I love fruitcake. There, I’ve said it.

Not just any fruitcake, mind you. I mean really good fruitcake. Preferably  homemade fruitcake that has been properly aged. By now you probably think I’m a fruitcake.

You may also be wondering why I’m writing about fruitcake – Christmas cake, if you will – on the second last day of January. Good question. The answer, of course, is that it’s time to put the fruitcake in my wine cellar so that it will be properly aged come November.

This is one of those interesting facts – equal parts fascinating and disturbing. You take a freshly baked cake without any preservatives at all, and store it for the better part of a year at room temperature, and then … you eat it? And it tastes better than when it was fresh? Seriously?

To be fair, when I said “no preservatives” I wasn’t quite telling the truth. I meant no artificial preservatives. It turns out the sugar in candied fruit, and the alcohol you brush it with are both wonderful preservatives. As guilty pleasures go, I suppose it isn’t all that bad.

Just don’t get me started on cinnamon buns…