So I’m blogging this recipe so I don’t forget all the changes I made to this recipe, because there were enough of them that it was significant, and yet the overall vibe of the result was the same, I think?
Jane Friedman had linked to the King Arthur “Orange-Cranberry Fruitcake” recipe in one of her publishing newsletters, saying it was basically a great fruitcake-like thing that wasn’t TOO fruitcakey. I decided to try making a variation when I saw we still had half a package of gourmet candied citron peel leftover from last Christmas’s panettone baking that really ought to get used up.
First, here’s the link to the original recipe: https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/recipes/orange-cranberry-nut-fruitcake-recipe
Here are the changes I made in the ingredients:
Ingredients
Fruit
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- 1/2 cup (57g) dried cranberries, or orange-flavored dried cranberries <–Trader Joe’s sells both of these, I used the regular which had been sitting around getting more and more dried out for about 2 months.
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- 1 cup (120g) King Arthur Fruitcake Fruit Blend or dried apricots, chopped <– I replaced these with about a cup of italian candied citron peel (less than half of a package came to about 1 loose cup)
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- 1/2 cup (113g) water, cranberry juice, or brandy <–I used good ol’ Christian Brothers brandy, which is our kitchen/cooking brandy.
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- 1 3/4 cups (283g) candied red cherries <–replaced with about 3/4 cup of dried cherries. “Candied red cherries” are probably the really divisive ingredient in fruitcake, don’t you think?
Cake
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- 8 tablespoons (113g) unsalted butter, at room temperature, at least 65°F
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- 1 cup (198g) granulated sugar
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- 1 teaspoon baking powder
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- 1/2 teaspoon table salt
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- 1/8 teaspoon orange oil, King Arthur Fiori di Sicilia, or 1/2 teaspoon King Arthur Pure Vanilla Extract (just go with Fior di Sicilia for that old-world hoiday baking vibe! It’s the stuff in panetonne and some other traditional treats.)
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- 2 large eggs, at room temperature
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- 1 3/4 cups (210g) King Arthur Unbleached All-Purpose Flour
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- 1/2 cup (113g) orange juice <— replaced with pineapple juice, because I had pineapple juice on hand
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- 1 cup (113g) pecans or walnuts, optional* <—- toasted beforehand, of course. They say to roast at 325 for 8-10 minutes, but I found I needed to up it to 350 for a couple of minutes. Usually I would just do one cup on the stovetop in a frying pan, but since I was toasting 2 cups, one for this recipe and one for banana bread, a sheet pan in the oven was more efficient.
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- 2/3 cup (133g) candied red cherries <– just ignored this and left it out! That would have been candied red cherries in the recipe TWICE and I prefer it with zero.
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- 1/3 cup (57g) King Arthur Orange Jammy Bits <– “Jammy bits” are some kind of blobby fruit puree you can buy from King Arthur, which I did not. I decided to replace this with 2-3 tablespoons of Dalmatian orange-fig jam that I got for Chanukah. My one note to myself on this is that the fig jam maybe needed to be better mixed into the dough/spread out than what I got, which was still in a few big blobs and led to some structural faults.
Soak
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- 2 tablespoons (28g) orange juice <– pineapple juice!
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- 2 tablespoons (25g) granulated sugar
Icing
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- 1/2 cup (57g) confectioners’ sugar <– I only had about a quarter to a third cup on hand and it was enough
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- milk, water, or orange juice, enough to make a thick but pourable icing <–a scant two tablespoons of pineapple juice did the trick
Preheat the oven to 325 and lightly grease a loaf pan. I used the silicone baking dish shaped like a rose (from Berghoff) and it made for nice ridges and crannies on top to hold the light drizzle of icing.
Put all the dried fruit listed in the fruit section above into the brandy, microwave it for about a minute and let it sit. The recipe called for a somewhat larger volume of fruit, but I found this seemed like the right amount, because any more and half of it wouldn’t have been able to soak in the brandy. As it was, after the initial nuking, I needed to mix it up and tamp it down to get it all in the liquid. Then I put it back in for another 30 seconds. Then I let it sit while I toasted the pecans and did the other prep.
On the cake dough itself, cream the butter and sugar in the KitchenAid stand mixer until it’s light-colored and fluffy. (I’m not sure mine ever got to what I’d call fully fluffy. The weather needs to be warmer for that.) Beat in the eggs one at a time, scraping the bowl, and then incorporate/beat in the flour and pineapple juice in three alternating batches. Once that was uniform, I folded in the soaked fruit and added the spoonfuls of fig jam.
As I mention above, next time I will probably mix the fig jam (or whatever jam, marmalade would be good, too!) in better. This would also be a great time for some fresh-grated lemon or orange zest and/or some fresh grated nutmeg. Fresh-grated whole nutmeg is like a completely different spice from the pre-ground stuff!
It took the whole 90 minutes to bake in the one big pan. Let it sit 10 minutes before unmolding onto a cooling rack. The recipe calls for nuking the soaking liquid and sugar for 45 seconds to dissolve the sugar, and then brushing it onto the still-hot cake until it’s all soaked in. The result didn’t feel wet to me at all, it just soaks in nicely and feels like a moist cake as a result.
Once it was cool, I wrapped it up overnight, and didn’t ice it until the next day, right before the party.
corwin complained that some pieces were not structural, and I would blame the blobs of fig and also maybe some of the large cherries for that. The one change I might try for next time is chopping the larger dried fruits into smaller pieces, as well as the pecans, which would make it more sliceable.
Overall, this cake really satisfied my holiday craving for a citrusy dried-fruit baked good, and I think it was probably a lot better with the citron peel than the candied cherries. If you wanted to spice it with nutmeg-cinnamon-etc I think that would be delicious, too, but it wasn’t really necessary. (Maybe try the soak with spiced rum instead of brandy? That sounds like an experiment worth trying, too.)
My impression is that this is a very forgiving recipe and that there’s a pretty wide variation in the amount of fruit you can use and how it’s flavored in the end. A++++ Will bake again.
UPDATE: Adding a link to the thread of photos on Bluesky since the embeds seem to not be working on crossposts: https://bsky.app/profile/ceciliatan.bsky.social/post/3lel4udzp6x2j
(Before it was iced…)
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