MMMmmmm Marmalade

Orange-Marmalade-Cake

I tripped into this recipe catching up on the week’s papers. My eyes locked in on Marmalade. And I HAD to have it.  The NY Times piece by Melissa Clark was titled: Sweetness is Found In a Slice. The recipe was for British Marmalade Cake. (Who knew the Brits could bake?)

“This beautiful, tender, citrus-scented loaf cake filled with bits of candied orange peel is everything you want with your afternoon tea. The key is finding the right marmalade; it needs to be the thick-cut (also known as coarse-cut) marmalade made with bitter oranges, which will be laden with big pieces of peel. Look for the British brands in the international section of your supermarket if the jam aisle lets you down. (And not give up and use the neon orange marmalade that’s more like jelly.) Your reward is a fine-grained, not-too-sweet cake that will last for days well-wrapped and stored at room temperature (if you can manage not to eat it up all at once).”

Bottom Line: Skip the tea. (Sacrilegious for you Brits, I know). Grab a fork, a glass of cold milk and belly up. THIS IS BLOODY GOOD.

See Recipe below: [Read more…]

Such was the force of her presence that what came after her was defined in terms of her absence

Margaret-Thatcher

She changed us all. We went from being a people who saw ourselves as eternally on the downward slide to a nation that was proud to be British again.  

The UK’s first woman prime minister transformed a sclerotic British economy, all but neutered the trade unions, and endeavored to ‘roll back the frontiers of the state’ … The flip side of her courage, toughness and radicalism was an arrogance, obstinacy and remoteness that became more marked the longer she clung to office … Yet such was the force of her presence that what came after her was defined in terms of her absence.

Born in 1925 in Grantham, Lincolnshire, Margaret Hilda Roberts was the younger daughter of a corner-shop grocer, Alfred Roberts, and his wife Beatrice. He was a self-made man, a Liberal alderman and a father whose tenets of integrity, hard work and self-reliance were strong influences throughout her career. His younger daughter’s self-belief manifested itself early. Told by a teacher how lucky she was to have won a poetry-reading contest, the 10-year-old Margaret replied: “I was not lucky. I deserved it.”

~ Financial Times on Margaret Thatcher (October 13, 1925 – April 8, 2013) who died yesterday. RIP.


Source: Quote from Financial Times: Margaret Thatcher: ‘Iron Lady’ Who Remade Britain.  Image from Taylormarsh.com

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