Week 46: No-Bake Fruitcake

A few weeks ago I was reading 38 Clever Christmas Food Hacks That Will Make Your Life So Much Easier over at BuzzFeed. The post contains a lot of great ideas. I particularly liked #27: The five-ingredient no-bake fruitcake, which linked over to the recipe at Mr. Food. Many fruitcake recipes I looked at involved soaking candied fruits in liquor for days, months even! Others yielded large cakes containing lots of expensive ingredients. I couldn’t be bothered, but I did want to try some form of a fruitcake so a 5-ingriedent no-bake version seemed right up my ally.

Mr. Food warns the cake is VERY rich, which makes sense considering it contains 2 whole cans of sweetened condensed milk. And as I’ve mentioned in the past, I am powerless over the stuff. I could drink it out of the can and often risk my health by licking the leftovers off the sharp edged tops. Having a full recipe of this stuff just didn’t seem like a responsible option. So I made a smaller recipe inspired by Mr. Food’s based on what I had on hand.

Here’s my mise en place.

Those are cinnamon graham cracker crumbs I ground up in my food processor. The assembly was quite simple. I dumped all the ingredients into a bowl and mixed.

As you might imagine, the mixture is VERY thick and tacky. I distributed the mix in loaf pan lined with plastic wrap.

I covered the mixture and froze it overnight.

The resulting cake was hardly a “cake” and more like a hunk of cookie dough that resembled biscotti. That’s the best description I could come up with. The ground graham crackers give it a gritty quality. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying a nice hunk of cookie dough in front of the television in your bathrobe. I just don’t want anyone making this thinking it’s something it’s not.

After the cake had solidified overnight in the freezer, I stored it in the fridge so it would soften up a bit and be easier to slice into pieces. It’s pretty good. I have one slice left and I’m looking forward to eating it tonight.