Still Raining...

Also this weekend, my dear friend Mrs. R and I went to visit another lovely girl (Mrs. G) who had a baby a few months ago for some lovely chat and of course, tea and biscuits. Miss G is sooooo cute and really amazing. My friends have such good gene pools, I hope I will be as lucky! Playing with other people's babies is such fun and of course encourages all sorts of broodiness, but it was nice to leave and go off to do one of the things I do best: eat cake and drink champagne!

Mrs. R and I went off to Ottolenghi in Islington for a bit of food, namely their very lovely cakes and some champagne. We had to wait to be seated because of the awful weather, but it was so worth it. After a nice salad and some champagne, we had these two cakes pictured here....

The one on the left is a gorgeous Plum cake (although they call it a tart, strangely). The top is perfectly golden brown, slightly caramelised in places with the fruit cut and laid in perfectly symmetry. Visually, perfect. The texture of the vanilla cake was dense with a large crumb that supported the heavy sweet-tart fruit making each forkful rapturous. I fell in love with plum cake in the cake shops of Vienna and I whenever I see it, I have to order it! For a bit of something different, we ordered the Ginger Tea Cake pictured on the right. Baked in a silicone mini-bundt mould, it was intensely moist as well as being very fluffy and nice. Baking cakes like this in a silicone mould is great because you don't have a crunchy outer shell that comes from excessive flouring of the pan, so the whole cake is divinely spongey, soft and edible. The flavour was very nice, great spices although I prefer a bit more of a gingery kick. The cake was finished off with a not too sticky or sweet caramel glaze. So good, especially as we were enjoying the cakes the rain was chucking it down so hard that all the fellow cake eaters turned and gasped. Sheets and sheets of rain. A nice day to be inside with good cake! I bought a second ginger cake home to Mr. H and he grunted with approval whilst sticking most of it in his mouth in one go. Guess he liked it then. There is an excellent recipe in my new Whole Grain Baking by King Arthur Flour book for Gingerbread (or ginger cake as they call it here) that I really want to try this week. Crystallized ginger pieces....yummmm.

x Arianna