Not so nutty: Fruitcakes in Ireland
Cakes rich in fruit have always been popular in Ireland, for a number of reasons. Initially it had a lot to do with household equipment. It wasn’t until about the...
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Cake
Rich Guinness Cake
This recipe is adapted from one in Clare Connery’s In an Irish Country Kitchen, and is light (as Irish fruitcakes go) and well balanced in terms of flavor — the...
Baileys Marbled Cheesecake
The “base” recipe for this rich and luscious cheesecake is derived from the famous cheesecake native to the venerable New York restaurant Lindy’s. (More about that cheesecake’s history here.) In...
Chocolate Potato Cake with “Irish Potato Candy” Frosting
In Maura Laverty’s tremendous 1960’s collection of traditional Irish recipes, Full and Plenty, this recipe comes with only one word of description: Rich. Our recipe is adapted from Laverty’s, which...
GIF Irish Coffee Cake: applying the coffee / whiskey syrup
Distributing the syrup evenly to the layers…. Spoon it on slowly and spread it around, as in the image. This will need to be done at least two or three...
Irish Coffee Cake
The reputation of the drink chef Joe Sheridan invented one cold and rainy evening in 1943 at the old seaplane base at Foynes, County Clare began to spread far and...
Hot Whiskey Cake
In Ireland, when the cold weather sets in — and it’s usually wet as well — a lot of people, when they turn up at their local pub, really want...
Irish Curd Cheeses and Cheesecakes
It would be hard to find a country where people were more in love with dairy products in general than Ireland. Historically this would have had a lot to do...
Sweet Caraway Luncheon Loaf
Tea cakes and quick breads featuring caraway (or caraways, as they sometimes call the seasoning here) have been popular in Ireland for hundreds of years. Possibly the best-known of these...
Wicklow Strawberry Shortcake
The centuries-old Irish passion for strawberries in season has turned this into one of the country’s favorite desserts. The shortcake is the real deal — not some nondescript sponge cake,...
It’s the berries
Berries of many kinds have been on the Irish dessert menu for centuries, if not millennia. Blackberries, along with raspberries, fraughans and wild strawberries, were here from the time when...
Everyday Gingerbread with Orange-Ginger Icing
Gingerbread would have been a perennial adornment of the tea trolley over the last century or so when the Irish housewife was doing the baking. It didn’t call for exotic...
The Art of the Irish Tea Trolley
There was a time in Ireland not so long ago when the arrival of a guest meant the imminent production of the Tea Trolley. Besides the teapot and cups, the...
Porter Cake
Somewhere along the line in the 1800’s, it occurred to somebody in Ireland that the dark beer called porter would make a good addition to the robust dark flavor of...
Gurriers
Everybody in Dublin knows what “gurriers” means. It’s an old word for street kids — with the implication that they’re the kind of kids who’re usually getting into mischief: messers,...
Gur Cake
Invented by Dublin bakers at the turn of the 20th century, gur cake was a way to use up unsold day-old bread or cake and still make some money from...
Apple Upside Down Cake
Great for any time you’ve got lots of apples. Also great for making the best of the few you have.
Chocolate Orange Guinness Cake
Balancing the basic dark bitterness of Guinness with a dessert’s sweet ingredients is always a little tricky. But the orange in this recipe makes it easy, since oranges are great...
In The Shade Of The Old Apple Tree
The Irish countryside is full of surprises for the creative baker, especially when summer begins. Early apples are ripe on the trees: and the best of these are the heirloom...