Last Sunday we spent a rather lovely day up in London with Tim’s family as an after- Christmas treat seeing a show. Before meeting up with the others Tim treated me to a coffee and cake at Laduree and I really have to share it here! It was an amazing concoction of rose, raspberry and lychee.

In the afternoon we went to see ‘Totem’ by Cirque du Soleil at the Royal Albert Hall It was fantastic. Really made you want t run away and join the circus. The space at the Albert Hall really lends itself to seeing the high flying aerial displays as they occur pretty much at eye height of you are sitting in the circle as we were. I would wholeheartedly recommend this offering from Cirque du Soleil. I have seen another version performed a few years ago at the O2 which was really rather surreal and I think I preferred Totem. It deals with the themes of evolution of man, nature, and the sea and it is set to tribal and African drum type music and a little bit of Latin style stuff too. The Froggy type acrobats are just amazing and the stars of the show for me were a trapeze couple dressed all in green that come on after the interval and perform a trapeze act with no safety cords using each other’s bodies for support that is just so moving and romantic you swear they must be in love for real.

Hope you have a great weekend! xHx

Meet Frankie... The other love of my life. He is an utterly mad Collie crossed with a Cavalier Spaniel. He was a 6 week old rescue puppy from Ireland and we adopted him nearly 2 years ago. He has come crashing into our lives and become very important to us!

Frankie Likes:

Everything! Cats, Dogs, Babies in prams, tripping joggers, Sweet things, Tennis Balls, Walks, Beaches, Wiggling, Doing doggie stuffs, keeping busy! Pistachios, water, mud, pooh, the rain, baths, His doggy friend Buster.

Frankie Dislikes:

Pigeons, the TV reflection in the window, the Doorbell noise, staying inside, foxes and owl noises.

Although I love to cook, I have long claimed that I cannot bake to save my life. I rarely make successful cakes and had never tried baking bread...until... Last weekend Tim and I decided to have a bit of a baking day and cooked up a storm.

Not as difficult as I had expected, the main problem with me and baking is just a lack of patience. It takes so frigging long; I always want to rush the process and poke at it and look at it while it cooks etc. Not great. I was pretty pleased with the end results though. We used Paul Hollywood's recipes from the BBC website for 'easy white bread' and foccacia. I would definitely recommend both recipes they were clear and easy to follow.

The easy white bread was really easy, and I made it even more so by using my ancient stand mixer and dough hooks. It rose to the challenge gloriously and I'm convinced I wouldn't have been able to stand hand kneading the bread enough I have no upper body strength whatsoever. The bread was very soft and springy and it seemed to stay fresh for about 3 days+ which surprised me.

The focaccia was much trickier because the dough was really wet and difficult to handle. It stuck to everything! It's supposed to be like that though apparently, don't ask me why! and the end result had big air bubbles and was nicely salty and oily. Very nice eaten hot or warm rather than cold.

Observe...!

Happy Monday! We had a good weekend this weekend, just spending some time and catching up just the 2 of us. We had a bakeoff on saturday which got quite fraught actually! (a failed first attempt at foccacia had me quite stroppy) I will bring you the photos from this foray into baking tomorrow. The final foccacia was really delicious and I would definately cook it again!

I also had a go at making some soap which smells amazing and is very moisturizing. I'm going to do a super easy tutorial for this cheats soap making method later in the week! (its such a cheat, I hope I don't get any real soap enthusiasts shaming me!)

I am also embarking on a diet this week... wish me luck :-( It is me realising that I may actually have to curb my festive gorging which has followed me into the new year! I am now roughly the size of a young killer whale and so I plan to follow a dukan/ low carb kinda thing to get back to my wedding day weight. You never know maybe I'll have to come up with some dukan recipes to satisfy my cooking compulsion.

Stay tuned for the diet come down!

XHX