No joke: Reviewing the best fruitcakes

Once the butt of bad holiday jokes, fruitcakes are making a comeback. Gone are the liquor-laden, rock-hard confections of yore. Today's cakes literally offer a lighter touch and contain more interesting ingredients.

For instance, Southern-style fruitcakes, like the best-reviewed Mary of Puddin Hill Pecan Fruit Cake, are typically chocked with nuts and contain no alcohol.

Monastery fruitcakes (usually bathed in booze) offer a more balanced cake-to-fruit ratio and are light on nuts. The Gethsemani Farms Kentucky Bourbon Fruitcake, made by Trappist monks, is dubbed by one reviewer to be "the cake against which all past and future fruitcakes will be judged."

One last category, contemporary fruitcakes, features cakes that are generally lighter and less dense, filled with a variety of dried fruits. These generally offer more exotic ingredients that you might not have seen in a fruitcake before. Tops in this category is the Bien Fait Cranberry Almond Teacake.

To learn more about the best reviewed fruitcakes, as well as the top runners up, check out or newly-updated report on fruitcakes.