Lawyering has been getting in the way of the niceties of life this week! On Monday I attended a mediation in London to try to settle a case - we started at 9am on Monday and finally reached an agreement at 4.30am the following morning - no breaks and being in the same room for 19 1/2 hours non stop can't be good for you! As we left the building the dawn chorus had started and the sun was rising in the distance. It was a surreal experience, believe me! Yesterday was a write off - I finally made it back from London by lunchtime - trying desperately hard not to fall asleep on the train and miss my stop and then spent the rest of the day talking gibberish - definitely not fit for writing on a blog! I am still tired today even though I have had a good nights sleep. Who would be a lawyer eh?

Anyway, to nicer things...On Sunday we celebrated Mike's birthday at the Inn at Woburn. Woburn is one of my favourite places and definitely worth a visit if you are in Bedforshire. Aside from the Safari Park (we loved this as kids), it has some nice shops (if you are female!), a nice tea room and an antique centre. It has an annual Oyster Festival in September which is definitely worth a visit. My favourite place is the sewing shop although sadly I was banned from going in on Sunday. Having shown Susan my stash cupboard on Saturday I realised that I really, really don't need to buy any more sewing things for a LONG while.

These are the delicious puddings we had at the Inn at Woburn - an artists palette of ice cream, gooey chocolate brownie and a blackberry and apple pie with real custard. All were delicious, as were the Happy Birthday petite fours. Happy Birthday Mike!

I received a perfect gift at the weekend from my dear friend Susan who came to visit. Susan is a fellow avid sewer - she is the most immaculate stitcher I know and you could frame her work back to front and it would look just as stunning. Susan gave me the most wonderful knitted cake tape measure - it is so perfectly me (the pink and blue one in the picture). Together with my knitted cake teacosy, I think this means I have officially started a new collection of knitted cake items!

I don't think I have ever posted about my love of vegetable boxes. It is a real treat to get a box of mystery ingredients and then being able to decide what to cook (obviously not in a scary "Masterchef...lots of pressure/you have 40 minutes to create the dish of our dreams" way but in a more relaxed, browsing all my cook books for recipes kind of way). Being faced with a vegetable you don't usually cook, may take you out of your comfort zone but it means that we usually end up with a dish we have not tried before which is a good thing. There are lots of good vegetable delivery companies local to us and I support them as often as I can. We are also blessed with a good few farm shops that sell local produce. When I am looking for a treat and particularly when I am in need of lots of fresh herbs I order from none other than Gregg Wallace's vegetable company. They deliver to lots of the top British restaurants and I have to say (I am biased of course given the MC connections) that the vegetables are simply excellent - lovely micro leaves, peashoots, borage flowers and chive flowers and really fresh veg and fruit - lots of unusual things that I don't normally see in standard veg boxes. Each box comes with a large bag of fresh herbs - some of which I chop and freeze in ice cubes for a rainy day and the remainder of which I put in everything I cook until I have run out. There is something so decadent about having a large pile of herbs to use, rather than picking sparingly from the garden so that I don't use up my whole supply or buying the little packets from supermarkets. With my last delivery, I made oven dried tomatoes with some delicious yellow baby tomatoes that were in my box; simply cut your tomatoes in half and scoop out the seeds. Place on a baking sheet with baking paper or a silicon mat, drizzle with a good quality olive oil and sprinkle with sea salt, course ground black pepper and fresh herbs. Bake in the lowest possible setting of your oven for approximately 2 hours (Aga simmering oven is ideal for this) checking every half hour (and more often towards the end) until they are dried. Transfer to a sterilised jam jar and cover with olive oil to preserve. These are perfect in salads or with pasta.

Gregg's vegetable boxes are available from www.greggsveg.com

Still no camera - those fairies are really being very naughty and I think I am going to have to go and buy a new one... I now have clear evidence of their existing as a fairy ring of daisies has appeared in our garden (well a slightly wonky ring) - they have definitely moved in! Any recommendations for good digital cameras gratefully received!

Several years ago I worked with a lawyer who was also a white witch (unlikely combination I know). He told me I would make a good witch as the alchemey of cookery is akin to creating spells. Whilst there may well be some merit in this theory, it was not a path I chose to investigate! He also told me about the naughty fairies that lived in his house who would hide his things - keys and such like. I completely dismissed this story as him just being forgetful about where he had left things. Alas I may have been wrong and fear that the naughty fairies have now moved into our cottage. My camera has disappeared - I know it is in the house somewhere but it has vanished. It is driving me mad as I can't take any photos for my blog!!! I am hoping that the naughty fairies will read this, take pity on me and return my camera to me immediately!

In the meantime, this is my mum's wisteria which has just come out. We are still waiting for ours to come out...I am beginning to worry that it might have died but am keeping my fingers crossed that it will soon bloom and make our cottage look lovely.

Muffy "helping" me work! She actually managed to send an e-mail the other day - sadly it was one to my boss and I had not finished typing it....she was trying to be helpful I'm sure! She has rather fallen for the little dog cupcakes on front of the Hello Cupcake book and spends a lot of her time sitting on it. She is a funny thing but good company when I am working in my home office!

