Are they PEA-cans or puh-CONS? In a special holiday bonus episode we continue our quest to restore fruitcake’s dignity as Lia tries a DeLuxe Fruitcake from world-famous Collin St. Bakery (booze bath not included). Anna & Lia show off their holiday sweaters, unravel the green mystery “fruit,” and marvel at some Texas-sized pecans.
Connect with us at @FoodDayPod on Instagram & Twitter, join our Facebook Group, and check out our webpage.
Are they PEA-cans or puh-CONS? In a special holiday bonus episode we continue our quest to restore fruitcake’s dignity as Lia tries a DeLuxe Fruitcake from world-famous Collin St. Bakery (booze bath not included). Anna & Lia show off their holiday sweaters, unravel the green mystery “fruit,” and marvel at some Texas-sized pecans.
Connect with us at @FoodDayPod on Instagram & Twitter, join our Facebook Group, and check out our webpage.
ANNA 00:02
Hi listeners, we've got a special surprise for you today, this is another mini-episode, bonus episode, a follow-up episode on fruitcake.
LIA 00:11
Oh yeah
ANNA 00:33
And to get in a spirit, Lia and I put on our holiday sweaters.
LIA 00:37
Yes!
ANNA 00:44
I'm gonna show you, Lia, the magic of this sweater.
LIA 00:45
Yeah, I wanna see yours.
ANNA 00:47
Okay, listeners, it's a fuzzy sweater that says, Kiss me at midnight with lips on it. Ready?
LIA 00:50
What! Anna's sweater lights up. So many colors. That is the coolest sweater.
ANNA 00:58
I'm shimmying. I can't help but shimmy when I turn the lights on.
LIA 01:02
Oh my gosh, I love that there's variations in the light blinking. You have like a light chasing, light blinking.
ANNA 01:08
Yeah, there's a cycle. There's all different patterns. It's very elaborate.
LIA 01:14
That is definitely the coolest holiday sweater I've seen.
ANNA 01:18
Thank you! Alright, I'm gonna turn it off, it's gonna give me a seizure. Alright, Lia, what do you got?
LIA 01:25
Alright, so here's my sweater, I might have to sit up a little bit in my closet... Okay, don't know if you can see this.
ANNA 01:35
Oh my God, it says, “Merry Princemas.” And it is Prince as Santa Clause in a motorcycle sleigh.
LIA 01:44
Yes. And it says, “Nothing compares to Yule.”
ANNA 01:52
Yes, a thousand times, yes. That is awesome.
LIA 01:56
This is my favorite holiday sweater. It's my only holiday sweater. I was the only one, I was like, You know what, if I'm gonna get a fun Christmas sweatshirt, it's gonna be this Prince one...
ANNA 02:10
Yeah, I'm not into the Ugly Christmas Sweater thing. I don't know why you choose to wear something ugly, that's weird to me, but this one...
LIA 02:18
No. Your sweater is adorable.
ANNA 02:20
Thank You.
LIA 02:21
And it lights up.
ANNA 02:22
It lights up people, I need the spectacle. So today, the reason why we're doing this is if you listened to our fruitcake episode, and if you haven't, please go back, listen to it. It is delightful. Lia mentions the Collin Street Bakery, which is world-famous for its fruitcake, and it's near you in Corsicana, Texas. But she'd never had a fruitcake from Collin Street Bakery, and so I said, have one and report back and people. She did. She's here with a Collin Street Bakery fruitcake. She's gonna eat it with us, I know it doesn't sound super exciting to listen to somebody eat, but she's gonna describe it to us, maybe it will solve the mystery of the green things we don't know. We don't know.
LIA 03:09
I'm very excited. So I got this Collin Street Bakery fruitcake, ordered it online, got it delivered, and... Okay, I got the regular Deluxe fruitcake which comes in this cute little tin. It's a beautiful little tin. I love that, well because this is Texas, of course, the main image right in the center of the tin is a cowboy lassoing something... Maybe the last fruitcake.
