Deutsche Welle has “an interesting article”:http://www.deutsche-welle.de/dw/article/0,1564,1391096,00.html about the Edelweiss Pirates, an anti-Nazi German youth movement whose members carried out numerous low-level acts of resistance and defiance during the war. “A feature film”:http://www.palladiofilm.de/palladio/englisch/projekte-e.htm about their exploits played at the Montreal film festival in September.

The election, kid’s birthday party, and work in general, have delayed my Christmas Cake making to the coming weekend. Still, I’m now on track for Saturday morning. Making Christmas Cake generates several challenges. The first is the absence of edible glace cherries (which tend to be way too sweet here, if you can manage to find them) and appropriate chopped peel (can’t get the Whitworth’s kind, just candied muck). I overcame these problems last year rather well, by substituting dried cherries and dried strawberries. Expensive, but worth it. The second is keeping it moist enough. I’ve finally acknowledged that our oven overcooks everything, so am just doing everything at 50 degrees lower, and a bit longer — hope it will work. I’m also going to add more butter than my recipe says (I use Katie Stewart’s from the 1975 edition of the Times Calendar Cookery Book). But the unsolved problem is how to get it boozy enough. She demands just two tablespoons of brandy, which is nowhere near enough for a 3lb cake; so I have been doubling it the past couple of years, as well as sprinkling it over the cake sporadically in the weeks before Christmas. Still not enough. Should I be soaking the fruit in brandy beforehand? Should I be using even more brandy? Does anyone have experience of adding Port? While I am in my non-cake eating life all-but-a-teetotaller, I like boozy cake, but am constrained by the fact that I don’t want it to be so boozy that my kids will reject it. Advice? (And if anyone can tell me an easy way of getting edible glace cherries and Whitworth mixed peel in the Midwest that’d be great too).

Update: here’s the recipe (as modified by me from Katie Stewart):

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There’s a nice piece in the Times about Irish emigrants returning home from New York because they think they can do better these days in Ireland. (Many of them do, though very low-skill service jobs are done by emigrants from Eastern Europe and elsewhere.) The article gives some sense of the surprise many of them feel when they see how much the country has changed. That used to take a generation or more to happen — one of our American cousins, returning to Ireland in 1978 after nearly fifty years in San Francisco, lasted only three days before the presence of televisions and the absence of livestock in the house caused him to fly home in disgust — but now returning emigrants can get culture shock after only a few years away:

bq. Counselors in immigrant advice bureaus on both sides of the Atlantic say that many returnees will have a rude awakening in Ireland — especially those who were stuck in the underground economy in the United States, unable to travel abroad for fear of not getting back in. The Irish government now puts out brochures warning that they will find not the Ireland of memory, but rather a fast-paced multiracial society where their dollars are weak against the euro and affordable housing scarce.

I go back as often as I can, in part to inoculate myself against misplaced nostalgia for the ole Green-n-Lovely. With typical good timing, I left Ireland in the Autumn of 1995, more or less exactly when the things were really starting to pick up. My younger brother had left the year before that, coming to college in the U.S. on an athletics scholarship. When he graduated, he convinced a big financial services company to sponsor his work visa and he got his green card last week. By contrast, my youngest brother and my sister left school a few years later and never gave a thought to emigrating. Neither of them even bothered to go to University and both have good jobs. Quite a transformation from a world where, around 1990, Career Guidance Counseling amounted to a recipes for leaving the country efficiently, and getting a Summer job stacking shelves in a department store required a family connection.