Christmas Cake Is One Hundred Years Old - Food News - Cooking

A Christmas Cake Turns 100 (Fruitcake, Eat Your Heart Out)

No Comments | Written on December 23, 2011 at 1:00 pm, by Lesley Kennedy

Spice Cake Just when you were about to make another joke at the expense of Aunt Edna’s annual fruitcake, may be we present to you—Little Drummer Boy, a drum roll, please—America’s oldest Christmas cake!

The Minneapolis Star Tribune reports a holiday spice cake dating back 100 years has held up rather nicely. Where did the seven-inch, double-layer confection featuring decorative mints and now-petrified nuts come from? The Tribune reports friends gifted owner Pierre Girard with the cake as a gag after finding it during an estate-sale assessment in 1992.

Handwritten on the top of the cake box: “XMAS CAKE BAKED IN DEC. 1911.” On the bottom: “Xmas Cake Baked in Year 1911 by my Mother’s Brother Alex died Dec. 27. Was operated on Xmas Day.”

According to the newspaper, Girard’s research shows Victorian tradition dictated that spice cakes soaked in rum and brandy would be tasted, saved for a year, and then added to again to be noshed on. Wow, that’s actually quite terrifying. Can you imagine? We don’t know what’s scarier—to only be allowed a few bites of a delicious liquor-soaked cake or actually saving it to eat an entire year later. Shudder.

(The cake pictured here is not the grandaddy of cakes, by the way; see the details below. You can click the Star-Tribune link to see the actual cake.)

Anyway, perhaps as a nod to modern American tradition, in honor it’s 100th birthday, Girard gave the cake its own party last weekend, according to the newspaper. No word on whether or not they celebrated with nibbles of the century-old dessert.