Greggs goes Posh!

Cool, quirky, stylish.

I love the Newcastle skyline lampshades

If you were asked to pick three words that describe Greggs, the stalwart of the Geordie diet, these might not be the first ones you’d pick.  You might go for “Ooh hot pasties!” or “Bag of jam donuts!” or if you want to go way over your word limit “Why don’t they sell vegetable pasties in Newcastle like they do in London?”, a persistent gripe of mine. 

Greggs is close to every Geordie’s heart, from our first toothless suck on a bit of puff pastry to the “double decker” pasty trick  that Wayne taught me (two pasties, one bag; nobody will ever know your secret). There is a Greggs on every street corner in Newcastle, sometimes two. The Greggs on Clayton St in the city centre is open until 4am at the weekend doing sterling work for the inebriated. There are two Greggs at Newcastle Airport, one at Arrivals and one at Departures, allowing the jetsetting Geordie to minimise his time away from a sausage roll.

Greggs has now upped its game with Greggs Moment, their new trial coffee shop on Northumberland Street. Its décor is cool, quirky and stylish. It’s clean, comfortable and well-staffed. It sells LOADS of cake.

The sandwiches, cakes, biscuits, cupcakes, muffins and scones are all very reasonably priced. For example, my pre-lunch snack of a cream tea (scone, jam, clotted cream and a pot of tea) is a mere £3, which barely buys you a cup of hot grit in some other high street cafes.

Greggs Moment was chock-a-block on a Friday morning and I am sure the trial café will be a big success. For the time being at least, it’s exclusive to Geordies. London can keep its fancy vegetable pasties – we’ve got posh Greggs!

Wedding cake with fresh flowers

This weekend I did a two day course making an open stack wedding cake with fresh flowers at Cakes4Fun.

The first day was spent cutting and covering the cakes with Jen, a lovely instructor whose advice is always in my head when I’m doing cakes. On the second day we were joined by Patty, a florist with an infectious enthusiasm for both flowers and cake. I felt that I learned a huge amount from her about taping and wiring flowers, about how to use them on a cake, which flowers wilt or cause others to wilt, which are toxic and which are edible. I felt the tingle of a possible new hobby coming on and I swear I felt my credit card wince.

Jen showed us how to dowel and stack the cakes leaving a scary two inches of air in between the bottom two layers, something I have never done before. The space was filled with red and cherry brandy roses, salal leaves, rosehips, Chinese lanterns and plants I’d never even heard of like amaranthus and kangaroo paw (hilariously misheard as kangaroo poo). We also included some bird eye chillies on the wedding cake, which my mum suggested would make for a “hot night”. Ridiculous. Who would cook a curry on their wedding night?

The reds and oranges of the flowers and berries looked stunning and everyone was pleased with their cakes.

 I wish my rear view was this good

This was a really lovely course – I learned a lot about flowers, gained confidence in using them on a cake and am very keen to learn more. Plus I now have 100 wedding cake portions to eat on my own like a jilted bride.

Huge thanks to Petra and Dylan for having me to stay and credit to Dylan for his persistence in trying all week to eat the circus cake. Thanks also to the taxi driver who picked me up from Petra’s and asked if she was my daughter. She is TWO MONTHS younger than me for god’s sake. Perhaps it’s time to get some rest.

Hedgehog

This summer I found a hedgehog outside my back door. I rarely see hedgehogs in Jesmond and this sighting was particularly unusual because it was broad daylight.


It had rained the previous night and the back steps had been thick with snails. I wondered if the hedgehog had gorged on snails to such an extent that it had been unable to haul itself back up the steps. Let's face it, we all know the feeling.

My mum, who knows about such things, pointed out that hedgehogs are nocturnal, so if you see one during the day it often means they're ill. We made a nest for her (she did turn out to be a lady hedgehog) and left out a plate of cat food, which disappeared.

This is a reconstruction using actors

The next morning she was still there. She looked very fat and I wondered if some hoglets were on their way. There are few things in life cuter than a baby hedgehog, but I didn't feel my back yard was the best place for them.

I called Northumbrian Hedgehog Rescue, who asked if I could bring the hedgehog to be checked at their centre in Longframlington. That was the one day I couldn't  - I had to finish a wedding cake and take it to Manchester. Northumbrian Hedgehog Rescue quickly rallied their troops - I was tickled to hear the call go out "there's a woman in Jesmond with a big fat hedgehog". She was bundled into a cat carrier and within minutes a neighbour was at my door to take the hedgehog into Northumberland.


I called to check on her a few days later - she wasn't ill or pregnant but she was a very dirty girl. She'd been named Kate after me.


To thank Northumbrian Hedgehog Rescue for taking in the little grubster, I sent them some hedgehog cake pops. The cake pops are chocolate cake dipped in milk chocolate and coated in chocolate sprinkles. Hedgehogs are probably my most popular cake pop.


 If you would like to offer the centre a donation of time, supplies or money, their contact details are at the bottom of this lovely little article about Andy the hedgehog who refused to eat anything apart from fairy cakes. I hope he enjoys the cake pops.

Sugar Flowers

This week I did the five day PME course in Sugar Flowers at Cakes4Fun, which is a mere 150 metres from this house

If you’re in your 30s and as a child watched BBC while eating your tea, you will probably recognise the bowler-hatted man coming out of 52 Festive Road. Putney was home to the man who created Mr Benn. When the humble bank clerk wasn’t solving problems for dragons or elephants or cavemen, he lived just round the corner from Cakes4Fun and is commemorated on a paving stone outside the original house. This thrills me out of all proportion.

