This recipe comes from my mother, who has used it for many years.
I added the soaking of the fruit in hot water.
Fruit-based Christmas cake is considered a treat in Ireland,
not a thing of horror, as so many Americans regard it.
| 12 ozs |
butter |
| 12 ozs |
brown sugar |
| 12 ozs |
plain flour |
| 1 tsp |
salt |
| 12 ozs |
raisins |
| 12 ozs |
sultanas |
| 6 ozs |
dried currants |
| 6 ozs |
candied peel |
| 4 ozs |
glacé cherries |
| 4 ozs |
walnuts, optional, cut in half |
| 2 ozs |
angelica, optional |
| 4-5 |
eggs |
Makes one round cake in a 10"x"3"-tall cake pan
or two cakes in 8"x3" pans".
Note: For the raisins,
you can substitute stoned muscat raisins
or valentias if you wish.
Be careful to only take the stone and leave the flesh.
I usually cut them in …continue.
As the Twelve Days of Christmas approach,
it's time once again to make fun of them.
Strictly speaking, we can't start until
December 25th, the first day of Christmas,
but the Xmas season starts earlier every year.
My favorite has long been Frank Kelly's Christmas Countdown,
which was a big hit in Ireland and Britain in the early 1980s.
It's couched as twelve increasingly exasperated letters from
Gobnait O'Lughnasa to his friend Nuala. Here's Day Six:
Nuala,
What are you trying to do to us ? It isn’t that we don’t appreciate
your generosity but the six geese have not alone nearly murdered the
calling birds but they laid their eggs on …continue.
(Originally posted to Ireland at
EraBlog on
Tue, 18 Mar 2003 06:52:18 GMT)
Roy Foster has a good op-ed
in Monday's New York Times about the origin of St. Patrick's Day, and how it's celebrated
in the U.S.
[Sorry, the piece is now behind the Times Select firewall.]
(Originally posted to Ireland at
EraBlog on
Mon, 24 Feb 2003 02:58:05 GMT)
Paul Graham has an insightful essay on
why nerds are unpopular
in American high schools.
So if intelligence in itself is not a factor in popularity, why are
smart kids so consistently unpopular? The answer, I think, is that they
don't really want to be popular.
...-
But in fact I didn't, not enough. There was something else I wanted
more: to be smart. Not simply to do well in school, though that counted
for something, but to design marvellous rockets, or to write well, or
to understand how to program computers. In general, to make great
things, which seems a …continue.
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