The other fruitcake event that took place at our house each year was my mother making fruitcake cookies. OK, strange I know, but stick with me here – there is a pay-off. I always knew that she was prepping to make fruitcake cookies when the packages of bright, and I mean bright, green and red round fruit things appeared at the back of the our white with gold fleck counter-top. One year when I was around 10, I came into the kitchen and saw this cup of raisins sitting on the counter top. Well, I did like raisins, and they seemed fair game just sitting there…no one watching… in goes my hand for as big a fistful as I could grab. The funny thing was they were wet, but no point in putting them back, plus they were dripping on the floor. Time to get rid of the evidence, down the hatch in big gulp. If you have ever made fruitcake or cooked with dried fruit, you are probably aware of the technique of soaking them, usually in some alcoholic spirit, to soften them. Remember the part about a big handful? OK, now think bourbon. My mouth was on fire, plus I was panicking about getting caught for eating all the raisins. Of course, it was about that time that my mother came in to find me stuck with a mouthful of bourbon soaked raisins and wet hands dripping on the floor. Lucky for me she seemed to find quite a bit of humor in the whole scene and helped me with a paper towel to get cleaned up.

Back to Alton Brown… A week or so ago I was watching Good Eats on the Food Network, and Alton was doing a show on fruitcake. No candied fruit here, he was talking dried blueberries, cherries, apricots and currents. This sounded really good, so after the memories of my Mother’s cookies came to mind, I had the bright idea of converting Alton Brown’s recipe to make fruitcake cookies. Nice, I could pay homage to my mother and update her recipe all at the same time, especially nice since I have not seen a copy of her recipe in many years.

Here is my recipe for fruitcake cookies. Please let me know what you think about these if you make them.