Gratuitous Cake Shots

Today one of my dreams came true.

Mrs. Roody of Roody’s Creation Shop, mistress of all baked goods and ice creamy delights offered to adopt me were I to feel the need to run away.

My entire family was with me at the time, and rather than them beg me to stay with them, they simply shouted: ‘Take us too, Mrs. Roody!’

She was too soft hearted to say no, which kind of made my dream cramped and rather noisy, but nevertheless there will be more cake.  So that’s always good.

We have to confess to having spent a great deal of time at Roody’s over the last fortnight.

I finally got Jason to go last weekend, and he was so impressed by the quality of the American pancake stack that he is thinking of chucking up our visa application.  If it weren’t for the fact that Emma Bridgewater pottery is hard to get over there, and he will save hundreds of pounds a month because I will no longer be able to collect it, I’m sure he would call the visa company tomorrow and cancel everything.

We have been for pancakes – yum

We have been for ice cream – yum – I have to say that the key lime ice cream is simply the most delicious thing I have ever eaten in ice cream form.

We have been for sandwiches – the veggie club sandwich is to die for.  It has so much flavour you need at least two mouths to eat it with.

We have been for milk shakes – white chocolate better than real chocolate, fresh strawberry best of all.

We have been for cakes.

Oh! Have we been for cakes?

Yes.

Here is a small photo montage of the cakes I have caked:

This is the strawberry and vanilla cake.  I think the thing underneath it involved caramel and cream.

This is called ‘Hello Dolly’.  It is lemon, lime and orange sponge with orange buttercream holding it all together, and then icing studded with dolly mixtures.

This is a kind of rocky road mousse cake with a biscuit base, mousse in the middle and chocolate with marshmallows in on top.

I also had the pie that is full of caramel and pieces of Curly Wurly. It’s called something like twirly wurly curly shirley yum.  Or something. Anyway. It was so yum I ate it before I took a picture of it. Sorry about that.

This is devil’s food cake.  It is glorious:

Here are Jason’s pancakes dripping with butter and maple syrup. This was taken two seconds before he smothered them in whipped cream and ate them.

And this is ice cream being made the liquid nitrogen way.  How cool is that?

About -159 degrees cool.

Finally, and to show you the power of the blog in action. We went for lunch there today and Mrs. Roody proudly unveiled her first ever Cherry Bakewell Cake, made because our very own blogeuse, Belgian Waffle suggested it.

It looks divine doesn’t it?

I confess to not having tried it.  I was far too taken with the orange cake, which again, I ate without taking a photo of, due to the amount of ‘nom nom nomming’ on my part distracting me from my photographic duty.

But I will return and eat Cherry Bakewell Cake and take more pictures.

And it’s all for you dear ones.

Really…

 

Angelic Conversion

Yesterday I was not ill! YAY!

You did not hear from me because I was hurtling down the motorways of merrie olde England to visit my friend Lizzie and her lovely son, Frazer.  We should have spent the whole weekend with Lizzie and Frazer, but instead managed to cram a whole weekend’s worth of fun into one, exhaustingly busy day.

Lizzie lives on the other side of Birmingham.  Birmingham, as you may know, is not only the second largest city in the UK, but it has millions of miles of complicated motorway systems going through, round and under it, sometimes all at the same time.

It only takes me an hour from my house to get to Lizzie’s house, but in that hour I have to negotiate three, separate motorways.  One of the motorway interchanges I have to get round is particularly hair raising as it splits into three different motorways as you branch off.  You have to know before you start which of the three motorways you want, because if you don’t get in the right lane instantly, you will be heading into the darkest bowels of somewhere you never wanted to go, faster than you can say knife.

I have done this wrong on several occasions.  It is my bete noire.  The sat nav is no help at this point either. It seems just as bewildered by the extravagance of choice as I am.  Sometimes I guess and we end up swirling into the vortex. Yesterday I guessed and we did it right.  It was entirely accidental.

If you get it wrong, it is possible to rectify your mistake, but it is a fairly labour intensive effort, and can add literally hours onto your journey, particularly, if like me, you are already inept, and you have three small helpers squeaking along in the back of the car.

