Fruitcake with flourish
A top pastry chef shares ways to remix the much-maligned holiday dessert
F RUITCAKES don’t necessarily have to be the curse of Christmas.
Take it from baker extraordinaire and Milk Bar CEO Christina Tosi, 36, whose famously sweet (and trademarked) Crack Pies and Compost Cookies are now in 12 stores across North America, from Carroll Gardens to Toronto.
“My family, as you can probably guess, was more into Christmas cookies, and not so much the fruitcake,”ke,” says Tosi from the bakery’ss WWilliamsburg classroom duringuri the launch of Milk Bar’sar’s cookieinspired fashion collacollaboration with the retailer MaMadewell earlier this month.h. “FFruitcakes have a bad rap. Butut I also feel like there’s a wayy to reinvent them.”
Her ideal iteration of a fruitcake e “would be like a fruitcake meets a ppanettone meets a German stollen stolle cake,” she says, suggesting gesti making a briochelike dough doug and rolling it up with a laylayer of nut butter, such as pistachio pist or cashew butter, instead stea of adding the nuts to the dough dou itself.
“AAnd I like to soak my fruit in, if it’s for kids, lemonade, or for adults, a little limoncello or grappa to plump it up,” she says. sa
But what about the inevitable ta brick of fruitcake that somehow so always lands beneath the Christmas tree this time of year? Tosi says there’s no need to throw away a thoughtful handmade gift — but there are a few ways to make it better.
One option: Use it for a Christmas-morning French toast by soaking slices in the usual egg-milk mixture and then grilling them.
“I would also try slicing them into little rectangles and drying them out in the [heated] oven and make a version of biscotti, maybe dipping it in chocolate,” she says. “No one’s mad about that.”
Although fruitcake probably won’t be among the goodies on the dinner table she shares with her restaurateur hubby, Will Guidara, she says there will likely be roasted chicken with black-truffle-and-brioche stuffing from the NoMad, one of Guidara’s restaurants.
“If you’re coming to dinner at our house, you know you’re gonna be well-fed,” she says with a laugh.
As for her baked-good empire’s holiday offerings, which currently include peppermintcandy-cane cookies and a mintchocolate cake, she says, “Maybe next year it’ll be fruitcake!”