Houses and Fruitcake for Christmas

[catlinyemaker]

After pondering the border trees for a bit longer and not achieving any clear vision, I decided to set them aside and work on the border houses, where I did have a much better feel for what I wanted to see.  The sewing has been fast and furious, in part because the quilter should be done with my log cabin quilt sometime this coming week, and if I can finish this quilt I can take it along when I go to pick up the other and have all three quilts finished and off to the quilters in good time.

To that end, Sunday was supposed to be the day to finish the houses (the smallest ones still need roofs.)  But that can’t be done until the layout is finalized, so that I can figure out which roof goes on which house.  Instead of spending the day laying out blocks and deciding which would go where, I wound up doing laundry (which really needed to happen) and helping J with the annual fruitcake baking session (ditto.)

We like fruitcake, especially home-made fruitcake, which is dense spice cake with our favorite dried and candied fruits, not a brick of pressed candied fruit like too many nasty commercial versions.  Last year, J made fruitcake at his mother’s.  This year, we used the small meeting room in the RV park’s main building.  That’s one plus of private campgrounds; they often have meeting rooms and kitchens you can use when you need extra space (in our case, extra oven space.)

J ordered our dried and candied fruit from Edwards-Freeman in Conshohocken, and we got the big heavy box this past week.  Yesterday he mixed the dried fruit and measured it into plastic bags one recipe’s worth at a time, added the port to soak in overnight, chopped and mixed the candied fruit and dredged it in flour to prevent sticking, chopped the nuts, and portioned those out also.  This morning he loaded up the truck with ingredients and bowls and loaf pans and utensils and just about everything but the kitchen sink, drove over and decanted our kitchen into theirs, and we made four batches of fruitcake with slight recipe variations.

It’s a long slow bake and then a long slow cooling before the bourbon can be added and everything sealed up for storage, but by nightfall we had 32 small loaf pans of fruitcake, wrapped and labeled and stashed under the table in the rig.  We’ll keep some, send some off as gifts, and enjoy at least one loaf soon, since I accidentally tore the aluminum foil just as I was finishing sealing it up.  That one won’t hold until the holidays; we’ll have to eat it in a week or two lest it dry out.  Oh, noes.

Check out what other quilters are up to today on Judy Laquidara's Design Wall Monday.