We recently brought a Victoria sponge cake to a friend’s birthday celebration and we may as well have sprinkled the gathering with gold dust, it went down so well.
It came from the Woodstock Café in Phibsboro and had raspberry curd in between the layers. Raspberry curd? Well yes, says Angela Ruttledge, who read a mountain of cookbooks before discovering this particular detail. “I love lemon curd and figured there must be other kinds of ‘curd’ . . . it is delicious with the icing. I might have to call it something else, though, because people seem to be put off by ‘Victoria sponge’. They have to taste it before they are won over.”
Ruttledge, a former lawyer, has written vibrantly in this magazine about fitness and has begun to develop a range of healthy takeaway foods, preserves and desserts for Woodstock Café devotees, as well as for customers at her sister’s restaurant in Clontarf, called Moloughney’s. For €4.90 she is selling a selection of favourite main courses from the Woodstock menu, including Mauritian Chicken Curry and Veggie Bean Chilli with sides of creamy mash or vegetables. You might buy her tomato and basil sauce with a chilli kick for €3.25, or pepper and onion relish, which is good with cheese, white meat or fish, for €4.50. And you can order gluten-free scones, bread or tea brack as well as the cafe’s own brown bread or sourdough loaves, and take them home to be slathered with buttery lemon curd (or just eat the lemon curd off a spoon, like I did).
These condiments are handsomely packaged and reasonably priced as well as yummy, so we suspect Ruttledge may have found another calling in product development. Definitely worth a try, from the Woodstock Café at 156 Phibsboro Road in Dublin 7 (01-8300265) or Moloughney’s, 9 Vernon Avenue, Clontarf, Dublin 3 (01-8330002).
- We always lookforward to seeing work by Paul Mercier for his sharp, contemporary intake and breadth. The East Pieropens on the Abbey stage in Dublin on March 23rd at 7.30pm in repertory with The Passing, which opened earlier. Try to see them both.
A youthful response
Against the background of all that is happening in Libya and throughout North Africa and the Middle East, Amnesty International’s annual Voice Our Concern initiative is well timed. Students around the country have been exploring human-rights issues through art, and the results of their projects are going on display in Amnesty’s office in Dublin, from next Wednesday until March 31st.
A school in Longford has made a 12-panel stained glass window with each panel representing a different human-rights issue. They also made a documentary of the process. Students in Gort have used thousands of individually painted toy soldiers to create a sculpture designed to represent young people fighting for change. At Newpark Comprehensive in Blackrock, Co Dublin, students created a frieze showing their class group. The piece is painted in a uniform way except for one aspect or detail on each portrait – the point here being that everybody needs the freedom to define themselves and not be labelled or corralled into a group identity.
All engaging work that both students and teachers will enjoy seeing. Visit Amnesty’s offices at Sean MacBride House, 48 Fleet Street, Dublin 2.
