Everyone Hates Fruit Cakes

So gross that they made a new adjective for it.

"Dear Americans, your thing about fruitcake is fucking weird. Love, the rest of the world."

— Diamanda Hagan, Elf-Man (2014 Xmas Special)

In America and (to a lesser extent) Britain, fruitcake is the common ridicule of many Christmas-time jokes for its bland taste and very long life, sometimes depicted as hard enough as to be indestructible, or to serve as a blunt weapon. It is often depicted as a gift given to someone the giver doesn't like, later used by the recipient as a doorstop, paperweight, or anything else a brick could be used for. Another joke surrounding it is the exact same fruitcake being passed around between "friends" or family members for decades, even centuries, because it's never gone bad (or perhaps can't get any worse than it already is), and no one wants to even taste it. Yet another joke is that fruitcake will be the only thing left After the End, apart from rats and cockroaches, and Even the Rats Won't Touch It.

The common stereotype came from the fact that fruitcake, when mass-produced and brought to the supermarket, has to be deliberately overbaked in order to have a very long shelf life, with side effects including hardness and a flat taste. Another reason people tend to dislike it is the unnatural colors, cloyingly-sweet flavors, and chewy textures of the fruit typically contained in these cakes (usually candied cherries, dyed green or an unnatural shade of red, and candied citron).

Even if people were to bake it themselves at home, the process is harder than they think; it is very easy to mess up the process, like baking it too dense or undercooking it so that the middle is a puddle of uncooked goo.

Very often subjected to Unconventional Food Usage, as people will use fruitcakes for just about everything besides eating.

So as noted, there is such a thing as a good fruitcake but it's rare to find one with a perfect balance of moisture and weight.^note With the notable exception of British Christmas cake; the copious amount of alcohol in traditional recipes probably helps. By the way, despite the stereotype, it can go bad, so we would not recommend giving your kids a fruitcake that has been passed down for many generations — just chuck it in the bin.

A sub-trope to Stock "Yuck!", sometimes overlapped with Indestructible Edible.

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Examples:

Advertising

• Interac, a Canadian debit card processing network, ran a series of ads in 2018 saying that credit card debt is like fruitcake— hard to swallow.

Card Games

• Magic: The Gathering has the Fruitcake Elemental, a promotional holiday card given out to Wizards of the Coast employees in 2006. It's an indestructible 7/7 behemoth... that deals 7 damage to its controller every turn. Naturally, it has another ability that lets you gift it to an opponent.

Comedy

• Erma Bombeck had an entire section (published in All I Know About Animal Behavior, I Learned in Loehmann's Dressing Room) discussing fruitcake along with other indestructible foods (namely split pea soup and hard rolls). She also claims that fruitcake bakers never eat their own products but zealously insist on pressing them onto other people, completely unfazed by the unfavorable reaction.
  It's too sticky for a doorstop, too big for a paperweight, too young to petrify, and too old to eat. Some of the fruits in it have become extinct.
• Bill Engvall has a song called "Fruitcake Makes Me Puke" where he talks about all the other uses he has for fruitcake instead of eating it cause...well, fruitcake makes him puke.
• Jim Gaffigan has a bit on how disgusting fruitcake is. He claims fruitcakes are made by bakers who just shove all the scraps from their previous creations into one bowl and mix it together. "Put all this crap in here. No-one eats it anyway, they just mail it to relatives."
  Jim: It doesn't make sense. Fruit: good, cake: great, fruitcake: nasty crap!

Comic Books

• One Archie Comics story has Veronica Lodge, already a Lethal Chef, try her hand at making fruitcakes, baked in fluted cake pans. The result is so hard it might as well be concrete. She tasks Archie and Jughead to deliver her "gifts", and when Archie's Alleged Car gets a flat, they use a fruitcake as a spare tire.

