I've never actually had fruitcake, so I can't really knock it. I can tell you it looks gross, but that's about it. But I hear lots of people dislike it intensely, especially when received as a gift. This one might not irritate your friends and family any less, but at the very least it should get points for creativity. It comes with its own envelope, so you can mail it right to the lucky recipient. I actually might send one to my grandma... she loves quirky stuff like this.
Link via Archie McPhee
They -do- offer a lot of opportunity for silliness, though, and that inflatable fruitcake is a great example =) Another bit of fruitcake humor that always makes me grin comes from this cartoon ("Ed, Edd n Eddy") where one of the characters once says something about how his family "parades" their "ancestral fruitcake" around every Christmas ... I keep trying to get that tradition established in my own family but nobody ever seems to go for it, alas!
Good fruitcake is sweet, and very rummy. My mother and grandmother used to make the absolute best, but they had to start it in September to have it ready by Christmas.
The ultra-processed bricks they sell in supermarkets are pretty lame, but good fruitcake is plenty tasty.
We buy my dad one every year from the monks (yeah, real monks) at The Abbey of the Genessee in Western NY (plug: www.geneseeabbey.org/bread-store2.html). Awful yummy good.
The chairman of the food pantry I volunteer for does an incredible fruitcake with huge chunks of pecans and fresh fruit and orange slice candy in it. You don't so much cut slices of it as spoon gobs of it onto your plate, because it's soaked with orange juice. I drool just remembering it! He does it without alcohol, but I bet a splash of Cointreau would elevate it to penultimate perfection.
--TwoDragons