Nutty as a Fruitcake
Christmas time brings many things around my house - friends, family, laughter, and, of course, copious amounts of booze. At the annual holiday party my friends and I have every year, though, we had an uninvited guest.
Fruitcake.
The tradition of eating an unappealing foodstuff started off as a joke two years ago, when one of our friends, who is an excellent baker, made a tray of cupcakes and frosted one with mayonnaise, with the expectation that someone would drunkenly eat it. Someone did, and the results were about as hilariously awful as you’d assume they would be.
This year, the guy who ate the mayonnaise cupcake brought a fruitcake. I agreed to eat it because I wasn’t physically present during the mayonnaise cupcake incident.
The loaf of fruitcake was about 2” x 1.5” x 10”. When unwrapped, it smelled like the trash can of a donut shop. I took a bite, not knowing what to expect. Which, in retrospect, I’m kind of happy about, because if I had expected it to not be so bad, I would have punched myself for being so absolutely wrong.
This food, and I think I’m giving it too much credit by calling it that, is foul. While chewing, I detected hints of bread and an overwhelming amount of mixed nuts. My actual words were: ”It’s not the taste, it’s the texture. I’m pretty sure there multiple Scooby Doo fruit snacks in here.” The best description of taste is a combination of equal parts gin and Airheads.
Swallowing the first bite, I looked closer at the kaleidoscope of colors within the cake itself. Black, red, green, yellow, and beige were scattered through the loaf like the shrapnel from an explosion. I commented on the black spots, asking if perhaps the flavor repulsing me was, in fact, from deadly mold spores.
For reasons I don’t understand, I took a second bite. And then immediately spit it out, disgusted at myself and at the dreadful soul who invented this vile holiday dish.
This holiday season, if you plan on giving someone you love a fruitcake, don’t.
