This weekend foodie gathering at Hampton Court Palace!

 
I have been keen to get to Hampton Court Palace for years and I think this is actually the best motivation to go to the palace. Combining food with a lovely grand palace and some King Henry the 8th history sounds like the perfect way to spend a day out of big bad London. The organisers of the festival have a 2for1 voucher going on so click here and download yours and go and see Michelin star chefs work their magic with a beautiful backdrop.

Use special code: foodies241 when booking online at www.foodiesfestival.com or on 0871 230 5573. 

Decorating saviours

 

The abundance of good quality decorations is not very easy to find in Londontown, in Canada you can go to several bulk food places and find tonnes of cake decorating items at bargain prices but in the UK you have a SMALL selection and it is super expensive. I will never understand how these things work sometimes? 

Anyhow, the good old supermarket and cash and carry where I buy my supplies for Le Dolci does carry my favourite decorations made by Silver Spoon.  The brand carries the best decorations at a reasonable price and the lovely people at Silver Spoon also contact me every once in a while to see if I would like to trial their products, yes please! 

So, I received a little package in the post and used their decorations for a batch of cupcakes to go to some sweet little 5 year olds! The best part of this job is seeing cute kiddies enjoying cakes. And also the adults too! I did have 4 cupcakes for breakfast the other day (all for quality control purposes, of course!) but do think that this job could get dangerous as my metabolism starts to decrease. I will have to go to D's personal trainer soon to get me some abs of steel like he is getting - wow - a personal trainer does work and I have witnessed real abs on a non-gay man! 

Keep the cake addictions going people of England, just make sure you work it off by dancing or walking or doing the London Marathon (a fabulous event that happened yesterday!) Next year I should make cupcakes with little medals on them and hand them out to runners - they deserve it! 

Thanks again to the Silver Spoon peeps for sending me sweets - my customers have given it the thumbs up as have I.

xx

Grouchy at Gaucho Grill

We took some friends from Toronto to Gaucho Grill on Charlotte Street last week and it was probably the worst service we have (we were 7 at the table) have had in ages!

I could do a whole rant about how poor the service would be but it would be a pointless waste of time.

Needless to say we pulled the manager aside and told her the problems we were having and from then on we had new servers allocated to us (the trainees were banished) and we got a very large discount on our meal. I would've rather had no discount and good service but it did help as we were there for a big night of dinner and if we had more attentive staff they could've easily sold a few more bottles of vino to us too.

After our chat, the manager watched our table all night and made sure we were well taken care of after the rocky start. It was still not a great meal but it was probably the first time that a manager actually cared about a complaint and did everything they could to rectify it. So bad points for the horrible service and then a few good points for the manager salvaging some of the restaurant's reputation. The embarrassing thing was that we were raving to our friends at how great this place was and then our poor thirsty tourist friend waited about 40 minutes for someone remember he ordered a beer (after being reminded about it 4x).

So steer clear unless you have patience and want to eat meat that has a zillion carbon footprint miles stamped all over it. 

Happy Birthday to me

After having a horrible birthday this year, I decided to change the date to make sure that my new birthday was with people that I loved. So indeed it was post-poned a few days and I spent it with some of my favourite people in a small country cottage with great food, wine and a lovely home made birthday cake.

The simple things in life are the best things and I am glad I moved my birthday date a few days forward! A dirty seagull swooped down and ate some chips from my plate on my birthday this year -gross (that was only one of the bad bits!). My special Easter/Birthday lamb dinner was prepared with love and was probably better than most 5 star restaurants and my banana birthday cake with one candle (to signify turning 21, of course!) was just what was needed for a great birthday.

Thanks to the Bunny for making my special cake and to the D&E for a fantastic weekend!

Hope everyone had a happy Easter with loved ones.