Buttermilk Pecan Fruitcake

Preheat oven to 400; grease and flour 4 loaf pans. Separate eggs. Mix
flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Add pears and pecans;
stir again. Set aside. In large bowl, cream butter and sugar. Add
egg yolks, one at a time, beating well after each addition. Add
vanilla and beat again. Alternately add dry ingredients and
buttermilk, blending well after each addition.

With clean dry beaters, beat egg whites until they stand in firm,
glossy, moist peaks. Fold 1/3 egg whites into batter to lighten it,
then fold in remaining whites. Fill each pan 2/3 of batter.

Reduce oven heat to 350. Bake 65 minutes, until tester inserted in
center of each cake comes out clean. Ten minutes before cakes are
done, rotate pans back to front to cakes on each rack brown evenly.
Let cakes cool five minutes on wire racks, then turn out and finish
cooling right side up on wire racks.

Before serving, decorate top of fruitcakes with whole nuts and mixed
candied fruit peel.

Sylvia’s notes: the nice thing about making your own fruitcakes is
you can load up on what you like and skip what you don’t. Pears in
fruitcake? I used candied cherries and candied citron instead, and
skipped the nuts. Since the last fruitcake I made was too sweet and
contained LESS sugar than this one, I reduced the 3 c sugar to 2. And
I didn’t have 4 loaf pans, but “4 loaves” worth of recipe settled
nicely into 1 bundt pan and 1 loaf pan. The bundt pan was overdone
after 40 minutes, the loaf pan was overdone after 70 minutes. I
think this recipe would be better as a conventional pound cake than
with fruit/nuts; the cake taste and fruit taste were both good but
didn’t complement each other.

MM by Sylvia Steiger, THE.STEIGERS on GEnie, 71511,2253 on CI$,
Internet sylvia.steiger@lunatic.com, moderator of GT Cookbook and
PlanoNet Lowfat & Luscious echoes