The Eden Project

As a nice summer break I headed down to Devon and Cornwall with my Mum and Dad last week. Whilst there we visited The Eden Project as it's always somewhere I've wanted to visit - and we were not disappointed! 

A word of warning... North Devon to The Eden Project may only be 90 ish miles but the roads are so winding it took us 2.5 hours to get there! It's worth it though to visit. 

It was relatively busy but we were thankful it wasn't the school holidays - definitely worth trying to go out of school time. When you walk in there's this incredible view of the centre and the biomes. 

Of course I took Noz along for the trip - more photos under Noz World Tour later! 

There are four key areas- the rain forest biome (with temperatures up to 40 degrees!), the Mediterranean biome, the core and the outside area. Each biome explores different countries - we headed for the rainforest biome first. Here are some of the things we found...

Next we headed over to the Mediterranean Biome...

The Mediterranean biome is much smaller than the rain forest biome but has some really interesting features, especially if (like me), you're very interested in chillies! The Mediterranean biome also has a restaurant inside so you can feel like you're on holiday whilst eating but sadly we had a boring sandwich on the way in - save yourself for the nice food inside the centre!  

We mainly focused on the biomes but took the mini bus around the wider centre too. The whole centre is dedicated to sustainable living and there are some really interesting features in the centre and areas (like The Core) to make it very accessible for children.

Well worth the visit if you're into this kind of thing - it's like stepping into a different world. It's tricky when we're all the way up North in Leeds but if you pay once you get access for the full year so you can visit as many times as you like. The Eden Sessions look really interesting too and we even saw Elbow warming up for their act that evening! 

Robin Hood's Bay

Recently we headed out camping in Dalby Forest so we could take full advantage of the Bank Holiday Weekend and Go Ape! Go Ape was great - if not a little terrifying! - but the photo highlights of the trip have to be the photos I took in Robin Hood's Bay. I haven't been since I was very little and wasn't fully prepared (only with my iphone in hand!) for how photogenic it is! Definitely worth a visit with a real camera - here are some of the shots from my phone for now.

Roast + Conch (Leeds)

Today Amy and I headed to the new Hotel Chocolat cafe/restaurant Roast + Conch which is part of the news (ish) Trinity Leeds shopping centre. Serving delicious drinks in a relaxed setting, this is the perfect place for a relaxing drink on a Sunday afternoon. At £3-4 for a cup of hot chocolate it's quite pricey, but totally worth it as a treat. 

We found a nice corner with nice leather booths and candles - on going to the bar to order our drinks the bar man was very helpful and made lots of suggestions of which drinks and chocolates we should go for. In the end I went for a chilli and rum hot chocolate and Amy went for a salted caramel hot chocolate. There is a great chocolate bar (£1 each) with a range of luxury chocolates available depending on how adventurous you're feeling. They showed me the chocolate making process from the conch through to the tempering, all of which goes on in sight of the bar - a nice added extra and it makes the place smell wonderful. We went for a rosemary and thyme truffle (delicious, if not a little odd!), a white chocolate and jasmine truffle (very sweet and tasty) and a rum truffle. 

All in all worth a visit for the chocolates and the atmosphere- the hot chocolate was nice but I've had better. My favourite part of the whole visit was the spoon of chocolate called a 'dipper' you can add for an extra £1 to your drink. I went for the hazelnut and chilli one - which was really nice but a bit too hot. They also had praline and salted caramel which I will definitely be going back to try! 

Cloudy Lemonade

Following on from yesterday's Limoncello recipe, I wanted to share a really easy cloudy still lemonade recipe I found on the BBC website. This lemonade is bitter and very sweet at the same time and it tastes lovely - plus, it only takes about 10 minutes! 

Ingredients
3 lemons
140g caster sugar
1l cold water

Using 3 of the left over lemons, remove the rest of the pith and roughly chop up the lemon flesh from inside. Pop this into a food mixer and blend the lemons till they are very finely chopped. 

Add 500ml of the water and all of the sugar to the mixer and whizz them together. 

Using a sieve and a bowl, push the lemon mixture through the sieve to leave behind a juice with no bits. Add the remaining 500ml of water and, using a funnel, pour into a sterilised bottle. Pop this in the fridge for at least a few hours as this drink is best served ice cold. 

Ideas to try with this recipe include adding vodka and making lemonade ice-cubes in the summer. Any others I could try?

