Cucumber and Red Onion Pickle

red onion cucumber pickle

This is the simplest of simple pickles. So simple, it doesn’t really require its own blog post. But hell, it’s such a great go-to recipe that I thought I’d give it one any way. Interestingly, I didn’t think there was that much about this pickle, (because a pickle’s a pickle’s a pickle, right?) but both my flatmates asked me to make it time and time again, so there’s clearly something in it.… 

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Redcurrant Soufflé

It’s round this time of year that my mother is in the midst of a fruit-induced madness. It starts with raspberries, then strawberries, then redcurrants…then just as it’s beginning to wane, it’s the blackcurrants, blackberries, then apples…… 

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Fiona Cairns: Royal wedding cake triumph

Fiona Cairns with the royal wedding cake

For those of you who have somehow escaped Royal Wedding mania, and are yet to scour the Sunday papers for any little detail that the BBC coverage might have mised - here’s a photo of what has to have been one of the most important parts of the big day: the royal wedding cake.

It took Fiona Cairns five weeks to make – and no surprise, seeing as there were 900 sugar-paste flowers which had been carefully selected for their own specific reasons: roses, daffodils, shamrocks and thistles to represent the different countries in Britain, and then more abstract symbols such as honeysuckle to represent the bond of love, and lavender for devotion and success.

Fiona and her husband went to the wedding, and are now enjoying a well-deserved couple of days off, but I will hopefully be interviewing Fiona Cairns at the end of the week to get the full lowdown, so watch this space…

Using my last tub of beetroot: Beetroot Ice Cream

Okay – so I know that I’ve gone a bit over the top with beetroot recently, but as I mentioned in an earlier post, there’s a 3 for 2 offer on tubs of beetroot at the Tesco’s down the road, so I had my ‘get one free’ pot to use up…. 

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