His and hers Superga, and they match Simon’s parents’ house too :)
These photos are pretty much in chronological order. The festival is in its second year and this was the first time I had been. Having been to quite a lot of music festivals this summer it took us a while to adjust to the fact that this isn’t really a music festival. This festival is focussed more on food, vintage, and dressing up, with only part of the entertainments being music, the rest being talks, plays, poetry, cabaret, etc. Once we accepted all that we ended up having a brilliant time! I’d love to go again.
My food highlight was a rare tuna steak sandwich with wasabi mayonaise and rocket from Fin and Flounder followed by a sheep milk ice cream from Shepherds. I really enjoyed the talk by Alys Fowler on foraging and bought her book The Thrifty Forager
We have the keys to our new place! It is very exciting :) There is so much to do to it but the house has a really nice layout, we are stripping everything back and assessing what we can afford to do. There used to be a separate ‘house’ section to this site when we were building a house which I plan to resurrect over the next few days (I’ll mention when it is up). I will share more pictures over there.
We sold our house! We are so happy :) A move has been a long time coming, some folks might remember that a year ago we were trying to build an eco house and how it almost happened but then did not work out because there was an obscure covenant that needed paying off. That land was then sold, and we put our other little house on the market, and this time around we’ve been looking for a place to buy rather than build. A young couple bought our house and the whole sale went through very quickly. I hope they are very happy there, it is a lovely first home. We have also found a place to buy, we get the keys at the start of August, can’t wait! In the meantime we are staying with my dad which is really nice, it is so peaceful. The cats seem to be slowly adjusting to the move too, we covered his sofas in our blankets, partly to protect them but also so there would be familiar smells for the cats.
I got fixed on the idea of coming up with a grownup striped jelly recipe that I could make both for my sister’s birthday, and the wedding of two friends where they were having a pudding competition. I experimented over about two months. Striped jelly (or ‘jello’) isn’t particularly a new thing but I didn’t want to use packet jelly. I did many flavour experiments by mixing juice with gelatin: grape, mango, pear, spiced blackberry, apple, strawberry, cherry, and probably more I can’t remember. It seemed to be that the more acidic fruits wouldn’t set that well, and some of the combinations were a bit odd. I also experimented with my jelly mould and bought this swirling shape cake tin
This is the first experiment in the mould, strawberry and cream layers.
After all the experiments we decided the best flavour was cherry and condensed milk, here it is at my sister’s birthday, we had it with local G&D’s ice cream. It went down well and was gluten free as is needed for half my family. I left it in the fridge until the last minute and it was difficult to get out of the tin so the bottom layer got a bit damaged but I don’t think that mattered.
And here at the wedding. It was really fun to try the other desserts too, the really professional looking green cheesecake is by my friend Emilie, so tasty!
I don’t have a recipe to share per se as the instructions would vary depending on what the juice and setting agent of choice is, the basic idea is that the stripes are done by alternating two different jelly flavours, waiting for each layer to set before adding the next. There are however some tips that I do have:
