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Um … what are the “spots” in spotted dick? It looks a bit like mild fruit cake.

Raisins and sultanas and shit like that. Yes, it’s kind of a suet-y cake thing.

But this version is pure, sweet essence of junk food.

It is mild fruit cake, Deborah.

That’s how we trap innocent (ha!) merkins… we start them off on spotted dick and before they know where they are they’re snorting Dundee cake down some dark alleyway and asking if anyone knows where they can score some.. y’know… (sniff)… Christmas cake.. like, with brandy….

Poor, poor fools….

Mr. Kipling’s junk food? Oh, that is just not right.

I am that rare American, because I love fruit cake, so it would be easy to get me hooked. Dundee Cake, huh. What’s that?

Some day I’ll tell you the story about when Husband came home with 22 lbs of Christmas fruit cake that he bought at Sears on a close-out sale in March.

Hostess Twinkie insouciance
That made me proud to be a ‘merken.

Can’t Hark – I agree. One of our major brands of junk food cakes, too.

Deborah – I knew there had to be some civilised Americans! Dundee cake is a rich, dark Scottish fruit cake topped with almonds. They often use whisky in it, too. Well-made, it is wonderful.

http://www.deliaonline.com/recipes/type-of-dish/sweet/scottish-whisky-dundee-cake.html

For other passengers, sick bags are located beneath your seats… please use responsibly 😉

You can count me as a civilised American as well, given that as your test–I adore fruit cake. Have you ever seen a recipe for Scripture Cake?

Golly, no! How many pounds of ground Bibles does it need?

Strange we should have fallen to talking about fruit cake today. Earlier I found one frozen, lurking in the freezer, bought from at a summer fete somewhere. The cake that is.

It’s defrosting at this very moment in the kitchen.

As the wind howls around the back door (130 mph in Scotland, today – somewhat less here) now and then I hear a small groan as it returns to life….

Well it says they are “Exceedingly Good” on the box.

Americans don’t have problems with whiskey and cake. The whiskey has to stay in a glass, though.

Uncle Badger:

Strange we should have fallen to talking about fruit cake today. Earlier I found one frozen, lurking in the freezer, bought from at a summer fete somewhere. The cake that is.

I’ll be dropping by a little later…

No ground Bibles–but the ingredients and (in the fancier versions) the cooking directions are all framed as Bible verses. The recipe I have (from Ernest Matthew Mickler’s White Trash Cooking, The Jargon Society 10 Speed Press, 1986), reads as follows:

4 1/2 cups (1st Kings 4:22)
1 cup (Judges 5:25, last clause)
2 cups (Jeremiah 6:20)
2 cups (1st Samuel 30:12)
2 cups (Nahum 3:12)
2 cups (Numbers 17:18)
2 tablespoons (1st Samuel 14:13)
1 pinch (Leviticus 2:13)
6 (Jeremiah 17:11)
1/2 cup (Judges 4:19, last clause)
2 tablespoons (Amos 4:5)
Season to taste with (2nd Chronicles 9:9) spices. Mix like a fruit cake and bake

The first Scripture Cake recipe I ever encountered (which I don’t have a copy of) instructed at one point that one should “follow King Solomon’s recommendation for bad boys.”

A quick look tells me that, if you are interested, you can spend happy hours exploring the varieties of Scripture Cake on the Internet. . .

And there was I, always assuming that some goodwife’s precious family recipe book had been dropped over the side of the Mayflower, taking with it the very notion of fruit cakes.

I wonder if there’s a Koranic equivalent?

Oh dear..what have I started now?

Hey, we even have steamed suet puddings! Just–they aren’t exactly POPULAR these days.

Cool, we spotted a wild badger today. Cute little guy. It was near Last Chance Canyon.

Badgers are extremely rare in the high desert so it was magnificent to spot the fluffy little guy. They move quick.

Are there extra karma points for spotting Uncle B’s relatives in the wild? Especially his American cousins.

That’s how we trap innocent (ha!) merkins… we start them off on spotted dick…..

Sigh…why, Why, WHY do I know these things?

Uncle Badger, was that an intended pun or a lucky strike?
Either way, it was perfect!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkin

Annonymous is me…. I just updated to Windows 7 and then to Explorer 9 Beta…. which rubbed off my ID in the process…

And there was I, always assuming that some goodwife’s precious family recipe book had been dropped over the side of the Mayflower, taking with it the very notion of fruit cakes.

You never noticed those ads for fruitcakes from Texas that appear in British newspapers during the run-up to Christmas? I’ve always been tempted to order one of them, but I never could justify the expense.

Oh, man! jic, you have brought back memories! Some Texican relative always sent us one of those every year (I might even have had one of the tins batting about my apartment at one time, but I don’t remember having seen it for awhile). And they were seriously tasty!

They look seriously tasty. They don’t contain any alcohol, but they have official “doctoring” instructions on their site. The thing is, I can drive to any supermarket around here and get perfectly good fruitcake, especially around Christmas, for a fraction of what it would cost to order one from them.

