Fruitcake, Heavier Than You Imagined

This fruitcake is for the doctor -- the good doctor, the important doctor, the doctor worth keeping close and happy.

So he's getting fruitcake. Five pounds of Hyde family fruitcake. A dense round loaf crusted with pecans -- all hand-chopped.

The cake has been, for the last three months, aging in Daill Day Hyde's Vienna kitchen, wrapped in old, torn-up sheets, awaiting regular dousings of straight Bacardi rum.

Another drizzle is about to happen. The fruitcake needs it. Hyde can hear it.

"She listens to them," says Laine Hyde, Daill's older sister and fellow member of the fruitcake cult. "Literally."

"I do!" Daill agrees. The secret is squeezing the cakes, waiting for them to "make a sound. It goes," she whispers, quiet as cashmere, "shh sh."

Since early October, this 58-year-old who spends her days in a Fairfax law office and her autumns "nursing" fruitcakes has been doing just that with the 56 cakes she and Laine made this year -- these homemade confections of raisins, dates, figs, pecans, cherries, pineapple, lemon peel, orange peel, citron, rum, flour, eggs, brown sugar, butter, mace and orange juice.

Oh, the lowly fruitcake, more Christmas trick than treat, more doorstop than delectable. Who are these fruitcake lovers, these delusionists who see the world through maraschino-colored glasses?

(Maraschinos? they respond, with hauteur and outrage. Banish the thought! Nearly all of American's fruitcake fanatics -- and they are out there, dotted across the country, although their numbers are nowhere near as densely packed as the fruits in their finest cakes -- would get all stirred up at the comparison: No artificial flavors, no neon colors in these concoctions. The analogy crumbles like a Walgreens fruitcake undergoing the knife.)

The Hyde sisters say theirs is a partnership that keeps alive a family tradition, a top-secret recipe that goes back six generations. They still make their cakes in the old baby bathtub used by their mother and grandmother.

To the rest of the fruitcake-eschewing world, though, theirs seems more like a partnership in a Christmas crime.

But when you go to Trader Joe's and they're all out of pecan halves and filberts? That could just be the work of the fruitcake coven. We'll never know for sure.