My brother and I are fairly different types of people as I have mentioned before but we do have one major common interest - cooking. My brother and his girlfriend Amy are currently in the throws of "Operation Nightbrace" to pay off a rather large debt - here they are with their debtometer - they are making really good progress and I am so proud of them. You can read about their progress on their blog (apologies for the swearing - as I said we are different!!!)

In an attempt to save money, Gareth is cooking lots (not something he has done much of in New York given how easy it is to eat out). Here’s is his quick recipe for Squash soup…

Fry an onion and a clove of chopped garlic
Stir in a teaspoon of cumin and chilli flakes
Chuck in a chopped carrot
Chuck in a box of frozen squash (it is cheaper than fresh)
Tip in 750ml of vegetable stock
Cook
Blend in a food mixer
Return to heat
Season
Serve with a drizzle of olive oil on top and a slice of toast

Good luck with the project guys - it is inspirational!

We have a lovely old church in our village - it has just had its windows cleaned for the first time that anyone in the village can remember (which means they hadn't been cleaned for at least 70 years and were very very grubby!) I can't begin to imagine what a difficult job it was for the window cleaner, patiently cleaning each tiny pane of glass on the stain glass windows. It took him a whole week to do but the church is now transform with so much light coming in! We have a flower rota in our village and everyone takes turns at decorating the church. This weekend was my yearly turn and these are my two arrangements!

Our May Day celebrations continued yesterday and we were blessed with a glorious sunny day here in Bedfordshire. We finally made it back to the Ickwell May Day celebrations (I had not been since I was a girl) and it was so special to see so many traditions that have long since been forgotten in other places. May Pole Dancing, the May Queen was crowned, Folk Dancing by Men in Smocks, decorated hoop competitions and some Morris Dancing - a short video for those of you who have not seen this traditional English dancing before! We took our picnic hampers and rugs and had a delicious picnic of lavender and fennel salad with roast chicken and a spicy chorizo pasta salad, followed by fresh
strawberries and ginger beer. A truly lovely afternoon.

They say good things come in threes! For me this week it is fours! Firstly lovely Amanda at Stressedoutmum seeksinspiration has been so kind in awarding me the "You Make My Day" award - I am honoured. Check out Amanda's lovely blog, particularly her luscious lemon meringue pie recipe. It now falls to me to bestow this award on a few of my favourite blogs who make my day:
Jonathan and Sarah at Around Britain With A Paunch
Sylvie at A Pot of Tea and a Biscuit
David at BooktheCook
Will at The Boy Done Food
Celia at Purple Podded Peas

Special mentions also go to Marie (who has already received the award from elsewhere otherwise would have received it from me) and also to Milhan who doesn't have a blog but regularly makes my day with posting lovely comments on my blog.

The second bit of excitement (well probably only exciting for us) is that our cottage has been featured in a Special Places article in BBC Good Homes Magazine - under the caption "Live it"! It is lovely to have someone else confirm that we live in a "special place"! You should be able to read the article by clicking on the photo.

Next month Delicious magazine are running my Wicked raspberry dessert feature. I have big shoes to fill as the article this month has been written by Marcus Wearing, who I adore and who has a michelin star or two. I was so excited when I reached the back of this months magazine to see that my raspberry and elderflower sundae with elderflower biscuits is the trailer for the July edition.

My final bit of good news - and really it should have come first above the other bits of news - is that I am publishing a cook book with Duncan Baird - A big book of cakes and cookies which will be released next year and will be translated and sold abroad!!! 365 recipes which is a fairly daunting task but definitely one that I am enjoying. Any requests or suggestions for cakes or cookies in the book, let me know!

Being someone who is an avid supporter of village traditions the first of May could not go by without a mention of May Day. There are so many wonderful traditions that surround this day - washing your face in May Day due will make you beautiful for the coming year, May garlands and May Lifting, the tradition of local boys carrying a girl in a floral decorated chair who would then find the boy of her dreams the following day. As children, May Day was celebrated in our household as my Mum was a Morris Dancer. Morris Dancing, Green Men and Maypole dancing are all key parts of a traditional May Day celebration. We usd to go to Ampthill Park in Bedfordshire, arriving at 5.30am. As the sun rose, people would dance accompanied by the green man next to Catherine of Arragon's Cross (as a complete aside the golden hare from the Masqerade book in the 1980s was buided in the park near the cross until it was found be a clever man who managed to unravel all the clues and codes - we tried and failed!). After sun rise we would go to a local pub which opened its doors early to serve breakfast before heading off to school. Sadly we live quite a way from Ampthill now and attending would require a very early start. My mum still goes and perhaps one of these years we will join her again! May Day celebrations continue this weekend and we are hoping to go to the May Queen pagent at Ickwell - with traditional May Pole Dancing and decorated hoop competitions and a real life May Queen with attendants and sceptre bearers. Happy May Day everyone - and don't forget to wash your faces in the dew this morning - I will be!