Limoncello

Moving house has got in the way of blogging this past year but in 2014 I intend to do a lot more! I wanted to start by taking you through a Limoncello recipe that has been great to give as Christmas presents this year. 

A word of warning - whilst this is super easy to make, it doesn't fall into the 'cheap homemade' present category with vodka being quite pricey. To make 4 x 0.5l bottles you'll need 1l bottle of vodka (£15 ish), a bag of 7 lemons (£1), a large Kilner jar (£3.50) and 4 x 0.5l Kilner bottles (£2.50 ish each). All in all I spent about £30 to make four bottles- making each bottle £7.50 each. 

You'll need a week for the lemons to soak in the vodka and the following ingredients:

The zest of 6/7 lemons (unnwaxed)
1 litre of vodka
1250ml water 
700g sugar
1 large Kilner jar - 1.5l or larger
4 x 0.5l Kilner bottles

Peel the zest from the lemons with a vegetable peeler - avoid the white bitter pith under the skin as best you can. Place the zest in the large jar and pour the vodka over the top - shut the jar and leave in a cool place for a week. 

The day before you're ready to drain the lemon zest create the sugar and water mixture. To create this, boil the water and add the sugar. Stir the mixture until the sugar is fully dissolved. I left it quite watery at this point - to make less liquid but to make the mixture sweeter boil the water down further to make the syrup thicker. Leave this liquid overnight to cool (or for a few hours in a cool spot if you're making it on the same day).

After a week, drain the zest from the vodka and discard the zest. Pour the syrup in the jar with the vodka and mix in well. 

Using a funnel pour the limoncello into sterilised bottles. Unopened bottles can be kept up to a year. 

Limoncello is best served ice cold to drink, or drizzled over icecream! I'd love to adapt this recipe to make an orange flavoured vodka- that's my next try! The left over lemons can be used to make a really simple lemonade- I'll put this recipe up soon. 

Instagram Prints from Origrami

I was very excited to receive this parcel through the post filled with Instagram prints from Origrami! Origrami is a great site that allows you to upload your photos from your Instragram account very easily and have them printed in Polaroid style prints. Each print has a map on the back in relation to where it was uploaded (I need to stop uploading them at home, rather than on the move, as a lot of them were my home address!). The photos come in these lovely, camera themed boxes with a really nicely designed tag. The company's based in Australia; with free shipping worldwide and only £12 for 32 photos it's a bargain! Plus the little boxes coming through the post can cheer up anyone's day. 

Vintage postcards

I found some lovely postcards in Boyes in Scarborough. Boyes is a shop that sells an assortment of cheap things from end of line shampoos, fishing equipment, ribbon, curtains, gardening stuff, toys and basically all of those bits of bobs you never knew you needed. It's known by some people as a bit of a dump but it's got all of the odd things you need in one place. 

I went in to get some new buttons but at 39p each these were an absolute steal so I bought 7 of them! In the blog I did back in March on my trip to Scarborough there were lots of beautiful old buildings - this is the nicest Boyes building I've ever seen- most of them are in 1970s style shopping centres!

Saltaire Arts Trail

Ahh.... Saltaire Arts Trail, what a breath of fresh air compared to most days of my week. Once a year in May, the Saltaire Arts Trail brings together a chance to go in Salts Mill, buy nice things in the Makers' Fair and have a nosey around people's houses. This year was especially nice as the sun was beaming down and everyone seemed to be in a good mood! 

I headed down with my Mum and a family friend, Jenny, to have a look around - first stop was the Makers' Fair where I bought a lovely selection of cards (about 11 cards - but you ever have too many cards, right?!). Six of them were from Sunlight on Closed Lids, who create really nice printed cards with clean, bright designs. I've been coming to the Arts Trail for the last 3 years and always stock up on these cards; they sell them in the Mill also but you can snap them up for only £2 each on the stall (or 3 for £5). The rest of the cards were from artists dotted around the fair - I bought so many cards as I wanted the large scale prints but couldn't justify buying 11 of them! 

The Makers' Fair was in the beautiful Victoria Hall (you can see the ceiling below) and was filled with lots of handmade goodies - from necklaces and prints to hand carved wooden chopping boards and ceramics. The stalls that caught my eye most were the stalls with screenprints - such lovely designs! 

