cake du jour - cut and come again

Blogger won't let me upload a drawing of the cake I was going to write about, so what the hell; I'm going to write about one I don't have a drawing of. Fiendish, or what?

Cut-and-come-again was Grandma's recipe. It sat in the recipe box on a yellowing index card, written in her careful pharmacist's handwriting. I don't actually remember ever having it at Grandma's, but the evidence that it was hers is there in the inky handwriting, stuffed between folded pages from magazines and pieces of grease-spotted scrap paper. Unlike Christmas cake it was a delight to eat direct and uncooked from the mixing bowl: a loose batter lumpy with cut peel and scented with mixed spice. Cooked, it was a light fruit cake from which fat raisin crumbs would drop as you sliced and then sliced again as its name demanded. A very slightly dry, dark-golden cake which perfectly accompanied a cup of tea and the interminable wait for the football results to finish on a dark winter's Saturday afternoon.