Category Archives: Spring

Welsh Cakes, & Your March Book of Days

And now it is March, and nearly spring, and since it is very late at night, I will make this short and sweet: Here is your printable Convivio Book of Days Calendar for March. It’s an astonishingly busy month: the vernal equinox in the Northern Hemisphere, plus Ramadan and Holi and Easter and all the minor holidays that generally come with March. The first of them comes today: It is St. David’s Day, sacred to Wales. It’s a day for leeks and daffodils, but even better: Welsh Cakes:

W E L S H   C A K E S

It’s not uncommon to find recipes for Welsh Cakes that call for regular granulated sugar, butter, and nutmeg, but the traditional recipe will add lard to the mix, use caster sugar in place of the regular sugar, and will be flavored with the more mysterious flavor of mace. If you want the best Welsh Cakes, stick to the traditional version. If you can’t find caster sugar, make your own: pulse regular granulated sugar in a blender until very fine. Do not use powdered confectioners’ sugar, which has added corn starch.

3 cups all purpose flour
½ cup caster sugar
1 ½ teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon ground mace
½ teaspoon cinnamon
½ teaspoon salt
6 tablespoons lard
6 tablespoons butter
¾ cup dried currants
2 eggs, beaten lightly
3 to 4 tablespoons milk
granulated sugar

Whisk together the flour, caster sugar, baking powder, mace, cinnamon, and salt in a mixing bowl, then work in the butter and lard with your fingers until the mixture has the texture of course crumbs. It’s ok if some larger chunks of butter remain. Mix in the currants. Add the beaten egg, working it into the mixture, adding just enough milk to form a soft dough that is not too sticky. Wrap; chill in the refrigerator for 30 minutes or until you are ready to make the cakes.

Turn the dough out onto a floured board and roll to a thickness of about ¼”. Using a biscuit cutter (scalloped, if you have one), cut into rounds. Gather up any remnants to roll out again and cut more cakes.

Heat a lightly buttered skillet (cast iron works great) over low to medium heat, cooking the cakes until each side is lightly browned (about 3 to 4 minutes… if they’re cooking quicker than that, lower the heat). Let the cakes cool for a minute or two, then set each in a bowl of granulated sugar, allowing sugar to coat both sides and the edges. Best served warm, split, with butter and jam, or, for a more savory treat, with cheese and leeks, at a table set with a small vase of daffodils.

SHOP OUR SPRING SALE!
Winter is quickly melting into spring and at our online catalog right now, you may use discount code BLOSSOM to save $10 on your $85 purchase, plus get free domestic shipping, too. That’s a total savings of $19.50. Spend less than $85 and our flat rate shipping fee of $9.50 applies. Traditional Easter goods from Germany have been arriving, and new fillable handmade paper eggs should be on our website by Monday.  CLICK HERE to shop; you know we appreciate your support immensely.

A STORY FOR WINTER
Before Winter completely melts away, here is a short bedtime story for a chilly night that I recently read for Stay Awake: Bedtime Stories for Kids & Sleepy Adults, from the Jaffe Center for Book Arts. It’s called “The Magic Porridge Pot,” and you’ll find this story (Episode No. 11) and nine others in the Stay Awake Library at the Jaffe Center’s Vimeo Channel. If you like what we do there at Stay Awake, please consider following the series on Instagram @stayawakebedtimestories … I do love this storytelling project, and it would be awfully nice to see the project get to a hundred followers, at least! Thank you!

Image: Our cover star for this month’s calendar is a painting called “Springtime, Harlem River” by Ernest Lawson. Oil on canvas, circa 1900 – 1910 [Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons].

 

Spring Green, or Your April Book of Days

And here now is your belated Convivio Book of Days calendar for April. Cover star: “Beech Trees in Springtime,” an 1897 oil painting by Christian Zacho. It is filled with the ephemeral spring green of newly leafed trees, which, if you are lucky, you will be seeing a fair amount of in the coming weeks, as spring comes into its own. An annual bit of wonder and renewal. We see it even here, in this strange green land, in an albeit subtle way: passing by a stand of bald cypress, for instance, as we drive across the state on Alligator Alley. It is a fine time to take a drive or to take a walk and see something new and fresh and green.

We find ourselves, too, in the midst of an important week, across cultures and spiritual traditions: Ramadan continues and at sundown tonight, Passover begins. And it is Holy Week, a week of complexity and mystery in which the forty days of Lent, which we’ve been immersed in since Ash Wednesday, will come to a close. It began last Sunday with Palm Sunday. Thursday will bring Holy Thursday, or Maundy Thursday, when tradition would have us visit three churches in the moonlit night, Friday will bring Good Friday, when we commemorate the passion of Christ, and Saturday the vigil through which we wend our way toward Easter.

What I know about Ramadan is not much and what I know about Passover is perhaps just a bit more, and is mostly is in relation to my Catholic upbringing and to Passover’s connexion to the Easter story. I know that Passover commemorates the liberation of the Israelites from their slavery in Egypt, and I know what a friend told me once, which has always resonated with me about the holiday: “We are traveling through the desert with our ancestors via a table filled with metaphor and symbolism.” The meal is the seder, the same meal that Jesus celebrated with his disciples in the upper room on that Holy Thursday night before he died. Pesach is the Hebrew name for Passover, and Pesach informs the name for Easter in many languages. Hence our Italian word for the day and season: Pasqua. And while Ramadan roams the calendar, falling a few weeks earlier each year, Pesach, Pasqua, and a full- or near-full Paschal moon are all constant companions based on the timing of the spring equinox.