ANNA 03:42
A fruitcake? A runaway fruitcake?
LIA 03:43
I'm gonna show you this gorgeous fruitcake.
ANNA 03:48
Oooh. The f****** green things. Those are some big pecans. Those are some enormous pecans.
LIA 03:57
Well, something that's pretty cool about the Collin Street Bakery fruitcake is that they only use native Texas pecans, so...
ANNA 04:07
Oh, cool. Support the local pecan farmers.
LIA 04:14
They're huge. Okay, alright, well, I'm sniffing it. Smells pretty good. Reminds me of like a honey bun kind of scent. Which makes sense.
ANNA 04:23
Should we describe what it looks like?
LIA 04:26
Alright, So now you've got this beautiful circular fruitcake. The hole in the middle.
ANNA 04:33
It's got a hole in the middle, it's got a row all the way around the edge of three-inch-long pecans.
LIA 04:39
These are gigantic. And then you see the pieces of red and green fruits, fruit chonks, like towards the center of the fruitcake.
ANNA 04:51
Candied fruit chonks.
LIA 04:52
Candied fruit chonks. Now, there are supposed to be cherries in it, pineapples, and they also use papaya in this.
ANNA 05:04
So, is it green papaya on top?
LIA 05:08
I'm not quite sure. Oh, you know what the green things are now that I see it up close. They're green pineapples. It's like a pineapple chunk.
ANNA 05:14
What? What?
LIA 05:17
Yes.
ANNA 05:18
Oh my God, I can see it now. How, why do they make it green?
LIA 05:22
Well, see, I had read about green, the green cherries, which kind of freak me out. So some of these fruitcakes, they have round green things and then those are actually green cherries, and the way they get green as they take a regular cherry and they have to brine it in this solution. I think like calcium chloride and sulfur dioxide, and then they put it in with red food coloring. But Green pineapples. I'm sure these are totally safe.
ANNA 05:54
Okay, maybe by the time we've aired this, one of our brilliant listeners will have let us know the secret, but that does look like pineapple.
LIA 06:03
It looks like a pineapple chunk. It's just green. So here's an interesting tidbit about the pineapples and the papayas that Colin Street uses, they actually come from their own organic Costa Rican farm. So before Colin Street sold a portion of their farms to Dole, they actually owned and operated the largest organic pineapple growing production business in the world. Yeah.
ANNA 06:36
Alright, so are you gonna sample this then, are we gonna see what it looks like on the inside?
LIA 06:40
Mm-hmm. I did bring a plate and a fork and a knife, because I'm not an animal, and I'm gonna cut a slice of this off of here, now, if you don't know how to handle a fruitcake that comes to you whole and not pre-sliced, Collin Street Bakery has a tutorial on how to slice these circular fruitcakes.
ANNA 07:02
Oh, tell us.
LIA 07:04
So I'm not gonna do it here because of space limitations, but apparently, the best way to handle your fruitcake is to take a cutting board, and then when you open up the tin, you unwrap the fruitcake, you kinda put it face down on the cutting board take the tin off, and then you start making your even cuts of the fruitcake, and they suggest putting a piece of parchment in between each slice, so that way you got it ready, prepped for the party. It's there. It seems like a lot of work, but.
ANNA 07:36
It does seem like a lot of work.
LIA 07:38
And then while you leave the fruitcake on the cutting board sliced up, you take the tin and put it back over it, and then you flip the whole thing upside down, so all of the slices, nest very comfortably in the tin and are ready for picking up the cake.
ANNA 07:52
I would be impressed if I showed up and somebody had that at a party, but if I did that for a party, I'd make sure everyone knew that I did it and it didn't come that way.
LIA 08:02
Guys, I did the slicing...
ANNA 08:04
By the way, the parchment paper was all me.
LIA 08:08
It looks very fancy. But what I'm gonna do here is I'm just gonna take this knife and go into this tin of fruitcake. I should get a slice with the green bit in. Just to confirm what it is.