Once again, the other ladies on the course had come from all over the world – Budapest, Johannesburg, Dubai, Arizona – so my journey from Newcastle seemed neglible.


My knowledge of flowers is minimal and stretches as far as “red ones, white ones, yellow ones” so I had plenty-plenty to learn. Monday was a gentle start making a plaque with non-wired flowers.

Work started in earnest the next day with a woodland bouquet using the pulled flower method. I finally found out a) what the holes in a celpad are for (Mexican hats), b) what the mysterious little celpad stick is for (Mexican hats) and c) what a Mexican hat is.  The pulled flower method had the highest casualty rate and it was a lot of work to create a small bouquet. I love the blackberries.

The next three days covered wired flowers – open rose; lilies and orchids; and a bridal bouquet.

At the end of each day spent cutting, veining, wiring and dusting petals comes the heartbreak of binding, when you have to say goodbye to some petals that break or don’t stay on the wire. It’s sad to spend so much effort creating a beautiful petal that in the end doesn’t make the final cut. Like spending years raising a child only to have him support Sunderland. The back up plan, apart from having lots of children and dressing them in black and white, is to make lots of spare petals for the reserve bench.


My favourite flowers in the bridal bouquet are the apple blossom and Sweet Williams. Kate Middleton included Sweet Williams in her bridal bouquet and the flowers were renamed Prince Williams in our class. My own William is sweet as a little pie and it turns out that Mr Benn's first name was William.

Sweet Williams

Sugar flowers demand concentration and it was surprisingly tiring work. Luckily we were kept energised with a constant supply of delicious cakes, cake pops and cookies.

I had a great time on the course, met some lovely people and felt that I learned a lot. Making sugar flowers taught me to open my eyes and look closely at a flower with all its idiosyncracies in the hope of recreating it in sugar. 

In other London news:

Helen and her fellow illustration graduates put on a successful exhibition at the Coningsby gallery and I bought three more pictures of cats for my pension plan office wall. I mentioned Helen’s work here and am very proud to say that, having graduated this summer with a first class degree in Illustration, she already has a contract to publish her first children’s book in spring.

Annabel is becoming increasingly addicted to courses at Cakes4Fun. Having got her hooked with the soft stuff (“go on, try a cupcake course or a cakepop lesson, you'll like it”) she’s rapidly moved onto the harder fixes of stacking tiered cakes and today has made this beautiful butterfly cake. The bag of chocolate truffles she made at an evening class was excellent company on the train home.

I had a lovely time staying with Petra and Dylan, both of whom celebrate a birthday this week.

STILL in our 30s

Petra had a birthday dinner with friends and Dylan is celebrating his first birthday today by holding a soiree for his two best friends Rico and Cookie. I’ve said it before, those London doggies live the life. Happy birthday, handsome!

Bingo!

I made this bingo cake to celebrate my grandma, Nora Page. She was glamorous, fun-loving and a bit crackers.

She once claimed it was possible to ride a cow and set about proving it on the Town Moor. She wore jeans well into her 70s (she liked maternity jeans for the elasticated waistband). She impressed everyone by dancing non-stop until 4am at my wedding in Athens - she was 81 at the time - and gave the bishop who'd married us a big wet kiss. For a laugh. 

Like a lot of people, as Grandma grew older her mental faculties started to fail her and she began to forget words.  A conversation became a game of twenty questions. She failed the Alzheimers memory test miserably but was able to laugh about it. "Count backwards from 100 in sevens? Divn't be daft, I couldn't dae that when I was a bairn".

One evening I took her for a drink in her old haunt St Dominic's Club in Shieldfield. As luck would have it, they were playing bingo and Grandma was keen to join in.  She bloody loved bingo. When we were children we'd meet her in Newcastle every Saturday to go shopping, but come 2pm and she'd be off to the bingo hall quick as a plume a smoke. I worried she wouldn't be able to remember the numbers as by now she could no longer read or write, but years of semi-professional bingo training kicked in and she marked two tickets at a time. Just as she was about to fill a line, someone else called house. She shouted back, "You fat c*nt!" I suppose there are some words you just don't forget.

As her dementia worsened, Grandma moved into Cestria House in Jesmond, two doors away from the house where she'd lived  in the 1940s and where my mother was born. Grandma made a lot of friends there, though she sometimes liked to escape. Having learned the code on the front door lock, she slipped out one day, caught a bus into town and headed straight for the lipstick counter in Fenwicks. 

Cestria House was home to Grandma for the last two years of her life. When she suddenly became physically ill they looked after her (and us) with a love and dedication that we will always remember.


To thank them and to mark the second year since Grandma died, I made a cake for the staff and residents to share. There was only one way to decorate it - a bingo ticket. Fans of the game will recognise it as anatomically correct: nine squares by three, each row containing five numbers. The numbers on the cake represent her birthday; the number of her children (cup of tea, number 3) and grandchildren (knock at the door, number 4); the years we were born; and her age when she left us - top of the shop, 90. 

It was lovely to see the photos of Grandma still on the wall at Cestria, pictures of her smiling, dressed as a witch at Halloween, and blowing out the candles on her 90th birthday cake. I hope all the staff and residents at Cestria enjoy the bingo cake and fondly remember Nora Page.

Children's cakes

I love doing cakes for little children because they're so cute. This week I've made a christening cake and cake pops for a baby boy.

I also made a dozen of these little fellas for a two year old boy's birthday. 

Can we bake them? Yes we can!

 Lastly I made an In the Night Garden cake to celebrate a baby girl's first birthday.