devonshire cream teas

It’s about time I got round to writing this one, after all I have been back home for nearly a week now.

Living and working in Devon for nearly two months was certainly an experience, and certainly not one I regret in the least – living with Jenny was hard work at times, but never dull, in fact we spent probably 90% of our time together laughing – from minor kitchen epics, to supermarket fiascos and random ‘youtubing’ competitions, oh how we laughed.

Anyway, the main point of this post is simply to provide the reader with our guide to some of the best cream teas we sampled during our time in the county, so here we go!

• Fradgley’s, Lynmouth Street, Lynmouth EX35 6EH

9 out of 10. I’m cheating a little with this one, as this time round we didn’t make it up to the north coast, but on my last Devonian work trip this place scored a huge hit – a cream tea here consists of two HUGE scones, decent jam and beautiful clotted cream in ideal amounts (although for me perhaps more cream than was really necessary!). I don’t remember much else, so the tea must have been acceptable – I can recommend this place as somewhere it’s worth skipping lunch to visit, the scones really were massive.

• Primrose Cottage, Lustleigh, TQ13 9TJ

7 out of 10. This place really is a lovely place to stop for afternoon tea, situated in the Dartmoor village of Lustleigh, it would be well situated for the casual walker. Jenny and I stopped here for a ‘site meeting’ one afternoon after having attempted to visit the day before only to find the place closed – the opening hours and days do vary. Very nice tea, beautifully made scones, with nice jam and reasonable clotted cream, although perhaps a touch on the expensive side – a cream tea here costs £5.00 per person and the scones aren’t of an overly generous size, unlike some of the others we experienced. That said, for me they were an ideal size – perfect for an afternoon treat and not requiring an empty stomach to accommodate.

• The Fingle Bridge Inn, Drewsteignton, EX6 6PW

9.5 out of 10. The only reason these guys don’t score the full 10 out of 10 is because the scones on offer were plain, there was no option of having a fruit scone which is normally my preference. Colossal freshly baked scones (and I mean freshly baked – these scones were not warm from having been thrown into the microwave for a few seconds, they were warm from quite literally having just been pulled from the oven. Admittedly this may not be the case on every visit – we were there mid Saturday afternoon at the beginning of the half term break, so prime time really) greeted us alongside gallons of proper tea (with a milk jug that actually poured!), pints of wonderfully fruity jam and several kilos of the thickest clotted cream I have ever seen – I kid you not, the cream was the stickiness and consistency of treacle, truly gorgeous.

Unlike the previous two venues mentioned, the Fingle Bridge Inn is in fact a pub and not a tea room, and you could easily be forgiven for not necessarily considering that they might in fact be the purveyors of what for me, was certainly one of, if not the best cream tea in Devon!

 

 

An honorary mention must go to the Service Station at Okehampton, just off the A30, for serving simple, decent cream teas, at a reasonable price, in a roadside diner that once used to be a Little Chef. The scones are smaller than the likes of the Fingle Bridge epics, but similar in size to what you are served in Lustleigh, and come warmed (likely in the microwave), with an adequate amount of proper clotted cream and some simple sachets of jam. This is not a gourmet cream tea, but I like the place and I always enjoy the teas here – not at all pretentious, ideally positioned for the hungry driver in need of a break, and open into the evening. Ideal!

toffee apple cake

So, today I decided to break out my baking skills once more in order to produce some hill fodder for the weekend (for anyone who doesn’t know, tomorrow I am walking 20miles of the Offa’s Dyke path as a part of the NEWSAR sweep team, for this I will be requiring cake).

After much deliberation and some random googling, I settled on a sort of toffee apple loaf – basically and apple loaf cake with a ridiculous toffee sauce topping. Yum.

I must admit this is not my own recipe, I used a fabulous one I found on the BBC good food website, I did make a couple of tweaks though.

