Review: Holy Transfiguration Skete Poorrock Abbey Cakes

I had mentioned in a previous post that I had purchased the First Gift Box from the Holy Transfiguration Skete Abbey in Michigan. I hadn't looked closely at the description of the gift boxes, but they weren't kidding when they said gift box: the food is actually sent in a nice maple box with "fire-branded" covers. It's a pretty box, though the fire-branding comes out a bit muddy:

Here's a close up of the branded logo:

The cover slides off, revealing two cakes nestled in their individual little cabins:

The box I ordered contained two 24-ounce cakes, the Abbey Cake and the Walnut Ginger cake. Both are liberally doused in liquor; the walnut ginger cake, in brandy, while the Abbey cake is soaked in bourbon. So when you unwrap them, they both look like this:

The cakes are wrapped in two plastic bags to keep in the moist boozy goodness, and it really works--I've had both in my fridge for a couple weeks now and they still are very moist.

Regarding cost, the gift box was $58.00, and with shipping (from the Midwest to the Midwest) it cost me $70. These are not inexpensive cakes, but do keep in mind I got a nice maple box with them. In hindsight I think I should have ordered the Fruitcake sampler, a set of six one-pound cakes, to get the full Transfiguration cake experience, but that one cost $70--uff da! I'm planning for a wedding here!

On to ingredients. Here are the ingredients in the Walnut Ginger cake:

I guess the name of the actual abbey is Poorrock, although on the website they call themselves the Abbey of  Holy Transfiguration Skete. As you can see, pretty simple, wholesome ingredients, and brandy. Here's the Abbey cake ingredients:

While the ginger cake uses both Madeira and brandy, the Abbey cake focuses on my favorite liquor: bourbon.

Here's what the Abbey cake looks like unwrapped:

And finally, a shot of a slice of the Ginger Walnut cake. The proportion of cake to fruit in this cake was similar to that of the Abbey cake:

So, on to the taste. The walnut ginger had the texture and taste of a light tea bread. The ginger was not overbearing but instead gave it a nice bright flavor with a tiny bit of heat. The heat from the brandy cannot be overlooked; unlike a cake where the liquor is baked into the dough, both of these cakes, wrapped in liquor-moistened cheesecloth, have a pronounced alcohol edge to them. If you don't like the heat of alcohol on the tongue, don't get these cakes. Depending how you look at it, the alcohol was either a bit distracting from the taste of the cake, or it added one more element to the flavor.

The Abbey cake is darker due to the molasses in the dough, and had a taste more like a typical fruitcake. The moisture and flavor imparted from the bourbon-soaked cheesecloth made two ingredients that I'm not a huge fan of--walnuts, which I find to be sometimes bitter, and raisins, not my favorite dried fruit--taste quite good. The moisture gave the walnuts a better texture, and the raisins were plump and juicy. Being that there are only raisins in this cake, you don't get the different textures and tastes of a variety of fruit--I think the dried fruit cake they offer might be better for that--but overall this is a very tasty cake.

The hallmarks of these cakes are the honesty of their ingredients and the heavy-handed booziness of them. I'd be interested in trying the dried fruit one I just mentioned. It might--just might--give the Robert Lambert cake a run for its money, and at $40 for 5 pounds, it's a better value.

Review: Abbey of the Genesee Rum fruitcake

I purchased the two pound rum fruitcake from the Abbey of the Genesee. They also have a one pound cake (suitable for giving) as well as a larger round cake in a decorative tin. Didn't order it but based on the photo here it looks like a standard tin that I know I've seen with another fruitcake. The two-pound cake was $19.95 with shipping which ended up being $26.75 to the middle of the country.
The cake came in a pretty commercial-looking package:

Here's a close up of the ingredients, too:

Not great (do I mean the photo, or the ingredients? A little of both). Besides the standard ingredients, there were hydrogenated soybean and cottonseed oils, corn syrup, artificial flavors, agar, maltodextrin, locust bean gum, and some preservatives.

