About our site

Real Irish Desserts is an outgrowth of our household’s oldest website, EuropeanCuisines.com, which last year celebrated its 25th year online.

One of the favorite features of our users there for some years now has been the Irish dessert page, a compendium of dessert recipes previously published as part of a number of Irish recipe festivals we held in the runup to St. Patrick’s Day each year in 2007, 2008 and 2009. The desserts became so popular every year around “The Day That’s In It” that it occurred to us they might better serve their users by being spun off into a website of their own.

So here it is. If you came here by being forwarded to this new site from European Cuisines, all you need to know is that the recipes you’ll find here comprise the entire original collection — recipes that have racked up an impressive number of pageviews over the years (and those numbers have followed them here, so you can see which ones have become the most popular over time). All the recipes have been cooked or baked again, assessed, adjusted (if they needed it) or changed (ditto) and rephotographed with much better equipment than we had when we started this endeavor.

Over the course of 2018 we’ll be adding many traditional and new Irish dessert recipes to the original collection, while we also start the work of spinning all the rest of European Cuisines’ Irish recipes into their own website in time for St. Patrick’s Day of 2019.  Additionally, we’ll be opening up discussion forums here for readers who’d like to add their own recipes, as well as opening up registration on the site for those who want to rank and comment on the recipes we’ve got.

About our recipes and images

Every recipe on this site has been sourced in traditional Irish-published cookbooks, some of which go back a hundred and fifty years or more. Every dish has been tested in our own kitchen — a standard Irish kitchen with no fancy catering-level equipment.

All photography is of each dish as it’s emerged from the oven or come off the cooktop, ready to be served. We do not style our dishes with artificial ingredients or colorings. Everything you see here was afterwards eaten either by us or our neighbors. The only Photoshopping that happens is to improve lighting conditions and to remove crumbs and so forth.

In case you’re interested, the dishware we photograph on for the Real Irish Desserts site is the “Apple” pattern from the world-famous Nicholas Mosse Pottery in Kilkenny.

Thanks for visiting us!

And as we say in Ireland, Céad míle fáilte; a hundred thousand welcomes!