the last postcard

I've always sent postcards when I go away, usually for one reason: my Granny has always loved receiving them. They're displayed in a special place in her kitchen (below the radio, above the microwave) until they've been there too long, and then they're stored in the outside loo, where there are hundreds of postcards from family holidays dating back decades. Once, me and my brother both forgot to send a post card and she was so upset, it was so horrendous, I've not made the same mistake again. In the last year or so I've moved away from sending handwritten postcards. I'm still not entirely comfortable about it - surely handwriting them is half the point? But my handwriting is atrocious, and my Granny's eyesight is getting worse, so I moved to an app where I can take my own photos, add a location and type instead. 

As I was writing my latest batch from my trip to Iceland, I realised you could see all of the past postcards which had been sent. The first one I ever sent was from my trip to Bath, and it was sent on the April 11th - addressed to "Granny and Grandad" and signed off with "I hope Grandad feels better soon". The next postcard after that was sent in May, addressed only to my Granny, because on April 17th my Grandad died. 

I'd never really known grief before, no one I knew had ever died before. To get to 25 and to still have all four of my grandparents felt lucky, and I was grateful. And then it all disappeared in the space of a weekend. I hadn't realised just how much of an impact a death has on a family. I know it sounds so naive, but I didn't really think that six/seven months on we'd still be sat in my Granny's living room looking at his empty chair and crying about it.

The funny thing was that my Grandad was a quiet man, and we rarely spoke. He couldn't hear me on the phone, so when I called my grandparents he would quickly pass me off to my Granny so we could chat. But I knew he loved me and my brother - there were many stories about how we both could get away with anything and my Grandad would laugh it off, but had my Dad and my Aunt done the same things, he would have shouted at them. Even though I'm in my twenties now and live in London, whenever I visited and was about to leave, he would tell me to "mind how you cross the road". When I started secondary school, at a school a train ride away, he used to catch the train and follow me to school to make sure I got there safely, even though I sat with my friends on the train. His funeral was packed, rare for a 92 year old, but it showed how many people loved him.

I didn't realise that seeing that postcard would jolt me as much as it did, or how many feelings it would throw up. But it did make me glad of one thing, because I know my Grandad would have seen it, would have read it and would have known I'd thought about him before he died. And even though it's just a postcard, now they seem to mean a little more to me, and now I know why my Granny likes them so much. 

hazelnut & espresso cake | a recipe

I was going to take part in the last week of Bakealong. I was going to go all out and do the picnic showstopper at the end - cakes, quiches, tarts and sausage rolls and whatever else. I was going to have a picnic tea, which are basically my favourite. I hadn't had a good run with Bakealong and couldn't even entertain the idea of taking part some weeks (Tudor week, I'm looking at you) so maybe this would be my week to make up for it all? Go out with a bang? But...

Well, recently none of my bakes have gone well and I've found myself at 1am standing in the kitchen, covered in icing sugar surrounded by a mountain of washing up, longing for my bed, but with absolutely nothing to show for it, telling myself that I would never bake again. So I thought I'd scale it back to just doing the chocolate cake. And then for some reason, when I was looking for recipes, I ended up deciding to make this hazelnut and espresso cake instead. However, this cake didn't manage to escape the recent baking disaster curse, because it took two cakes (hello cake tins that leak) and two batches of frosting (always follow recipes instead of being lazy!) to even come close to this one. Even now I can see some pesky crumbs on the side and some over squirted icing on the top ruining the effect. 

If nothing else, it's probably the most ridiculously fattening cake I've ever made and those are usually the best ones, amiright? I never managed to eat any of it myself, but it went down extremely well at work and someone even took some home for their kids. In fact it went down so well that I'm declaring the baking curse is now over. Fingers crossed. 

One of the great things about this cake is that it's quite easy to shake it up a little and change around. For example, I was going to use Ferrero Rocher on the top instead of Kinder Bueno but I got to Tesco and realised that it would definitely not have been the cheap option. If I was making this cake again for a snazzier occasion, then I would have definitely chosen that instead - and maybe I will give it another go, as all the Christmas chocolates are out on the shelves and reduced in price now. Tight? Me? Never. I used espresso in the cake and in the butter cream inside, but different kinds of coffee could change it up, or make it weaker, or a chocolate flavouring could be used instead if you're not a huge fan of coffee. Finally, I was going to make a coffee syrup to decorate with, but I ran out of steam. It probably would have been a great addition. 

The recipe is below, good luck!

Ingredients:

Cake:

• 150g caster sugar
• 150g butter or margarine
• 3 eggs
• 150g self raising flour
• 1 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 1 tbsp hot water
• 1 tbsp espresso 

Frosting:

• 230g unsalted butter
• 240g icing sugar
• 220g Nutella
• 45ml double cream
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Coffee buttercream:

• 100g unsalted butter
• 200g icing sugar
• 2 tsp espresso powder
• 1 tbsp boiling water

Decoration:

• 5 x bars of white Kinder Bueno
• Chopped hazlenut.
• Grated hazelnut chocolate (I used Chocologie)

Method:

Cake:

1. Preheat the oven at 160C
2. Grease two sandwich tins
3. Add butter and sugar together and whisk until fluffy
4. Beat the eggs with a fork and then add them gradually to the mixture with 1 tbsp of flour with the last bit of eggs
5. Add the rest of the flour and the baking powder to the mixture and fold in
6. Dissolve the espresso in the boiling water and fold into the mixture 
7. Divide into the sandwich tins and cook for 30 minutes