Here's the cake, denuded of its packaging:

There is a glaze on top, probably the apricot concentrate, which was neither distracting nor gooey, and gave it a nice finish.

As you may have seen from the ingredients, the nuts in this cake are just marked as "nuts." I think we've seen this before--I'm guessing this is a way to hedge which nuts you choose to include, based on world nut stock prices, etc. Helpful Brother Paul at monksbread.com confirmed with me that they are almonds and walnuts. I have to say I like an almond in a fruitcake. The Claxton fruitcakes contain them. Their sweetness is a nice counterpoint to the darker richness of the walnut, and they give a nice texture to the cake.

The fruits were your standard fruitcake mix (cherries, pineapple, fruit peel), with the addition of my personal favorite, the date. The booze was, as noted by the name, rum. There was a good amount - you tasted it throughout.

Although the guar gums and preservatives worried me, the flavor was actually very good. There was a good amount of cake to fruit, so you could really taste the cake. The cake itself did not seem gooey or uncooked, but rather had a nice quick bread density: rich and moist.

Yup, I've been eating it happily lo these many weeks since I originally posted about having purchased it. It's a good one!

So now onto the next. What shall it be? I'd love your suggestions in the comments!

Review: Hermitage Big Sur (New Camoldoli) Date Nut Cake

Oh, I'm so sad. I wanted so hard to like this cake. How could a date-nut cake be bad? But it was really not at all what I was expecting, and really didn't appeal.

Similar to the Hermitage Big Sur fruitcake, this cake comes in a very simple, eco-friendly box, quite appealing in these green times:

In the interest of full disclosure, I did not actually purchase this cake; it was generously donated. Cost, though, for the 3-pound cake is $36.00, plus shipping, so I would assume for me it would have been around $39 or so.

As the fruitcake was, this cake is large and sturdy. It's really not very pretty. I realized when reviewing these photos that I may have had the cake upside down, but I'm not sure how much better it would have looked right side up:

It's a very dark cake, and I have been remiss in not noting all of the ingredients, but as with the fruitcake, it is dipped in brandy and aged. The cake actually comes wrapped in plastic to seal in the moistness.

Since the loaf itself is not super attractive, here's a shot of a slice:

Quite a few walnuts in a dark batter, and I didn't notice large chunks of date. I guess I was mentally comparing this with the date-nut bread that I create, which has a lighter batter and lovely chunks of date and nut in it. This was different: the batter was not light, and there was an overall raisin flavor that I tasted with the fruitcake. I didn't get an overall impression of "datiness."

If given a choice, I would go with the Hermitage Big Sur fruitcake over this. This is going to the bottom of the Other list. Good ingredients, but an overall murky, non date-like flavor.

Review: Holy Spirit Monastery Fruitcake

I don't know who this Brother Basil is, but he makes a damn fine fruitcake.

One of my commenters suggested the fruitcake from the Holy Spirit Monastery in Conyers, Georgia. I bought the 2-pound round fruitcake in a tin for $27.95 and shipping, for a total price of $34.89. Here it is:



Notice the little message about Brother Basil and his kitchen. The tin arrives with a cardboard cover around it:



Unfortunately, I threw that cardboard cover away, and darn if it didn't have the list of ingredients on it. Really sorry about that, but I don't have the exact ingredients. According to their website, the fruit they use in it include "peaches, pineapple, raisins, dates and cherries". The nuts? Pecans. And the liquor includes peach brandy and sherry.

From what I remember from the discarded cardboard thingy, this cake did contain a couple not-so-lovely ingredients, such as high-fructose corn syrup and perhaps some preservatives. But the flavor didn't show it too much. They do something to the top of this fruitcake, however, that I really don't like. They put some kind of glaze on the top to make it very shiny and finished looking. That's why my photo is kind of dull; I had to take it without a flash, because with flash, all you would have seen was the glare of this shiny glaze. Anyway, what the glaze does is make the top very gooey and sticky, which I found unappealing. I managed to work my way around that, though, because I really liked the flavor of this fruitcake.

