Ayesha Curry’s Cast-Iron ‘Fruit Cake’ is foolproof when dessert time is tight

The trolls inside the Conservative tent

The Conservative Party of Canada has a troll problem. And it’s coming from inside the tent.

Once, trolls existed only in imagination. They were figures of mythical proportion, big and small. They lived solitary lives under bridges, in caves, or forests. They were considered dim-witted and mean. Best avoided.

Today, they are real, unavoidable, and ubiquitous on social media. They are anything but solitary. There are tribes of them out there and tribal is how they think and post. As for dim-witted and mean, others can opine but they are uniformly mean and dismissive.

Mean to anyone who disagrees with their views. Dismissive of any view but their own. They distribute questionable, at best, facts and opinions grounded in hostility towards anything or anyone deemed disagreeable or heretical to their world view.

Pretty, purple and pernicious plants plaguing Prairies

After noticing mysterious purple flowers popping up in little patches around the Wolseley neighbourhood last summer, Vic Penner didn’t give it too much thought.

However, this summer, the deceivingly beautiful flowers were impossible to ignore.

“They were just everywhere,” said Penner, 37.

Wolseley isn’t the only neighbourhood being overrun by the plant.

Executive exodus continues at Shared Health with three recent departures

Manitoba’s provincial health authority is looking for its fourth chief financial officer since 2023 and additional replacements after the recent departures of three executives.

Kinew says Manitoba stands with PM in trade war with U.S.

The Manitoba government and business leaders are rallying behind Prime Minister Mark Carney’s plan to fight back, after a sudden collapse of trade talks between the U.S. and Canada sparked a new salvo of U.S. tariffs on some Canadian goods.

On Saturday, after Carney vowed to respond with retaliatory tariffs, Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew said his government stood “100 per cent” behind the prime minister’s plan to respond to what Kinew called U.S. President Donald Trump’s “unjustified and immoral” tariffs.

“History will not be kind to Donald Trump, so we should never appease him,” Kinew said. “We should fight back, which is what Canada is doing today.”

Kinew met reporters for a brief news conference at the legislature on Saturday afternoon, about an hour after finishing a call with Carney and the other premiers. There was a “really strong sense of unity” on that call, Kinew said, and emphasized that he backs the federal decision to “walk away from what would have been a bad deal.”

Ayesha Curry’s Cast-Iron ‘Fruit Cake’ is foolproof when dessert time is tight

While I’m not sure how or when it started, there is no denying that I have an extremely mean sweet tooth. It shows up all the time in the way I cook savory food — but it goes bananas when I get to dessert.

None of this means that I need my sweets to be complicated. The desserts in my cookbook “The Seasoned Life” are all easy to make. This one in particular is something of a cheater recipe because it uses a box of cake mix. Still, I love this recipe because not only is it foolproof (after all, it’s pretty hard to mess up a boxed mix), but it’s a good trick to have when you need to make a dessert and are pressed for time.

The finished product is like an upside-down cake served right-side up.

Cast-Iron ‘Fruit Cake’

Winnipeg team behind national LGBT monument spent six years bringing it to fruition

The Winnipeg team behind a national monument recognizing the LGBT Purge were in Ottawa to celebrate its official unveiling Friday.

Thunderhead is the work of local artists Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan, Liz Wreford and Peter Sampson of Public City Architecture, and knowledge keeper Albert McLeod, who served as cultural adviser for the project.

The team beat out 31 international submissions for the project, which is permanently located at 201 Wellington St. in Ottawa along the Ottawa River, in view of Parliament.

“We are a beacon internationally around the world of what democracies can do about inclusion, about human rights,” McLeod said.