A countryside wedding – as a guest – Part 2

After the gorgeous ceremony, the guests returned to the bride’s family house just down the lane…

Canapes and photographs in the family garden, with much snooping into the various corners of summer houses, vegetable patches, water features and scented gardens… Heavenly…

Then the grand removal of hats and we all went into the second marquee for dinner…

Trio of desserts (banoffee pie, chocolate mousse and raspberry jelly)was a great hit…

    

The cake was cut, the dances were danced and a glorious day was had by all.

Brain + Pregnancy = Empty Head + Full Fridge

My latest pregnancy trick reared its ugly head when the supermarket online order arrived yesterday. I'd gone to the loo halfway through the order and had clearly completely removed all memory of what I'd already put in my 'basket' and pretty much started the shop again.

When it arrived we had:

• Three pots of olives!!
• Cherry tomatoes
• Whole tomatoes on the vine
• Kleenex tissues
• Sainsbury's own tissues
• 12 mini scotch eggs
• 12 mini basic scotch eggs
• 24 yoghurts in various flavours and sizes
• Value kidney beans
• Normal kidney beans
• Value tinned tomatoes
• Normal tinned tomatoes
• Frozen chips
• Frozen potato wedges
• 18 soft buns
• 12 pitta breads

And it went on...

The classic thing was that I was clearly (at one point on the order) on an economy drive and so the duplications didn't show up as I had ordered the cheap and the normal of each thing!! Our fridge is bursting and luckily the Boy is taking it in good humour (not least of all as the order was on his credit card!). I did warn him that I'm not the best at the shop at the moment. Usually all my cravings come out in triplicate but this time I tried to rein that in and this is what happens!!!

Ah well - we've got a load of scotch eggs if you're up for a picnic any time soon!

On your Marks…

I know I’ve already waxed lyrical about some of the wonders of the British High Street.

Then the icon that is M&S turns 125… And wonders will never cease…

There’s homewares… Not to mention the jams, cordials and fizzy pops that aren’t on their website…

Silk underwear with retro styling to accentuate those curves and give a bit of oomph to your retro frocks…

    

And as if that weren’t enough… The frocks come strutting by…

Not one of these is over £100 and not one of these is made of polyester or anything else yucky. Utterly inspiring and utterly timeless.

And then there’s the accessories…

An online museum of the history of their shop, packaging and products is worth a little wander too…

As per usual, though, I won’t be held responsible for any credit card bashing that arises as a result of this post… Though I’m getting VERY close to nabbing one of the orange/black/white tulip frocks myself…

Bump needs a break

My belly at 14 weeks! Off now for a week’s sojourn in *sunny* Somerset so will get back on track on our return.

Arrivederci!!

A countryside wedding… As a guest

So as not to bombard you with too many images of this divine wedding at once, I thought best to give you the eye candy in easy-to-manage bite size chunks…

A Saturday in June…

A walk to the church

Following the sea of hats…

A beautiful ceremony with sunshine to follow…

A car poised to take the couple to the reception

Bridesmaids in silver silk with butterfly print

Confetti, top hats and feathers… A wonderfully quintessentially British ‘do…

An amble down the hill to the bride’s family’s house for a garden party to put the Royal Horticultural Society and the National Trust to shame.

Chelsea and Hampton Court Flower shows have little to say against this little taster… 

More to follow…

Storm clouds a’brewing

I got sunburnt this weekend.

This was the view from the car on the way home yesterday.

Then today I burnt again (seriously, will I ever learn that my Irish heritage laughs in the face of Factor25??) and then it hailed on my journey home.

And then I saw this picture that I snapped last weekend.

And all was right with the world.

Atop the cake

I have a very good cohort of friends. Friends who enjoy (!) being put on the spot and asked for things in the shape of intensely stressful once-in-a-lifetime requests…

Such as…

Merry Christmas!

Please will you make my wedding cake?

Jenny is the mother of my godchild (one of the flowergirls) and was something between a live-in nanny, surrogate aunt and all round best friend when we were growing up. A family friend, she turned 21 at our home when she lived there for 18 months when I was about 7. She also happens to be the daughter of an incredibly talented chef and made my sister’s Christening cake in 1986. It seemed only natural that we ask Jenny to bring out the skills again.

What… is it really such a big ask??!?

As you will know from my various meanderings we rather dilly dallied on the style and structure of what we wanted. In truth, as long as it didn’t look like any of these we honestly didn’t mind. Which wasn’t exactly helpful to a nervous non-cake designer.

So we got our thinking hats on, our design books out and came up with this 1950s retro look on the left as our favourite but with the pearls on the right rather than the stripes. For some reason, living with hayfever for 27 years has rather put me off flowers-in-food, so we decided on compact layers, and four at that!

Due to the Boy’s nut resistence and yet my LOVE of walnuts in cake, the layers were decided thus:

• Fruit cake (without whole nuts but moistened with ground almonds)
• Fruit cake (with whole nuts and moistened with ground almonds)
• Carrot cake without nuts
• Carrot cake with nuts

 

All recipes, instructions and general brilliance were sourced in the wonderful Mich Turner’s Spectacular Cakes who also founded the Little Venice Cake Company from where these images are taken.

The final result is the rather unflattering image of me here… with FIMO cake toppers made by yours truly as described here.

 

 

 

Needless to say, we were over the moon.