Halloween: Of Ghosts and Pumpkins

Boo!

So I'm back (finally!) with a Halloween themed bake that I made for our department charity bake sale this week. The theme was to bake something scary for Halloween, and I was thinking "well... do you mean scary as in boo! scary or scary as in....scary..ly bad?" Because, you know, I can do the latter pretty well.

I just don't put it on my blog... :)

The Ledbury, London

I'm not gonna lie, I was pretty excited about the Ledbury. And this isn't really a review, because who needs a blogger review when you're ranked no. 20 on the top 50 restaurants only in the entire WORLD?? (And number 10 last year, hurray).

So I guess this is more of a photo 'guide' than anything else :)

Eric Lanlard’s Baked Vanilla Cheesecake

This cheesecake recipe calls for 900g of (full fat) cream cheese. So when I was out picking up the ingredients the supermarket only sold them in 200g tubs, so off I went to pick up five.

That's...a lot of cheese.

French cooking class at L'atelier des Chefs

"What do they wax lemons with, chef?"

"Er...wax?"

This was the question I asked the chef at our cooking class this week. In an effort to seem keen and interested (which I was!) I had asked a Stupid Question.

One of the other guys there, bless him, did try and help me out "Don't worry! We were all thinking it". But its ok, I had already died of embarrassment at this point.

So where was I asking this question, you ask?

A group of us found these excellent Groupon deals for a place called L'atelier Des Chefs near Bond Street, which run a bunch of different cooking and baking classes ranging from Japanese to Moroccan to French and Italian.

What did we think of it? And how was the food? I can only say is that I came home with a very content belly full of French delicacies after a great evening chatting with good friends and meeting new people.

To start off, we all put our aprons on and moved into the kitchen, where our expert chef (she used to work in fine dining all over the world) told us how to properly prepare the ingredients we were using.

In our French class, we cooked (see pictures below!)

Crisp confit duck leg with salad paysanne and fried quail's egg

Roasted fillet of pollock with samphire, shellfish velouté and girolle mushrooms

Creme brulee with mini madeleines

Elderflower and lemon cake

I thought about starting this post with "Hello! I'm alive!! I'm still here!" as it has been over four months (that's like 5 cat years) since I last blogged.

I would like to say that I've been deprived of any baking equipment and flour and butter and sugar and an oven and I just really wanted to bake but simply couldn't. But um, I think I've just been busy eating cake rather than making it. 

So when the email came round at work for an Easter themed bake sale I jumped at the opportunity to get off my chair (which was proving difficult after all of said cake eating) and make something (ahhhhh).

I settled on an elderflower and lemon cake with almonds, decorated with pink and yellow butterflies and sparkly things and flowers. 'Cos you know, Spring.

All in all, our department bake sale managed to raise just over £520 for Great Ormond Street Hospital which is great news! Somebody bought the whole elderflower and lemon cake and shared it around her desk (well, I presume she shared it around her desk.. but I'm not judging if you eat it all by yourself, hehe).

But just to let you know (although it probably doesn't affect over over that side of the electronic screen you're looking at this from) that THIS CAKE CONTAINS NUTS. 

ALMONDS. NUTTY ALMONDS. NUTILICIOUS ALMONDS. So don't eat it if you have a nut allergy, folks.