Next we moved to look in Salts Mill which is always a pleasure. Salts Mill, set up in its current guise in 1987 by Jonathan Silver, was once a textile mill opened by Sir Titus Salt in 1853. The mill today houses galleries, restaurants, shops and the most beautiful book shop I've ever seen.  The mill is a shrine to one of my favourite artists, David Hockney, and the gallery-cum-shop (the photo to the right below) lets you look at the art work AND buy art equipment at the same time. I love it in here but I always end up leaving with a new piece of equipment I'll never use (I have some charcoal tucked away that I bought 5 years ago but in that moment I just HAD to have it). 

Finally we moved on to have a look around the houses...

The houses surrounding the mill were built to house the workers of the mill and are ordered so that the foreman's houses at the end of each street were the tallest and largest houses on the street (apparently so the foremen could keep a watchful eye!). All of the streets are named after Salt's children (Mary, Helen, Amelia, Albert, Fanny and more - he had a lot of children!) and the houses are small and perfectly formed. As part of the Arts Trail about 20 of the houses open their doors to present artwork for sale - giving you a chance to look at the art work and have a good nosey around people's houses! Of course, I always want to live there before the day is through as the houses are just so nice. 

All of the houses that have artwork for sale have red bunting outside and range from the weird to the wonderful. My favourites were Clare Caulfield who creates really nice illustrations and Salts Press who I bought a lovely print from for a tenner.  

Saltaire is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and is kept in beautiful condition - it's my favourite place in Yorkshire and I would recommend a visit all year round but it is especially good when the Arts Trail is on. 

Food glorious food

I spotted this beautiful food blog from a guy in Sydney and had to share it. Named Heneedsfood, the blog is really well designed, has some lovely photos and also some really nice recipes. 

This recipe for Kruske (pears) caught my eye - they look delicious and include my favourite flavour (almonds!). 

I found the recipe on TasteSpotting. It's a great site that brings together lots of different blogs - I'd recommend it as it's great for finding inspiration! 

Envelope Club

I signed up to the Envelope Club last month after spotting it on The Culture Vultures Blog. What a great idea - sending nice things through the post to other people and getting nice things in return! 

I was delighted to receive an envelope through the post filled with stickers, a card and a folding bird from Kate - I took a few pictures to show you the kind of thing that comes through. It cheered me up mid week and I would recommend it to anyone who likes sending letters. The bird that Kate sent through fits perfectly by my desk with my other birds. 

Here's a selection of pictures of what I sent through to Kate. I found these lovely old fashioned postcards in Scarborough for 39p of the old railway advertisements and added some clippings from my sticker collection. Also, I discovered Death By Tea at the Saltaire Arts Trail whose card you can see in the photo below - she makes some really nice things so I thought I'd pass her card on. I particularly like her digitally printed cards which are very reasonable. More on Saltaire Arts Trail later. 

A little love and a lot of gloss paint

With a little love, care and a lot of gloss paint I turned my old, scruffy wooden candle holder into something fit for a living room. There are a few handy hints I picked up from my mum that I wanted to share. 

I started off with my old wooden bowl, which, over the years has become covered in wax from one to many candles blown out. As you can see from the picture below, it's in a pretty bad state and as I hovered with it over the bin I thought, wait!, I can probably do something with this...

My mum introduced me to 'Stain Stop'. An absolute godsend when decorating, stain stop can be sprayed on to anything you want to paint to cover up any greasy marks (very good for kitchen walls!). In this case I scraped off as much candle wax as I could and sprayed some over the top to stop the wax showing through. 

Using quite a thick brush I painted white gloss paint over the top, using a smaller brush to get in the nooks and crannies and giving it a second coat here and there. I left to dry and popped some candles in and it's like having a new candle holder!

Afterlight photos

I have an obsession with Instagram (as you can probably tell!) so imagine my delight when I found Afterlight for iPhone. It has many of the same features as Instagram but takes it a bit further, enabling you to shape photos, change the contrast, brightness, clarity, etc. 

Here's something I made from photos shaped into letters.

It also has film 'textures' which is a feature I really like - here's some photos I've put through on the app. Photographers may be shaking their heads in despair on 'adding' 'film textures' but I think it's good fun. I particularly like the filter applied to the daffodils as it's a bit more subtle but the one of the right hand side with the red streak looks good too.

For £0.69 it's a bargain and a must for those who love to put photos through Instagram's filters as it gives you more control over the effects and how much you want to apply them. A feature I really like is being able to put the photos through Afterlight and immediately open them in Instagram to upload as the two programmes can be linked. The two work well together and give you more control. Can you recommend any other photo apps for the iPhone? 