Anyway, this is it:

Ingredients

• 175g soft butter (I used standard salted stuff)
• 180g golden caster sugar
• 1tsp vanilla extract (I actually used ‘vanilla flavouring’ as it was all I could get hold of today – seemed to work fine)
• 2 eggs
• 225g self-raising flour
• 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
• 150g tub Greek yoghurt (BBC version calls for 4tbsp)
• 2 normal apples (not cooking apples)
• 50g ish chopped pecan nuts (BBC version uses walnuts, but I thought pecans would fit the recipe better)
• 60g chewy toffees
• 2 tbps double cream

First things first – preheat the oven to 160c/gas mark 3. Line a loaf tin with greaseproof paper (you could alternately just use a strip of greaseproof paper along the bottom and ends, and grease the rest of the tin, but I’m lazy so just crumpled the paper into the corners).

Firstly, cream together the butter, sugar and vanilla (making sure the butter is ‘warm’ and not straight out of the fridge really helps reduce the forearm pump).

Beat in the eggs, one at a time – it will look seriously manky when you’re doing this.

Peel, core and then chop the apples into little bitty pieces.

Add the flour, cinnamon, yoghurt, apple and a small handful of pecan nuts, then carefully mix it all together until it resembles a smoothish yellowy paste with lumpy brown and appley bits in (aren’t my descriptions so much better than Delia’s?)

Tip the mixture into your loaf tin and smooth it down so it’s roughly even, then scatter another small handful of pecans over the top. Whack it in the oven!

Leave it to bake for 1hour, then check it to see if it’s done – use a cake tester or some kind of skewer to ‘probe’ the cake – if the skewer comes out clean (i.e. no goopy cake mix on it), then it’s done. Be aware though that you may get little goopy bits of apple with this cake! If it’s not quite done, give it another 5-10 minutes and check it again.

Let the cake cool in the tin for a bit (it will sag otherwise), then when it’s solid enough, remove it from the tin and place on a cooling rack.

Once it is pretty much cool, you get to make the icing/sauce stuff, which is the best bit:

Pour the double cream into a small saucepan and add the toffees (for reference I put 7 in, weighing roughly 60-65g). Slowly heat the pan and keep stirring constantly to make sure the cream doesn’t burn and the toffees don’t stick to the bottom of the pan and burn. Eventually they will melt (trust me, they will, it just takes a little patience) – keep stirring until you have a lovely toffee fluid. Tip this over the top of your cake and then sprinkle yet another loose handful of pecans over the top of the sauce.

Now this one is important – LET IT COOL for at least 10mins before you tuck in, otherwise you will get into a mega mess.

Bon Appetit!

gear we like, part 3: flasks and hot drinks

• Flasks

Not a part of everyone’s gear loadout I know, even in winter there are a number of people I know who still prefer to take a bottle of water or squash out, but for me the flask is the king of cold weather hydration!

(Note: lots of people carry both a bottle of water and a small flask of hot drink, I only tend to do this if I am doing a big big day where I will be needing lots of fluid – i.e. days where I pack the camelbak as my primary source of hydration, and the flask becomes a luxury morale booster.)

Anyone that knows me, knows that I drink alot of tea. I can’t stand coffee, I do partake of the occasional good hot chocolate, but primarily I am a tea drinker. Funnily enough I never used to drink all that much of the stuff, but working in an office meant I learned the time-wasting value of a trip to the kettle (especially if you were making drinks for 5+ other people, but I digress…), oh and of course Phil (my dearly beloved) is apparently addicted to the stuff. I should really run a tally of how many cups he averages a day – could prove quite interesting. Anyway, I seem to have digressed again, so back on topic: flasks and hot drinks on the hill.

Nothing is quite as morale boosting as a nice hot cup of something after you’ve spent the previous hour or so freezing your butt off on some god-forsaken belay half way up some frozen crag. Using a flask to carry a hot drink is also the best way I’ve found of ensuring the fluid you’re carrying is still drinkable when you need it (i.e. it hasn’t frozen as can be the problem with simply carrying a bottle or a camelbak when it is really, really cold).

I guess I don’t really need to say much more do I? Hot drink on the hill – big thumbs up. Still fluid fluids? Humungous thumbs up. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the flask!

(Of course flasks are also great in summer, but winter is for me when they really come into their own.)

• Hot drinks for the hill (aka ‘what to put in the flask’)

Right, so I’ve dug my flask out of the cupboard, ready to fill it with warm goodness, but what exactly should I fill it with? Now I know that everyone is going to have a different opinion on this and many people will go with something coffee related, but as I’ve already mentioned I can’t stand the stuff.

