Let Them Eat Cake

Oh my word, busy busy day - wine and cheese in the morning and tea and masses of cake in the afternoon! Perhaps if it had been the other way around, I wouldn't have had to break the golden rule of never using a spitoon but even I couldn't manage 6 wines before lunch, well at least not without doing the dreaded  "aeroplane nod" halfway through the afternoon session, you know that move where the only reason you wake up is because your chin and your chest collide with a spectacular follow up head jerk, and so sacrilege, spitoon use took place I'm afraid.

We started at 09h00 with a quick talk by Mary Burns of Adrahan Farmhouse Cheese, gorgeous cheese but quite strong, granted I was in the front row (Virgo move, I can't help it) but the smell was fairly overwhelming, especially for that early in the morning.

And from that gentle introduction to the day, we moved onto wine at 09h30 with Colm McCan, sommelier at Ballymaloe House. The focus for the day was, gasp, French wine - honestly I've no words for how confusing this whole French business is, why they can't just tell you what you're drinking I fail to understand - instead you're just expected to know that a white wine from Burgundy is made from Chardonnay (are you impressed, I now know that) - anyway it's no wonder I've never ordered a French wine off a list, you've to have second sight to be able to order anything...............Colm did a great job of trying to break it down for us and gave us a spreadsheet showing each appellation and the grapes that are allowed to be grown there, I might have it blown up and gilt edge framed, I'd be utterly lost without it.

On top of all that, once you've worked out which blasted area you're in and which grapes they're allowed to grow there, you've then to know something about the actual producers because, and I just can't get my head around this, all the vineyards are graded and have been since 1855 and under no circumstances can any changes be made, so a vineyard could be graded as a Grand Cru (the best) even if they produce wine that's remarkably similar to a bottle of vinegar, why???

I keep thinking that the whole Afrikaans/Latin/Zulu thing at school has really backfired on me now - what I'd do for a few French-minded brain cells...........................instead I've made a complete pig's ear of my notes and covered them in phonetic scribbles so that, with any luck, I'll be able to pronounce the names again at some point in the future without making a complete fool of myself - Pouilly Fuissé = poolay foosay and so on.

We tasted (and spat out, I know, horrors) 6 wines - 3 from Burgundy and 3 from the South West which is my new favourite area of France - for some reason which only the French could explain, the South West region does not fall under the Appellation Controllee and so they're allowed to put the type of grape on their label, the joy, so you can just pick it up, mumble your way through the still-unpronouceable name and then move swiftly onto the lovely bold print that says Sauvignon Blanc or whatever, YAY!

Lunch in the Cafe - such a gorgeous day although the wind was a shocker, lots of sunshine but sneaky little breeze that was cold, cold, cold. Having seen the list of items to be made in the afternoon demo, and of course the tasting session that would follow, I managed to restrain myself admirably at lunch and just as well.



Lunch in the Café and the sunshine



Afternoon demo was with Darina and has to be one of the highlights so far and not only because there were so many delish things to scoff at the end - I just love baking and all the little fiddly things they did to make the cakes look fantastic appealed to me in a big way.

We started at 14h00 with a chat by Sean Moran of Sip Tea and honestly, the shock - I'm a BIG tea drinker, multiple cups per day and it turns out that all these years I've been drinking dust, dust! Did you know that? All the tea used in tea bags is tea dust and about 98% of the population drink tea via a tea bag rather than whole leaf - well, the tea companies are scoring in a big way because it's all the off cuts that go into the bags - Sean showed us the contents of a tea bag next to "real" whole leaf tea and you wouldn't believe the difference.

The school only use whole leaf tea and so I've been trying to get my head around the whole straining thing and all that and it must be said, it's lovely, lovely tea.

From there we moved onto the main event - an afternoon tea demonstration and for that we were shown how to make Tunisian orange cake, orange and almond cake, a classic sponge with raspberries and cream, baby meringues sandwiched together with cream, cupcakes with all sorts of toppings, rum and raisin cake, crumpets, drop scones and miniature sandwiches filled with ham, smoked salmon, egg, chicken, mozzarella, roasted vegetables, all sorts - just look at the piccies below, it was all so cute and so good - the stampede for the tasting was unprecedented, I had a flashback to East Africa and the annual wildebeest migration - they had nothing on us............bottom line, I ate too much. You wouldn't believe the mountain of butter that was whipped, whisked and beaten during the afternoon - cows and cows and cows worth.

It was Claire's birthday today, one of my housemates, and so her turn to be embarassed at the end of demo - gorgeous cake and happy birthday sung by all and then God forbid the cake came home with us to the White Cottage and largely languished in the kitchen table, completely at a loss no doubt as to why it was receiving so little attention but we were just stuffed.

Back to the kitchens tomorrow and I'm making bread, the dreaded tortillas, the doubly dreaded mayonnaise, sorbet and quesadillas - it's going to be a busy day.