Comic Strips

• Brewster Rockit has Frank, the Unloved Christmas Fruitcake, who became sentient after laying around so long.
• The 12/4/2013 panel of Cow Town as well as the 12/5/2013 panel. And the 12/6/2013 panel. And more to come throughout December. Strip creator Charlie Podrebarac has admitted that fruitcakes are a source of much fascination to him, though he prefers povitica (Croatian nut bread) as a holiday treat.
• One strip of Crankshaft has characters mentioning what they did with last Christmas' fruitcake. One used it to kill spiders while the other used it to make their truck heavier while driving on icy roads.
• This FoxTrot strip has Roger use Aunt Eugina's fruitcake as a footstool to help put the star on top of the Christmas tree.
• Garfield has had more than one strip denouncing fruitcakes. In one, Jon recalled his family holidays. As an act of magic, his Uncle Joe made the fruitcake disappear. Garfield didn't consider it a great loss.
• Knights of the Dinner Table has a running gag about the awful fruitcakes B.A. and Sara receive from their Aunt Nudra every year.
• In the Liō strip for December 16, 2014, the title character happily pulls a fruitcake out of its box... and uses it as a footstool to help him hang his stocking over the fireplace.

Fan Works

• Dani's First Christmas: Jack's lesson to Dani about fruitcakes.
  Jack: And everyone just pretend to like the Fruitcake... though why anyone would make something so inedible is beyond me...
  Dani: Weird...
• Duran And Kiyohime's Omake Theater: Ch. 39, Shizuru, during a holiday break, points out that it's easy to tease Natsuki because she hides her true feelings and gets huffy instead of admitting the things she enjoys. Natsuki then asks Shizuru for some of the fruit cake in the kitchen, which Shizuru teases her for. Natsuki points out that she's never denied liking fruit cake. Shizuru admits this is true...
  Shizuru: But...you like fruit cake, Natsuki. It's not my fault that you've chosen to open and shameless about the one habit you have that truly is embarrassing. (Natsuki nailed her in the face with a throw pillow)
• In an Empath: The Luckiest Smurf Christmas-related mini-story, as a nod to The Smurfs: A Christmas Carol , Hefty eats fruitcake by the plateful.
• Legend of the Accursed Fruitcake of Camlann: A gift fruitcake spurned by Merlin and cursed by Morgana has triggered untold grief and conflict in Wizarding England. Until Ron Weasley selflessly devours the Dark artifact, reversing all the damage done through the ages.
  "I muff mootmape!" Weasley said, his mouth stuffed full.
• Averted in With This Ring when Paul gets Drunk with Power after absorbing an energy field far larger than his head, and makes a four-mile-wide Christmas cake in the sky over New York, large enough for everyone in the city to have a slice; it's apparently delicious. Storing it for several months until Christmas does run into some complications, though. He will also never live it down.
  Paul: How was school?
  Zatanna: I, um... Yoooou.. remember the cake.
  Paul: I remember the cake. The internet remembers the cake. Two hundred years from now, alien civilizations that have never met a Human before will address me as "The Cake Man".

Films — Animation

• Frozen: In Olaf's Frozen Adventure, Olaf eats a fruitcake that literally goes right through him. Subverted in that Olaf eagerly eats it rather than hates it. Played straight later on when a hawk steals the fruitcake (which, by that point, has been carried for some time by Olaf through woods and mountains but is still intact), then returns it untouched some time later.
• A plot point in Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer, in which Grandma Spankenheimer's fruitcakes are actually one of the cornerstones of her business since she bakes it well enough that people willingly want to eat it (despite the song "Grandma's Killer Fruitcake"). Cousin Mel trying to sabotage the recipe is what kicks the plot of the special into gear since she unknowingly turns it into reindeer nip which causes the titular hit-and-run. Likewise, during the court scene, when Jake presents the first evidence to the jury, one of them warily asks the judge, "Do we have to?" And the judge's response?
  Judge: Excellent question. [to Jake] Do we have to?
• In Mickey's Once Upon a Christmas, Minnie is given a fruitcake in place of the Christmas bonus she should have received. Her boss is a rich Jerkass. The guy is Mortimer Mouse, after all, a minor and somewhat obscure antagonist of the Mouseverse.

Films — Live-Action

• The exterminator hero of Big Ass Spider! keeps getting fruitcakes as gifts from a grateful elderly client. They're even worse than normal, because she does things like leave the stems on the cherries; a brief gag shows a pile of the things in the hero's truck, untouched.
• In The Ref, one of the neighbors has a holiday tradition of dressing up as Santa and going door to door delivering homemade fruitcakes. The family being held hostage throws the fruitcake away as soon as he leaves.

