … one can only do cookies for so many years.

So, a couple of years ago, Blondie and I decided to change it up. We did home-made cheese and bread, herbal vinegars and oils – all kinds of good edible things, packaged in pretty tins from the Dollar Store, or in little paper bags with a gingham-checked napkin on top. This year, Blondie decided that we should do an assortment of home-made fudge. We got this notion from a lovely candy store in Fredericksburg which commits a regular assault on good taste by providing chocolate-coated dill pickles and jalapeno peppers, but also has an amazing variety of made-on-the-premises fudge. So it was my daughter’s brilliant Christmas notion to make fudge for this year’s seasonal affliction of the neighbors. Which we did, the first of this week, after researching a comprehensive collection of fudge recipes on-line, and laying out for white, milk, and semi-sweet cooking/confection chocolate and all the other ingredients at Sams’ Club or at the friendly neighborhood HEB.

Toasted pecan fudge, under contstruction

I swear, we did not skimp on the quality of ingredients; real butter, real cream, quality chocolate all the way. And so we spent two days stirring pans of butter-cream-sugar combinations over low heat, measuring out the additions on the kitchen scale, pouring them into every butter-greased pan in the house, taking up all the available space in the refrigerator (and some in the Coleman cooler, too) for slabs of fudge: straight chocolate drizzled with white chocolate, brown-sugar with pecans, two-colored and liqueur-flavored Brandy Alexander fudge, orange-white-chocolate crème flavored, white chocolate cocoanut and nut, dark chocolate peppermint topped with crushed peppermint-stick-candy, and dark chocolate Christmas-flavored with cranberries and nuts… yes, we gave that candy shop a run for their money, locally. We even doubled some recipes … an unnecessary precaution as it turned out, although it did use up just about every scrap of the ingredients purposeful-bought for this seasonal exercise. And the other thing – a good few packages of seasonal candy-papers; the tins and plates looked really good and almost professional-grade as we packed them. But we did have a lot, when all was said and done – enough to give a tin to practically every neighbor we have ever had several polite conversations with, and a good-sized platter of assorted fudges to the fire station on O’Connor, plus tins for the mailman and the guy driving the trash collection truck. (Mom always left the trashmen a six-pack with a bow and a Christmas card on it, sitting on top of the cans on the first collection day after Christmas.) For all of that, we still have a large Tupperware container of cut fudge, enough to package in another five or six tins. So far, it has proved enormously popular, and likely we will do it again – but not doubling any of the recipes.