The Last Supper is the Passover meal in the upper room that is commemorated at the Mass for Holy Thursday. Each year, as Lent begins, I think to myself, “This is the year I’m going to do things right.” I imagine myself taking the time to give the forty days their proper space and time, to be more mindful, and give them more reverence. And each year those forty day zip by and I find myself here, at this junction where Lent runs headlong into Holy Week, and I realize I just have these few days left to make things right. Holy Thursday is my night to do this. I drag Seth along with me, if he has it in him, on a Holy Thursday pilgrimage that my grandmother taught me: as the rest of the world is contemplating sleep, we will head out into the night and visit three churches. The churches that know Grandma’s ways will keep their doors open late into the night, or even throughout the night until morning. The moon is our companion through this pilgrimage, along with a few other hearty souls who visit the churches with us. The churches will be dim but warm with candle glow and quiet and the presence, to me at least, of all the loved ones I bring with me in my heart. I sit, I kneel, I pray, I ponder. It is a night like no other, the strongest bridge I know between realms. We each, of course, bring to it what we bring, but this is what my Holy Thursdays, my Maundy Thursdays, are like, and I feel truly at home in the mystery.

IT MAY BE NOT TOO LATE to order things from our website for Easter. We ship US Priority Mail, which is two days to most domestic destinations, so chances are good you’ll have your order by Saturday. Locals, of course, we can deliver to you or you can come pick up at our front porch. It’s a little too warm these days to ship our German chocolates for Easter, but locals: I don’t know that there’s anywhere else nearby where you’ll find German milk chocolate bunnies and German marzipan bunnies. We have a few left of each. Plus Ukrainian pysanky, wooden bunnies and splint wood baskets and paper mache eggs from Germany, handmade egg-shaped candles from Sweden…. many Easter delights await you at Convivio Bookworks! CLICK HERE to shop. And use discount code BUNNY at checkout to get $10 off your purchase of $85 on all our offerings, plus free domestic shipping!

AND WON’T YOU JOIN ME this Friday, Good Friday, via Zoom for Real Mail Fridays? It’s a weekly online social I host for the Jaffe Center for Book Arts. Good Friday is an odd day for a social, I know, so the approach I’m planning is this: a more subdued soundtrack for the first two hours, and then we’ll devote the final hour of our gathering to a most sublime recording called “Lamentations: Holy Week in Provence.” It’s by the Boston Camerata. “Lamentations” is a most beautiful piece of music, and we will play it uninterrupted from 4:00 Eastern to the close of our online social. We do bill Real Mail Fridays as a letter writing social, but the folks who join us each week from around the globe do all kinds of interesting things during our time together. We’ll begin as we always do, at 2:00 Eastern. Come and go as you please but do consider joining us for “Lamentations” beginning at 4. No matter your faith tradition or your beliefs, it is a most special way to mark the day. CLICK HERE to join us Friday between 2 and 5 Eastern.

 

Image: “Beech Trees in Springtime” by Christian Zacho. Oil on canvas, 1897. [Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons.

 

Spring Market on Saturday

Locals! Please come see us this Saturday, the First of April (no fooling) at Johan’s Jöe, our favorite Swedish coffee house, for the Johan’s / Convivio Spring Market. Johan’s will have springtime treats like semlor, the delicious cream-filled buns of Sweden made only during Lent, along with the best coffee in Downtown West Palm Beach (or maybe anywhere), and all their other wonderful offerings. We’ll be there with all of our handmade artisan goods for Easter and springtime from Germany, Sweden, and Ukraine, plus German chocolates, candies, and marzipan, my mom’s hand-embroidered tea towels, and who knows what else.

Official hours for the Spring Market are 9 AM to 3 PM, though I plan to be there in time for Johan’s 7:00 opening time and at the end of the day, I’ll be packing up from 3 to 4… so there is some flexibility in those hours. We’d love to see you, so please come by! German wooden bunnies, pyramids and incense smokers with bunnies, handmade candles from Sweden, real egg pysanky from Ukraine and hand carved crosses from there, too. As for the semlor, as I understand it Johan’s just serves them on Saturdays and they only make so many and once they’re gone, they’re gone (so maybe get there early!).

For all you folks who are not here, you may peruse our springtime (and other) offerings at our online catalog, and when you order online you also can take advantage of our online springtime special: Use discount code BUNNY at checkout for $10 off your order of $85 or more, plus get FREE domestic shipping. CLICK HERE to shop!

Johan’s Jöe is at 401 South Dixie Highway in West Palm Beach. It’s the southwest corner of Fern Street and Dixie, and if you approach from the east on Fern, from Flagler Boulevard, you’ll get to see some of my favorite local murals. My suggestion? Make a day of it: Visit the wonderful West Palm Beach Green Market first, then come to Johan’s for coffee and Convivio shopping. We can help fill your Easter basket with the most unusual things!

Your Convivio Book of Days calendar for the month of April will be a little late! Maybe that is my All Fools Day prank on you. I promise to get the new calendar to you as soon as I can.

John