Back a few years longer than I care to remember, I decided to save money on Christmas gifts. I went to a local outlet store and bought several different glass kitchen items. I also had the bright idea to fill them with Christmas goodies, wrap in saran wrap and add a pretty bow.

This was where the recipe for fruitcake came into the picture. One of my older co-workers gave me a recipe. I was too young and naive to be suspicious when the list of ingredients includes 14 cups of flour and almost everything else was listed by the pound. One other item on the ingredient list was a bottle of Manischewitz’s Concord Grape Wine. The recipe called for about a cup of wine in the batter.
First of all as a young single girl my biggest bowl barely held the flour. This was my first clue that I was in trouble. I didn’t have anything in the house big enough to mix the batter in.

I put on my jacket and went to an older neighbors house and explained my situation. She took me into her kitchen and opened her cupboards and brought out a big mixing bowl, I didn’t think it was big enough for all the fruit, nuts and other stuff I had to mix. She suggested the biggest steel pot I had ever seen. She told me I am better with something too big then something to small. I thought that was sensible so I marched back home with her super pot.

I washed it and dried it and assemble all my ingredients in the order they were supposed to be mixed. I opened the wine and had a little taste of it. I came from a long line of Southern Baptist so drinking wine wasn’t something I was use too. I liked this wine.

Manischewitz’s Concord Grape Wine is a desert wine so it taste very sweet and very easy to drink. It was at this time I realized I had another problem. I was too short to reach into the pot and mix my fruitcake batter. I had another sip of wine and maybe the wine made me see things from another angle, but I got the idea of putting the pot in a chair to make mixing the batter easier. I was up to my elbows in fruitcake batter. Actually it worked pretty darn well. In no time at all I had my first oven full of fruitcakes baking.

While I was waiting for those cakes to bake, I proper up my feet and had another small glass of wine. I prepared the next pans and loaded then with batter. I repeated this until I had baked fruitcake in all the gift glassware I had bought. I also used every baking pan I owned and everything I owned that was oven proof. Next I started on empty coffee cans. I can only say I gave everyone a fruitcake and I even gave some to people I didn’t even know.

Now about the wine, I drank the whole bottle. Except for the partial cup that went in the fruitcake. I was home alone, my cakes were done I had an empty wine bottle and all I could do was giggle.

I was so happy when the cakes were done in more ways than one.

Merry Christmas!