They are always convinced that if we have to detour, or if the word ‘lost’ is mentioned, that it is irrevocable, forever, and involves being eaten by mastodons.  I never, ever, ever, confess to being lost.  Even under torture.

I am afraid of being trampled in the rush for the exits.

Anyway, we did alright yesterday, and had a lovely day zooming around Brum on the bus and eating lots of food.

We found a marvellous bakery/tea room called The Fallen Angel.  It is in a place called Harborne.

You must go. You must brave the motorways of the Midlands to get there.

Their cakes are insanely good.  I had the most divine piece of red velvet cake. Like a red velvet cupcake, but bigger, and with more cream cheese frosting.  Need I say more?

It was indeed, as their motto says:

love at first bite.

We had a truly excellent day, but didn’t get home with late, and my invalid status of late has left me fairly exhausted, so instead of blogging I ended up falling asleep over Ernest Hemingway’s ‘A Farewell to Arms’. It only has a little bit of dribble on it. Honest.

And a few stray crumbs of Red Velvet mixture.

Hell on Earth

Significantly less head pain today but my right eye is refusing to play ball. It stays ‘normal’ for a while and then wanders off and does its own thing.  Hmmm.  I feel like Mad Eye Moody from Harry Potter.  None of the necromancers of Broughton Astley will be safe from me, by jingo.

I spect there’s loads of practitioners of the dark arts round here. It’s just the sort of place. Very respectable, quite suburban, buttoned up.

It’s all a front.

In the witching hour they’re all out sowing their begonias into hex patterns and weaving curses into the net curtains.

That’s how it starts you see.

As Terry Pratchett says, you only have to look at the M25 for evidence of the devil’s work on earth.

Other things invented by the devil to plague us on earth include:

• Chicken Tonight
• Argos
• The metal ring pull lids on Illy Coffee tins (I never fail to take off a chunk of knuckle no matter how careful I am)
• Cling Film
• The all pervasive smell of rotting fish in Morrisons, even when you are nowhere near the fish counter.
• Ants who refuse to know their place in the pecking order.
• Raspberry jam with no seeds in it (What is this about? What?)
• Big hair. (I’m thinking of you here, Charles Worthington)
• Wayne Rooney
• Wet look leather leggings on anyone over five stone.
• Fig Newtons

I could go on.  I won’t.  My friend Jo would definitely add mushrooms into this list. She refers to them as The Vegetables of Satan.  I save that title for sprouts.  My daughter would like to add minced beef of any kind, cooked any way.  Tallulah is voting for anything which is not pink and sparkly or made of chocolate.

Votes for things that the devil has put on earth just to torture us with in the comments box please.

Dig This

I love codeine. It is a marvellous thing.  I can now function, albeit at a very low level. I know that were I to stop taking it I would feel ghastly, because it is just taking the edge off, rather than restoring me to normality, but it is enough of an edge that I can stay dressed, and upright and manage my son, in a token fashion.

Mostly I am camping at my mum’s house. This is so that I do not have to drive anywhere until I am sure that both eyes will work together in a co-operative fashion.  I also seem to have hideous cramping pain, rather like period pain, except that I am not bleeding. The cramping could be the codeine I suppose.  I don’t care.  I shall carry on for now.

In other news, my poor mother has now graduated from looking after my children to looking after me, and my children. I was supposed to be taking them away and relieving her of her burden. Instead I am adding to it.

She is very long suffering.

We have not been downhearted though. Mostly we have been gossiping.  This is quite nice.  We have ranged far and wide in our conversations. I am infecting mother with my Emma Bridgewater addiction. She has started bidding on pieces on Ebay. We are trying not to outbid each other. That would be bad.  This leads to complicated discussions about patterns (there are about 2000), and shapes.  My father is in despair.

I think she’s only doing it to get back at him for his carnival glass fetish.

We have also discussed super injunctions. That took approximately two minutes.  Mum: ‘It’s so bloody boring. Who cares?’ to which I said: ‘I totally agree, and I like gossip.  It IS boring.  Let us never speak of it again.’