Literature

• In Dave Barry Slept Here, the Soviets' blockade of West Berlin was finally called off after Harry Truman threatened to bombard their territory with "huge amounts of cafeteria-grade ravioli or even—remember, these were desperate times—fruitcake."
• In Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, when Uncle Vernon is boarding up the mail slot to prevent any more "mysterious" letters from entering, Petunia hands him a fruitcake and he uses it to pound in a nail. Since fruitcakes are normally made for the Christmas season and this part of the book took place in mid-July, said fruitcake was probably at least half a year old.
• An Imponderables book addresses a reader question about fruitcake in a tongue-in-cheek way, the author David Feldman making it abundantly clear how much he dislikes the stuff and implies it's hated by every human on Earth. Naturally, Feldman got flooded with letters from people who like eating fruitcake, most of them angry but a few who got a good laugh out of it.
• In Junie B. Jones and the Yucky Blucky Fruitcake, the title character wins a cake walk at her school carnival and picks the fruitcake. She's warned that it won't taste good but chooses it anyway. When she brings it home, she finds that she doesn't like the taste, but it makes itself useful anyway, as a replacement for the telephone book she has to sit on at the dinner table ("that thing hurts my hiney").
• Zig-zagged in the original Martha Speaks book; Martha tells Helen's grandmother that Helen's mom said the fruitcake she sent them last Christmas wasn't fit for a dog, but she thought it was delicious. Naturally, Helen and her mother and grandmother are offended when they hear this from Martha.
• In The Search for Delicious, Gaylen polls everyone in the kingdom about their favorite foods. When he asks a farmer couple, the wife tells him the question is easy because her fruitcake is the best food in the kingdom. But because all respondents are under a royal decree to be honest, her husband says that he absolutely hates fruitcake and has been suffering in silence for thirty years.
• The Speed of Dark: When Lou bumps into Marjory at the grocery store, they talk about how pretty fruitcakes are and how disappointing the taste is.
• The titular family from Vatta's War has Aunt Gracie, who insists on sending out every family member going on their first voyage with a stash of fruitcake. Her fruitcakes are generally considered inedible and dense enough to block out X-rays. The last bit is Not Hyperbole. Gracie often sends valuable items in fruitcakes, knowing that they can get through most security checkpoints without comment and that no one will cut a fruitcake unless the situation is well beyond frazzled. The main character cuts hers when her funds have dropped low enough that she can't afford to resupply, and finds out it's full of diamonds. However, it turns out that while Ky doesn't like them quite a few of her crew love fruitcake and would have gladly eaten them if she'd asked.