Or even make your own. . .where I live had many Italian immigrants starting in the first half of the last century (and still has a trickle today), so we have some Italian specialty food shops, one of which I frequent because they have bulk olives and other stuff I like. In November it is dangerous to go in there: entire half citrons, candied; almost any candied or dried fruit you can think of available in bulk quantities, plus some specialty mixes. . .and they always have nuts (almonds, cashews, pine nuts. . .just for starters). I have to avert my eyes because I live by myself and much as I love fruitcake, I’m not prepared to live on it for the next six months!

Just last week I broke out a Spotted Dick from my death pool winnings. Expiration date be damned. In honest truth, it’s fruitcake lite. Rum soaked raisins would probably lift its popularity, but alas.

Hey you merkens, limeys, frogs, and krauts. It’s Ronald Reagan’s 100th on Sunday! Which should be a national holiday, if it weren’t for the fact that we’ve become Europe. Spotty dicks and all.

Suet. I don’t quite understand suet. Is it like lard, or shortening? Does is come in a can or a pail, wrapped in paper like butter?

I see that the brand is MISTER Kipling…I wonder if spotted dick goes well with (South Park’s) Chef’s chocolate salty balls.

Actually, no, I don’t.

My mother would start the Christmas cake and the Dundee cake towards the end of October. After they were set up in the tin they would be ‘fed’ at regular intervals. Since none of us was a brandy fan, and whisky is what you eat with fruit cake, not in it, rum was the tipple of choice. Come Xmas, just taking the lid off the tin would release a gust of fumes that would make you dizzy. Each cake got about a 1/4 bottle. On the 23rd, it would be my job to create the Royal Icing that would adorn the Xmas cake. Now that is tough work. Icing sugar, lemon juice, egg white. That’s it. My god it nearly breaks your wrist beating it. And despite the vapourings of scaredy-cats, the salmonella risk from the raw egg white is zip. No bacterium can survive in what is essentially pure sugar. Osmosis kills ’em stone dead.

Another Xmas favourite: Coconut Ice. Now I’m diabetic sadly all these things are firmly off the menu.

If you like more fruit than cake, super-moist and sweet, Costco’s is excellent. Can’t hazard a guess as to whether it’s alcoholic, or non-.

La Weasel’s title sentence reminded me of my good lady. She likes scampi but won’t eat prawns uncoated because “I won’t put anything ugly in my mouth”.

Quiet at the back, there!

Umm… guilty as charged, Some Vegetable 😉

Uncle B knows full well what a merkin is, Some Vegetable. Don’t laugh. It only encourages him.

By the by, I’ve bought your dick, but I haven’t put it in the mail yet. My bad, but it takes some wrapping. Every day, I imagine you poking your snoot into an empty mailbox and sighing wistfully.

Yes Weasel- it’s gotten to where when I trudge sadly to the mailbox every day, I sing a sad little song: ” Oh where oh where has my little dick Gone? Oh where oh where can it be? Up till now, I’d suspected it had been intradicted by customs but now I know there’ll be no dick for me for Valentine’s Day. But then, life is suffering. It’s 21 degrees again this morning for the 5th day in a row and it snowed 5 inches yesterday. 🙁
That’s not supposed to happen in Dallas. Still I had a great time clearing the driveway- I used my leaf blower! How’s THAT for Yankee ingenuity

SWeasel, I gotta try me some dick…no, wait, that doesn’t sound quite right. There’s gotta be an internet site where I can buy some and get it shipped to California, right?

Look no further than your local Whole Foods. The hippies love their dick.

My mom’s (God rest her) recipe for fruitcake was very much like your mum’s David–although she’d swear you were supposed to make it for NEXT year if you were really doing it right. She also said that if you poured enough rum over it, it could taste like crap and nobody’d care after the first slice. I never liked them because I don’t like raisins–or most dried fruit for that matter–and definitely not nuts.

I can still picture the whole brazilnuts (along with the fruit and other nuts) studding the stiff batter, though. And the smell of the rum, the smell of any rum still brings her fruitcake to mind–and considering that she stopped making them when I was a wee lass, that’s an heirloom memory of nearly half a century.

I really miss my mom. 🙂

Matamoros, I can get dick at my local Bel Air here in Suburban Sacramento County, so unless you live in the sticks, I’ll bet you can find it in your neck of the woods, too.

Suet. I don’t quite understand suet. Is it like lard, or shortening? Does is come in a can or a pail, wrapped in paper like butter?

It’s the fat from around a cow’s kidneys, usually comes in a paper-wrapped block. Yes, it’s like shortening.

Thanks, Gromulin and Nina for the info…I guess I can put up with a few freakin’ hippies in order to get some Spotted Dick. Glad I don’t have to mailorder it…and we got Whole Foods here in the LBC.

Twinkies? A poor imitation of Tastykakes.
http://www.tastykake.com/

(I don’t think it’s too bold to assert that the best junk food comes from Pennsylvania. Tasty Baking Co. is in Philly.)

