In defense of the besmirched, besotted fruitcake.

Christmas is just a memory now, but the fruitcake lingers on -- to be buried in a cupboard, passed along to an unwary victim or used as a doorstop.

But seriously, folks, there are good fruitcakes, proclaim local bakers and retailers who defend the honor of the creations they bake and sell and who add that more and more bakers are making their fruitcakes consumer-friendly.

"Ours is different -- it's edible," said Faye Greenberg, director of daily bakery and commissary operations for Mrs. Gooch's Natural Food Stores, a chain of food stores based in Sherman Oaks. "We have people who tell us they hate fruitcake and tell us ours is the only one they like. This isn't like eating a fruitcake. It's like eating a fruitbread."

Greenberg said that the difference comes from using only natural fruit, not using artificial colors or flavors, and keeping the product moist, "not heavy, like a brick."

Other bakers are seeing the error of their ways and fixing their fruitcakes.

"We're reformulating the fruitcakes to make them more to consumer tastes of today than yesterday," says Robert Davis, vice president of manufacturing at Ralph's Grocery Co. in Compton, which baked 14,000 fruitcakes to sell in its 158 Southern California stores this past yule season. "What we've seen is tastes moving away from citron fruits to exotic nutmeats."

What that means is that fruitcake makers are leaving out the little bits of petrified fruits that everyone loathes and loading the loaves with high-end nuts, like macadamias.

"In recent years many bakeries have come up with lighter and more interesting versions," says Claudia McQuillan, executive chef and cooking school director for the Bristol Farms supermarket in South Pasadena. "People don't want to give up the tradition, but they are looking for a lighter version of the fruitcake."

Davis says that while the actual number of fruitcakes that Ralphs sells each year has increased as the company opens new stores, he believes that per-capita interest in the fruits has been declining over the years.

Other bakers, however, claim fruitcakes will never go the way of the dinosaurs.

"We have some loyal customers," says Dave Van Laar, general manager of Martino's Bakery Inc. of Burbank, which sells products to food service management companies, hospitals and restaurants. "People either hate them or love them. It's a very rich piece of goods, a lot of texture in every bite. I think it takes a certain taste to like them."

Fruitcakes do have their fans.

Just ask Maggie O'Rourke, a City of Los Angeles employee who had her first fruitcake experience 17 years ago.

"Our family received fruitcakes from our great aunt," she says. "People would put it away in the pantry and it would become buried during the year. Then, 17 years ago, when I moved to California I received the annual fruitcake from my aunt. When I was ready to put it away (for good), a friend said, 'If you don't want it, I'll eat it.' I thought if she wanted it so badly, I'd better have some. I tasted it and I thought it was great."

Now O'Rourke has the all the fruitcake she can handle -- relatives send her as many as five fruitcakes a year they don't want.

Van Laar, whose company made 3,000 pounds of the comestible last year, is a fruitcake purist who claims that consumers must raise their tastes to fruitcake's level, rather than expecting bakers to mellow their fruitcakes.

"It has its own standard of identity," adds Van Laar. "The customer comes to it rather than it coming to the customer. The big craze is fat-free everything, but I don't foresee a fat-free fruitcake. For the people I know, it's an acquired taste and 'Don't mess with it!'"

Van Laar has even taken to defending the product's honor. After KCBS-FM disc jockey Charlie Tuna told a fruitcake joke on the air last year, Van Laar ripped into him. "I said, 'I don't pick on DJs; you shouldn't pick on fruitcakes.'"

Just so Tuna wouldn't forget, Van Laar baked and gave him a 37-pound fruitcake in revenge, a creation which Van Laar says must surely rank as the mother of all fruitcakes.

Treated like some bastard child of the cake family, fruitcakes actually have a noble lineage.

"Because of the expensive ingredients (in medieval England) they were kept for special occasions, even by law," says Jane Matyas, former associate food editor for Bon Appetit magazine. "You weren't allowed to make them except for Christmas, high days and holidays. That's why they came to be associated with Christmas."

There is more to making a fruitcake than meets the eye, the experts say. After using the finest fresh fruits and cooking the cake over a low flame, the cakes should be treated like royalty for up to eight weeks while they are aged in a cool place.

"They absolutely need to be aged, wrapped in cheesecloth and anointed with good cognac at every possible opportunity," says Matyas, who claims the booze helps keep the cakes from rotting while the aging allows the moisture from the fruit to spread out evenly in the cake.

The two main varieties of fruitcakes are light and dark, with dark fruitcakes being noticeably more spicy and thicker in texture.

O'Rourke has mixed feeling about attempts to repopularize fruitcakes.

"We've won many converts to fruitcakes," she says, then openly questions whether that is such a good idea. "On the other hand, if the word goes out, the price might go up and we wouldn't be able to get them."