MINNEAPOLIS — It's hard as a rock, has a slight scent of spice and looks like Frankenstein, with knoblike mints protruding from its sides. But, hey, will any of us look any better than Pierre Girard's fruitcake when we're 97 years old?

"Most people won't touch it," said the Golden Valley, Minn., resident with a chuckle. "Others say, 'I wouldn't have that in my house. I'm afraid of it.' I think I'm the only one that really loves it."

The cake's history, aside from its being baked a few months before the Titanic sank, is shrouded in mystery. Two of Girard's friends, Audrey Staber and Dick Scheimo, found it on a St. Louis Park, Minn., closet shelf while doing an estate-sale assessment in 1992. The elderly resident had died with no heirs, and Girard never learned her name before Staber and Scheimo subsequently passed away.

But the cake came in a box with cryptic inscriptions: "Xmas cake Baked in Dec 1911" on top, and "Xmas Cake baked by my mother's brother Alex died Dec. 27. Was operated on Xmas day" on the bottom.

Staber and Scheimo gave Girard the cake at a holiday gathering at T.K. Nick's in Golden Valley. Hilarity ensued. But when Girard decided to keep the cake, his friends "were amazed," he said. They shouldn't have been: Girard said he always has had a well-known weakness for "old things and castoffs ... and I've always had a reputation for keeping old food around."

With crumbling pecans and a motley, uneven frosting streaked with curvy pinkish lines — "I don't think that's blood veins," Girard quipped — the cake, like most things nearly a century old, looks every bit its age. It might be the oldest baked good in the state.

"Nobody around here has heard of any kind of food nearly that old," said Bill Belknap, spokesman for Hennepin County Public Health Protection. "It does beg the question: How long does a fruitcake last?"

Up to 25 years, according to "The Joy of Cooking," "when they are well-saturated with alcoholic liquors, which raise the spirits and keep down molds."

There's no question, then, that the cake was soaked in booze, which has served these many years as a preservative and kept it from disintegrating or being eaten by critters. Girard says dogs generally take a whiff and quickly turn away.

Humans, on the other hand, have taken much more interest in at least checking out the cake. Before he retired, Girard would take it to work at Qwest; his co-workers and fellow bus riders would marvel at this chunk of history.