Holiday Cooking Failures

On the weekend, I actually mustered enough spirit to do some Christmas cooking. There are some standards that must be made every year, but the problem is of course that there are two of us, so the standards are different. (The nice thing about standards is there are so many of them.)
My favourite is frying pan cookies, his favourite is fruit balls. The good thing about Christmas cooking is that for everything the ingredients are pretty much the same but the method is different. Ingredients for dark fruit cake, (or war cake as we call it in this house) frying pan cookies and fruit balls are all the same, only in different amounts which make the trip to the bulk barn easier. Sugar, fat, eggs, dates, nuts, coconut, candied cherries and candied fruit are all you need to make anything at Christmas.
War cake is pretty easy, and I posted about it two years ago here. This year, I forgot to cover the outside of my breakaway bunt pan with tin foil, so the cake got mushy on the bottom inch as it sat cooking in water to keep it moist. Moist, yeah I'll say. The fix for that is I have a slightly shorter bunt cake than usual because I cut off the bottom and threw it in the compost.
Frying Pan cookies are also easy, because they don't get baked, just cooked in the pan and rolled in coconut. Yum.
Fruit balls are trickier apparently. This year was my first attempt. He usually makes them, as they are his mother's recipe. They have always turned out for him in the past so I was not forewarned. On Monday, while he went to Digby to pick up his parents from the Saint John Ferry, I got to work to make fruit balls as a surprise for them all. You mix all the stuff together in a bowl, add eggs and sugar, and drop them on a cookie sheet and into the oven. Easy right? The sugar and eggs are supposed to keep the chopped fruit and nuts together and they turn into sticky chewy blobs. It didn't work. They looked fine until I tried to remove them from the cookie sheet, and they fell apart into crumbled sticky fruit and nuts, they wouldn't stay as balls at all. It was at this time they all arrived home to witness my complete failure. That's when his mum told me she couldn't get them to work either most times. She blamed the egg being too runny, I blamed the dates being too hard.
I thought I could salvage the failure by taking the crumbs and using it as topping for a holiday pear crisp. Good idea, but bad execution. I had some already sliced pears in the freezer that we harvested from our tree out back this fall. I threw them in a pan, threw the topping on top and popped it all in the oven. I think, it would have worked better if the pears weren't frozen. What we got was a very watery, mushy pear soup on the bottom with sticky chewy nuts and fruit on top. It tasted Ok once it was drained with a slotted spoon, but there were a lot of leftovers that went into the compost bin.