Some people I know go with a hot squash type thing (usually either orange or blackcurrant), and this is far from a bad idea. Personally though, I steer away from these types of thing as I just find them too sickly sweet which then puts me off drinking when I really should.

Hot chocolate is not the most successful of drinks to choose for a flask, simply because you end up with alot of grit in the bottom (I’m obviously talking about simple drinking chocolate powders, I have never experimented with proper hot chocolates in a flask because firstly, it seems like a waste of good hot chocolate, and secondly, because it is again a very sweet drink option and probably not that great a source of hydration anyway).

Tea. You’ve probably already guessed this is where I was heading, but you might be surprised yet!

I’ve already mentioned that I drink alot of tea, and this is bog standard builders tea for the vast majority of the time (for any non-British readers, ‘English Breakfast Tea’ is the stuff – none of this ‘Early Grey’ nonsense). At home our tea of choice is Twining’s Everyday Tea – loose leaf (the only place you seem to be able to buy the loose stuff is Waitrose currently, but the tea bags are everywhere and equally good – we just prefer loose leaf for its cost and waste advantages…anyway…), always with milk but no sugar, thank you.

Now, standard tea with milk is a great drink at home, but is utterly crap from a flask – the milk means it goes all grey and nasty, oh and it stews. If you don’t mind drinking it black, then this is better, but it does still stew, and isn’t entirely pleasant when cold or only lukewarm.

I’m not into herbal teas, but I do like Green teas and White teas (and by White tea I don’t mean tea with milk – White tea is essentially unfermented Black tea). Last year I was using alot of Green teas in my flask as it doesn’t stew anywhere near as much as Black tea and is still actually quite pleasant to drink even when mostly cold. Winner! This year I discovered White tea, which has all the advantages that Green tea does in a flask, but for me tastes even better on the hill (it’s slightly more like standard Black tea in taste I feel, although not by much).

(One additional note about Green tea and White tea, is neither contain caffeine, which can also be an advantage on the hill as caffeine is of course a diuretic.)

All drinks are a matter of personal taste, but if you’re like me and are looking for a good flask drink that is still drinkable when cold and isn’t coffee or squash, I recommend you try some Green or White teas, but for goodness sake only leave the bag in for a few seconds, because if you brew them strong they taste absolutely vile! Green and White teas need to be weak to taste good. Trust me.

So my pick of the drinks, currently, White tea:

winter climbing tips: ginger cake

By far the best food I’ve found for a winter day out in the hills, be it Scotland, Norway or the Alps, is a tasty, sugar laden cake that simply does not freeze.

Behold! The ginger wonder.

Ingredients

• 150g unsalted butter (I have used salted and it doesn’t make a massive difference actually)
• 125g dark muscovado sugar
• 200g black treacle
• 200g golden syrup
• 3 teaspoons ground ginger
• fresh, finely grated ginger, lump approx. 2-3 thumbs

note: I’ve upped the ginger amounts massively from the recipe I was originally using, and even these quantities aren’t overpoweringly strong. Beware of using much more fresh ginger though as it seems like too much can make the cake rise a little oddly.

• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 250ml milk (we only ever have semi-skimmed but I don’t think it really matters what type of milk)
• 2 large eggs, beaten
• 1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda dissolved in 2 teaspoons of warm water
• 300g plain flour

Method

Preheat your oven to 170 C (gas mark 3).

Pre-line a loaf tin with baking parchment.

Choose a large saucepan (you can mix the entire cake in this), and melt the butter, then add the sugar, treacle, syrup, ginger and cinnamon and ‘melt’ these together (use a low heat so as not to burn the butter to the pan, be patient!).

Take the pan off the heat and add the milk, eggs and the bicarbonate of soda. Mix (don’t worry that the mixture seems to be layered at this point).

Sieve the flour into the batter mix, slowly and in increments, whilst stirring (I usually add a bit, stir it all in, then add some more until it is all in, roughly 4 or 5 batches). Now, at this point it WILL be lumpy, no matter how careful and patient you have been, so the next stage is to stir, stir, and stir some more – trying to work out most of the lumps. You may be stirring for quite a while, but eventually you should end up with a nice silky looking liquid batter.