So we didn’t.

We have had an interesting discussion about Time Team.  Mum loves Time Team.  She watches it religiously every week, and then watches all the repeat shows on The Discovery Channel.  I quite like it, and used to want to be an archaeologist before I went to university and met a lot of bedraggled, muddy refugees in the bar, clutching toothbrushes and talking about grid references.  This put me off.  I wanted pith helmets, cursed golden treasure and my own bedouin tent.  It was not to be.

We were talking about how excited the archaeologists get when they discover a body.  Mum was telling me about one of the programmes in which they found lots of pairs of people buried in single graves, with a bucket between them.  Apparently these bucket burials are very rare, and they found five in the same programme.  Nobody knows what the buckets were for.

I posited my theory that they were either a) hangover victims or b) migraine victims.

It could be true.

As true as anything the real archaeologists come up with.

This talk of graves and grave goods led me to thinking.  I wonder how many archaeologists go for a full interment when they die as opposed to a cremation? 

I would put money on the percentage of interments being much higher than the average man in the street.

I bet they can’t resist it.

I suspect when that Mick, who heads Time Team comes to meet his maker he will have an enormous grave mound, festooned with stripy jumpers and buckets and ornate bejewelled hats.  I  am sure thatPhil will make him one out of one of his old leather hats, with the help of some re-enactment specialists wearing hosen made of woven nettles and stained with hemp tea bags.  Frenzied hemp tea bags.

They will be so excited as they lower him into the grave, thinking of the fun the archaeologists of the future will have working out what the hell we were all doing with sapphire encrusted cowboy hats and jumpers knitted in all the colours of the rainbow.

It will be their gift to the future.

Me and my quaint Victorian Ways

I am poorly.

Soooo uuuu pppppp! Sooo uuuuu pppp! I would cry, if the thought of soup didn’t make me want to hurl.

I have been poorly since Wednesday evening.

At first I thought I had Oscar’s sickness bug. My stomach was doing low dips and swirls and making rumbling in the jungling noises.

But by the time bedtime came around I had an absolute crasher of a headache.  A headache that was making my teeth hurt, and my hair hurt and my joints ache in places I didn’t even know I had joints.

Yar!

I woke up on and off all night, with nasty, tight, thumpy head pains.  By the time the alarm went off I could not see straight and felt as sick as a dog.

Oh welcome, great migraine of ever living pooh ha and rubbish.

Jason was a saint.  He handed me a bowl, gave me some pain killers, doused the lights and crept off into the fog.

I surfaced at about eleven and staggered downstairs feeling very grim.

Being upright was not a great idea, which became apparent after about twenty minutes of drooping around, holding my head and crying whilst only looking at the world through one eye, because it hurt too much to use two.

Jason sailed in with the children.  I did not question this.  He was a knight in shining pharmaceuticals and gave me pink migraleve. 

Yum.

Pink migraleve, for people like me, who have migraines where your entire system shuts down, are brilliant.  Pink migraleve have magic ingredient X in them.  It is something that keeps your digestive tract working.  This is very good indeed.

I took them just in time.

I was not sick.  Oh yes. Oh yes! It is the small victories in the battle against the  vicious migraine pixies that count.

I still could not see straight. 

I waved vaguely at my family and crawled back to bed with a hot water bottle wrapped in a blanket.  I went to sleep with it on my face.  Not the most comfortable of poses, but soothing when the inside of your face is making valiant efforts to climb out of your nose and run wild across the bedroom.

I woke again at six o’clock.

The house was ghostly empty.  My head pain was duller, although my vision was not entirely right. i.e. I could not see out of my right eye, even when it was open.  This kind of thing used to disturb me.  Now I take it in my stride.

I wriggled downstairs on my bottom, just in case. Depth perception is not great when you’re only functioning with half your vision.

I found my phone. I called my mother and said: ‘Do you have my children?’ to which she replied in the affirmative.  This was a relief.  She offered to keep them until this morning.  This was a further relief.  I find driving with only one eye open quite tricky.

