Are You Nutty or Do you bake Fruitcake?

In the late 1980's I was the homemaker and my wife the bread earner. My wife taught at a private nursery school.They needed a fundraising idea and I so Nutty volunteered to make Christmas Fruitcakes.  I never liked any I tasted with the exception of the Trappists. The cake inside any never pleased me! But I then remembered in my tasty taste budded memory a honey cake my mother used to make with black tea brew essence in it that I loved! So the culinary wheels were turning in my head.My mother gave me her recipe and I went about like a mad hatter mixing the batter in my brain with dried fruits soaked in orange liqueur and grain flour etc.,etc. The first loaf was sooooo good! We were off to the races! Then the hairy logistics crawled in.Pans to sell them in? When to put the fruit in? How to keep them fresh? How to Christmas wrap them? They froze great so into our big freezer they went.They sold and raised funds.We barely broke even(excepting how much fruit and walnuts we ate and cake!) But relatives ate it for Thanksgiving and Christmas and my "rep" increased since the baby of the family always needs increase!😃. What have you baked for Christmas?

I haven't baked fruit cake yet, but a few of my aunts and grandparents make their own fruitcakes and share them with us. I really love the fruit cakes they make, because they are stuffed to the gills with candied fruits and nuts. They had the bare minimum amount of cake batter to hold them together! They were practically all fruits and nuts, which made them just delicious!

During the Christmas holidays, the tradition that my family and relatives have is to get to together and make perogies. We would lay out the dough, flatten it out, cut it into squares, and one of us would drop the mashed potatoes onto the squares. Then, we would all fold the perogies, as we chat, watch television, and generally goof off. After all the perogies all folded, we'd bake them in dishes in the oven, fry them on a pan, cook them in a crock pot, or some combination of all three. Then, we'd eat them with melted butter mixed with green onions. Yum yum yum!

The pirogi making sounds great Dave! Never made any yet, no stove at moment or kitchen.I have had some really good ones at a Ukrainian fair down in the East Village years ago!     Another Christmas bake in our temp. Convent kitchen was Rugeluch. We had a recipe book from Junior's which is a Brooklyn diner famous for their cream cheese cheesecakes. But did they ever want you to fail following a fake recipe! We had a ton of problems with their ingredient measures and procedures.Like it never said to refrigerate the dough! We eventually made it good but what a struggle! I will give a simple easy recipe here.
Watch "Joan Nathan Makes Rugelach" on YouTube
 https://youtu.be/MAaxKxN1hE8