The consistency of the cake is very similar to my favorite--need I even mention which one that is anymore? There was enough cake in the mix so you could both see and taste it. The peach brandy and sherry gave it a lovely rich flavor, and even though it has raisins in it, which I tend to hate, they were offset by a really nice mixture of all your basic fruitcake food groups--cherries, pineapple, etc.

So now I have to rate it, or at least rank it, huh? Sigh. I wish I had a slice of each one of the monastery fruitcakes I've eaten in front of me right now. They are all so good, containing such good ingredients and having such good flavor, and now I'm having trouble even remembering what they tasted like.

OK, well, since it's my blog, I'm going to bump all of them down one and put this one in second place. It did taste really good.

It could also be that I haven't been getting to the grocery story much lately so I've been really hungry each time I cut into it, and so have been treating it more as a meal than a dessert. I mean, I don't want to denigrate it at all, and its number 2 position is earned: I liked the flavor of this cake. I just wonder how much hunger affects how much I enjoy a fruitcake. Perhaps a subject for another post. But really, who am I kidding? Nothing, not even hunger, could get me past the flavor of some of the nasty ones.

So there you go. Thanks, anonymous commenter--you've pointed me to a goody. Holy Spirit Monastery at number 2. Just don't get it if you don't like shiny goo on the top of your cake.

UPDATE: from customer service, here are the ingredients: Pecans, Pineapple, Cherries, Dates, Sherry Wine, Butter, Eggs, Enriched Wheat Flour, Raisins, Peach Brandy, Sugar, Honey, Invert Sugar, Corn Syrup, Almond Paste, Contains 1% or Less of Locust Bean Gum, Modified Corn Starch, Salt, Cinnamon, Nutmeg, Calcium Propionate[ A Preservative], Sulfur Dioxide, Food Coloring [Red 40, Blue 1, Yellow 5], Methylcellulose Gum.

Review: Hermitage Big Sur Fruitcake

I ordered a 3 pound (!) loaf from the Hermitage Big Sur Bakery, associated with the New Camaldoli Hermitage, for the total cost of $38.91 with shipping. The packaging is quite eco-friendly looking and no tins are available:

And here’s a look at the loaf itself—unassuming and hefty, though not very elegant:

I believe they do a final dip into brandy before they ship it to you—it was very moist when it arrived, but has been getting less so as I’ve had it in my fridge. Let me tell you, three pounds is a lot to get through—I’ve had a few pieces but the rest are in the freezer.

This is a very good fruitcake, but there’s something in it that’s not my favorite. I may have identified the two culprits—raisins and walnuts. I’m not a big fan of raisins—I don’t like the sweet, grapey flavor that they add to, well, frankly, any dish they’re put into. Walnuts are a fine nut for eating, but they are a little bitter and although I don’t mind them in a cookie, I prefer pecans in my fruitcake.

That being said, if you don’t mind either of these, you’ll like this fruitcake. Ingredients include the standard “fruit mix,” as defined in the ingredients as cherries, pineapple, and citrus peels. There are margarine and vegetable gums but nothing else too bad in the ingredients, and on the good side, there are two alcohols listed—wine and brandy.

There are dates in this cake, which I normally like, but I think they are overpowered by the raisin flavor. The fruit was in pretty large chunks, and there was (yay!) a pronounced alcohol flavor to the cake. As mentioned earlier, it was very moist when I first received it, which was nice.

Let’s talk about a flavor in this cake that I call “burnt.” I think what I might be tasting is carmelization of the raisins in the batter. I checked the last two posts where I mention this burnt element, and both cakes contain raisins. It’s not my favorite flavor in a fruitcake, but apparently it’s not so off-putting that I’ve stopped eating the cake.