Live-Action TV

• Cousin Skeeter: In the intro to "Miracle on 32nd Skeet", Bobby's dad Andre suggests Bobby get Skeeter a fruitcake for their first Christmas together, which Bobby counters nobody likes fruitcake. It Gilligan Cuts to Skeeter showing enjoyment over a fruitcake... which he uses for a hockey puck.
• On Game of Thrones, old fruitcake soaked in water was used in the infamous "poop montage" in Season 8, to create the "poop." It worked really well.
• In one Christmas Episode of The Golden Girls, the protagonists seem to have accumulated several fruitcakes as gifts over several Christmases. Sophia suggests bringing them to the soup kitchen where they're volunteering that year. They do, but by the end of the night, not only has no-one touched them, she swears that there are more of them there than they brought.
• Good Eats naturally discusses this and, being a cooking show, attempts to defy the stereotype by producing a fruitcake recipe that is actually delicious. He uses fruit that is dried, but found in nature and otherwise untampered with.
• Grimm:
  • One Christmas Episode featured the following, after a chunk of gnawed fruitcake turns up at a crime scene:
    Hank: That looks like fruitcake.
    Nick: Hmmm... didn't know anyone ate those...
  • Later in the same episode, after reading about the Monster of the Week being baited with stollen (a German type of fruitcake):
    Monroe: Wow, so there's actually a reason for fruitcake.
• The Food Network show Holiday Baking Championship often has a fruitcake challenge, acknowledging its bad reputation and asking the contestants to take it and reinvent it (or its ingredients) as something more appealing. In the first season in 2014, the contestants predictably groaned and winced when Bobby Deen announced the challenge...except for one who visibly averted it by perking up and going "YUM!" Said contestant won the competition.
• Subverted on a Christmas Episode of I've Got a Secret in which the panel didn't mind the fact they were eating fruitcake. However, when they found out it was 100-year-old fruitcake...
• In the "Black Friday" episode of Life, Det. Charlie Crews pegs a running mall thief (dressed as a Christmas elf) with a fruitcake, dropping him. Right in front of some confused carolers. Who become horrified when he approaches with his gun drawn. Then the suspect is finally tackled and handcuffed... by Santa Claus (another cop undercover).
  Crews: [explaining matter-of-factly] Bad elf.
• It crops up in an unexpected dating and baking metaphor on Little Mosque on the Prairie:
  "The cake could look good and still be crummy. Or it may be a fruitcake and you know how we all feel about fruitcake..."
• Zig-zagged throughout the Pee-wee's Playhouse Christmas special. One of the running gags in the special is Pee-wee receiving fruitcakes as gifts from his friends. At first, he pretends to like them, but at several points, he says lines like, "It's not a fruitcake, is it?", and "No, no, no more fruitcake!" Towards the end of the special, when Cowboy Curtis gives him a fruitcake but then sees Randy gave him one as well, he is about to take it back, thinking Pee-Wee doesn't need another. Pee-Wee tells him he does, and reveals to his friends what he did with all the fruitcakes: he used them to build a new room to the playhouse.
• In The Pretender, the first-season episode "Not Even a Mouse" has the protagonist discovering a range of Christmas traditions he missed out on due to his deprived childhood, one of which is the tradition of disdaining fruitcake. Jarod himself rather likes fruitcake.
• The Red Green Show: One of the Christmas specials has a segment where Harold asks the audience if they can guess what part of Christmas he hates more than fruitcakes, before thinking for a second and doesn't think there is anything worse (but his intended answer, now second-worst, is the waiting). Another segment shows how the various lodge members use their fruitcakes. Dalton, for example, leaves a fruitcake for Santa, who then gets his revenge by filling Dalton's stocking with fruitcakes.
• Most people point to The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson as the originator of the fruitcake jokes. He regularly asserted that there was actually only one fruitcake in the world, and it just keeps getting passed around.

Music

• Bill Engvall has a Christmas song called "Fruitcake Makes Me Puke".
• "Grandma's Killer Fruitcake" by Dr. Elmo has the singer dreading his grandmother's recipe for fruitcake.
  It was harder than the head of Uncle Bucky
  Heavy as a sermon of Preacher Lucky
  One's enough to give the whole state of Kentucky a great big bellyache.
  It was denser than a trove of barnyard turkeys
  Tougher than a truckload of all-beef jerky
  Drier than a drought in Albuquerque
  Grandma's killer fruitcake!
• "Miss Fogarty's Christmas Cake" shows that this is Older Than Radio. It's a 19th-century song about a repulsive Christmas Cake that required the use of a hatchet and a saw to slice.
• A verse from the "Salvation Army/Temperance Union Song" goes like this:
  We never eat fruitcake because it has rum,
  And one little bite makes a man like a bum.
  Now can you imagine a sorrier sight
  Than a man eating fruitcake until he gets tight?

Podcasts

• Ghost of True Capitalist Radio repeatedly states how much he hates his sister-in-law Caroline, pointing out that every Christmas, she brings a foul-smelling fruitcake with her, and the odour lingers for days after she leaves. Naturally his trolls used this as ammunition to further enrage him.

Tabletop Games

• In the Santa's Soldiers role-playing game, fruitcake is used as low-end artillery shells. You play a team of paramilitary Christmas Elves — yes, it's just as strange and funny as it sounds.
• In the Shadowrun-verse, the immortal dragons Dunkelzahn and Alamais spent 30-odd years feuding over a fruitcake, giving it away to the other on alternate Christmases. Alamais got stuck with the short end of the straw (and the fruitcake) in 2057 when Dunkelzahn died and revealed the game publicly in his will, along with the fact that, as Dunkelzahn is dead and Alamais isn't, he is the de facto winner. Of course, half of the deal was that Dunkelzahn outed Alamais as Not Quite Dead by mentioning him in his will, and forced him to return to public life. Alamais had faked his own death in 2053 after being bombarded from orbit by a Russian black ops team.