Pour the batter into your pre-lined tin, then carefully put it in the oven (middle of the middle shelf), for 45mins – 1hour (keep checking on it – when it’s done a knife or skewer inserted into it should come out clean – any gooey residue and it needs a touch longer.)

Once it is cooked, take the cake out of the oven and carefully lift it out of the tin, onto a cooling rack. Let it cool! When it’s feeling solid enough, remove the baking parchment, then replace the cake on the rack and let it cool completely (trust me on this, it actually tastes better when it has cooled down! Honest!)

 

And there you have it! Glorious sticky ginger cake. Cut it up, stick some in the freezer if you want to keep it (note: it probably won’t actually freeze solid – one of mine hadn’t gone hard even after 2 months in the freezer!)

Oh, and one more thing to be aware of – this stuff is deadly. Or at least it appears deadly on the security scanners at airports when it’s packed into your hand luggage. I kid you not…

egg banjo

Apparently a fried egg sandwich is called an Egg Banjo.

Awesome. You learn something new every day!

top tips on how to eat more healthily when you’re away from home

Following a set of discussions with a friend of mine who commutes to London for work every week (i.e. he stays during the week), I thought I’d try to pool some of the ideas and techniques I developed for eating [at least relatively] healthily when I was working away from home alot.

(There may also be more to come on this subject in the future.)

Planning

• Firstly, and obviously, think about what you’re eating, generally – does your diet consist primarily of convenience snacks and fatty foods? Can you simply eat healthier things?
• Think about and plan when you are going to eat each day (this may not always be possible, but you should try to stick to a well thought out and consistent regime as much as you can).
• Set yourself a guideline as to which meal is going to be the main meal of the day (classic example: if you expect that one day you will have to skip lunch, plan to make your main meal in the evening, or if you think you will have to work late, perhaps consider making lunch your main source of sustenance for the day and have a simple snack in the evening).
• If it does look like you will need to skip lunch on a particular day, think about taking in a ‘packed lunch’ bought or prepared the day before, that way you won’t actually need to skip the meal entirely – this should help you to resist the urge to ‘binge’ later on, or snack on chocolate or crisps from a vending machine.
• Think about where you will be getting your food from each day – if you have this planned out in advance, you will be far less likely to just grab something horrendous from the first convenient fast food store or chip shop.
• Plan the general outline of your meals (by that I mean roughly what and how much of particular types of food like sandwiches, pieces of fruit, snack bars etc).

Food

• Find places that sell healthier types of ‘convenience’ food – a good example is the chain ‘EAT’ – alot of the food they sell actually isn’t too bad.
• Try to minimise the amount of heavily processed and ‘calorie rich’ food you consume. Generally avoiding fairly obvious items like chocolate, cakes and crisps is ALWAYS a good idea.
• Substitute ‘healthier options’ for those calorie rich items you are now avoiding – fruit is an especially good choice.
• At lunch, don’t have soup AND a sandwich, have one OR the other (this also means don’t have two sandwiches – a sandwich AND a sandwich).
• Packed lunches are your friend as they stop you going out and just buying whatever you fancy at the time, which for those who lack a degree of self-discipline, is a sure way to end up buying and eating too much, even if what you’re having isn’t necessarily unhealthy.
• Go to a supermarket and buy the basic ingredients to prepare your own meals.
• A quick, easy and healthy option for an evening meal you can prepare in a hotel room is pre-flavoured cous cous (just add boiling water), plus some cooked meat or chicken to add in.
• Pot Noodles are BAD.

Penderyn, welsh single malt whisky

Welsh whisky!

Not bad, but not stunning either. If it were £20-25 for a bottle I’d buy it, but seeing as it is priced (varyingly) at £30-40, I think I’ll pass – it simply isn’t that good, not when compared to similarly priced scotch.