Crumpets with Paul

I made some crumpets recently from Paul Hollywood's new book 'Bread' - it's worth getting hold of for a tenner on Amazon (rather than the usual £20 in shops) as the book is full of lots of easy to follow recipes with pictures showing you step by step what to do (here's an example 
below).

I like that he shows you how to make one type of bread through step-by-step photo instructions and then gives you 1-2 recipes to make with that certain type of bread afterwards - this is great to get bread more into everyday meals (not that I need help with that as I absolutely love bread). 

The recipe to follow for crumpets is quite a long one so leave plenty of time - I started making them for a lazy Sunday breakfast at 9.30am and they weren't finished until lunch! Here's the recipe below:

Makes 10-12 crumpets

• 175g strong white bread flour
• 175g plain flour
• 14g fast-action yeast
• 1 tsp caster sugar
• 350ml warm milk
• 150-200ml tepid water
• 1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 1 tsp salt
• Oil for cooking - I used olive oil as it's all I had in
• Crumpet rings - these are crucial and you can't make the crumpets without them. I got mine from Lakeland and they're very good and non-stick. They're quite expensive at over £10 a set - do you know anyone who wants to split a pack? I shared mine with my Mum as you only need to keep the crumpets in the rings until they're set and you can use the rings again and again.

Put the flours in a bowl and mix in the yeast evenly. 

In a jug dissolve the sugar in the warm milk, then pour in the flour mixture.

Beat the mixture with a wooden spoon for about 3-4 mins until you have a 'smooth batter' - this was incredibly difficult to do as the mixture is so thick it feels like you're fighting with in, not making it 'smooth' - I managed it in the end but it helps to have someone with a strong arm around! You need to do this to make sure the crumpets develop the holes that we all know and love. 

Cover the bowl with clingfilm (or a tea towel) and leave for 1 hour. The batter rises a lot and it needs to be left alone to do this or else the crumpets won't turn out. I left mine on a warm windowsill which worked a treat. 

In a jug, mix 150ml of the tepid water with the bicarb of soda and salt. Stir this liquid into the batter until evenly combined - use more water if you need to to make a thick dropping consistency. When I first did this step I thought I had done something very wrong as it looked like a big soggy mess sitting in a bowl of water - I persevered though and made it through. 

Cover the bowl and leave the batter to rise for 20 minutes. You'll see little holes start to appear.

Heat up a frying pan on a medium-low heat. Grease the inside of the crumpet rings with oil and the pan. 

As Paul says, it's a good idea to start with a trial crumpet. The books says that like with pancakes the first one is never the best - this was definitely the case for me! So give the pan chance to heat up by running a trial crumpet first. 

Keep the cooking 'low and slow' - my biggest mistake was heating up to quickly and I ended up with some burnt bottoms! 

Now you're ready with your crumpet rings - add in the batter and leave to cook for 6-8 minutes. You'll see the bubbles start to rise in the mixture after a while (you can speed up cooking by gently popping these bubbles with a sharp knife). To further speed up the whole process, take the crumpets out of the rings when they're set and get ready for the next batch whilst they're still cooking (see the pan photo below). 

Once the tops have set, turn the crumpets over to lightly cook the top for a further couple of minutes. I made mine thicker than expected I think so needed to add a further 5 minutes on to the cooking time.

Once they're cooked re-grease your crumpet rings and repeat. Then serve warm with butter or re-toast later on. I enjoyed mine with butter and egg and later on with golden syrup (I have a particularly sweet tooth and this just seems to go). 

The Ropewalk, Barton - paradise over the bridge.

Having been to The Ropewalk a few months ago to do a glass-work day course I went back recently to check out the print exhibition and catch up with my Mum and Dad over a cup of tea in the cafe. The Ropewalk, just over the bridge from Hull in Barton, is a mini paradise filled with prints (I can't help myself - I just love anything etched or lino-printed), a cafe, a gallery, a sculpture garden, a museum, a shop and on a strange offshoot in the cafe they also sell Mr Huda's sauces which I can't find anywhere in Leeds.

The Ropewalk is a breath of fresh air in this part of the world and just makes me feel, well, better, when I walk in. I've taken a few pics below to give you more of a feel for the place but it's well worth a visit if you're in the area (and even if you're not!) as there's plenty of art on display and there's a nice cafe to get some lunch. 

Having dabbled with a bit printmaking in the past it's nice to see what other people are doing and it inspired me to come home and work on my own lino block (admittedly, this is still just a thought... watch this space).