Crunchy Fruit Baskets and Fruit Cocktail Cake
Posted by Lidian on May 14, 2008
First of all, tremendous thanks to Tarrant at Retro Food, for alerting us all to the fact that it was National Fruit Cocktail Day yesterday! I am not sure if we are celebrating this in Canada (which I plan to use as my excuse for not knowing this), but I would like to mark the occasion with a couple of recipes that pay cakey tribute to the wonder that is canned fruit cocktail. [I am a day late, I have just realized, and in fact today, the 14th, is National Buttermilk Biscuit Day - but no matter!]
The classic rendition is from The Hospitality Cookbook: Favorite Recipes From Ministers’ Wives (1960, reprinted 1969). And if Fruit Cocktail Cake is not hospitable, I just don’t know what is (I rephrased the end of the recipe, which was replete with remarks about how good this is the second day, etc.):
FRUIT COCKTAIL CAKE
1 egg - beat in mixing bowl
1 medium sized (#2) can of fruit cocktail - pour juice and all into bowl with egg
Add to the above:
! cup each flour and sugar
1/2 tsp soda
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
Stir together well. Pour into greased baking pan (or glass) about 8″ by 12″ size.
Mix together 1/2 cup brown sugar and 1/2 cup nuts; sprinkle over top of cake. (You can use more brown sugar and nuts). Bake at 325 degrees about 45 minutes. Good warm with ice cream.
Ida Bailey Allen is a little more daring and artistic in her Money-Saving Cook Book (1947). She says to whip up a 3 egg sponge cake (I reckon any sponge cake or plain cake will work here) and bake it in 2 layers. Then put the layers together with any kind of jam.
“Then with a kitchen fork prick down through the cake on top 10 times to make small holes. Pour in 3/4 cup pineapple juice or use equal parts orange juice and Tokay wine. Chill at least one hour. Then decorate the top with sections of canned pineapple and cherries; or instead, make small insertions and in each stick half a blanched almond nut meat cut in halves lengthwise. To serve, place on a good-sized platter and surround with slightly sweetened, well-chilled fresh fruit cocktail.”
I don’t know about that last bit. it sounds potentially rather soggy.
Slashfood has an article on National Fruit Cocktail Day, too, and apparently the big name here is Libby’s - how fortuitous that I had a Libby’s ad in the previous post! But I would like to point out that Del Monte is also a big, big name in the Fruit Cocktail World, witness the above ad - which suggests another exciting idea for dessert, Crunchy Fruit Baskets. Something bothers me about it, I am not sure what. The name, possibly, or the resemblance to birds’ nests, or the implication that the canned fruit is going to be the high point of the meal.
May 14, 2008 at 11:33 pm
oh my goodness! My grandmother use to buy fruit salads in a can like that - they were a treat when I was growing up.
May 15, 2008 at 12:10 am
Happy Fruit Salad Day, a day late but hey i didn’t
know. They used to have so much fun with food, before
there was TV & bloggin. I luv cripy coconut!
May 15, 2008 at 2:04 am
I have always found those jumbo shredded-wheat “biscuits” disturbing, probably because they were never part of the breakfast routine when I was growing up. They just seem so…unwieldy. As an ingredient in a recipe, they might be okay.
For a brief while, my mother made a “fruit salad” that used canned fruit cocktail, instant vanilla pudding mix, and (perhaps) coconut. It was pretty good, as long as you didn’t delude yourself that you were satisfying the fruit-n-vegetable part of the food pyramid.
May 15, 2008 at 3:04 am
I have some horro stories that revolve around fruit cocktail, a mean babysitter and me at 5. Suffice it to say. I can’t look at the green can with the red shield without gagging. And why only one cherry in the whole can?
May 19, 2008 at 7:58 am
There are some really weird fruit cocktail recipes out there. A friend of my use to make the fruit cocktail cake and she liked it. I made it once but I thought it was too sweet.