That’ll be number 40 off the list then.

airports

Glasgow. The airport and the railways - these are all I ever get to see! Not that I've any particular desire to go sightseeing. Ok so there probably are some cool things to see, and I must admit there are some nice places to eat and the nightlife is good - there are a few rock clubs I wouldn't mind venturing into at some point.
Anyway, I digress, today I was back on the railway, again. Joy of joys. Dressed up like the tango man's sister, trogging along scummy sections of track hoping that I would be able to fix the problem quickly and go home. Thankfully I did, and the guys at EasyJet even managed to get me on an earlier flight home (I had booked the very last one in case the job had gone tits up, and yes, that is a technical term).
On a side note - I went to Burger King. I had an XL Bacon Double Cheeseburger and dear lord did it taste good. It was filth and floorshavings but it tasted fantastic after being stood trackside for ages. I normally avoid junk food of this ilk like the plague- it's bad for you and really doesn't taste that great in reality. I did suffer afterwards - I always end up imagining I can feel my arteries contracting and the fat cells starting to form and clump together on my stomach. Melodramatic I know, but it also wasn't helped by the fact that I also had cake. Yes, today I was very, very bad.

Phil very kindly picked me up from the airport and took me home. I'm glad he did because airports aren't good places to stay.

I have sort of developed a knack for dealing with airports - lord knows I spend enough time either working in them or travelling through them!

My reasoning on airports is: when travelling through the terminals, and indeed whilst on the planes themselves, there is no reason to let yourself get stressed (except pehaps because of the airport arseholes, and even they needn't be a cause of stress if you take the right viewpoint*.)

My tips on avoiding airport stress (and note that it is all about the art of queueing):

• when travelling alone try to be at the end of the queue. Yes, I said the end. The back. The rear. Call it what you will, you just don't want to be at the front - that is where the airport arseholes tend to congregate (see footnote).
  
• the only important queue is the one at check-in (and possibly the ones in the shops and cafes, but that's obvious). Don't be late for this queue as being late may mean you miss the flight, and even if you just scrape in, you will be stressed - being late and having to rush is stressful!
• don't panic and rush through security in a flurry - for one thing, some airports have virtually no facilities once you are through security (I'm thinking here of domestic departures at Glasgow International for example), and for another - getting through security is much less traumatic if you are relaxed and organised. Make sure you have sorted youself out (empty pockets, laptops out of bags, jackets and shoes off if necessary etc) and remember the security staff are there to help you!
• RELAX!!! Once you have checked in there is absolutely no reason to rush around like a headless chicken - it will always be easier for the airline staff to get you onto the plane than to get your bag off again. Hence, no need to rush. Plus, by not rushing you have a much better chance of being at the back of the boarding queue.
• when you are travelling alone it is always better to be at the back of the boarding queue (see point 1) - if you have an allocated seat number it doesn't matter how many people board in front of you as you will be sat in the same place no matter what. If you don't have an allocated seat number (as with most budget airlines) you are better off at the back of the queue as you will get to pick the best seat - if you are at the front of the queue and pick what you think will be a good seat, you have a whole row to yourself, you can virtually guarantee that you'll either get the fat bloke with the serious B.O. problem or the screaming brat sat next to you. By being the last person to pick a seat you can choose to avoid such irritations. Simple.
• ipods are you friend. They can block out a surprising amount of noise, including snoring, squelchy chewing noises, children crying (to a degree- don't expect miracles with this one).
• if you do still find yourself feeling stressed at the airport for one reason or another, just think yourself lucky - you're only passing through!
  

*I will concede only two genuine causes of stress at airports - badly behaved children (and their parents), and arseholes.
My definition of an airport arsehole is one of those people who just have to be at the front of every queue and won't consider that there actually are other people alive and breathing who are in fact also entitled to a little standing room. I pity these people in a way because they are just making the whole sorry process unnecessarily painful for themselves! I still laugh when they trip over though...

font day 9: going home

Today we had a quick visit back to 95.2 so I could have yet another go at La Mur de la Fosse aux Ours, my 7a project. Needless to say I still didn't finish it. I did get to watch a rather nice young German chap try it and also not get any further than I did, although he did seem to be somewhat stronger than me so that was nice.
I blame the fact that I'm just not a very good climber, and I'm weak. But also - I think I have whiplash. Stupid stupid woman. NEVER get wrapped in a bouldering mat, not for any reason, ever.

