Fruitcake recipe a crowd-pleaser for 50 years

When her future husband took her to meet his Lithuanian grandmother, Kay Dixon got to sample the “magical” fruitcake for the first time.

It was sweet, dark, moist and speckled with raisins, prunes and nuts.

Fifty years later, it remains one of her husband’s favorite treats.

At Christmas, Dixon makes Nana’s Fruitcake in loaf pans to give to friends and family, but it’s especially for her husband. It offers him a slice of his childhood, a connection to his grandmother, a taste of his roots and her homeland.

Not only that, Dixon said, “it’s easy, and” – despite the negative connotation often associated with fruitcake – “it’s always a hit.”

Nana’s Fruitcake is more cake than fruit. And, contrary to the oft-repeated joke, it most definitely couldn’t be used as a doorstop. More moist than dense, it lacks the rum- or bourbon-drenched bits of sticky, candied fruits that seem to come in bright, nearly unnatural colors and often help give fruitcake its bad rap.

“The worst Christmas gift is fruitcake,” the late comedian Johnny Carson once cracked on “The Tonight Show,” continuing with the punchline. “There is only one fruitcake in the entire world, and people keep sending it to each other, year after year.”

On the contrary, Nana’s Fruitcake, a favorite Dixon dessert, gets gobbled up at family parties and holidays. It’s sweet but not cloyingly so and pairs perfectly with coffee or hot cider.

Nana – Alena Kudorowski – made the cake for church events as well as her Lithuanian friends and family, like her grandson.

As a boy, Kevin Dixon had hawked newspapers on Sundays in front of the Catholic church in Nana’s Lithuanian neighborhood. Afterward, Nana “served him large slabs of this cake with tall glasses of milk,” his wife said.

Nana came to America as a young girl. “She was put on a boat and sent here to some relatives,” Kay Dixon said.

Nana also married at a young age. Her husband was another Lithuanian immigrant, John Dixon, whose name had been changed when he arrived in America in the early 1900s. The oldest of their four children, also named John, was Kevin Dixon’s dad. Kevin Dixon, 74, grew up in Massachusetts, the oldest of seven in a Lithuanian-Irish Catholic family.

Kay Dixon, 73, comes from a Presbyterian family in Pennsylvania. She met her future husband in Colombia while both were serving in the Peace Corps.

“In 1962, when I went, it was still an experiment,” Kay Dixon said of her Peace Corps experience. She had applied for the newfangled program because “I didn’t know what I wanted to do. My family was not pleased but I did it anyhow.”

Dixon joined the Peace Corps at 21, upon graduating from college. She was sent to Barrio Antioquia in the city of Medellin, one of the largest red light districts in South America, and worked in a neighborhood health center.

Kevin Dixon helped her with a project, but they didn’t start dating until returning to America, marrying in 1966.

When they visited Nana in her walk-up apartment in Little Lithuania in South Norwood, Massachusetts, “I would sit there and smile, but I couldn’t understand a thing she was saying,” Kay Dixon said.

That first time they met, she asked Nana for her fruitcake recipe, but couldn’t understand the response, which was delivered in rapid-fire Lithuanian.

“It was hopeless,” she wrote in her submission to The Spokesman-Review’s “In the Kitchen with …” feature. “I had not a clue what she was saying, other than understanding something about applesauce and not tomato soup.”

This was the mid-1960s, when tomato soup was promoted – particularly by Campbell’s – as a way to keep cakes moist. But that method wasn’t for Nana. That much was clear. Because of the language barrier, however, the rest of the recipe remained a mystery.

During the next several years, Dixon tried to re-create her husband’s beloved fruitcake, experimenting with all kinds of variations. “Kevin would say, ‘That’s not it. That’s not it,’ and sure enough it wasn’t,” she said.

On a visit about 10 years later, Nana handed over a cigar box filled with old letters and scraps of paper. She sometimes needed help understanding her bills, and the job usually fell to her oldest son. Now she was trusting her grandson.

On the back of an old envelop, he found several items and measurements but no title. Kay Dixon recognized it immediately. It was the recipe that had been eluding her.

“She didn’t have any instructions but she had the ingredients so I tried it and figured it out,” said Dixon, who – within days of that discovery – made several test batches and began the start of a new era of the family tradition.

It was one of the last times they saw Nana.

She died after the Dixon family moved to Saudi Arabia, packing up their three young daughters and moving overseas in 1976 for Kevin Dixon’s work managing recreational services for American workers. A fourth daughter was born there the next year.

After five years in Saudi Arabia, the family settled on Cape Cod. Kevin Dixon remained in Saudi Arabia for five more years, returning home to the cape every three months to visit.

Kay Dixon worked as an instructional designer for software applications and recently wrote a book about her Peace Corps experience called “Wanderlust Satisfied.”

The couple, now retired, moved to Spokane five years ago next month to be near their oldest daughter and four grandchildren.

Kay Dixon makes Nana’s Fruitcake when they request it. She’s the Nana now. But the treat still brings out the boy in her husband.

“I normally have it for dessert,” she said. “But he’ll have it for breakfast.”

Nana’s Fruitcake

From Kay Dixon of Spokane

2 eggs

2 cups applesauce

1 cup cooking oil

1 cup brown sugar

3 cups flour

2 teaspoons baking soda

1 cup chopped nuts

1 cup raisins

1 cup chopped prunes

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Grease and flour a 10-inch tube pan or a Bundt-type cake pan.

Mix eggs, applesauce and cooking oil in large mixing bowl. Add brown sugar and mix again.

Add the flour 1 cup at a time, along with baking soda, mixing well after each addition. Add nuts, raisins and prunes. Mix again.

Pour into baking pan. Bake at 400 degrees for 50 to 60 minutes. Cake is done when toothpick inserted comes out clean. (Be careful, this cake is easy to overbake and then it becomes dry.)

Let cool on the counter for 20 minutes or so, then invert and remove from cake pan.