How to Celebrate an Anniversary on a School Night and why Champagne isn’t a French Creation

My wife and I celebrated our third year of marriage this week. Seeing as we had work the next day we didn’t go out but made sure we had everything we needed:

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Chocolate Chilli

In the world of food some things were simply meant for each other. In fact some food items are so compatible it’s a bit of a mystery why God didn’t just save some time and bring them into existence in their final, delicious form.

Take, for example, bacon sandwiches and tomato ketchup. No one would even consider one without the other, so why bother producing them as separate things? And lamb with mint jelly. What else can you do with mint jelly except eat it with lamb?

And so the list of inseparable foods goes on – cheese and pickle, steak and scallops, chocolate and jelly beans…I’m stopping now before I start chewing the keyboard.

However you can go too far. Sometimes a food combination sounds better than it tastes. For example ‘Chocolate Chilli’.

Now on paper this sounds like it should work.

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Fraisier Cake By Mary Berry For Furniaphobics

I just made up a new phobia – furniahobia is the ‘fear of baking’ (from the Latin ‘to bake’). Yes its a pretty slow Saturday afternoon around here and kids are hogging the Playstation.

The problem with food blogging, however, is baked creations are often the most interesting. So in the interest of entertaining readers it seems fair enough to attempt that which can so easily go wrong. This time round I tried out a recipe I found in this winter’s London-based Good Food Show catalogue:

Fraisier Cake! This creation combines Genoese sponge with a crème patisserie filling finished with chocolate and strawberries.

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Another BBC Good Food Show

The BBC, that bastion of investigative journalism (if you’ve been following the news recently you’ll know I’m being sarcastic oh deeeeaaaar) also does a nice line in all things food related. A couple of times a year it takes over big exhibition centres and fills them with foodies. We went to the summer event and liked it that much we took the kids to the winter version in London. Getting the train into London is a drab affair though, so I filmed it and shoved the Bellamy Brothers on…

(I’m not sure why I would want to share a drab miserable train trip to London, with no views and grey skies, but I guess I just like playing with the movie maker)

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