25 Days of Christmas Cookies: Day 9 Ma Ma's Fruitcake Cookies

I know some of you turned your nose up at the word fruitcake.  Fruitcake has gotten a bad rap lately.  I will admit there are bad fruitcakes out there but there are some good ones too. This recipe is very special to me.  Growing up my grandmother use to make these fruitcake cookies for Christmas. And they were/are good.  Mine are a little different from hers but they are similar.  These might start becoming a holiday regular.

My cookies look different to MaMa's.  I bought the precut candied fruit which was in very small pieces.  It also had some citrus included.  My grandmother would hand chop green and red cherries.  So the pieces were larger.

Oh and this recipe uses buttermilk too.  I don't know about you but it isn't something I keep in the fridge.

Start with 1 cup shortening or butter.  I used butter flavored shortening.  If you are using butter soften it first.

2 eggs

2 cups brown sugar

1/2 cup buttermilk.  Mix well.

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon baking soda

3 1/2 cups plain flour.  Mix well.

1 1/2 cups chopped pecans.  You can rough chop them or like I did and put them in the food processor.  The pieces will be smaller.

This is my candied fruit.  See the pieces are really small.

2 cups of the fruit. You can also put in 2 cups of dates.  My grandmother did not like dates so she did not put them in her cookies, so I didn't either.

Mix that well.  Chill for at least one hour.

Scoop them onto a parchment lined cookies sheet.

The directions say to place a cherry on top of the cookies. Yes Hallmark Christmas movies are the perfect thing to watch while baking cookies.

Now some of you might remember the discussion of cherries on pear salad.  I don't usually cut my cherries but I did for these cookies.  And believe it or not I didn't put cherries on all of them.

So just place the piece on a cookie.

Here you can see I did about half and half on the cherries.  You could use green ones too. Place in a preheated 350 oven. Now I got this recipe from my mother.  I am going to tell on her a little bit here and she doesn't know this yet.  She didn't tell me how long to bake the cookies.  So I had to play a little guess and seek.  I started at 5 minutes and worked up. It ended up being about 9 minutes.  So check them at about 9 minutes and see if they need to brown a little more.

Fresh from the oven.

MaMa's Fruitcake Cookies Recipe

1 cup shortening or butter(softened)
2 cups brown sugar
2 eggs
1/2 cup buttermilk
3 1/2 cups plain flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cups pecans
2 cups candied cherries chopped
2 cups dates chopped
Chill at least one hour.  Scoop out the cookies onto a parchment lined cookie sheet.  Top with cherry.
Bake about 9 minutes in a 350 preheated oven.