To bake or not to bake,- this is the question

To one hand, festive season is often associated with baking at home different wonderful cakes&cookies; to the other hand, there are many people out there, who are indifferent to sweet stuff, or must follow the diet, or just prefer the aroma of newly baked gingerbread to their actual taste. Not even mentioning the enormous amount of people, who simply don't have time to stay in front of the stove for hours. In addition, many cookies are the best, where they are just from the oven; the next day they are still ok, but as time goes by, their charm somehow fades. 
So,- what to do, if you still want to experience this wonderful feeling of being a part of this magic world of sweet&spicy aromas; creating something unusual; feeling the warm waves, coming from the oven,- but without too much job and too much weight gain? 
Our advice would be,- try to make a fruitcake. It is lots of fun, - fun, which can be "distributed through the time",- both when it comes to production and consumption. Namely....
The process of production consists of four phases. 

1. Making or buying so called "mincemeat" (which has nothing to do with a real meat for at least last 150 years, and contains mostly candied fruits, citrus peel, currents, raisin and sometimes nuts). Everything is simple,- you just buy a beautiful mason jar, put their these candied and dried fruits and berries, and pour in some brandy. After that you just attend your businesses, while the fruits soak in the brandy, and the jar decorates your kitchen and "makes the spirits bright". 

2. In a couple of weeks,- or whenever you have free time,-  you just go online and find the most appealing fruitcake recipe; we have taken ours from the site of  well-known Delia Smith. The one, which we have chosen, consisted mostly of mixing  of several ingredients with our matured "mincemeat" and pouring the result into the cake form. Still very simple, isn't it?

3. The most exciting part was the baking itself, because none of us could believe, that  the classic fruit cake has to be in the oven for about 5 hours! So we were breathing in wonderful aromas, coming from the oven, and every hour trying to check the cake,- is it finally ready? Nope, not yet....But finally the cake was baked, and we let it "relax" over night under the clean tea-towel, and in the morning put it in the nice tin, lined with parchment paper.
  
4. After that it was just to "feed the cake" every now&then with some brandy,- to wit,- making the holes in the cake with clean toothpicks and dropping in the holes some brandy.

As you can see,- the entire process has been very entertaining and not too labour-intensive. We could choose ourselves, when we had time and desire to perform one of the steps. But the most important is, that not only the producing the cake could be spread in time, but even the consumption of it. Because this beautiful and tasty fruitcake was also very long-living*, and one could take a small slice with an intense Christmas flavor today, eat it with the tea, then wait for a week or two, - and take another bit. Lots of enjoyment,- and very little weight gain.  

*For those who don't know,- properly prepared fruit cakes can live for several months.