eccles cake & a little venting

A couple of days ago, I went to the Little Mermaid bake shop and they were passing out advertisements for a new product called Eccles Cake. The word was in katakana "ekuruzu ke-ki". Since the ad talked about it coming from the Northwestern part of England, I went onto the internet to find out more info on it. Here's a little history of Eccles Cake from a website called "Pride of Manchester" with a recipe, too.

I bought one today and it tasted great, really flaky, kind of like eating an apple pie without the apples...

Here's the recipe from the Pride of Manchester website:
Ingredients
500g flaky pastry
25g melted butter
Nutmeg
50g mixed peel
100g sugar
200g currants

Method
On a lightly floured surface, roll the pastry thinly and cut into rounds of about half a centimetre thickness and 10cm diameter.
Warm the butter in a saucepan and mix into it the sugar, currants, nutmeg and peel.
Place a teaspoonful of this mixture into the centre of each pastry round.
Dampen the edges of the pastry. Press the edges together sealing in the currants etc.
Place upside down on a greased baking tray and press them down a little.
Make three small cuts across the centre of each cake.
Brush with water and sprinkle with a little sugar.
Bake at 425F or 220C for 20 minutes.

Enjoy!
Do you have door-to-door salespeople where you live? We do...lots of them. And they are the most obnoxious people! They will hound you until you buy something from them...

There are the newspaper salesmen who, as soon as people move in, they are at your door trying to sell you a subscription to their paper.

And there are the salesmen, salesmen...trying to sell something...last night, the doorbell rang at about 8 p.m. I usually don't answer the doorbell because I hate dealing with these salespeople, but I was expecting something to be delivered, so I picked up our inter-com...it turned out to be a salesman. The guy was rambling on and on about something. Now I speak Japanese, but that doesn't mean I understand everything. I told him, "I don't understand what you are talking about, no thank you!" and hung up.

He then went next door to ring their bell. I then went to stand by the peep hole of our door, so I could catch a glimpse of what this guy looked like, just in case I needed to call the police or something...he then came back to our door and with something sharp (hopefully not a knife...) made lines on my sticker which says "no soliciting!" but really politely in Japanese....as I heard him vandalizing our inter-com, I really wanted to go out there to give him a piece of my mind...but there are a LOT of weirdos nowadays and you never know what is going to set one off...so, I held my tongue...
I know they have to sell things to get paid, but just because they can't sell anything, they don't have to take it out on my inter-com....