Money can get tight around holiday time, so old community cookbooks from poorer areas can come to the rescue! If you can't put a lot of money into gifts, try Cook Book: Favorite Recipes from Our Best Cooks (Mabie Grade School Parent, Mabie, West Virginia, 1975), which offers up Pappy's Cheap Fruit Cake.
No expensive candied fruits necessary! Nobody really wants fruitcake anyway, so might as well just use the cheaper dried fruits and call it good. Pappy thinks that's a fine idea.
Alternatively, if you really don't like somebody, crush their spirit with a Choco-Moist Cake. From the title, they'll think they're getting a moist chocolate cake. And then, well...
They'll find out that it's a fruit cocktail cake. With a few chocolate bits and nuts sprinkled on top. (I was going to say "mixed in," but then I saw the instructions to "combine all ingredients, expect chocolate pieces and nuts." I'm still not sure what I'm supposed to expect of them, except that they prefer to be toppers rather than mix-ins and I better pay attention to their preferences.) In any case, yay. Barely any chocolate, but more than a pound of baked fruit cocktail.
It might cost a little bit more to spring for Stokely's finest fruit cocktail, chocolate chips, and nuts than for the currants and raisins in Pappy's Cheap Fruit Cake, but Choco-Moist Cake might save more money in the long run when the recipient decides that it might be better just never to swap gifts with you again.
I guess that my friends will be glad that I stick to my standard cookies and candies that I know they like (well, okay, I did make the pumpkin cookies from a book of cookrye http://abookofcookrye.blogspot.com/2022/11/pumpkin-cookies-or-tis-season-for.html) but someone else already vetted that recipe for me). Speaking of homemade gifts, I can really confuse your other readers when I mention that I have a pillow full of tats to spray.
ReplyDeleteI am not at all surprised that you would look to another blog for things that you might actually want to cook!
DeleteI'm guessing that you're planning on using spray starch on some lace that you made... ?
I use the icon of the 80s to starch my lace. Unscented aqua net. It's hard to find these days. Thankfully a local grocery store still carries it.
DeleteWow! I didn't think that even existed anymore.
DeleteI think the only reason it exists anymore is because of crafters. Hairspray can fix pastels and charcoal drawings, and it can starch things. Maybe some misguided souls still use it on their hair.
Delete