Coffee buttercream:

1. When cakes are cool, remove from sandwich tins
2. Place softened butter in a bowl and mix with electric mixer
3. Add the icing sugar and beat together. 
4. Dissolve the espresso in the water and add to the buttercream and stir
5. Spread out on one cake and sandwich the two together

Frosting:

1. Beat softened butter with an electric mixer for 2-3 minutes until smooth and creamy. 
2. Add icing sugar and continue to beat until soft peaks form. 
3. Add the Nutella and continue to beat on.
4. Add the double cream and vanilla extract. 
5. Whack on the cake. I will give no tips on this as I am crap at it. 

a little trip to rochester | england

In recent months, I've started to want to get out of London each weekend. I don't know whether this is because I just find the whole London lifestyle exhausting, or because I've just realised that there is more to life outside of the big smoke. Obviously I'd love it if I had the money to travel a little further, go somewhere and book a hotel and feel like I'd explored more of England - I can't remember the last time I went further north than Manchester for example - but the budget doesn't always stretch that far. And so, sometimes, options a little closer to home have to be explored. A couple of weekends ago I headed out to Rochester, which is a perfect little day trip as it's only 35 minutes away on High Speed 1. Just don't do what I did, which is get the slow train by accident and arrive an hour later feeling like a bit of a prat... 

I'll be honest and hold my hands up to not knowing that Rochester had such a connection with Dickens. It's where he started and ended his life, and there are buildings he wrote about in his books which still stand on the high street today - you can find Miss Haversham's home and various  other buildings from Great Expectations, which sent a few shivers down my spine and lots of memories of GCSE English. There were also a lot of buildings from The Mystery of Edwin Drood, but I have to admit that that's not a Dickens book I've ever clapped eyes on. 

It's clear that "kentrification" is alive and well in Rochester, you can see that while it was probably once a little bit poor, it's now starting to get elements of money flooding into it. There are loads of independent shops to potter about it, I spent quite a bit of time in City Books, which sold a lot more than books, and managed to pick up some old bottles from the 1860s for a couple of quid, which I'm looking forward to using as vases once (if) I get them looking sparkly again. There was also Baggins Book Bazaar, which had thousands more books to rummage around, and lots of old sweet shops, which was perfect for me as I'd been after parma violets for ages and London just wasn't stumping up the goods. 

I quite enjoyed visiting Rochester, it's opened my eyes to the possibility of not living in London for the rest of my life, and I can see why Londoners are flocking to move there, not least the fact that you can buy a bloody massive seven bedroomed townhouse for £1m. Not that I have that amount of money, but it would barley get me a flat in London. If you're a bit sick of London and need to get out for a day then I fully recommend jumping on the fast train and coming down to Rochester for a quick day trip. Now, where next?

a few icelandic places to eat (but mainly sægreifinn...)

Eating in Iceland was not an easy thing to do, and that's mainly because of the cost. Before you even think about eating somewhere fancy, a meal at an inexpensive restaurant will cost you £20 and that's without any drinks or starters or any added extras. At prices like that, it doesn't make you want to go and find the best food out there, just any food that won't bankrupt you. Despite that, we still managed to find a couple of places to eat during our whirlwind trip there, and these are a few of my suggestions. 

Firstly, our favourite restaurant while we were over there was definitely the Sea Baron, or Sægreifinn. In fact, even though we were only there for two days, we ate here twice. It wasn't horrendously expensive and the food was exceptionally good. Even though the decor reminded me slightly of a school skiing trip cafeteria and had a major hostel vibe going on, it was a brilliant place to eat. It wasn't horrifically expensive, there was some good choice and the portion sizes were good too. The original owner, Kjartan Halldórsson, used to be a fishmonger and still worked the grills until he died - a little lifelike statute of him remains in the seating area - and you can tell he was loved if you ever google this place. It still feels like it's a little family run business, who think more of the food than they do anything else.

On the first night we had some of the fish - which they serve on grill spears - and which were all fresh the sea around Iceland. It meant we got to try some salmon, some trout and some scallops. And they were all incredible. We also had some lobster soup to go with it, and this is basically what we went back for on our second night. Sægreifinn says it has the best lobster soup in the world, and actually, I can kind of believe it. We did have some other lobster soup while in Iceland, and it didn't come close to how this stuff tasted. It's worth going to this place for the soup alone and there's not many restaurants you could say that about. If you're ever in Iceland, make sure you stop and enjoy this place.

Another honourable mention for a place to eat in Iceland is Smakk Barinn, where we had Icelandic tapas. It was served in jars, which was utterly bonkers and felt like the place was trying a bit hard, but the food contained in jars was pretty good, and it was a great way to try Icelandic foods that maybe you wouldn't want to have whole portions of. This included puffin heart and hákarl, which is basically fermented shark. It was a little touristy, and not the cheapest meal, but still a great way to try some delicacies and have some lunch.

Finally, we picked up breakfast on our first day in The Laundromat Cafe. The food was quite mid range, as were the prices, but the pancakes I had were quite good. The main selling point of this place was the atmosphere. It was cosy, you never felt rushed and it was a perfect place to hide from the cold weather outside in Reykjavik. There's definitely something for everyone on the menu, and the decoration was pretty top too. Plus, you really can do your laundry there. 

If you've ever been to any of these places, let me know what you thought!