Summer Pud - The Irony..........

Woke up this morning to absolutely the most gorgeous day - clear blue skies and sunshine but oh my, so so cold, felt like Frosty the Snowman by the time I'd walked from our cottage to the kitchen and then had to make Summer Pudding whilst jogging on the spot to warm up, the irony was exquisite. It was quite sad really because to make this pud, you've to line a bowl with thin slivers of Victoria sponge cake and then fill it up with berry compote so I made the most gorgeous sponge cake and all I wanted to do was smother it in butter cream icing and eat it, not shove it into a bowl - just waiting for the compote to be ready with all the  sponge cake sitting on my cutting board was stiff lesson in self discipline (in which I'm pleased to say I scored about 95% and only because I was worried that if I ate too many of the bits my summer pudding would end up being a winter pudding with insufficient coverage......). Anyway, the pud has to spend the night in the fridge before being de-bowled and plated up so with any luck it'll do it's thing tonight and end up pretty tomorrow, fingers crossed.

Straight on from there to crab bashing - had to pull his head apart first and his little eyes were still there although he'd lost a few legs along the way which were just lying on the board beside him. I'd much rather have just closed mine instead of having an eye clinch with him but since I had a 2 pound weight in my hand to bash him open and with my fingers being fairly important to me right now, it was eyes wide open and anchors away with the weight pounding, poor little dot. I wasn't feeling too sorry for him ten minutes later, the finnicky-ness of trying to get all the bits of meat out, my word, I fiddled around for ages with a skewer trying to get everything out - he might have looked like a big crab but I tell you he was suffering from a severe eating disorder in terms of what was on him, he really should have munched more when he was still wandering sideways across the ocean floor.

Turned him into a little layered salad once it was all finally done and most of my morning had gone, tomato at the bottom, Monsieur Crab in the middle and avo on the top, yum.

First thing this morning I started making candied peel - for the record, can I just say here that I never thought of myself as a girl that would make candied peel, it's a 3 day saga and I simply don't have the patience but it's on the dreaded Technique List so I've got to knock it on the head at some point and since I made lemonade yesterday and squeezed an orchard's worth of oranges and lemons in the process, it seemed the perfect opportunity to get this particular task out the way. So soaked them in water and salt last night, boiled them for the better half of today, went and scooped out the insides after demo this afternoon and finally tomorrow get to coat them in syrup, cut them into bits, coat them in caster sugar or chocolate and be done with it.

Lunch was wicked today - fab chicken salad, roast kuku with all the trimmings, those brilliant turnips from yesterday topped with caramelised onions, and lots of cakes made by the lucky people that didn't have to bastardise theirs into summer pudding. A few of the students also had to roast guineafowl which was delish, I much prefer them in this way - I know them as "bush chickens" from the sticks and they're very beautiful and I love them but they have a nasty habit of waking you up at 04h30 in the morning, screeching at each other - if birds were nationalities, guineafowls would be Italian, non-stop chatting, all talking over each other, you can just imagine them gesturing wildly with their wings and cursing one another in true style, the ones that lived outside my house in the bush were most certainly Serengeti Sicilians...............

Don Corleone and the "family".............

Afternoon demo was with Rory and there were some truly fab things on the menu today, lots of chicken salads using the left overs from lunch and I love chicken salads, and lots more cakes, we're on a full blown, fast lane cake run this week, long may it last. So we learnt to make Thai-spiced squash soup with noodles (a whole new world in terms of butternut soup, this one was fantastic), spiced chick pea soup, Vietnamese chicken salad, a brilliant Mexican chicken salad with tortillas chips (which has an ingredient list from here to Midleton), curried chicken and mango salad, chicken and mushroom pie (your man's favourite thing, this'll be made many times over), tomatilla salsa, chocolate cake, coffee and hazelnut cake, orange cake, lemon curd sponge, strawberry jam and chocolate twirls.

The choccie twirls were a bit of a bugger - Rory showed us these quite near the end of demo when to be honest, attention levels are often doing a bit of a Titanic immitation but when he casually mentioned that making a baking paper cone to then create chocolate twirls was almost certainly to form part of our final Technique Exam, ears were pricked and there was a tangible leaning forward in chairs moment and frantic requests for him to make a second one so that we could watch more closely - it all got a bit technical after that and honestly I had a bit of a geometry class flashback (and that's sadly quite a flashback), it was all angles and triangles and what have you and in the end you've a cone, I'm off to practice one at home tonight (because I really do need to get out more) and with any luck I'll manage to make a cone that looks like it should and not like it got taken out by a terrified 18 year old having their first stab at getting their driver's licence...................and if it works then I'll be twirling away with the melted choccie tomorrow although I fear most of our first attemps will possibly be more rural than refined. As Rory said, getting this right could well come between us and a good night's sleep over the next few weeks.........

Brilliant tasting session, that Mexican salad might require a shopping list the length of your arm but by God, it's good!

No theory tomorrow because we're off on a "school tour" on Thursday (in a big bus, more flashbacks - actually really looking forward to it, some amazing stops scheduled and a change from the normal week) to a whole bunch of local farmers, markets and suppliers and so we're cooking tomorrow as normal - bread for me, another cake, rescuing my summer salad from it's night in the fridge, a Mexican dish and the final phase of Operation Candied Peel for my sins, busy morning I think.

Off to boil the kettle and make a hot water bottle now, I've been hugging the radiator since I got home, my new BFF and I think this relationship really has a future!