I have just ordered $150.00 worth of nuts, glace cherries, raisins, currents and candied pineapple. Yes, I admit it – I am making fruitcakes. That’s fruitcake with an s. I plan on producing about seventy pounds of fruitcakes to hand out as gifts to family,\u00a0 friends and total strangers. I thought I was the only one doing this until I went to Voltaire’s, our local bookstore in Key West and one of the owners told me to read a short story by Truman Capote called “A Christmas Memory”<\/p>\n
http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/A_Christmas_Memory<\/p>\n
This absolutely confirmed my decision to carry on making these things.\u00a0 I make the best fruitcake I have ever tasted and I love fruitcake. I’m happy, not offended by the naysayers, the bad jokes about using them as doorstoppers and other nonsense and don’t care what some people think because I know the truth. We fruitcake lovers are everywhere, some in hiding some not. Every Christmas I hand out these cakes and look for the telltale expression the tightening of lips, the blank stare of the fruitcake hater and I say – O if you don’t like fruitcake give it to someone who does – most families have one in their midst.\u00a0 I come from a family with a long fruitcake tradition. I think what I like most about the recipe is that is is arduous, complicated and has a high failure rate – this is the true lure of the fruitcake. it’s like growing watermelon in the north – foolish but when it works – O man does it taste good! My brother and I used to have watermelon wars – Andrew got me into it saying – “You’ll like growing it, it’s a tense fruit.” I knew what he meant by that and that’s the way I feel about most things I do. Who else would bother to write short stories – another thankless task that I enjoy – something else that Truman Capote & I have in common.\u00a0 Anyhow, the stuff should arrive mid-week. Can’t wait<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I have just ordered $150.00 worth of nuts, glace cherries, raisins, currents and candied pineapple. Yes, I admit it – I am making fruitcakes. That’s…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":4033,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,14,19,23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-120","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction","category-fruitcake","category-key-west","category-making-things"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/argyle.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/argyle.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/argyle.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/argyle.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/argyle.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=120"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/argyle.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/argyle.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/argyle.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/argyle.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/argyle.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}