Eating fruitcake is my best consumer experience while Apple customer service is lacking

The holidays are coming, bringing fun and stress already.

Best consumer experience: Eating fruitcake

I really like fruitcake. I used to make it, but no one in my family liked it.

Now, I often buy a small fruitcake to enjoy with guests.

When I lived in Sydney, Australia, for a couple of years, one job I had was teaching cooking to middle school students.

Among the demonstrations I had to do was make an English style fruitcake.

It was quite the learning experience. Lots of raisins, sultanas or golden raisins, currents, and brandy. Then bake it for a long time.

Next, roll out marzipan and cover the cake.

These English cakes often are covered with intricate decorations. I didn’t have to demonstrate decorations, thank goodness, so we ate ours without.

Since I made that fruitcake, I like to enjoy fruitcake at Christmastime.

If you like fruitcake and want to try your hand at making one, see allrecipes.com’s “Best Fruitcake Recipes” for its top 20 fruitcake offerings.

Worst consumer experience: Lacking customer service from Apple

I have a Panasonic video camera that records on a mini-DVD. Unfortunately, it isn’t compatible with my iMac. I bought a Pinnacle Dazzle, which imports the analog files the video camera produces so that they can be used in the Mac format.

Since Christmas is coming, I wanted to make a movie from the footage I took this summer when my daughter and her family visited from Madrid.

I usually take a half-hour mini-DVD to a video store and have them make copies. However, this summer I made a mistake and put footage on two disks instead of one. So I thought I’d edit the video myself.

After I imported the video, I noticed that the video and audio didn’t match up.

I tried to call Apple Saturday night, but their customer service shuts down at 11 p.m. ET.

I called Sunday and paid $19. After talking with a customer service representative for about 20 minutes, he said the problem was with the Pinnacle Dazzle not iMovie. He told me to talk to Pinnacle. He said there wasn’t any way an adjustment could be made in iMovie to solve the problem.

I asked to speak to his supervisor. The supervisor linked to my computer and after about half an hour said I could detach the audio from the video and move it so it would sync with the video.

I hope I can figure it out. I have dozens of mini-DVDs and want to import them into my computer and make movies about my family and grandchildren.

I made the short movie above from footage I’d imported earlier to see if it was in sync.

Copyright 2012, Rita R. Robison, Consumer Specialist