Is that fruitcake I smell on your breath?! No…just the new fruitcake sauce.

Good fruitcake is hand prepped, gently baked for hours then doused with generous quantities of fancy liqueurs. The flavors of the particular liqueurs infuse every morsel over the months of cool storage ahead so you can savor the flavor! It sounds perfect but can be improved on if you find a piece of fruitcake still in storage at the back of your fridge.

At Old Cavendish Fruitcake, we developed our fruitcake sauce recipe when we had to bring a locavore dessert (locavore means local or home-grown) to an impromptu party. Naturally we had fruitcake on the top shelf of our very tall fridge!

We also had local vermont-made butter and not-so-local sugar (shhh, don’t tell). Looking in the cupboard we also found a bottle of Sapling, a maple liqueur. Made in Saxton’s River, Vermont, only 20 miles from us, it is delicious. Not too sweet and leaves a lingering reminder of the Vermont spring time ritual of sipping maple sap slowly converting to syrup in the sugar house.

We simmered the sauce, added some more fruit and took the cake, warm sauce and remaining Sapling liqueur (!) to the party. It was all so well received! Lets say there were zero leftovers. And no hangovers.

When you tuck that last piece of fruitcake away in the fridge, leave a little Sapling left in the bottom of the bottle so you can make a really fine fruitcake ever finer and whip out a dessert with just a few minutes notice. Enjoy!

Here’s the Fruitcake Sauce Recipe

You’ll need these ingredients:

* 1/4 cup brown sugar 
* 1/2 cup water 
* 2 Tbsp butter 
* 3/8 cup Sapling Vermont Maple Liqueur 
* 1/4 cup minced apricots

Simple Directions:

1. Simmer sugar, water and butter together in a small sauce pan until thick. 
2. Remove from heat and add Sapling Vermont Maple Liqueur and apricots. 
3. Spoon over sliced fruitcake for an elegant dessert.

That’s it! Enjoy, your fruitcake and fruitcake sauce.