Baking cakes without flour

For artistatlarge and sinfulkitten, by request.

I use two recipes taken from Claudia Roden's Book of Middle Eastern Food (one of my favourite cookbooks; I have worn out one copy, and the replacement is looking the worse for wear!). She describes them as Sephardic in origin, and intended for Passover (hence the absence of flour). ( Recipes behind the cut )

She also gives a recipe for Coconut Cake, which also sounds good, if you like coconut.

No rugby player left behind

Saturday was our last day in Orkney as a threesome; on Sunday durham_rambler and I were to deliver Gail to the airport for her flight home, and then catch the ferry ourselves to Shapinsay. So we had to pack in as much as we could, which meant a visit to Yellowbird Gallery, and then on to Kirkwall.

Over lunch at the garden centre, we picked up the local paper, and realised we had stumbled into the middle of the big news story of the summer: Northlink Ferries were asking passengers to produce photographic proof of identity. We hadn't noticed this on our way to Orkney, as we had sailed with the rival company, but on Tuesday durham_rambler and I were due to catch the midnight ferry to Shetland. He had his bus pass; I had nothing.

The two local papers were full of claim and counter-claim, different stories about the ridiculous effects of this recently introduced requirement. One - if I am remembering correctly - claimed that a local football team had been allowed to travel to mainland Scotland, but that Northlink had made difficulties about letting them return (except for the man who was able to produce a Kirkwall library ticket). The Orcadian countered with Northlink's denial, under the headline: "No rugby player left behind". A visiting rugby team had cut it fime and nearly missed the ferry, but had made the crossing without difficulty, except for the member who had left his documentation in the car in the car-park, and had returned for it and caught the later ferry, accompanied by a colleague who had volunteered to wait with him. The letters column carried a letter from the man with the library ticket: he had witnessed this, and was not amused.

Reading between the lines, this tightening up of identity checks was nothing to do with security, and everything to do with stopping non-residents benefitting from the cheaper fares charged to islanders. A Kirkwall library card was clearly acceptable as proof that someone who didn't appear on the electoral roll did, nonetheless, live in Orkney. We could only hope that Northlink would be equally flexible about whatever proofs of identity we could offer them.

But there was nothing we could do about it now; so we went off to be tourists. The Cathedral has a fine collection of tombstones arranged around the wall (I didn't take pictures, and can only find this detail and another here, which does at least show a trace of the beautiful square lettering: why isn't there a book about these?)*, and we browsed these until the brass band became too much to bear (not bad, just loud), and we moved on to the Earl's Palace, the Bishop's Palace and the secondhand bookshop.

And ended the day, as I've already said, with a pleasant meal and a magnificent sunset.

And of course there was no problem getting our ferry ticket endorsed to the effect that the Northlink office staff believed that we were who we said we were - although we didn't know that until Tuesday morning.

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ETA: * Another Flickr set - some beautiful details, and enough examples to indicate how the same themes repeat. But still no pictures of the stones as a whole, and no indication of the distinctive lettering.