In which Seanan learns to make mai tais.

I love mai tais. I always get one when we go to a hibachi bar, because a dear friend who passed away from a heart condition taught me to drink them back in my tender years while at a hibachi bar.

I go through cocktail obsessions, which I then force feed (hah) to my cooking club. Last year I figured out how to make really, really, really solid margaritas of various forms (though I am apparently forbidden from making peach ones forever and ever, as they lead to drunken, half nude dancing. My neighbors must have felt VERY lucky indeed that night). Then I moved on to mudslides because my husband is a chick and he usually likes his booze to taste as much like a milkshake as possible (we are forever getting served the wrong drink when we go out). Then I made fruitcake, and if you believe that fruitcake is 1. yucky and 2. not an alcoholic, uh, food, then you have never had a proper home made fruitcake that gets lovingly soaked in a mix of Southern Comfort and bourbon for at least three weeks in my refrigerator before I will even CONSIDER serving it, which I will then top with hard sauce, which is hard because it's mostly rum.

Come to think of it, it's getting close to fruitcake season again.

Then it was bloody marys.

Lately it's whiskey sours, which hubby has come to enjoy.

God that makes me sound like such a boozer. I don't drink often. I just take my drinking VERY SERIOUSLY and it's a heck of a lot cheaper to learn to make my own than it is to drink them elsewhere.

I think I subscribe to your notion of fruitcakes.

I could never for the life of me figure out why most people profess to hate it. Parties at our family gatherings that involved fruitcake usually involve the fruitcake being set upon like it's the only nutritive substance the adults have seen in weeks. Then, in my late teens, I was exposed to my first commercial fruitcake. Ugh.

I also make plum pudding. Which ALSO tends to involve rum, though alas not quite as much.

I could never for the life of me figure out why most people profess to hate it.

As far as I can tell, fruitcakes are like banjos, or bagpipes. They have a terrible reputation, but in the hands of an expert, you'll want more.

I don't drink much, but when I do, it's The Good Stuff, like seriously aged singlemalts, aged zins & cabs...

I make stollen instead of fruitcake, but I have had some really good fruitcake, and it DOES need rum/rum sauce. I use dried, instead of glace fruits, though, as more people preferred those, they were less expensive, and didn't feel yucky as I kneaded the dough.

Mmm, stollen. At FilkContinental in Germany several of us take good tea (usually Yorkshire) and exchange it for stollen goods, thus proving that proper tea is theft *g*.

Meg Davis introduced me to Yorkshire tea, in return for my gift of every tea mentioned in her song, Teatime, from her Wonderland album.

Got the pun--it's oft made.

I can't see buying the stale stollen we find in stores here. Gayle's Bakery in Capitola makes one, but I prefer mine. I make a lot every Yuletide, instead of buying gifts.

I haven't had stollen since I lived overseas. Yum.

http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/free-range-fruitcake-recipe/index.html

Though honestly if you trust Random Reader in New Jersey not to poison you I'd be happy to send you one. I'm going to make like ten to send various relatives anyway.

Excellent. Consider it a Happy Campbell Award gift. I will contact you about an address to mail said fruitcake sometime between mid-October and mid-november, depending on when I next go to the Big Booze Store and then get around to baking the fruitcakes.