Today with Claire Byrne
RTE Radio 1
Anyone for some Gur cake? The name is lost on me, but the recipe sounds familiar – crumbs, raisins and flaky pastry.
There was more than a smidgin of nostalgia about the baking feature with Claire Byrne.
Drop the hard news and rewind to bun nirvana with baking specialist Tony Kane and retail consultant Barry Savage.
They even brought choux swans into the studio, their necks bending slightly in the heat - don’t you love the pictures you get on radio?
The talk turned back to Gur cake. In Blackrock – it’s fancy there and they call it Chester Cake - and in Ringsend and Swords (not at all fancy) they call it Wet Nelly.
Gur cake is fruit and cake crumbs and flaky pastry, but to my mind it was what my father called a Flies’ Graveyard and my mother called a fruit slice.
Then there’s Tipsy Cake, you could be breathalysed after four or five, they laughed.
Barry likes a proper bun.
“When did fairy cakes become cup cakes?” he asked, all mock outrage.
“The ones you see now, you wouldn’t know whether to eat it or stick a feather in it and wear it as a fascinator.”
Doughnuts – or gravy rings, as we call them – should be dusted with sugar, not the American ones, fancy, fancy, fancy.
It was a mouthwatering trip down memory lane that prompted a lively debate on what you call what.
Anne from Cork messaged the programme to say that Gur Cake is called “Donkeys’ wedding cake” where she’s from. Odd as flies’ graveyards.
From buns in the oven to buns in the oven - it’s the time of year when pregnant female bats gather to have their babies in maternity roosts.
Ecologist Donna Mullen says if you know a bat roost, get up an hour before dawn and watch the mothers to be swarm.
“It gives you an adrenaline boost,” she sighed.
Bat mothers don’t get it easy. The baby is a third of the weight of the mother.
“I’m 10 stone it’s like me having a three stone baby,” she said.
“The girls need all the help they can get.”
Hers is a love story to the bat. Did you know each roost has its own song? A national anthem sung by the father bats... But it’s the mothers who teach the babies their song.
