Fruitcake is a strangely retro seasonal dessert, and it’s also an old timey vaguely homophobic slur that isn’t always about being gay, just more about being crazy with the silent agreement that gayness is the cause, which is probably a good assessment of me anyway. I am not fond of fruitcake as a food, although I do kind of like it as an insult in the same way I like “oh mary!” or the Archie Bunker favorite “meathead”.

It is usually too hard and too chewy and Nyquil tasting, and one of the very few sweets I would systematically avoid, as I do most coffee flavored and liqueur based confections unless they contain prodigious amounts of chocolate, which is the food group to which I am wholly monogamous and if you know me, you know I will eat through what I don’t like to get to what I love, so devoted am I.

Fruitcake isn’t my love, but there is one version that I remember eating that I really liked, and it was a chocolate fruitcake, given in a big, splintery fire hazard of a basket to my grandmother in the late 70s from a dry sausage/cheese/maple syrup gifting company which had a log cabin branding motif. This ‘homespun’ company would later find great success in smoked hams and jerkied meats during the 3rd or 4th wave frenzy of the Atkins Diet, but their true talent was for carbs.

I really think I ate the thing in the mid 80s because the cake had been sealed into a can, rendering it edible for generations.  I must admit that I am sometimes overly excited about canned things, mostly because if ever I am in an enclosed underground space, any kind of basement or lower floor or bank vault or walk in safe, without windows or source of natural light, I briefly picture myself trapped there for years wherein I would have to rely on the canned goods secreted nearby. This is due to too much late night reading about the Fritzl case and also that later post-Desi Technicolor Lucille Ball show where she and that mean banker who seemed like Mr. Drysdale were trapped in the bank vault that had a spinning doorknob like a captian’s wheel and they had to eat raw pasta.

The cake portion of it was dense dutch chocolate with harmonies of cinnamon/anise underneath. It was packed with closely interconnected air bubbles, suggesting that the batter had been steamed or even boiled, or at the very least cooked at an extremely low heat like in an easy bake oven. Studded around the outer layer of the can shaped cake were the gelatinous ‘fruit’, of which fruit they were from is still unclear, these sticky, anonymously ‘tropical’ fruity chunks that would adhere themselves to molars like nothing else, pulling out expensive dental work when fillings were still silver and gold. Still, it was delicious in the way of things that never really go bad, like slurs of yore, creepy true crime, easy bake oven cookery, dark fantasies of captivity and good old Lucy B.

My wonderful friends made me a pie on my birthday, and not just any old pie, but my favorite pie, a humble pie no less, made from a box of chocolate pudding mix and Cool Whip, layered together in almost equal proportions and chilled into a store bought graham cracker shell.

It is the most beloved sweet of my childhood, having lived in close proximity to a Kentucky Fried Chicken. My favorite part of this oddly homespun hometown ‘n’ homegrown fast food chain’s offering wasn’t the chicken, as i didn’t love the peppery thick wet crust, made with floury mud and clay, packed around an overly large antibiotic plumped chicken breast like a grenade, too salty savory and breadlike, an american cold war chicken kiev. No, i didn’t care much for the dripping pickle and pimento mayonnaise coating desperately short ends of macaroni, although i wouldn’t kick it out of bed for eating crackers if you know what i mean. Not even the peristalsis stopping southern style biscuits, that would coat your teeth with the unpleasantly squeaky chemical effect of buttermilk as it filled your mouth with salt and dryness inspired my ardor.

I loved the desserts. The dessert I loved most there in the 70s was the plastic cup o’ chocolate parfait – rich inches of cold chocolate pudding, toothpaste white whipped cream (de facto Cool Whip) and crushed graham crackers lining the bottom like sandy gravel in an aquarium. as a child, i actually thought that someone over at kfc had a janitor friend at Nabisco, and that this friend would routinely sweep up the kill room at the main nabisco bakery and then turn around and cheaply sell the contents of his dustpan to make the base of this lowbrow garbagey treat.

Chocolate pudding, the most processed kind, not the artisanal kind that often circumnavigates a refrigerated case in better diners the world over, the kind that grows a skin, proteins in the milk coagulating and creating a protective border between you and the pudding, a sweet, self-excreted condom, that sticks to the roof of your mouth and can be pulled from your lips like a caul, the lacy fat which sometimes surrounds infants to cushion them from the blows of birth, but the kind that comes to you as a powder, like a dark, sugary cocaine, mixed with liquid and treated with temperature like crack. It looks fake and tastes fake and is fake – all preservatives and milk solids and extracts and something that controls your mind – and is delicious beyond compare. Foamy whipped cream which is essentially Cool Whip tops off this genius creation, its texture plumped up with air bubbles setting off the glossy egg glamour of the pudding and dulling the decadence. For some reason the graham cracker crust chastens the sinful dessert even further, the crunch like pop rocks but without the fruit flavor. as you can tell I have thought much about this concoction. It is truly one of my favorite dishes, trashy as it is. I can’t help it.

In the unlikely event of my execution, please get me this. If this is in my mouth, at least I’d go into the abyss with the taste of glory, which is just as fine as a blaze any day.

I even made my own version at home after school, almost unable to bear the hour it took to chill that motherfucker. I wanted it so bad and i wanted it fast and the longer i had to wait for it the more i would end up eating because it was like i was trying to sate not only my hunger but my desire. And so began my long love affair with chocolate, to whom I am monogamous, but the chocolate in this recipe is not quite the lure, as I can’t even really taste the cocoa in the dense bland background. It tastes more like eggs and it also tastes shiny, if light reflected could be perceived as a flavor. The texture is what I am after. It fills me, and I feel so empty all the time and this stuff, It just fills me and that is why I am writing this love letter to it right now.

I brought the birthday pie home, but not before texting my husband that it was coming home with me, as if I had found a stray animal to rescue. He was excited about the pie, but he must not have been that excited because he was asleep by the time I got home and so I ate that pie because yes, you snooze you lose, especially when it comes to this pie and hell – it’s my goddamned birthday and I can cry and eat a whole pie if I want to. Thanks to Ian and Sarah and Selene for making my birthday treat and making my birthday great and my wonderful husband for letting me have the whole thing to myself.