|
Fredericksburg resident Conrad Warlick gets prepped before whipping up an annual batch of fruitcakes with wife, Anne.
Reputation aside, fruitcake can be moist and tasty, the Warlicks say.
Every year, the Warlicks pull out the worn fruitcake recipe given to them in 1968 by Helen Shanklin, Anne's mother.
The Warlicks take great pleasure in baking 17 pounds of fruitcake for family and friends.
Conrad Warlick bathes the still-warm cakes in bourbon The day before baking their fruitcakes, Anne and Conrad Warlick mix fruit and nuts with a cup of sifted flour. |
BY EMILY BATTLE
When Conrad and Anne Warlick told me recently that they make 17 pounds of fruitcake every holiday season for friends and family, I thought, "Now, there's something you don't hear every day."
Fruitcake has become the ready-made punch line for holiday-cuisine-related jokes.
Even on the day the Warlicks whipped up this Christmas tradition, a "Dennis the Menace" comic in the paper had Dennis yelling, "Mrs. Johnson brought us another fruitcake! Are we gonna give this one to Ruff [the dog], too?"
The Warlicks will be the first to admit that there are some disastrously bad fruitcakes on the market, and that they are ruining the delicacy's reputation before many people ever get to taste a good one.
The perennial jokes about fruitcake tend to center on the industrial version of this baked good.
There's no question that some people just don't care for fruitcake. Just like some people (me) don't like butter beans, or some cringe at the thought of cilantro.
But if you turn up your nose at a machine-made cake and never try the homemade version, you miss out on a lot.
You don't just miss the moist texture and the refined blend of spices that home-cooked versions are more apt to deliver. You also miss out on a process that keeps alive a tradition and passes on a piece of food culture. This is what holiday baking is all about, right?
In their kitchen each year, the Warlicks bring out a well-worn, hand-written recipe that Anne got from her mother, Helen Shanklin, in Bluefield, W.Va.
Anne said she's not sure where her mother found the original recipe, but Shanklin made it nearly every year from the early 1960s until the late 1980s.
At that point, Anne and Conrad took over.
They mix a blackberry-wine-kissed batter with more than six pounds of dried fruit in a huge kettle that belonged to Shanklin.
They bake cakes for friends in Atlanta, Northern Virginia and around town. And they never foist them on family members who aren't fruitcake eaters.
On the contrary, the Warlicks have to carefully budget their fruitcake supply to make sure they can accommodate all the fans they have acquired in the years they've been making the recipe.
"We have a friend in Atlanta who says, 'We can't have Christmas without Helen Shanklin's fruitcake,'" Conrad Warlick said.
There is no comparison between the Warlicks' homemade fruitcake and the dry, crumbly bricks you find in grocery stores these days. I confirmed this with a side-by-side taste test in The Free Lance-Star newsroom.
The mixture of spices in the homemade batter gives the cakes a dark color and a lot more flavor than the store-bought version.
And there's another secret to the Warlicks' fruitcake that most store-bought versions don't have: When the cakes come out of the oven, while they're still warm, Conrad Warlick pours bourbon over them until they can't soak up any more.
Once cooled, the cakes are wrapped in bourbon-soaked linen napkins, slipped into plastic storage bags and carted to the basement, where they ripen for three weeks.
(So if you make this recipe today, wait until New Year's Day to enjoy your fruitcake if you want the flavors to fully develop.)
This, it appears, is the secret to moist fruitcake that doesn't crumble when you cut it. It also produces a fruitcake that can sit on a garage shelf for a year--with just a little help from the fridge during Virginia's humid summer days--and come out the next Christmas tasting just as good.
The bourbon-pouring alone might be enough to convince some skeptics to become avid fruitcake fans.
Emily Battle: 540/374-5413
Email: ebattle@freelancestar.com
