"Do you have those, too?" *Beware - Lots of pictur

I've never heard of the tree cake, although i'd love it to be introduced. it looks so pretty and yummy.

I have no idea about reed roofs, but there are some thatched roofs around. I haven't seen many though, think they're dying out.

The country signs usually just say "England". The signs for towns and cities, though, say "Welcome To..." along with a list of the towns they are twinned with (never understood the twinning thing) and town association stuff. The Chester sign proudly proclaimed that Chester was a member of the Walled Cities Club or something.

I've seen a badger sign and a fox sign, i think. No frog sign. it is cute.

I have never in my life seen a reed roof.

The city/town signs usually read: "You are now entering [i:d3bb81f193]x[/i:d3bb81f193], pop. [i:d3bb81f193]y[/i:d3bb81f193]"
We don't have any frog signs, but we do get deer crosing signs.

The tree cake is new to me, it looks a bit like a multi-storey donut.

Thatched rooves aren't uncommon in the rural areas near me. They seem to be more frequent around Gloucestershire (where my brother lives), which is an area which has seen a lot less urbanisation than where I live (in the london commuter belt)

I've seen a frog/toad sign before, I remember because of it's inherent weirdness. I've seen a lot of deer signs [img:eedc2e3c8b]http://z.about.com/d/german/1/0/N/H/vz142.jpg[/img:eedc2e3c8b], horses and one or two duck signs (can't find pics of those two). Never a tank sign, though - low aircraft is the closest. [img:eedc2e3c8b]http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/_teaser/low_flying_aircraft.gif[/img:eedc2e3c8b]

Every town/village has a sign saying that you are entering it. High Wycombe is twinned with Kelkheim in Germany, in case you wanted to know.


edit: added pics

Of course, we have the famous Beware of Elks sign:
[img:10fe024d37]http://www.vv.se/filer/Hitodit/img/vagmarke_alg.gif[/img:10fe024d37]

Upon entering a new town:
[img:10fe024d37]http://www.vv.se/filer/bilder/vagmarken/1_5/1_5_3.gif[/img:10fe024d37] (city of Nyköping, pronounced knee-SCHU-ping)

I am familiar with reefed roofs, but it's not very common here. Not that in to cakes, so perhaps tree cakes exist in Sweden too, but I've never seen one.

Now... Thatched (reed or straw roofed) houses are still around in England, although as they're quite costly to maintain, they are dying out. In France they are extremely rare, and are called "Chaumières".

We have a kind of tree cake here, and ours really look like pine trees :
[img:922ef32e43]http://perso.orange.fr/moulindelamousquere/images/broche09.jpg[/img:922ef32e43]
but they are made the same way, on a spit over a fire, and can be enormous. They are rather a regional thing, and frankly don't taste that great...

As for sign posts, the ones in France look like this :
[img:922ef32e43]http://news.bbc.co.uk/media/images/38776000/jpg/_38776421_condom150ap.jpg[/img:922ef32e43]
(found you a nice funny one, Condom is a town not far from Toulouse, and the town sign is regularly stolen, can't think why ) This example is when you enter the town, and when you leave, it's barred. This is part of the highway code and signals a speed limit of 50kmph and the end of that limit, unless otherwise mentioned.

The funniest animal sign I have seen is one at the Ferry port in Poole (it may exist elsewhere, but I have never seen it) with a dogg pooing, something like this one :
[img:922ef32e43]http://phenomena.cinescape.com/multimedia/Master_Site/Positron/Master_SiteArticle2198.jpg[/img:922ef32e43]

I have also seen sheep signs (usually all cattle are represented by a cow) and on the motorways here, there are wild animal passage (underground passage) signs, with rabits, toads and wild boar.

Thanks for the topic Hsing, great idea !

one of my favourite English signs has to be the old people sign:
[img:4d3720a301]http://www.uwm.edu/Dept/CUTS/signs/elderlys.jpg[/img:4d3720a301]
We have nicknamed it the granny perverts sign for obviouse reasons.

wile looking for that sign I also found these:
[img:4d3720a301]http://www.uwm.edu/Dept/CUTS/signs/otters.jpg[/img:4d3720a301]
[img:4d3720a301]http://www.uwm.edu/Dept/CUTS/signs/16s.jpg[/img:4d3720a301]

I've seen hedgehog crossing signs before in England but could only find ones from other countries when i googled it :?

In the town that i went to school a lot of the street signs had been designed by school children, unfortunately I can't find any pictures of them on the website or on google. I may ask a friend to send me a pic of them to give you, they are pretty good. However i could find a picture of this:
[img:4d3720a301]http://www.pendle.net/Colne/Pictures/Colne-KirkbrideMural1-33p.jpg[/img:4d3720a301]
I believe this was done by the cunning artists at my own school (park high) for the year 2000. not quite the same but its pretty good.

**laughs long and hard at the granny perverts sign** I had fogottent that one. In France they have signs outside retirement homes too, they list the number of points for various combos (granny with shopping trolley: 150 points...)

Oh all right, I'm kidding. But they should have.

On the subject of tall cone-shaped cakes, here is the traditional French wedding cake (the pic is rather big) made of choux pastry (like those cream puffs, remember, but bigger) filled with cream and covered in caramel. This makes them simultaneously soggy from the cream filling and rock hard from the hard caramel. I hate these things, does it show ? We had an assortment of cakes from a friend's tea room for our wedding, the best in town, yummy ! But not at all traditional (i.e. they actually were pleasant to eat and didn't break any teeth)...