ANNA 08:21
Yes, a slice with the green bits. I wanna see what it looks like in the inside. Is the fruit evenly dispersed like Paul Hollywood demands?
LIA 08:32
I'm gonna show you what it looks like, so you can kinda see... Where it’s sort of, the pecans are spread, I think pretty evenly throughout.
ANNA 08:42
So there's pecans inside.
LIA 08:45
There are pecans in the cake.
ANNA 08:47
It looks like it has kind of like a carrot cake texture.
LIA 08:52
Yeah, and the fruit seems to be spread pretty evenly to... It does not look like it's just all resting on the bottom... Okay, now I take a bite. Hmm. This is really good.
ANNA 09:10
Yay!
LIA 09:12
Yeah. Okay, so I got the candied pineapple piece.
ANNA 09:16
Okay, can we confirm it has the taste of pineapple?
LIA 09:20
It has that bite to it the way you would with a pineapple chunk. Mm-hmm. Got a piece of the cherry in that bite too. I'm not a cherry fan, but this candy cherry tastes good to me.
ANNA 09:39
'Cause, it's been soaked in sugar.
LIA 09:42
Yeah, because it's been soaked in sugar.
ANNA 09:43
For months and months.
LIA 09:45
It's actually quite mild, so it's nice and sweet, it doesn't taste as heavy or super sticky, you know what I mean?
ANNA 09:55
It's not a plum pudding, it's not gonna make you faint?
LIA 09:57
Yeah, it's like a good honey flavor in it, and I read that they use honey from Clover flower, so I can kind of see that clover taste with pecans that are spread through the cake are really good, so you got kinda get that nice nutty flavor and the bite, a little bit of crunch, there's golden raisins in it. Do you know how I mentioned that I usually ate around the fruits in some of the other cakes? This one's really good, I can actually eat the fruit. The fruits don't taste like gummy worms, I feel like in other gas station fruitcakes, it's as if I'm just eating a bunch of gummy bears.
ANNA 10:40
I'm really glad that this tastes different than a gas station fruitcake. That would have been really sad conclusion to the story.
LIA 10:48
I am so pleasantly surprised by this fruitcake.
ANNA 10:54
That's great. Collin Street Bakery is not sponsoring this episode, by the way, but if they wanted to clear, we can now endorse. Call us.
LIA 11:04
Okay, I'm like a fruitcake convert now.
ANNA 11:07
Awesome
LIA 11:09
So I love this. You got the pecans, you have cherries, you've got the pineapple, that's green, but it tastes good.
ANNA 11:15
Mystery solved. At the end of the fruitcake episode, I challenged everybody to give fruitcake a new chance and possibly try making out your own. Fruitcake can be the new sourdough. So, Lia, I think I'm doubling down on the challenge.
LIA 11:34
You know, now that I know what it should taste like. I think I'm game. I can do this.
ANNA 11:43
You should just go, like take a shot of whiskey and dump it over your next piece, get a real authentic boozy aroma.
LIA 11:50
I should. I should make it. You can booze it up some more, you can infuse it, so Collin Street bakery doesn't wanna do the infusing for you as you might have different standards for your...
ANNA 12:07
Preferences. Boozy preferences.
LIA 12:10
They do have a guide for how to do it, they do put a little warning beware, some people might be a little heavy-handed with it, but yeah, I think I might go take a few pieces and infuse my own fruitcake.
ANNA 12:25
Awesome. Well, listeners, if you had a fruitcake, send us a picture, let us know what you thought of it if you made a fruitcake, especially congratulations. Share it with us. And thank you for listening. Yay!
LIA 12:41
Well, you know, I'm gonna finish this piece.
CREDITS 12:46
ANNA 12:47
This has been a special bonus episode of Every Day is a Food Day. Connect with us on social media @fooddaypod or visit yumday.co/podcast. Every Day is a Food Day is a production of Van Valin Productions and Yumday. It was created by Lia Ballentine and Anna Van Valin. This episode was edited by Emma Massey. See ya next time!