I went back to sleep.

I woke up at nine o’clock. Both eyes worked.  I was hungry.  I still had a headache, but it was just a headache.

Frabjous day.

I ate strange things, as you do when you’re hung over.  Toast, and cous cous mainly. 

I felt relieved, and sore.

Victory.

Then I woke up in the night again.  Head going ‘bang. bang. bang.’

Oh blimey.

This morning I was still experiencing the jungle drums, and lots of nausea.  I staggered into my clothes and drove to my mum’s house.  I was determined to get on with my day.

By the time I had parked in her drive, there were small mice wielding knives chopping into my eye socket, and I was shaking.

Not quite the entrance I had planned on making.

I cancelled my appointments, distributed my children and took a lot of codeine.

It is now beginning to work, although I feel slightly trippy.

Better than the knives though.

Much better.

I am sure this is hormone related.  I had hardly any PMT this last week before my period started.  This usually means I am in for a hum dinger of a period.  But I managed for the first two days with regular pain killers and very little bleeding. This is not like me. Not like me at all.

Then, when the migraine started, I simply stopped bleeding, even though I was only on day four of my period.  This is not normal.

I did have a doctor’s appointment yesterday, to talk to her about this kind of thing. I had to cancel it, thanks to this kind of thing.

I will remake it, when I can be sure my head is not going to explode into a million bits if I do more than cuddle a hot water bottle and weep.

Goosey Goosey Gander…

The children and I were having another one of our circuitous conversations in the car this afternoon.  It started, I believe, with Tallulah telling us that her teacher thinks that mushy peas are better than chocolate.

The collective response to this was ‘urgh!’

I told the children about how when I was little, my parents would drive us to Nottingham for the day, and at lunch time we would go to the local market, on the top floor of which was a cafe.  The speciality of the cafe, and a local delicacy peculiar to Nottingham, was huge bowls of steaming hot mushy peas, drenched in mint sauce.

Again with the ‘urgh!’

I told them that every year at Nottingham Goose Fair there are hundreds of mushy pea and mint sauce stalls, and the smell is overwhelming.

After we had all said: ‘urgh!’ again, Tilly said:

‘Is it really a goose fair?’

I said:

‘No. They don’t allow geese on roller coasters anymore. It is against health and safety recommendations.’

Tilly: ‘But is it really a goose fair?’

Me: ‘It is just a giant fun fair, but it used to be a fair where farmers would take their geese to market to sell.  Nottingham was famous for it.’

I said:

‘Do you know how they got the geese there?’

To which Tallulah said:

‘Did they ride them there?’

I was trying to tell them about how they would dip the goose’s feet in tar, and then cover the tarry feet in gravel, so they could walk miles without tearing their feet to shreds. It was going to be very educational.

Instead the children became utterly fixated with the idea of riding geese.

So basically, this is their version of how the farmers would get their geese to the goose fair every year.

They would take small babies, only the lightest would do, so that they didn’t squash the geese.  They would train them to become champion goose jockeys, supply them with whips made of ears of corn, and then saddle them up, so the hordes of baby goose jockeys could race the geese to Nottingham.

Apparently the average goose travels at about fifty miles per hour, with baby on board.

So now you know.

Chaos in a Tin

I saw this in the window of the fishing tackle shop where my mum lives:

It made me laugh a lot.

I don’t care what Sarah Waters’ Says

Winifred Holtby is a miserable, whinging, middle class nightmare.

I speak from bitter experience, both as a miserable, whinging, middle class nightmare of a woman myself, and because I am struggling my way through South Riding, and have been for about three weeks now.

Gawd help us, it is tedious.

Sarah, whose work I greatly admire, says on the front of the book that it is; ‘A Twentieth Century classic.’

I beg to differ.

The only difference between South Riding and Catherine Cookson’s; ‘The Cinder Path’ , or indeed any of her grim ‘oop North classics (and yes, I have read some, which allows me the right to comment) is about 300 pages and the odd plug for independent females who don’t get tizzicky at the sight of beetles in the undergrowth.

