Ball of Wool

It was Rachael's 30th birthday yesterday so I hired a knitting shop for her and a few friends to go to in the evening. If that all sounds a bit tame, you should know that it's the only knitting shop in London with a fully licensed bar! We also went for dinner beforehand (curry, what else?) so by the time the evening was over we were all nicely wobbly, and Rachael had spent the GDP of a small country on wool.

Oh, I baked a cake too...

Cake shape courtesy of the amazing "any shape as long as it's round" cake mould I bought to make this.

Scare Bear

The Bears Arms is a pop-up pub that appeared in my brother's flat for his birthday. He went to a lot of effort getting a friend to build a flat-packable bar, and we bought in a load of different beers and lagers from a local micro-brewery.

Since he went to so much effort I thought I'd invest some time in an appropriate cake...

Here's a micro-sketch of the cake I drew while we were at the micro-brewery. I could only find a pink pen at the time.

Once I got home I drew it out as a full size (not life-size!) template to lay over the cake for cutting to shape...

...like so.

It looks a bit cuddly at the moment, but it'll hopefully fiercen up. If fiercen is actually even a word.

Some marzipan and coloured icing later, and it's *starting* to look a bit more cross.

...and there we go. I like that he's a little bit boss-eyed :-).

As it turned out, the partygoers where a bit more fierce than the cake was. Maybe revenge for the severed hand cake?

Belgo Beers

On the spur of the moment we decided to go out for moules and frites last night at Belgo Centraal in Covent Garden. The mussels were amazing, but for me the enourmous selection of Trappist beers took the centre stage. Didn't get any shots of the food, but here's some of the beers...

De verboden vrucht - 8.5% abv, brewed by De Kluis, the same company that brews Hoegaarden.

Steenbrugge Dubbel Bruin - 6.5% abv. The guy on the label is Sanctus Arnoldus who was a medieval monk. Apparently he got the local villagers drinking beer instead of water because the water was boiled during the brewing process which meant it was less toxic than water at the time. Yay for beer!

Trappistes Rochefort. Brewed in a monastery in Rochefort, Belgium. Comes in three flavours - 7.5% abv, 9.2% abv and 11.3% abv. I can't remember which one I had as things were getting a little bit blurry at this point.

Hackney Empire

I was on my way back from the shops just round the corner from my flat when it started snowing heavily. The traffic instantly came to a grinding halt and I snapped this picture. I know it's no David Bailey, but there's something very Christmassy about it and I really like it.

Cod of the Weekend

My dad hired a boat to go fishing in the Thames Estuary last weekend, and so half a dozen of us arrived bleary-eyed at the dock under Rochester Bridge at about 05:00 to cruise out in the buffeting wind and driving rain for a day of rods, hooks, worms and fish guts.

Once the sun came up and the weather calmed down it turned out to be a whole lot more fun. We all caught our fair share of dogfish and whiting, although I managed to blag what felt like a whale when I hooked it. When I eventually pulled it up to the surface it was apparently a large (for the season) cod. Large enough, in fact, for me to win an award in a competition that weekend that I didn't even enter, and get my photo in the local paper!

Cod of the Weekend! And a new nickname: "Mick".

Note: There were no other codling caught on the trip. Graham East is telling porkies.

Anyway, once I got that little fella home (the cod, not Graham), I filleted him down and made some nice fish and chips and home-made tartare sauce.

Whiskers and Biscuit

My brother and his girlfriend have recently adopted a couple of zebra finches, and they've lent them to us for the weekend.

Well, they've gone on holiday and asked us to baby-sit them. Same difference...

They're very cute, either way.

Norfolk Broads

It was a friend's sister's 30th birthday last weekend and a bunch of us hired a couple of boats on the Norfolk Broads for a little celebratory holiday. I figured that since they'd been nice enough to invite me along, I'd do something nice and make a cake in the shape of the boats we were hiring...

This was the initial design after learning that we'd be spending the weekend on a barge...

...except on further digging I found we were staying on something more like this so I had to go back to the drawing board with very little time left to make it.

Here's the basic sponge cake, all jammed-up and ready for the marzipan.

Marzipan layer added.

Iced and decorated.

In the end, the boat was small, cramped and very very warm at night. However the beer, boating and company more than made up for it, including the massive game of water-pistol pirates in small lake off the side of the main river, which the locals really weren't impressed with :-).

I also slightly overestimated the amount of cake for the number of people, so the leftovers were given to the swans that had been following us all holiday, but they weren't impressed either when it sank without a trace. Too much icing, maybe?