So in conclusion, this is not the most elegant cake I’ve purchased—it doesn’t come in a tin, and it’s a loaf, not round, shape. But it’s a nice, large, moist loaf with a very good flavor--if you don’t mind raisins--and I’d say it’s a good value.

The next fruitcake's name is:

Thanks for the votes. I was leaning towards Holy Transfiguration Skete, and I still think I'll do that one, but I'm going to leave it to the end. They have a sampler that includes all six cakes that they create. Since four of their cakes are variations on fruitcake (traditional, dried fruit, sourdough, and Jamaican black, which a past commenter had brought to my attention), and the sampler contains one-pound versions of each, it seems like a good way to go. However, I don't feel like footing out the $80 to order it just yet. I think I'll leave that one to the bitter end, when we're more in the real fruitcake season--you know, the time of year when normal people order fruitcake. Six cakes at once--that might be the death of me.

In any case, I've decided on a write-in cake from commenter Brian: the fruitcake from Hermitage Big Sur bakery, from the Camaldolese Benedictine monks in Big Sur, California. First, it's a monastery fruitcake, always a favorite; second, it's only one fruitcake, not six; and third, I covet their location. Really, this is where they're located (from their website): "The Hermitage is located at Lucia, off the Pacific Coast Highway, (Highway 1) about 25 miles south of Big Sur village, 55 miles south of Monterey, and 85 miles north of San Luis Obispo." These monks picked a beautiful place to live.

It's on order. I was touched by how my order was completed; after the credit card information was finalized, you're taken to a page that shows the monks praying, with the message "The monks are prayerfully grateful for your order." Y'know, they're prayerful guys--why not reflect that prayerfulness in everything, even your e-commerce website?

Review: Our Lady of Guadalupe Monastery Fruitcake

There is nothing wrong with this fruitcake.

Our Lady of Guadalupe Trappist Abbey is in Lafayette, Oregon. I paid $33.17 to receive 2 one-pound fruitcakes--but that included about $10 in postage. This was back about a month, and now when I see their site, I don't even see the option to purchase the one pound fruitcake. Instead, they have a three pound loaf, which comes in a "handsome container," something I missed. They must change their offering seasonally--this being gladsome fruitcake season and all.

The one-pound fruitcakes are really adorable:

Maybe a little perspective is needed here. Here's the box next to the horrible Hickory Farms fruitcake tin:

They're really tiny but would be perfect for giving. I imagine this is an easier size for the abbey to handle during non-fruitcake season, as well.

So here's the cake itself:

You'll have to excuse the shrink wrap on there; I had already cut into the other one-pound cake and didn't want to have two going at once. Isn't that a cute little size?

The ingredients panel on the box has to be one of the most intimidating and truthful lists ever. I felt like I was reading the small print on a contract, what with the parentheses and brackets- inside-of-parentheses. Every single ingredient, whether it be in the cake, the preserved fruits, or the enriched flour, is there for all to see. This is a full-disclosure list of ingredients. That being said, I didn't find anything too horrible besides the expected chemicals in the preserved fruit, margarine instead of butter, and artificial butter flavor to make up for it. The list also included a delightful little ingredient named "Sheri-rumco Flavor." I'm guessing this gives a . . . hmmmm . . . sherry- or rum-like flavor? In any case, I could find no evidence of this ingredient or the manufacturer of it anywhere, on all of the Internets. Go ahead, Google it. I'll wait.

Didn't find anything, did you? All right, all right, maybe you did, but not much, eh? Well, anyway, it's in this cake, along with brandy, which taken altogether give a pretty good, boozy flavor - not overly so, not underly so, just about right.

This isn't a cake for people who don't like chunks. The batter in this fruitcake serves as binder for good-sized chunks of pineapple, cherries, raisins, walnuts, and pecans. With honey and the aforementioned alcohols and alcohol flavors, one ends up with a really nice, balanced, good-tasting monastery fruitcake. I've been contentedly munching my way through a pound of it for the past couple weeks, and enjoying every slice.