Toys

• Even My Little Pony (G3) pokes fun at fruitcake. On the backcard description for toyline-only pony December Poinsettia, her favorite type of cake is listed as "fruitcake (no, really!)", implying that it's surprising that anyone (or any pony) would like it that much.

Theatre

• The musical revue "That Time of the Year" has "Holiday Lament (The Fruitcake Song)", sung from the viewpoint of the fruitcakes themselves, about how everybody hates them. Video and lyrics here.

Theme Parks

• Jingle Cruise, the holiday version of the Disney Theme Parks Jungle Cruise ride, uses fruitcake as a running gag:
  • The difference between fruitcake and a king cobra is that one is poisonous... and the other is venomous.
  • The hippos are in bad moods because they've been eating fruitcake.

Video Games

• At one point in Darkened Skye, you have to perform a Chain of Deals, with the starting item being a fruitcake. The reactions of the various merchants in the marketplace who can be offered the fruitcake but don't want it are rather amusing.
• Fruit Cakes are drops during December in Don't Starve Together. It counts as a 'food' item but it will never spoil and none of your characters will eat it, instead making grimaces if you try to make them.
• EverQuest II has the "Fruit Cake" item. The description says "The cake is a lie". It's a worthless item that just takes up space and the best you can do is hurl it at opponents. The hit player falls to their knees, brushes crumbs off their face, and then they have the fruitcake in their inventory to throw at someone else.
• The extraterrestrial equivalent "Berry Sludge" of Oxygen Not Included is an Indestructible Edible whose "relentless and overbearing sweetness leaves the tongue feeling numb."
• In The Sims 4, Sims will give fruitcakes to new neighbors as a housewarming gift. If eaten, and the Sim doesn't have the randomized hidden trait 'Likes Fruitcake', they will get the "What Did I Just Eat?" moodlet, leaving the Sim in a bad mood. The one who brought the fruitcake will also claim it’s a family heirloom when your Sim first takes a slice. It is also one of the few food items that won't spoil. Inverted if your Sims does have the 'Likes Fruitcake' trait, as they get a Happy +2 moodlet from eating some and can 'Enthuse About Fruitcake' as a conversation topic.
• ''Star Trek Online" has Last Year's fruitcake as an obtainable item during the Winter Event. There's also Rippleberry Fruitcake.
• Terraria has fruitcake as a drop during the holiday season. Its only use is as a throwing weapon, and cannot be consumed like all the other Christmas-themed food items.
• Zigzagged in World of Warcraft. The annual "Mincemeat fruitcakes" from the Christmas event given an achievement when eaten while in Santa garb. They're also the best food items in terms of healing as they restore 5% every second for 20 seconds (That's 100% HP) meaning they're effective for even a level 90 tank with thousands of HP and only require one serving. Still, the description says it will "be a long time before it goes bad" and that "you should probably also like the taste of fruitcake". (Of course, many useful food items in this game are stuff the typical man would be revolted by.)

Web Animation

• The Trash Pack episode "Completely Armless" lists fruitcake as being a more disgusting flavor of cake than "fungus" or "boogers and brine".

Web Comics

• In Kevin & Kell, Kell Dewclaw fought her first challenge as CEO of Herd Thinners against Marty, a polar bear. She beat him by shoving a fruit cake in his mouth and yanking it out, parting him of his entire set of teeth.
• In Manly Guys Doing Manly Things, Commander Badass has been known to store caches of fruitcakes just in case. Of course, even though the Commander appreciates fruitcake's value as wilderness survival food, he admits that it's impossible to tell if a fruitcake has gone bad because he's never tasted a good fruitcake.
  Commander Badass: Fruitcake's so calorie dense and it has such a crazy shelf life it's perfect fer wilderness survival kits. I'm just stockin' up, it could save yer life, y'know.
• Pixie and Brutus: Zig-Zagged. Randal finds a fruitcake in the trash, indicating Brutus and Pixie's owner didn't want it. However, Randal gleefully exclaims about finding a whole one and begs Brutus to let him have it when the dog interrupts his trash-raiding. Brutus acquiesces.
• Subverted in this Pocket Princesses strip: Tiana clearly expects some reluctance toward her fruitcake, but Merida and Aurora seem quite eager to sample it.

