What begins with the promise of toasted grains and caramelized sugar spreading across a baking sheet soon collapses into an unpleasant fruity morass of rehydrating dried fruits - raisins, cranberries, apricots, dates - forgotten in weak rum and lemon juice until swollen and sodden. These pulpy masses dissolve murkily when stirred reluctantly into lumpy, sticky porridge whose very revolting nature renders it immediately abandoned. Time passes, and what remains is merely a cloying potpourri, less a deliberate composition than a reminder of culinary aspirations left to wither on a countertop. Alternately, a fruit cake that mysteriously drowned in a lake in 1984 but somehow appears on your holiday table every year like clockwork, bloated and putrid, its origins forever unknown and unspoken.
What begins with the promise of toasted grains and caramelized sugar spreading across a baking sheet soon collapses into an unpleasant fruity morass of rehydrating dried fruits - raisins, cranberries, apricots, dates - forgotten in weak rum and lemon juice until swollen and sodden. These pulpy masses dissolve murkily when stirred reluctantly into lumpy, sticky porridge whose very revolting nature renders it immediately abandoned. Time passes, and what remains is merely a cloying potpourri, less a deliberate composition than a reminder of culinary aspirations left to wither on a countertop. Alternately, a fruit cake that mysteriously drowned in a lake in 1984 but somehow appears on your holiday table every year like clockwork, bloated and putrid, its origins forever unknown and unspoken.