I’ve never actually HAD fruitcake (or any variation thereof), mostly because nobody in my family likes them, thus they’re never around for me to sample.

(Uncle B): “Earlier I found one frozen, lurking in the freezer, bought from at a summer fete somewhere. The cake that is.”
Speaking of free-floating modifiers, this brought me up short:…
(weasel): “When I first spotted the package in the supermarket, though, it made my eyes water. And I don’t even have one, spotted or otherwise.”

Pinball wizard? That’s nothing. How ’bout an eyeless graphic artist?

Most glass eyes come with one pupil, but you could special order, I suppose.

While we’re critiquing language–don’t you love the verbs of foodspeak? “Smothered in a rich custard flavour topping,” indeed! Leaving aside the whole issue of which of the three sequential nouns is modifying which (and how!). . .The image of the dick, formerly breathing, having been reduced to breathlessness by what appears to be a fairly thin layer of topping, is, well, unnerving!

Please understand: it’s not a critique, it’s appreciation. The language hooked me on this site, and I stayed for the art as well. I’m certainly in no position to criticize anyone else’s written English.

Ah, Malcolm, my apologies. It wasn’t exactly the language that hooked me–but certainly the rhetoric was a major factor, as was the art. And the lively community of commentors. So, let us unhook my previous post from your previous post, and allow them to float free. . .

For some misfiring synaptic reason, as I read Can’t Hark’s comment, the ‘princes in the Tower’ came to mind, and I saw them being smothered in cheap custard.

Another Dick story, perhaps.

Or maybe a Henry.

There! From Spotted Dick to vacuum cleaner posts in the blinking of that eye.

That’s what this place does to you. “Fills yer ‘ead full of nonsense!” as old Granny Badger would have said.

Heh. My natural voice is term paper speak — you know, that awful high school expository writing style they teach you when you’re 15. I’m surprised my first drafts don’t have footnotes. I have to go back and weasel shit up.

Here, watch this beefeater give the Tower of London tour. He’s funny.

I think the time we went, our guide was funny, too. All’s I remember is, it was REALLY expensive to get in, and at the end of the tour, he stuck his hand out for tips.

Also, the torture implements display was down for renovation.

Oh, and the crown jewels were awful. Uncle B called them “Tudor bling.”

“Tudor Bling”

Heh….I saw the crown jewels when I toured the Tower, many years ago, and that pretty much describes them. Expensive bling, mind you, but bling nonetheless.

However I preferred the weapons display over the torture devices, although there was some interesting items for, ummmm, “persuasion” made back when.

The torture implements in Hever Castle (Ann Boleyn’s childhood home) weren’t original; they were imported from Germany. It was rainy on the day we went. When we walked into the tower room where they kept them, there was a crack of thunder and the lights went.

Just for a second, but it was spooky.

…there was a crack of thunder and the lights went.

Behold, the power of The Weasel and The Badger!

You gotta wonder…if you’re, like, the National Trust and you need to buy some torture implements to decorate your dungeon, where do you go? eBay?

David Gillies–Thank you! I’d read references to coconut ice, but had no idea what it actually was. And that recipe allowed me to use up some stuff that came to me when my mother moved to assisted living last summer. Also a very ELDERLY can of condensed milk that I bought for some reason I can’t remember. Yee hah!

Suet.

“Traditional suet is the dense fat which surrounds beef kidneys now very hard to obtain in its natural form as many butchers no longer get the kidneys intact.”

Also known in butcher’s shops as “leaf fat”.

And why suet?

“Because suet has a high melting point, it serves to keep the structure of pastries even after the dough has begun to set, leaving hundreds of tiny air holes. The result is a light and smoothly textured pastry, whether baked or steamed. When butter or margarine is substituted for suet, the results are often much heavier and greasy. Suet does not have any meaty taste it just imparts a rich flavour, so is suitable for both savoury and sweet dishes.”

chicken farmer – also makes the world’s best dumplings 🙂

Over here you can even buy something called ‘vegetarian suet’.

I knew there had to be a use for them.

Ah. Thank you jic and chicken farmer for a more detailed explanation on suet.

@ Sweasel, Nah, Amazon. You gotta by that kind of thing new otherwise you get all the preused nastys. And noone wants infections from who knows where from preused implements….

Can’t hark: glad to pass on an od favourite.

I had the devil’s own job explaining to a butcher here what suet was. Trying to explain that I didn’t want calves’ kidneys but the caul of fat around them that he threw away was nearly defeated by a cultural barrier not a language barrier. Now I usually bring a packet of Atora back with me.

Good Heavens! You mean the High Cholesterol Vigilantes have not ruined Spotted Dick by insisting that it be made with canola oil or olive oil? And putting one of those little red “Heart Healthy” signs on the box? Amazing.

I think to get suet I’d have to go ask the butcher for that fat stuff that gets put out for birds. 🙂