In England, the traditional wedding cake is a very dense fruitcake, reputedly hard as dwarf bread, and looks something like this (the slice, not the cake) :
[img:263245b972]http://nrfnkiva.smugmug.com/photos/11110950-S.jpg[/img:263245b972]
And even if it's not a fruit cake (i.e. if the bride and groom actually like the people they have invited) it's usually presented as a 3 (or more) part tiered cake like these fine examples, and from what I have gathered, it's more or less the same thing in the US, with more frills, more food dye and even less taste [size=9:263245b972](isn't that applicable to almost anything ?)[/size:263245b972]

There's a tendency now to have the different layers made from different types of cake. One layer fruit, one madeira with butter icing and one chocolate to accomodate all those who can't stand fruit cake.

It's funny, I can't stand fruit cake but love clootie dumpling which is similar (but not to be confused with it or called fruit cake. Ever. It's a scottish thing.) I blame the cherries, candied peel and alcohol they insist on shoving in.

I've never seen the tree thing before. For all that effort surely it should taste wonderful. Disappointing otherwise.

[quote:9fd4580a75="jaccairn"]I've never seen the tree thing before. For all that effort surely it should taste wonderful. Disappointing otherwise.[/quote:9fd4580a75]
In the French case, it is incredibly dissapointing.

Bah, I can't seem to find any pics of Philadelphia signs. No tree cakes, or thatched roof cottages though. We are Trogdor proof.

[quote:1516c4ba8e="Hsing"]About the reed roofs, there are communities in Northern Germany where it's city law to use them for your roof. They're handy for those areas for a number of reason. One may be that you don't want hundreds of tiles flying around when the storm season comes - a bundle of stray hay has never killed anyone.
[/quote:1516c4ba8e]
I did not know people still used reed roofs. I thought that they had died out.

Here's about dumplings, basically they're balls of dough, they can be prepared different ways, and have many different ingredients and flavours... it's almost as vague as "pudding"

[quote:75acc6fa1c="Bradthewonderllama"]Bah, I can't seem to find any pics of Philadelphia signs. No tree cakes, or thatched roof cottages though. We are Trogdor proof.[/quote:75acc6fa1c]

That comes from everything there being made out of cream cheese.

About the cake:

I know I mentioned this somewhere before (I think in the old boards) but isn't there a cake eaten in Asia (A nice singapore lady gave me some once) called thousand layer cake made from loads and loads of eggs?

In Ireland we don't have multiple layer cakes like the tree cakes but we do have the heavy fruit cakes which are for some reason eaten at most big celebrations for example Christmas, weddings and christenings. - although as someone mentioned more and more people are now having three different types of layer for their cakes.

About the thatch:

I have seen both reed (think bull rush) and thatch (straw) on the roof of houses - it probably on most Archetypal postcard people around the world see of Ireland.- A country cottage with some old bloke leaning over his half door peering out. The other 'popular' one is the one entitled 'rush hour in Ireland' -A man on a country road is standing in the middle of a herd of sheep (oh the japes and Jests of my country have to be seen to be believed!)

Thatching is deffinately more common in rural areas were the tradition is being kept alive. I think that more people probably would still use this method for roofing here if they had the oppertunity to as its eco- friendly and a really good insulator. The only problem is the huge insurance premiums that people have to pay if they have it done!

I love that explosive one ! Another one I like is the one with the car flying off a cliff...

[img:110ba7dfa7]http://www.highwaycode.gov.uk/images/signs125.gif[/img:110ba7dfa7]

When I was little, I used to wonder about this one, because the way I saw it the tyre tracks crossed and I couldn't work out how that could happen.

[img:110ba7dfa7]http://www.highwaycode.gov.uk/images/signs102.gif[/img:110ba7dfa7]

And from a French-English point of view, this one is very funny

[img:110ba7dfa7]http://www.highwaycode.gov.uk/images/signs134.gif[/img:110ba7dfa7]
(Verge in french means penis, so 2-mile-long soft ones is quite amusing :;D )

And one I like here is the "Mud" sign on muddy roads that says "Boue", at which we always say "ahhhh !"...

Duh, did you never watch the Inspector Gadget cartoons? It's obviously so slippery that the cars go-go-gadget wheels crossed. However it is now stable and the wheels have retracted back to their normal state.

Obviously!

Yeah, see Garner, Grace and I are weird and Ben's a TV geek.
Grace, we should start a WWI group... (Weird Women's Institute)

And no, carrot_man, it's just badly drawn with a strange perspective so the left line seems to cross the right one, but it doesn't... Duh to you too. :roll:

You mean the lines do NOT cross? Funny, I always thought they did.. and found the author/artist silly to draw it that way..
So I guess I'm weird too

I love the English signs that say "Change priorities ahead."

Here they have a special Epiphany cake called "Galette des rois" or "Couronne des rois" ("small round flat thing of the kings" or "crown of the kings") which looks like this

[img:5142ead7b7]http://www.croissantsdefrance.com/images/epiphanycake.jpg[/img:5142ead7b7]
(Galette version)

or this

[img:5142ead7b7]http://www.slowtrav.com/france/images/food/kw_galette1_med.jpg[/img:5142ead7b7]
(Couronne version)

A "feve" or "bean" is hidden inside it, often a ceramic figure, and it is the prize that designates the king or queen for the day (hence the cardboard crowns given out with the cakes). Traditionally, the youngest person present hides under the table on which the cake is cut, and decides who gets which part.

There's quite a good article here about the tradition.

Those resemble King Cakes from New Orleans and all the rest of Luisiana. They're really popular on Fat Tuesday. They hide baby in them, most of the time, and the person that finds the baby, or other prize, gets all their drinks for free. At least in some places.

:lol: Hmmm, baked baby pie