The iconic holiday dessert, the much-maligned fruitcake, can serve as an example of healthful holiday dessert tweaking. At its low point, traditional fruitcake had degenerated into an arid, mass-produced, doorstop-dense, holiday loaf of overly glazed nuts and sickeningly sweet, neon-colored fruits. Its image had become so tarnished that the late talk show host Johnny Carson once remarked: “There is only one fruitcake in the entire world and people keep passing it around.”