Websites

• The adoptable website Chicken Smoothie featured a trio of dogs based on Christmas-themed treats. The cookie and hot chocolate-themed dogs had happy and adorable expressions; the fruitcake dog looked put-out and depressed.
• In a Twitter series Presenting ALL OF THE U.S. PRESIDENTS as SNACK FOODS, the fruitcake is the stand-in for Dwight D. Eisenhower:
  A triumph at its best, but often regrettable. Heavy enough to be a bludgeoning weapon. Also suitable for paving highways.

Western Animation

• The Christmas Episode of The Adventures of Sam & Max: Freelance Police features a rock-hard fruitcake that is eventually weaponized by Sam's grandma.
  "That was an unconventional use of a beloved holiday treat!"
• Fruitcakes being given to Mr. Plotz is a running gag in the Animaniacs episode "A Christmas Plotz", which he rejects because he hates fruitcake (and has a whole office full of fruitcakes that were given to him). It gets to the point where he thinks that Dot, who is disguised as a gift box when she enters as the Ghost of Christmas Present, is probably another fruitcake, which she considers an insult ("fruitcake" being a term for an insane person). At the end of the story, after he has reformed, instead of sending a turkey to Ralph's house, Plotz tells the Warners to buy the biggest fruitcake they can find and send it to Ralph's house. They bring a gigantic fruitcake the size of Ralph's trailer house using a helicopter and drop it, where it lands on top of Plotz. Listening to Plotz's screams underneath the fruitcake, Wakko replies, "We'll have you out of there by Easter." The trope is possibly subverted given that the Warners don't seem to mind the task of eating the giant fruitcake.
• The Danny Phantom Christmas Episode has Danny use his ghost powers to blast Christmas-related items in the Ghost Zone as a means of venting his frustration. One of the items he blasts is a fruitcake.
• A double example from the Darkwing Duck episode " It's a Wonderful Leaf":
  • Bushroot complains that "everybody treats me like last year's fruitcake."
  • Darkwing hears a guy yelling that someone stole his fruitcake. He wonders who would do that, and Launchpad responds, "I wish I knew. I can never get rid of the stuff."
• In the Dave the Barbarian episode "King for a Day or Two", when he's told that Chuckles sent the royals a fruitcake, Dave remarks "The fiend!"
• In the Ed, Edd n Eddy episode "Fa La La La Ed", the Eds find a decades-old "ancestral fruitcake" in Edd's parents' closet, which Eddy initially mistakes for a hunk of bologna. Rather than eating the fruitcake, Edd's family apparently just uses it as a Christmas decoration.
• At the beginning of the The Fairly OddParents! episode "Christmas Every Day", Vicky makes Timmy gift-wrap a large amount of fruitcakes (which Cosmo uses to build an igloo), a job that Timmy deplores. After bringing him a giant fruitcake that she needs a forklift to lift, Timmy asks her who all the fruitcakes are for, and she tells him they're not for anyone, but she just likes making him work, and promptly uses his wrapped fruitcakes as firewood.
• Garfield and Friends. In the episode "Revenge of the Living Lunch", a meteor lands on Earth, gets mistaken for a fruitcake, and is passed along for decades because no one will even try to eat a fruitcake. Jon receives it from his Aunt Edna (prompting Garfield to wonder what Jon ever did to make her mad at him) and after stashing it in the fridge, wanders off to contemplate the age-old question fruitcake recipients always ask themselves: "Who do I dislike enough to give a fruitcake to?" Garfield mentions fruitcakes are one of the few foods he refuses to eat ^note The others being raisins and snails, and also that although (in his opinion) Jon is dumb, even he isn't dumb enough to try eating one.
• The Histeria! episode "World War II" ended with a segment where the main characters helped Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Josef Stalin decide what to do with the nations liberated from Nazi rule and how to punish the enemy soldiers using foods to represent the nations and enemy soldiers. Fruitcake is chosen by Charity Bazaar to represent the Nazis because she claims that no one likes fruitcake.