I really like the small one-pound boxes. Although these may not be available year-round, for those of you who want to give just a small amount of fruitcake as a gift or hostess present(unappreciated you will be if you choose to foist a full-size fruitcake on the unappreciative masses), you may want to consider these cute little numbers.

UPDATE: Commenter JP (thanks) has also waxed poetic about this fruitcake, and pointed out that one-pounders are still available (and individually, as well) at chefshop.com. Chefshop also has a story up about the monastery.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Yep, the monks have sold out of their fruitcakes. So as JP indicated, the best place to get them is chefshop.com.

AND ANOTHER: I think we bought 'em all, folks. Looks like chefshop.com is out as well.Check the comments for any updates.

Review: Assumption Abbey Fruitcake

The latest fruitcake is from Assumption Abbey, located in Ava, Missouri. This abbey website has won me over with one of the best photos ever, of monks injecting cakes with alcohol. (The rest of the site is very nice, as well—I encourage you to go to their main page for a peaceful mini-retreat). There’s an interesting back story on how the abbey came to the fruitcake business. You can read parts on their website, but there’s also an interesting article here.

The two-pound cake cost $28, shipping included, and arrives in a pretty basic, unassuming tin. Nothing fancy here--the fruitcake I received was simply wrapped in food service plastic wrap, no fancy shrink wrap.

This is a dark, boozy cake, as all abbey fruitcakes seem to be (bless the Roman Catholic Church, which is not alcohol-averse). Fruits in this cake include raisins, pineapples, cherries, currants, citron, as well as orange and lemon peels. Nuts include both walnuts and pecans.

As for the rest of the ingredients, they’re pretty basic. Butter, eggs, all good stuff. The worst ingredients are corn syrup--not even high fructose--and fake vanilla. However, as I continue to review fruitcakes, I’m starting to wonder about the preserved fruits used. They tend to be full of scary-sounding preservatives, like sodium benzoate, sulfur dioxide, and sorbic acid.

Really, now, in days of yore, when they were first making fruitcakes, how did they preserve their fruits? Certainly not with sodium benzoate—I’d hazard a guess that it was not available in days of yore. I’m inspired, now, to review a fruitcake that uses dried rather than preserved fruit. Although most dried fruits have sulfur in them, maybe dried-fruit fruitcakes will have a few less icky preservatives. A dried-fruit type of cake may also convince those people who are frightened of shiny green and red fruit to come to the dark side and become fruitcake-lovers. The texture of the cake should be different, too.

But I digress.

The alcohols in this cake are wine and rum. The rum (which is what the good monks are injecting in the photo) gives the cake that good, boozy flavor, a bit lighter than bourbon. Both the flavor and texture of this cake are similar to the other abbey fruitcakes.

To conclude, then: this is a delicious abbey fruitcake. It seems like you can’t go wrong with an abbey fruitcake. They consistently deliver a quality, well-made cake that tastes great.

The Assumption Abbey Bakery is celebrating their 20th anniversary in the fruitcake business, and that’s reason enough for me to promote this fruitcake to the top of the list of abbey fruitcakes for this holiday season. And why not? Although Gethsemani is still my favorite, heck, it’s my blog.

So let’s keep ‘em in business another 20, eh? Here’s hoping for great fruitcake until 2027 and onwards.

UPDATE: Looks like no one other than Williams-Sonoma sells Assumption Abbey fruitcake. For $11 more. Don't gild W-S's pockets and make your own lighter--shop direct!!

Coming soon . . . the latest fruitcake

. . . and, hands down, one of my favorite fruitcake-related photos on the web. Really, how can one resist buying a fruitcake from a group of monks that show, on their website, a picture of them literally injecting the fruitcakes with booze? It seems a bit naughty. Fruitcake doping.

Review to come soon. In the mean time, please, visit the other crazy cranks on the Web who have single-minded food blogs. Over to your right are links to other wonderfully monomaniacal blogs like this one.

