I know this may seem like I’m pushing the season …but if you intend to make Christmas cakes for Christmas 2005, you had better get at it now. Like wine and pickles, they should never be served before their time.

I myself no longer make fruit cakes. There are several reasons for this. One is simply that I usually leave it too late. The second is that it costs quite a bit which on its own normally wouldn’t deter me, if it weren’t for reason number three: I know very few people who like, or at least admit to liking, fruit cake.

Oh, if we had to really confess, we’d probably admit that we could devour a marzipan-iced slice of decadence but, as with many old favourites such as french fries and Capt’n Crunch cereal, concern over our arteries and waist line has stripped us of our ability to really dig into anything of questionable caloric value.

I hadn’t even thought about Christmas cakes until someone asked me if I had a good recipe. I pulled out my Joy of Cooking, and as I opened it to “fruit cakes,” out fell a cash receipt from November 3, 1990, with my fruit cake ingredients circled. Along with this, I found my itemized list of actual cost per cake.

The following week, when I asked if she had made cakes, she told me that they were too expensive, and was looking into something else. Above all, I did remember that it was a hefty investment in raw materials, even 15 years ago, but at the time, as a mother of two young boys, I must have felt the need to start my own family tradition.

I then recalled going to one of my family’s homes months later—I have blocked out whose exactly—to find the cake I had sent still in the back of the fridge; unopened. Now how’s that for tradition!

The classic, dark fruit cake was once a staple for all British celebrations, including weddings. The significance of the fruit and nut richness of a brandy-soaked and well-aged chunk of marzipan-covered ambrosia cannot be lost even on the most insensitive. For a household to serve its guests the homemade dessert with all the most exotic and pricey ingredients, was a way of making the occasion very special. For the bride, serving the fruit cake at her wedding, and even sending pieces of it to those friends who could not attend, was also a symbol of wealth and happiness and promise of a rich, married life ahead. The heavy, fruit-laden cake was also very symbolic of another type of wealth: the promise of many children to come. I can recall going to weddings years ago where we were all sent home with a doily-wrapped slice of “wedding” cake, a.k.a. Christmas cake; you don’t see that tradition much any more here in Canada.

At Christmas, a compulsory platter of fruit cake always makes its appearance, only to be re-wrapped later by the hostess. The cakes, although probably as moist and rich as those once homemade, are more likely to come from the Lions’ Club or Marks and Spencer. The flavour may be there, but the personal significance is gone, and hence, I believe, the spark and glory.

Converting my 15-year old calculations, I figure I paid back then $2.50 per pound, but I had substituted the expensive pecans with walnuts, and had cut back on citron. I also forgot to include the cost of a mickey of brandy used to “marinate” the cake.

Using prices from Village Foods, noting that there is currently a sale on some of the ingredients needed for Christmas baking, I came up with about $4.20 per pound for the same recipe. I priced out a few other recipes with at least 50% by weight fruit content, and most costed out at about $4.50 per pound.

That sounds like quite a lot, but when you look at the price of a good quality store-bought cake, it won’t seem so bad. Pricing on a one-pound “deluxe” cake can be as much as $20.00!

Unfortunately, most recipes for fruit cake come in ginorma-sized versions. I recall using the kids’ old baby bathtub for mixing my double batch. Nigella Lawson’s cookbooks have a chart that gives you the option of making two, three, or four pound cakes. This information is also on the internet. It is important to note that mucking around with a fruit cake recipe to either reduce or increase it in size will lead to most certain disaster: it isn’t simply a matter of dividing by 2 or multiplying by 4.

Although I still have plenty of time to get a batch of cakes aging, and I am also at a time of my life when I seem to be searching for more tradition, I am not tempted.

I think I will stick to my knitted dishcloths and chutneys for hostess gifts. That’s not to imply that if anyone were to give me a (small) homemade Christmas cake, I couldn’t enjoy a touch of their tradition.