July | 2012 | Cider with Rosie

10 things that’ve made me happy this week…

27.07

1. an impromptu brownie bakeathon on wednesday afternoon with jo :) even just five minutes in the company of that lovely lady makes me happy x100. she makes me laugh until my stomach hurts!

2. alfie coming home safe and sound on wednesday morning after being gone for hours on end. after losing our other beautiful little cat tilly in march, i’ve had to work hard not to panic every time alfie leaves the house. in fact, it’s been an effort to keep from blocking up the catflap and keeping alfie tucked up safe in the house 24 hours a day! thanks to the lovely people of twitter for sending positive vibes our way, i really appreciated it :)

3. in the same vein, chatting to some wonderful people on twitter this week has made me super happy.

4. the feeling of jason’s hair when it’s just been cut. especially the really short buzzed bit at the back that’s all fluffy-spiky. that’s my favourite ♥

5. domino’s pizza. yum. we salute you.

6. sunshine! and more importantly, the sun shining on days i wasn’t in work!

7. shopping for a super duper posh new camera! if all goes well (i.e. unless the taxman decides to not be my friend) i’ll be buying a canon eod 600d on saturday and it’ll be arriving on tuesday! in true standard geeky style, i’m already reading everything about photography i can lay my hands on! who doesn’t love a new project, right? :)

8. august being just round the corner, with all the promise a new month brings.

9. using up all the vegetables in the fridge, and not letting a single one go to waste. hurray!

10. the beautiful spot we’re lucky enough to live in has made me smile every day this week. i just can’t tell you how much i love pottering barefoot round the pond in the sunshine! jo and i sat out and ate brownie batter from the bowl on wednesday, and it was pretty much the best thing ever :)

tell me, what’s made you happy this week? ♡

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Shall we eat cake?

26.07

the waitrose weekend newspaper was my reading material of choice during yesterday’s sunny afternoon, and splashed across the front page was an article entitled ‘let them eat cake.’ who could possibly argue with that?’ i thought! waitrose say that cake is britain’s best loved treat, and conducted a survey to find out the ten cakes best-loved by the british public. but it is precisely this ‘ten best cakes’ list that i am going to argue with! i just can’t imagine who in their right minds would list black forest gateaux as one of the best cakes this country has to offer? and surely we can be more creative than to list two types of fruit cake in one very short list (because let’s be honest, christmas cake is just fruit cake you can get drunk on right?)

waitrose’ list reads as follows:

1. chocolate cake

2. victoria sponge

3. black forest gateaux

4. carrot cake

5. coffee cake

6. battenburg

7. fruit cake

8. christmas cake

9. banana cake

10. angel cake

victoria sponge, carrot, coffee and banana cake i agree wholeheartedly with, but where’s the lemon drizzle cake? the devonshire apple cake, the sticky gingerbread?

right, i thought, we can do better than that! so i’d like to create a new blog series finding, baking and sharing recipes for britain’s favourite cakes as voted for by the wonderful folks of the blogging community.

i’d love to hear your suggestions for cakes to be included on our list of ‘britain’s best’, so share your thoughts below… ♡

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Wonderland

25.07

this afternoon i ventured out into the heat of the day, sat down on banks of the pond, and began to read ‘alice’s adventures in wonderland’. with huge blue dragonflies flitting about and the sounds of fish pattering against the reeds floating across the water, it seemed the most perfect place in the world to be reading of rabbit holes and talking caterpillars. no waist-coated white rabbit ran past me though- only a little cat named alfie intent upon eating every wasp in surrey.

i absolutely love all the pen and ink illustrations that pepper the text, and find they capture my imagination just as much as the story itself. aren’t they so lovely? :)

my favourite part so far is from a little poem that alice recites called ‘you are old, father william’, about a man whose jaw is so strong from arguing with his wife that he can bite through goose bones!

…’you are old,’ said the youth, ‘and your jaws are too weak

for anything tougher than suet;

yet you finished the goose, with the bones and the beak-

pray, how did you manage to do it?’

‘in my youth,’ said his father, ‘i took to the law,

and argued each case with my wife;

and the muscular strength, which it gave to my jaw

has lasted the rest of my life.’

what are your thoughts on ‘alice’s adventures in wonderland’? have you ever read the book/seen the film? ♥

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