Warm holiday memories baked into Christmas fruitcakes

Linda Peters, co-owner of Goodies Bake Shop in Winnipeg, pulls a fruitcake from a display on Dec. 19, 2022. Every year the shop makes between 300 and 400 fruitcakes the Christmas season, and every year the cakes sell out. (Source: Danton Unger/CTV News Winniepg)

Every year at Christmas time, without fail, fruitcake would be on the menu for Jennifer Cupples McLeod.

"It's a long-standing family tradition. We call them Christmas cakes," she told CTV News.

Around Thanksgiving, at their home in Winnipeg's St. James neighbourhood, her mother Pat would pull out the big mixing bowl and get to work on the two-day process – weighing, measuring, chopping and stirring. She would laugh as her daughter would scoop up a spoonful or two to give the cake an 'official taste test.'

The cakes would be topped off with almond paste and buttercream icing and decorated with ribbon and winter scene decorations.

"Everybody always wanted a little piece," she said. "Everybody asked for the recipe and she was never shy about sharing it, because she knew nobody could make it quite the same."

She still has one of her mom's fruitcakes tucked away in the freezer – it was the last batch her mom made before she passed away in 2019. As a tribute, Cupples McLeod said she shared her mom's fruitcake recipe at her funeral.

Fruitcake, in one form or another, has been around for centuries. Though the first recipe was far from the holiday treat we know today – it was more of a wartime ration.

The ancient Romans are widely credited as being the first to make fruitcakes, referred to as satura. Their recipe mixed stale bread, nuts, seeds and raisins together with a barley mash. It made for an easy-to-carry and hearty treat – almost like an ancient granola bar.

Diana Bizecki Robson, the curator of botany at the Manitoba Museum, said fruitcake as we know it today started to become popular back in the Middle Ages.

"People couldn't get access to fresh fruits and vegetables, like we do nowadays," she said.

As trade routes opened around the world, she said dried fruits and sugar started to become more common – which is when fruitcakes started to rise.

"People really found those foods to be special. They were a treat, and they were not the kind of things that ordinary people ate every day. So if you could get your hands on some of that, you were eating it during a special occasion."

As fruitcake's popularity grew, so did the traditions that go along with it. One such tradition, Bizecki Robson said, encouraged single wedding guests to take a piece of the fruitcake and put it under the pillow. It was said the cake would bring sweet dreams of their future lover.

So how did the fruitcake become a mainstay in the Christmas season specifically? Even the Smithsonian, according to its website, says that is a bit of a mystery.

Some of its closely related desserts have gotten a few Christmas carol shout-outs – give us some figgy pudding, marshmallows for toasting, or chestnuts roasting on an open fire. Fruitcake, however, seems to deal with a bit more… negativity.

The 1883 folk song 'Miss Fogarty's Christmas Cake' quips that hatchets and saws were needed to crack into the cake that could paralyze a jaw. The song warns Miss Fogarty's fruitcake could kill a man twice after eating a slice.

It was the brunt of a now-infamous joke from Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson in the 1960s when Carson is credited saying, “the worst Christmas gift is fruitcake… There is only one fruitcake in the entire world, and people keep sending it to each other, year after year."

Even kids' cartoon character SpongeBob Squarepants got in on the fun, calling the cake a 'Christmas time cliché.'

Goodies Bake Shop co-owner Linda Peters says she can understand the negative hype when it comes to some fruitcakes. But that's not a problem for the Winnipeg-based bakery.

Every year the shop makes between 300 and 400 fruitcakes for the Christmas season, and every year the cakes sell out.

"I've never had fruitcake left over after Christmas as long as I've been running Goodies Bake Shop, ever," Peters told CTV News. "Our fruitcake is very famous and it's very popular, and a lot goes into it."

She said Goodies Bake Shop has been using the same recipe for fruitcake for as long as she can remember, with the same baker making the fruitcakes for more than two decades. The process starts in October, marinating the ingredients in bourbon and letting them dry for at least two months.

"That is one of the secrets to making a really good fruitcake, you can't really speed up the process," she said.

For Cupples McLeod, she is cherishing the last piece of her mom's last fruitcake– nibbling away at it bite by bite, savouring each one.

Preserved with the raisins, walnuts, nutmeg and cloves are the memories Cupples McLeod shared with her mom. The countless hours they spent over that big mixing bowl getting ready for another Christmas with friends and family.

"It just makes me feel warm. You know, with all the memories, you can kind of feel the oven on."