Making Fruitcakes with Monks

Meditative monks at an Ozark monastery meticulously decorate 30,000 fruitcakes a year.

Melodic voices in unison fill every crevice of the chapel at the quaint Assumption Abbey, a Catholic monastery near Ava. The monks who live full-time at the abbey seem to know their Mass routine by heart. Priests and monks alternate chanting prayers, and the sounds reverberate off vibrantly colored stained glass windows. This is followed by a moment of complete silence at the end of Mass. The monks wear waterfalls of neutral-colored drapery, some with crosses hanging from their necks.

This is what we expect of monks.

What isn’t expected is their other undertaking: fruitcake making.

A Recipe for Survival

Day to day, Assumption Abbey functions as a Catholic monastery, complete with seven prayers a day—starting at 3:30 am and ending at 7:45 pm—Bible readings, Bible study, Mass, and meditation. But at 7 am every day, except on Sundays and religious holidays, the monks ditch their robes for aprons and baseball caps to make fruitcakes.

From February to December, the monks make over 30,000 fruitcakes—about 126 per day. Most of the fruitcakes are sold during the holiday season.

The monastery, which started in the 1950s, is considered contemplative rather than missionary focused, meaning it does not focus on community outreach, and the monks must earn their own money to live. Before making fruitcakes, the monastery produced cement blocks, but it couldn’t compete with a nearby ready-mix plant that sold them cheaper, 95-year-old Father Cyprian Harrison explains. A Trappist monastery in Kentucky, Abbey of Gethsemani, had been making fruitcakes for many years, and it urged Assumption Abbey to get into the same business, Father Harrison says.

The monks started searching for a fruitcake recipe. In 1987, Louise Salmon, the wife of an Episcopal priest in St. Louis, told them she knew a retired French pastry chef, Jean-Pierre Augé, who had worked for the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and that the chef might be able to give them a fruitcake recipe. The chef gave the monastery five recipe options. They narrowed them down to their favorite and worked on perfecting their process of baking, storing, and selling the cakes. “Little by little, we have learned how to make a good fruitcake,” Father Harrison says.

Assumption Abbey was a Trappist monastery until 2019, when it became Cistercian, a change made because of the abbey’s dwindling population. Both the Trappist and Cistercian orders follow the Holy Rule of St. Benedict, a set of standards for monastic life that emphasizes peace, prayer, work, sacrifice, humility, frugality, and obedience. The Trappists are typically more rigid in comparison to the Cistercians, focusing on solitude rather than communal life with each other and others. In 2015, because fewer people were becoming monks, the monastery invited a few Vietnamese monks from a monastery in Vietnam, who were of the Cistercian order, to join them. After this, their Vietnamese community grew.

“This way we have a hope for the future,” Father Harrison says. “We can continue as a monastery.”

Cooking in the Abbey’s Kitchen

When I walk into the abbey’s kitchen, the room is so filled with the scent of sugary, uncooked fruitcake batter that I feel like I could eat the air. Noticing my surprise and sharp intake of breath, Michael Hampton, who manages the commercial side of the abbey’s bakery and was showing me around, responds with a chuckle, “I can’t even smell it anymore, but everyone tells me it is amazing.”

As my nose adjusts to the sweetness, I take in my surroundings: a kitchen mixer almost as tall as me slinging batter with every spin, with whirring and whipping noises, a monk hunching over a workstation pouring thick batter into circular baking tins that are clinking together, and another monk on a tall step stool stirring fruitcake batter in a metal basin large enough that I could bathe in it. It was a stark contrast to the peaceful Mass I’d attended earlier.

Each day, baking starts after Mass. Brother Lawrence Phung (monks’ first names change after joining the monastery) mixes pineapple, cherries, lemon peel, orange peel, walnuts, three types of raisins, and burgundy wine into the fruitcake batter. After the batter is ready, the monks fill the scarlet paper-lined fruitcake tins with the thick mixture and put them in the abbey’s industrial-sized oven to cook. Then they move the cakes to a warehouse to sit for a day. Once the ingredients have melded, they decorate and wrap the cakes. Then they store them in the warehouse for about two months to age before selling them.

