Peace of Cake
Photo by Starboard & Port Creative.
You won't find Assumption Abbey unless you’re looking for it – and maybe not even then.
You might drive through Ava, Missouri, the closest town to the monastery, on your way to Arkansas on state Highway 5. The Douglas County town of just fewer than 3,000 is about an hour southeast of Springfield. Yet even here, you’re still a good 20 miles from the secluded abbey. From Ava, state Highway N winds through lush Ozark hills and forests. Radio reception is spotty and cell reception is nonexistent. Eventually, a gravel road angles through the trees up to a complex that looks not unlike a forgotten summer camp. It’s here that an order of Trappist monks make 30,000 traditional English-style fruitcakes a year.
At about 5:30am, five days a week and every other Saturday, Michael Hogue arrives at the abbey's bakery. He’s not a monk – he’s not even Catholic – but he’s been the head baker at Assumption for five years. He lives about a mile up the road, which is partly why he took the job.
“Father Cyprian showed up at my house one day, and said that the monks were getting old and they wanted somebody to help out,” Hogue says, referring to the monastery’s superior. “I showed up for work and I’m still here.” Hogue and bakery manager Michael Hampton were hired to help out the dwindling community.
Each morning, Hogue mixes the fruitcake batter by hand. In the center of the kitchen, there are big plastic bins with dried fruit and nuts. The candied and dried fruit – which includes pineapple, cherries, lemon and orange peels, black and golden raisins and currants – is soaked for two weeks in four gallons of Burgundy wine. Hogue combines the fruit mixture in a large metal container with flour, eggs, butter, sugar, brown sugar, walnuts, vanilla and cinnamon. He scoops batter into round cake pans lined with red paper, and baking assistant Father Basil makes sure batter is distributed evenly and that each one is perfect. He then places the pans onto baking trays and slides the trays into tall sheet-pan racks where they’ll stay until it’s time to bake.
“I dream about fruitcake,” Hogue chuckles.
The monastery was gifted an oven from a St. Louis supermarket in the late 1980s. It takes up almost an entire wall and features 20 trays that rotate upwards in a circular motion, almost like cars on a Ferris wheel. The team bakes 126 cakes in the oven daily.
Three or four additional brothers arrive a few hours after Hogue, dressed in civilian clothes (T-shirts, khakis, button-up shirts, fleece jackets), and begin decorating cakes baked the previous day. Each fruitcake gets eight squirts of rum – about an ounce total – from injector needles. They’re then brushed with a splash of hot corn syrup before the brothers add pecans, arranged in the shape of a cross. Red and green cherries are next, and the final touch is another glaze of syrup.
The fruitcakes are shipped all over the world, but of course, the bulk of orders come during the holiday months. Cakes have been sent to Australia, South Korea and Iran. This year marks the 30th anniversary of fruitcakes being baked at the abbey, a tradition that has, over the years, gained the attention of national and international media and become a holiday ritual of its own for thousands of families.