"Personally, we hate even the smell of fruitcakes"

You're totally eating the wrong kind. Real fruitcake is absolutely DOUSED in alcohol to preserve the fruits through the winter so you don't get scurvy (prior to year-round produce availability!). You make them in a bundt pan so you can stick a shot glass full of rum in the middle and "feed" the fruitcake every month or so because it'll keep sucking up the rum. Then you store it in a cool, dark place so you can keep your alcohol-doused, scurvy-preventing fruit good for a year or so.

You have to eat seriously tiny pieces though -- it's waaaaaaay rich.

But mostly real fruitcakes smell like rum more than anything else.

I'm not one for rum, but fruitcakes do make it go down well.

Eyebrows has it right-- a homemade fruitcake is awesome. The more alcohol, the better. It's too late to make one for Xmas this year, but I highly recommend Alton Brown's recipe over at the Food Network site. He uses a variety of dried fruit reconsituted in alcohol, of course, instead of that nasty, unnatural candied stuff.

I, too, agree with the delightfully-named Eyebrows. Real fruitcake, made the traditional way with loads of rum, is utterly delicious.

Yeah, stop eating that prepackaged garbage. Homemade fruitcake is good.

Kewl! Fellow rumtopf-cake lovers! I thought I was the last of the breed left in America. And yes I make my own from scratch...I start the fruit marinating in sugar, rum, and Triple Sec on the 4th of July. And yes, it is *extremely* rich, but worth every calorie!

I think we'll all have to start some fruitcakes next October and send Meghann a truckload of them for Christmas!

Fruitcake is one of the nastiest things mankind has ever conjured up.