Father Basil Nguyen expertly injects the cakes that have rested for a day with a syringe filled with Puerto Rican rum—every cake gets one ounce of rum, which helps them stay moist and preserved and adds flavor. Father Nguyen was so meticulous it looked like he was performing surgery. As he worked, he talked about his life. He moved to the monastery more than a decade ago because his superior in Vietnam told him to aid Assumption Abbey. He sometimes misses his family, but every few years the monks can go home for a couple of weeks to visit. We both laugh when he comments on why the monks sell fruitcakes: “We have to make money to eat to live.”

After Father Nguyen injects the cakes with rum, he gently glazes them with corn syrup from a baster. Then the monks place two neon-green and two crimson cherries and four pecans on top of each cake. All the cherries have been cut in half by hand. The cherries can come precut, but Father Nguyen says they often arrive smashed or misshapen—not up to their standards.

I ask Hampton if I can try my hand at decorating. He hands me a black shower cap, a black apron, and gloves, and guides me to the decorating table.

I pick up a pecan and place it on top of a gooey cake. Midway through nestling the nut, Father Nguyen stops me. He explains that they never put broken or cracked pecans on the cake, pointing to my cracked one. He also instructs me on how to position the nuts—with all the “heads,” or pointed ends, facing inward toward the hole in the center of the cake. The nuts must also be placed in the shape of a cross, a detail I would have missed if not told. Father Nguyen explains that each corresponding colored cherry sits across from the other, between the pecans. If a cherry looks misshapen or isn’t cut well, they toss it in the discard pile.

As I work, I notice Father Nguyen silently but kindly fixing my work after me. He slightly repositions some of the fruit and nuts and replaces others. It baffles me how precise they are with fruitcake decorating—almost as if it were a science. With every cake, I become more detailed in my decorating, taking my time rather than rushing through the motions, inspecting each pecan and cherry with keen eyes.

Time flies by as I find solace in the decorating. Just as I find a perfect rhythm, the final cake for the day is finished. I smile as a monk places the last cake on a baking rack and think, That was surprisingly cathartic.

But before they wheel away the cart full of cakes, Father Nguyen hands me a laminated sheet full of Bible verses and hymns. Nodding, he motions for me to join in singing a hymn. Still wearing aprons, we sing, “Come Holy Spirit live in us / With God the Father and the Son / And grant us all the grace we need / To sanctify and make us one.” Then, together, we read three psalms, bowing our heads after each for a prayer. Seeing these people who make hundreds of fruitcakes a day take 15 minutes to pray over a completed batch was astonishing.

The Right Way to Wrap

The monks’ attention to detail in making fruitcake doesn’t end here, though. Now it is time to wrap the cakes.

At first glance, the wrapping process seems simple. A piece of plastic wrap is draped on the four upward-turned legs of a small wooden stand. Then, a monk places the cake upside down, folds it in plastic wrap, and sets it on a griddle to seal the plastic. But when I start this process, I realize how challenging it is. When I lay my piece of plastic on the stand, Brother Hilary Vo, wrapping across from me, watches closely. Before I can grab a cake, he says, “Make sure the plastic is completely flat.” Looking down, I notice my plastic is sagging a bit in the middle. After fixing it, I slowly lower my cake into the custom-made stand—a perfect snug fit.

Brother Vo catches my eye, then nods toward his cake.

Wordlessly, he shows me how to wrap the cake: Fold two diagonal corners toward the center, pull in the inner folds, and fold in the last two corners. It was similar to wrapping a Christmas present. He keeps an eye on the bottom of my cakes to make sure the plastic has fully sealed and is uniform.

While we work, Brother Vo, who wears thin blackrimmed glasses, tells me about his life. His family is from Vietnam but moved to Louisiana when he was young so he could pursue higher education. “But then I joined a monastery anyway,” he says, laughing. He has been a monk for nine years but moved to Assumption Abbey only a month ago. “It is not just a way of life. It is a vocation. It is how you respond to God’s calling,” he adds.

Finding Solace in the Silence

As I watch the cakes being wheeled to the warehouse, I realize how little the monks have spoken throughout my visit, aside from a few words in Vietnamese, and how little they have spoken with me overall. Making fruitcakes seems like a form of meditation for them, even when they are together. Father Joseph Ngo told me, “We like the contemplative life and prayer. We try to be in union with God. A monk is mono, which is one. So we are one with Jesus.” Making hundreds of fruitcakes day in and day out seems to help the monks stay focused on God.

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This article was originally printed in the November/December 2026 issue of Missouri Life.