Sunday 26 December 2010

BUON NATALE!

Have you got any Christmas cake left? I know: silly question! I remember, as a little kid, being intrigued by the fact that as the cake got eaten and the acreage of icing got smaller, the decorative personnel: Santas, snowmen, Eskimos, fir-trees and robins all began to huddle together like dispossessed citizens!

In Venice (where we hope, belatedly, to arrive today) the cake-top residents tend to be of a rather more religious disposition and are usually made of marzipan.

Ventian Christmas Cake

Now I really like marzipan, but I honestly don't somehow think I could bring myself to eat Mary, Joseph and the Baby Jesus. Perhaps they are always given to any atheist who happens to be present at tea-time...

Photograph: © Brian Sibley 2009

4 comments:

Suzanne said...

Hope you manage to get away Brian! And I hope that the weather in Venice is slightly more clement than it is here! I realise how extremely lucky I was to get home last month - just in time!
buddl: a crowd of people in a stable

Boll Weavil said...

I know you're probably annoyed at delaying your trip to Venice but it does mean, for the rest of us, we've had your company much more over Christmas.As you jet off, finally, I want to say what a great series of posts we've had - sheer joy to me as your primary medium is radio (my own first love).It's been wonderful to have conversation on some of my standard seasonal dramas illustrated by gems like today's Pauline Baynes work.As for the cakes... I am minded to recall my own Silver Wedding cake which doubled as a Christmas cake for that year. As one of our guests stepped up to survey the ornate work - bedecked with a photograph of the two of us on our wedding day somehow printed into the icing, she said "Very nice but don't give me a piece of him" Charming :-)

SharonM said...

Hope you are on your way, at long last and that you find lots of cake to eat, without turning into a cannibal.

Arts and Crafts said...

:) Ha, ha... In Spain, and specially here, southeast and south, we have a large record of christmas cakes and all kind of sweet things, marzipan of course (in different ways), but I never saw a Holy Family for a xmas dessert... I'm very near to the atheism, but I confess that I would have many scruples to... you know...after all is the family of a humble carpenter, I like too the mule and the donkey, even when they are totally apocryphals.