The journey back was fairly straightforward, although we did see some kind of weirdness going on at one of the motorway services - it was closed and ALOT of fire brigade vehicles were turing up, including the chemical unit and the big vehicle lifting airbag thing. Not quite sure what was going on but it did spawn some interesting conversations in the car.
I also had a really nice panini for lunch - chicken curry in a toasted ciabatta! Amazing! French motorway services clearly aren't all bad.

We had dinner at Cite Europe even though all the shops were shut. I only mention this because I had a huge bowl of mussels and they were lovely!

font day 8: stupidity

Cleared out of the Gite then back to 91.1 for a chilled out day bouldering. I swear the grades there are harder than at other areas. Or maybe the climbing's just a different style that really doesn't suit me, I don't know. Anyway I think Dave enjoyed himself - he certainly managed to get into some interesting positions at times.

Anyway the main point of this post is to emphasize just how immensely stupid it is to be wrapped up inside a bouldering mat and then participate in your friends challenges. Ok so the wrestling (see above) wasn't so bad - I only ended up with a face full of sand. And the race round the boulder was tame enough. The falling over backwards thing however, was a REALLY REALLY crap idea. I cracked my head really hard on the ground and very nearly passed out. Stupid woman.

Ok so after the day's antics we went to the restaurant near Elephant - I had the Kangaroo steak - it was lovely :)
Then we made our way over to the Formule 1 hotel at Moret for the night. Cheap but, umm, well, kinda crappy - but hey, for around 10 euros each it was a bargain!

font day 6: pain

A good day all round. Dave's first day in Font - I think he enjoyed it.

Ok so I didn't get anywhere near to doing the 7a but I tried and I suffered for it. Nearly split a tip and ended up feeling incredibly battered. Such hard moves!
Anyway, my excuse was that the conditions were too bad - it was roasting! Apparently 32 degrees for alot of the day - the rock sweats. Jen and I failed to do a 5b we'd both flashed earlier in the week, purely because the rock was sweating so much!
Phil and Alex managed to finish their project so the day was still a good result.

Ok so I gave up on the 7a and we went off and explored 95.2 a bit more - it's a cool area. Found a nice arete problem, graded 6a that we decided to work. I managed it first (not that I want to brag ;) ) and then repeated it a couple of times (see bottom photo). Jen and Dave both did it too and were really chuffed :)

Again a nice dinner - Phil cooked a curry of sorts, once again lots and lots of good food. Oh, and crepes for dessert - amazingly fun. We even discovered that Dave truly is 'a great tosser' (his words not mine!).

font day 5: rest

So today was a forced rest day. Think I've been going stir crazy.

Just got in after having a short but entertaining session on the training wall. Admittedly most of the time was actually spent chatting but hey!

Once again a big meal with a ridiculous dessert - was a bit of a shame that the entire tub of ice cream had melted in the freezer and was more of a fluid mousse type thing. Not great but still.

Picking Dave up from the station tomorrow morning, still undecided as to where we're going to climb (I do however have a desire to head back to 95.2 for a 7a re-match)!

font day 4: de-motivation, rain and the world's biggest spag-bol

Ok so day 4 was a bit of a washout. We went to La Roche aux Sabots with doing the whole yellow circuit in mind (this was mainly Alex's goal so we all thought - great a nice day of fun climbing!). Anyway, we only managed 12 out of 34 problems before we all got fed up and went to sit down to eat lunch. Unfortunately it then started to rain quite hard so we beat a hasty retreat back to the car.

We had a bit of a play back at the training wall, doing some endurancy type circuit work (I felt the need to do more exercise after eating a fair amount for lunch).

Dinner was, well, large. Jen and Alex cooked Spaghetti Bolognese, or at least they would have if they'd found the spaghetti in the cupboard. Instead we had pasta bolognese. All fine so far, the trouble was they had decided to use a whole packet of pasta plus the remains of another for a meal for 4 people! Honestly, there was enough to feed 7 or 8! Plus we then finished the massive chocolate gateau from Monday night. Dear goodness was I full!

Tomorrow is a forced rest day. Slightly depressing as I'm desperate to get back to 95.2 to do battle with my 7a project again (a problem called La mur de la Fosse aux Ours).