Review: Monastery Fruit Cake, Holy Cross Abbey

The Trappists must compare fruitcake recipes. This fruitcake bears a very close resemblance to that of Gethsemani Farms.

The two pound, four-ounce fruitcake cost $27.95 with shipping. Its looks are average, and the tin is also attractive but nothing too fancy.

Ingredients include cherries, pineapple, walnuts, raisins, dates, pecans, papaya, orange and lemon peels for nuts and fruit, as well as honey, brandy and “Sherry Wine.” There are some partially hydrogenated oils towards the end of the list, as well as some standard preservatives.

The cake itself smells of fruit. It is dense, with the batter serving to bind the ingredients together. One can definitely taste the alcohol, or perhaps I should say the memory of alcohol—the brandy and sherry make the taste of this cake more complex. In contrast to the Gethsemani cake, which uses red wine and whiskey, the brandy and sherry make the cake a bit sweeter. I also notice a more pronounced caramel, almost burnt flavor—perhaps the cake was a bit overcooked.

My mother and sister, both aficionados of the Gethsemani fruitcake, tried this one as well. They felt that this cake looked “more homemade” than other fruitcakes and that the fruit in it is cut more finely than the Gethsemani cake. After multiple slices (ergh) we still found ourselves returning to the Gethsemani cake; the batter seemed a bit lighter and had better flavor. That being said, my Mom asked if I could get her a catalog for this abbey; she might send this instead of Gethsemani this Christmas for a change of pace. In conclusion, this cake is a nice find with a similar, complex flavor to the Gethsemani cake. I am intrigued by another product the Abbey offers called “Fraters.” They are slices of their fruitcake dipped in dark chocolate. I think it sounds delicious. My sister and Mom both think it sounds like stuffing a turkey with a chicken—just too much. I’ll have to try those when cooler weather sets in.
The Our Lady of Holy Cross Abbey also sells creamed honey and truffles, neither of which I've tried, so can't speak for them.

Review: Gethsemani Trappist Fruitcake

The cake against which all past and future fruitcakes will be judged. I’ll try to stay objective but I’m disclaiming right now that this is the one I’ve grown up with, the one I look forward to every holiday season, and the one that comes to mind when someone says "fruitcake." It’s also why I don’t have the anti-fruitcake bias—I’ve grown up on good fruitcake. I suppose out of full disclosure I should mention that my brother is a monk and has visited and stayed at this monastery. But he’s Benedictine, not Trappist, and our family had been eating this fruitcake many, many years before he became a monk, so that did not influence my opinion in any way.

The $28, 2.5 pound fruitcake isn’t as pretty as the Collin Street fruitcake; it’s darker and not quite as ornate. It’s got a really nice tin, though—those monks did a good job there. The ingredients are a delight to read, especially after the rather disappointing ingredients included in the Collin Street brand: just about everything on the list you could buy at the grocery store, including the very cute “oleomargarine”—my mother has old recipes calling for “oleo.” The worst things I could see in the ingredients are the ubiquitous food colorings in the fruit and the preservative sodium propionate at the end, but there are quite a few reassuring ingredients listed, like butter, “pure flavorings and spices,” and my favorite: Kentucky bourbon.

And now, the experience. The aroma is of fruit, bourbon, and caramel. The flavor is not overly sweet, and is a combination of vanilla, spices, bourbon, and fruit. As with Collin Street, the cake is dense and moist. There are some pretty large pieces of fruit and nuts (pecans and walnuts) in this cake, so depending on what you’re biting into, you might be tasting one or the other, or the cake itself. There is an overall taste of booze, either the bourbon that the cake is soaked in or the wine that I was surprised to find is part of the recipe. I wouldn’t call it overpowering, but it makes its presence known and adds to the depth of flavors. I’m pretty sure fruitcakes got started back in olden times when you went all out on special occasions and took all your high-end ingredients and combined them. This really tastes like that to me: a very rich experience.