It is like Eastenders on steroids.

I was rather sad I missed it when it was televised recently.  Anna Maxwell Martin, who plays the beetle indifferent, cow birthing heroine is a superb actor, as is David Morrissey.  I could not imagine them being in anything I would not enjoy watching.

But after two hundred pages of unrelenting drudgery, bad drainage, lard arsed adulterers and chapel hat pegs I am beginning to count my blessings that I did not see the television version.  I would probably have tried to shut my own head in the garage door afterwards for a bit of light relief.

I console myself with the thought that I am now nearly half way through, everyone is bound to die, which is neat and saves me having to worry about a sequel, and I can cross it off my list of classics wot I have read.

The Queen, The Pope and Bill Gates, sitting in a bar…

Our burglar alarm went on the blink a few weeks ago.

Jason called out the burglar alarm repair man, but he took a few days to turn up.  He clearly wasn’t as worried about someone pinching four thousand books and some hand painted pottery as we were.

Needless to say we had no burglarizing incidents.

Oscar though, was mightily alarmed by the thought of being unprotected.  He is not keen on burglars.

The day the burglar alarm man finally turned up, Oscar was in a heightened state of tension all day, and we had many conversations about burglars, and what they might take, and what if they were lurking under the bed with a pound of poisoned sausages for the dog we don’t have, and a cosh made out of bean tins in a sock.

It was exhausting.

In the end I explained to Oscar that we really didn’t have too much to worry about, because we weren’t rich.  I explained that burglars really only like to break into your house if you have lots of money or jewels, and as we have neither, we would be alright.  It is only rich people that have to worry about burglars.

He said:

‘Like who?  Like the Queen?’

Me: ‘Yes! Like the Queen.’

Oscar: ‘Well, who else is very rich mama?’

Me: ‘Ummm, well. Bill Gates is very rich.’

Oscar: ‘Who is Bill Gates?’

Me: ‘He is a man that made lots of computers and things to put in computers.’

Oscar: ‘Like Dada?’

Me: ‘Err, yes, but richer.  Lots and lots richer.’

Oscar: ‘Right.  Who else is rich?’

Me: ‘The pope.  The pope is very rich.’

Oscar: ‘Who does he poke?’

I explained about the pope.

Oscar: (very happily): ‘Well that’s alright then, because we are not the Queen, the Pope or Bill Gates are we mama?’

Me: ‘No. We are not. Nor are we ever likely to turn into them, so we will be safe.’

Oscar: (gleefully): ‘And they are the ones who have to worry about their burglar alarms working properly instead of us.’

Today we were driving home when Oscar and Tallulah got on to the subject of burglars again.

Oscar: ‘Don’t worry Tallulah, we are not the Queen, the Pope or Bill Gates, so we are going to be alright.  The burglars will burglarize them first.’

Tallulah: ‘Great! Mama. How much money does Bill Gates have?’

Me: ‘Oh, Tallulah, billions and billions of dollars.  Too much to count.’

Oscar: ‘Is that more than eight thousand?’

Me: ‘Yes. It is.’

Oscar: ‘Well, the burglars are going to be very happy when they go round to his house then, aren’t they?’

Nasty Little Bugger

Oscar: ‘What is wrong with me, mama? Do I have anewmonia?’

Me: ‘You mean pneumonia?’

Oscar: ‘Yes! Yes! Do I have it?’

Me: ‘No Oscar. You just have a nasty stomach bug I think.’

Oscar: ‘Like a beetle inside my tummy that doesn’t like me?’

Me: ‘Ummm, kind of. It’s a teeny weeny thing called a germ.’

Oscar: ‘Oh! O.K.  Will I die of it, or will I live to the end of days?’

Me: ‘You will definitely live to the end of days.’

Oscar: ‘That’s alright then.’

Me: ‘Yep.’

He trots off, and then a few minutes later he comes back and smacks his hand on the table saying:

‘Mama!  I hate that dirty little bugger in my tummy!’

Me: ‘You mean that bug?’

Oscar: ‘Yes! That’s what I said.’

I think I liked the first version better.