My family is facing its first Christmas without our modest matriarch, so if we're going to have any chip'n'cherry fruitcake this year, I'll have to be the one to bake it, since I'm her only daughter and none of my brothers is big on baking.

Fruitcakes have earned a reputation as a brandy-soaked brick of bad karma to be regifted as quickly as possible, presumably to someone you don't really like all that much.

But my mother's chip'n'cherry fruitcake isn't like that. So many fruitcake recipes seem to be a cacophony of currants, dates, raisins, figs, in short, every dried fruit under the sun, topped off, of course, by unnaturally red and green candied cherries.

My mom's cake does call for candied cherries, but, despite being a dutiful daughter, I opted to use dried organic cherries instead. I only made two other changes, though: instead of semi sweet Nestle's toll house chocolate chips, I used Callebaut's bittersweet dark chocolate chips. And I substituted a combination of unbleached wheat flour, whole wheat pastry flour and soy flour for the conventional white flour my mother would have used. So here's my slightly modified version:

Chip‘n'Cherry Fruitcake

3 eggs

1 cup sugar (I used granulated brown)

1/2 cup unbleached flour

3/4 cup whole wheat pastry flour

1/4 cup soy flour

1 1/2 tsp baking powder

1/4 tsp salt

1 cup Callebaut bittersweet chocolate chips

2 cups chopped pecans

8 oz. chopped dates (I used fresh organic Medjool dates)

1 cup dried cherries

Preheat oven to 325 degrees and coat a 9×5 x 3 loaf pan with nonstick spray.

Beat eggs, stir in sugar. Set aside.

In a medium sized bowl, sift together flour, baking powder and salt. Add chips, nuts, and fruits, and mix well. Fold into the eggs and sugar. Turn into the loaf pan and bake for about an hour and 15 minutes. Cool for 15 minutes, then remove from pan and cool on rack.

My chip'n'cherry cake came out a bit differently from my mother's. The fresh dates and the soy flour made it more moist than hers was, and with dried cherries instead of candied, and Callebaut dark chocolate chips instead of Nestle's, my cake isn't as sweet as hers. It's good, in its own way. But it was bound to be bittersweet under the circumstances.

Image credit: Florida State Archives-