Christmas cake isn’t much of a holiday custom in the U.S., though it is more so in Japan, in as much as Christmas gets attention there beyond a modest amount of decoration and KFC. Actually, I don’t remember any to-do about KFC on Christmas in the early ’90s in Japan. Maybe it’s really a Tokyo thing — that’s often enough mistaken for the entirely of Japan by gaijin observers. Or maybe I wasn’t paying attention.

I digress. Yuriko made a Christmas cake this year.

Much chocolate, a healthy serving of cherries, and, you’ll see, a few dashes of edible gold. It’s so good it’ll hardly last until Christmas.