SOMETHING ABOUT FRUITCAKE

I planned really well to bake a cake for Christmas. The long preparation started actually two months earlier after the good outcome of my first attempt of baking a fruitcake.  I was overwhelmed about its result albeit with small comments from friends to reduce the sweet and consider including milk for a creamy consistency.  Although I actually did not put sugar on it but the natural sweet of dried fruits and juice make the sweetness, and I know fruitcake is not made smooth but in my desire to gratify my friends, I added evaporated milk and reduced sweet tastes.

And so I planned to have another fruitcake that is better to surpass the first one.  And with the addition of red and green ingredients on it, it will be Christmas Cake that is timely to do on the holiday season.  And this prompted me to really plan what nuts to mix and fruits to consist of, when to start the first part of preparation, and little by little bought the ingredients needed.   I even soaked the dried fruits nights before the baking proper.  This time, the colors of cherries will make the highlights of my fruitcake, aside from the added dates, pistachio and cashew nuts which I didn’t have on my first fruitcake.

But sometimes even we have prepared for a long time ahead, there are things happen to make you obstructed and lost.  Even if you prepared, it will not go along to what we want, things simply do not fall in our hands.  On the very day which is on the night before Christmas as I planned, I was stressed of rushing home because of the last minutes jobs to finish, looked for a lost thing that was not really lost but just overlooked because of rush, system glitch of apps that I needed to do first so that I can start my baking process until the last minute I finally decided to stop the preparation to do the thing that I became compromised on that moment.

So I decided to do the cake on the next day which is Christmas day.  With my measuring cups and spoons, I had the whole times making the butter, combining all the ingredients, putting them in molder and baking them following the instruction.  When I checked and tested it, I am not satisfied of the outcome.  Although it can be good enough but I wanted moist fruitcake.  I still had time and I still have some remaining ingredients left although they are not as much as I had on the first, I had less amount of size of some of the ingredients, and the one that I didn’t want to put on the first bake – I put it here in this second bake.   I started making again, and when it was baked, I was surprise when tested it – I liked it.

There is something about this fruitcake and I have realization of what happened.  This fruitcake brought me an insight that sometimes no matter how you pursued and no matter how much you prepared, things will not happen if it's not meant to be.  Sometimes your attempts of perfection bring you to distasteful, and what you did without great expectation is what makes you really happy.  Of course this doesn’t invalidate the efforts we put in whatever we do.  We just do not everything.  There are just things we thought it supposed to be that we do not think what would happen if this is what happened.