No joke: This fruitcake is delicious!

If I gave you this fruitcake for Christmas, you would not make jokes about it. You would not ask: What's this? A paperweight? Or: What's this? A doorstop?

Or: What's this? A new step for my step aerobics? Or: What's this? A new brick for my patio? You would not get on a plane and take it to the Great Fruitcake Toss, held the second Saturday of January each year in Manitou Springs, Colo., a charming town at the foot of Pikes Peak we had the pleasure of visiting last year. No, you would not launch this cake from a cannon!

You would nibble each slice with a cup of tea or pour of wine and try to figure out what all, exactly, is in there.

First off, it's called Lemon Extract Cake. My mother never called it fruitcake. She must have known that if she did no one would eat it.

No one ate it anyway. For years, only my sister Martha (or was it Mary?) ate it. I remember Mom packing one carefully in a shoe box each year and mailing it to one of them. She kept a loaf for herself and started making one each Christmas for Frank and Marcos, my friends in Philadelphia, who happily carried it home to enjoy on its own or topped with vanilla ice cream. Then Robert came along, and one of the cakes came his way. He loved it, too, and liked that he didn't have to share it. Then I tried it again. And, wonder of wonders, I discovered I liked it, too. The palate of a 50-year-old is different from the palate of a 15-year-old. As we grow older, our tastes change. We discover we like things we once dismissed. Yes, those sticky neon red and green cherries that go into fruitcake (and the lemon extract cake, too) are very strange. Their color is weird and baking doesn't do much to soften their texture. Maybe that's what people don't like about fruitcake.

That and the overwhelming taste of rum or bourbon or whatever alcohol is poured into and on fruitcake to keep it moist. Don't light a match near anyone cutting in to one of those.

 

The only alcohol in Lemon Extract Cake is lemon extract. Lots of it. Three bottles of it, if you use the standard supermarket variety. The lemon taste is noticeable, but not over the top. It won't make you pucker.

The recipe, which yields three large loaves, contains a pound of chopped pecans (toasted first). What's not to like about that? It calls for a pound of margarine, not butter. You probably could use butter, or a combination of shortenings, but out of respect for Mom and tradition, I make the recipe the way it's written down. That includes six eggs, half a pound of that funky fruit, plus dried pineapple and golden raisins to boot. The batter exists just to hold the fruit and nuts together, and the cake is dense and quite dry. I ate a piece while typing this post, and got not a single crumb on the keyboard.

It's good right now, but its taste seems to improve with age. Just to be sure, we've stashed a loaf in the freezer for a little Christmas in July. This recipe, found on Cooks.com, is close to ours, except that it's made with butter and baked in a tube pan. If you make it in loaf pans, reduce the cooking time by half or more.