Shopping In Ireland

In my last posting, I promised to show you closeups of the craziest cake I'd ever seen. Connor and I found it in the grocery store. But unlike in the States, our local grocery store has shelves dedicated to Celebration Cakes. Now, mind you, these are not in the bakery section. These are on shelves, next to the decadent bars of chocolate they sell here. I'm told that this is a relatively new invention in Ireland.

With the introduction of the supermarkets, all your little neighborhood bakers started closing. (And butchers, fish mongers, etc.) So while you used to be able to run down the street to your family bakery and get a celebration cake, now they are packaged and shelved in the supermarkets.

Of course there are still bakery sections in the supermarkets and they might have some refrigerated cakes (one Irish chain called Superquinn has a gorgeous selection of breads, cream cakes and desserts), but not as many as the choices on the shelf in our now-owned-by-an English-company supermarket.

When Connor spotted this cake, I couldn't believe my eyes. I was partly scared to feed it to him. The preservatives that it must have had, the crazy amounts of sugary toppings, and the way-too-big size of it were all good reasons I could have said "No." But I knew that it was such a spectacular sight, that I had to buy it. And take pictures of it. And turn it into this blog posting. What a life! ;)