Bia Gaelach

Church of England fundamentalism is impossible because you can't have:

"You must have tea and cake with the vicar... or you die! Tea and cake or death!"

Cake or death?
Uhh, cake please.
Very well! Give him cake!
Oh, thanks very much. It's very nice!

[points] You! Cake or death?
Uh, cake for me, too, please!
Very well! Give him cake, too! We're gonna run out of cake at this rate.

[points] You! Cake or death?
Uh, death, please. No, cake! Cake! Cake, sorry.
You said death first, ahaaa, ahaaaa, death first!
Well, I meant cake!

Oh, all right. You're lucky I'm Church of England!

Cake or death?"

— Eddie Izzard





If there's one food in the world I love, it's Irish brown bread. I discovered it when I took a hiking trip to Ireland (, Republic of) some six-ish years ago with the Sierra Club. As a vegetarian, I ate a lot of vegetable soup. I mean a lot. And to be fair, much of it probably wasn't vegetarian—people have a tendency to sneak in nasty things like beef broth in seemingly-innocuous items. But it was beef broth or starving, so the best I could do was keep my fingers crossed.

The best part about the soup, though, was the brown bread that came with every bowl. It was... just über-excellent. Just the right texture, just the right flavor. I like white, fluffy bread too, but this is my favorite bread in the world. Bar none.

Sadly, I've been completely unable to replicate this bread in the States. It's not soda bread (no matter how many times people try to tell me that's what I should find on every Irish table), and despite how ubiquitous it was over there I can't seem to find a good recipe. Sigh.

Probably as a result of the bread, I've developed a general soft spot for Irish food (Bia Gaelach... I think... I did actually take a few Irish classes). So when I saw this recipe for an Irish apple cake (courtesy of Supercook), it seemed like a great use for all those apples.

Apparently, it was. And it was eaten so fast I didn't get a picture before it all disappeared. It was declared to be not quite as good as the pear cake or the key lime pie made around here of late, but you wouldn't know it by the way it got devoured...

I tried to make an artist's rendition of the cake, but it failed miserably.


So, on a completely different subject, I discovered these "blog blossoms" (which come courtesy of this fantastic website) on Warm Olives and Cool Cocktails. As described, they are indeed hypnotic to watch in the process of being built.




Just.




Like.





This.


Sala, the creator, provides a nice key:

What do the colors mean?
blue: for links (the A tag)
red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
green: for the DIV tag
violet: for images (the IMG tag)
yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black: the HTML tag, the root node
gray: all other tags

You'll notice my blog has blossoms of links (blue) and linebreaks (orange). Apparently, I like my spacing.