New Zealand Post Coastal Otago area manager Craig Strathern holds a mysterious homemade fruitcake, carefully wrapped but sent in a prepaid bag with no details of recipient or sender. PHOTO: LINDA ROBERTSON

A slice of good luck is needed to help a beautifully baked fruitcake reach its destination.

New Zealand Post Coastal Otago area manager Craig Strathern, of Dunedin, has been scratching his head this week after the cake turned up in the city on Wednesday. It was in a postage-paid bag with no address or sender details.

"We have in our branch a beautifully baked and wrapped fruitcake, packed in an airtight plastic container.

"It turned up in a red, postage-paid bag with no receiver or sender details whatsoever.

"I have no idea where it came from or where it's going to.

"It really needs a loving home.

"I'm just so gutted that it's not going to get there unless we do something," he said yesterday.

Mr Strathern has absolutely no idea - half-baked or otherwise - how to deliver the cake.

That is when, instead of forking out for cake whisperers or gateau gumshoes, he contacted the Otago Daily Times and sought to contact the cake creator and reach the recipient.

"Somebody's gone to a lot of trouble" to bake the cake, carefully wrap it in greaseproof paper and tie it with string, before posting it in a plastic cake container.

This then went into a size six prepaid bag, for items up to 3kg, and which sells for $9.50.

A keen cake-maker himself, he knew cakes were usually made for special occasions, such as to mark Christmas, or were intended for special people.

The expertise of the cake-making, and the careful way the cake was prepared for posting suggested an older, experienced cake-maker.

"It was probably someone like my mum."

The cake-maker could contact him via email at craig.strathern@nzpost.co.nz.

The cake could have been posted from anywhere in Otago, and there was a good chance it was from Dunedin.

Somebody probably just forgot to put the address on the parcel.

"It would be the icing on the cake if it was successfully delivered."