• In the Let's Go Luna! special "Luna's Christmas Around the World", Luna hands out fruitcakes to everyone for Christmas. The recipients are clearly reluctant to eat the cakes, which are heavy enough to make them fall into the ice below them. The penguins that greet the Circo reveal they like the fruitcakes, and one of them offers a cake to Senor Fabuloso. He takes a bite and realizes it's not as unappetizing as it looks, thus subverting the trope.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: In "The Beginning of the End – Part 2", Pinkie Pie is especially distressed by what King Sombra forced the Cake family to bake for his victory celebration.
  Pinkie Pie: [sobbing] He made them bake a black licorice fruitcake that says "Congratulations to Our Favorite Supreme Emperor King Sombra" in green frosting! It's the ugliest cake I've ever seen!
• In Prep & Landing, Wayne receives a fruitcake from a coal elf upon news of his (expected) promotion. He immediately re-gifts it to Magee, who later gives it to Lanny during the company Christmas party.
• The Proud Family: In the episode "Seven Days of Kwanzaa", the homeless family the Prouds invite for Christmas give the family a fruitcake. Even Uncle Bobby, who says he actually likes fruitcake, doesn't want it and kicks it onto the front lawn, where it sinks under the ground. At the end of the episode, it shows a fruit tree sprouted out from the fruitcake. The homeless family are revealed to be spirits, which implies the fruit cake itself was magical and was intentionally meant to be tossed out so it would then flourish from the ground.
• Fruitcake appears in both The Smurfs cartoon show episode "The Master Smurf", as a substance that the Smurfs use to build Greedy's monument to himself while under the thrall of his magical crown, and in The Smurfs: A Christmas Carol as one of the things of Christmas that Grouchy says that he hates at the beginning of the story. Interestingly, fruitcake turns out to be Hefty's favorite holiday food, as he is seen eating it as the Smurf of Christmas Future.
• SpongeBob SquarePants:
  • In the "Christmas Who?" episode, at one point SpongeBob says, "...And everyone pretends to like the fruitcake!" Also, in the same episode, Mr. Krabs gives Plankton one as a present and he throws it out — into a trashcan full of nothing but fruitcakes.
  • In the It's a SpongeBob Christmas! special, Plankton puts Jerktonium in fruitcakes to make everyone into jerks. He gives the first one to SpongeBob, who turns out to be immune, making Plankton think his plan failed. SpongeBob then gives the Jerktonium fruitcakes to everyone else, unwittingly helping in Plankton's evil scheme. (Note that the characters are not complaining about getting fruitcake. The episode plays on the cake's reputation by making them instruments of evil.)
• A running gag in The Spooktacular New Adventures of Casper is that even ghosts don't like fruitcake, to the point that, in one episode, Dr. Harvey manages to send his daughter, Casper, and the Ghostly Trio fleeing in terror when he offers them some - much to his bemusement, as he genuinely likes it.
• In a Christmas Episode of Timon & Pumbaa where the duo were working at a mall as Santa Claus and an elf, a Running Gag was a sale of fruitcake being announced over the PA system, only for no one to buy it. As one of his good deeds in order to get on the 'Nice' list, Timon puts a piece in his mouth, instantly creating a stir for it. Unfortunately, he was forced to swallow it when the old lady spokesman for the fruitcake caught him trying to sneak away without completely eating it.
• Tiny Toons: In It's a Wonderful Tiny Toons Christmas Special, one of Plucky's proposed sketches is "Plucky the Lonely Fruitcake Nobody Wanted for Christmas". Buster ends up cutting the sketch and having it rewritten as "Urkel the Lonely Fruitcake".
• Wacky Races (2017): Averted in "It's a Wacky Life". Pandora tells Dick she joined the other Wacky Racers' Christmas celebration for the fruitcakes and gladly eats one. It's further averted in the end when Muttley eats another fruitcake.

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