If you are ever looking for a nice day out, I would definitely recommend Lille in France. Amazingly it is now only 1 hour 15 minutes from Kings Cross so is quicker to reach for us than going to Brighton for a day out. Tina and I had such a nice day - lovely shopping and delicious food. It is a true foodie mecca with lots of chocolatieres (our favourite was Guillaume Vincent which had a kitchen behind the counter making the most amazing chocolates - the salt caramel chocolates were our favourites together with the honey chocolate with popping candy in it - genius!), lots of bakers and wonderful food shops. A definite must visit is the tea room at Patissiere Meert founded in 1761 . Not cheap but definitely worth a visit and they sell violet tea (which is impossible to find in the UK so I bought lots!!!), macaroons and home made marshmallows. This is Tina enjoying a very rich chocolate fondant pudding - our fourth course of our lunch and a bit of a struggle - we managed it though!

It has been a busy old week and I am heading into a busy weekend! I have made 12 puddings for a charity dinner (three rose summer berry puddings, three lemon merignue pies, a toffee apple cream pie (which was the favourite) 2 chocolate truffle cakes, 2 cheesecakes and the good old favourite toblerone tiramisu). I gave Henry in our village a cookery lesson in baking cupcakes - white chocolate and lemon drizzle - this is him with his vivid yellow cakes decorated with blue glitter (note for future lessons: do not hand over the bottle of food colouring to a child - the icing was positively luminous!!!!) Henry is already planning what our next cake baking lesson will be! Yesterday, a visit to Newark and then today I am going to London as tomorrow we are off to Lille in France for a girlie day trip on the Eurostar (a very kind birthday present from my friend Tina). I am really looking forward to some delicious French food and a trip to the lovely delis there! On arrival back at London, I am meeting my German friend Maren who is coming to stay and then a university friend Sonya is coming to visit on Sunday! Some weeks are just a whirlwind but a lovely whirlwind! I hope you all have a lovely weekend xxx

As someone who cooks a lot and eats out quite a bit too, it is unusual for me to come across an ingredient I have not seen or heard of before. These Fiddlehead Ferms that we found in Dean and Deluca were unlike anything I had seen before. Apparently they taste like a blend of asparagus, green bean and artichoke. They are the only edible fern, other types of fern can apparently cause cancer so I am not planning going out into the woodland and foraging for these any time soon! They look positively prehistoric and I am wondering when or if they will make it to the UK! If you have ever tried them, let me know!

The lovely people at BBC Countryfile Magazine are asking for your help again. They are launching a new regular feature in the magazine - 'Farmers Market of the Month'. Now I am a big fan of Farmers Markets and they really do deserve all the free publicity they can get. What Countryfile need from you are nominations of your favourite farmers markets together with a hundred word description of why your market is the best and a photo of you at the market by your favourite stall. They will pick one each month to feature in their magazine. So get snapping now and you never know, you could end up in print! Any pictures and nominations should be sent by email to editor@bbccountryfile.com.

Have fun!

Lovely flowers for sale at the Union Square market in NY

I have always been a true lover of dumplings - fluffy clouds on top of a casserole. This is probably the reason I love Germany so much as dumplings are a specialty. On my recent trip to Germany, we had dumplings - but served on their own and not in a casserole. What a great idea for a dumpling lover! I was hooked. With certain types of food, I think it is an advantage to have been brought up making them - somethings definitely require natural instinct. I came back with a German bread dumpling recipe, eager to try it out, alas not being German, I clearly did something wrong. Far from being light and fluffy, my bread and egg dumplings were like lead! So I went back to the drawing board and decided to try making good old English dumplings instead. Much easier! Poached in chicken stock in place of the casserole, they were perfectly light and we devoured them on a rainy day last week! 2 or 3 dumplings per person are enough unless you are REALLY hungry! My German friend Maren is coming to visit this weekend, so if I am feeling really brave I might serve her my English/German dumplings!

Dumplings with Brandy and Bacon Sauce
Preparation time 10 minutes plus 20 minutes cooking
Serves 2

For the dumplings
4oz self raising flour
2oz suet
salt and pepper
water to mix
1.5 litres chicken or vegetable stock

For the sauce
3 rashers of bacon, finely chopped
1 small red onion, finely chopped
3 tbsp brandy
250ml creme fraiche
salt and pepper to season
1 tbsp gravy granules
Parsley, finely chopped for garnish

Place the flour, suet and seasoning in a bowl and mix to a soft dough with cold water. Add the water a little at a time so the dough does not become too sticky. If it does add a little more flour. Form the dough into small dumplings, heat the stock in a large pan and once simmering add the dumplings. Poach the dumplings for 20 minutes. They will increase in size so use a large saucepan for cooking.

Whilst the dumplings are cooking, pan fry the bacon and onions until the are soft (approx 5 minutes). Add the brandy and cook gently until it has almost evaporated. Add the creme fraiche, granules and heat gently until the sauce is thick and creamy. Place the dumplings in a bowl, top with the sauce and sprinkle with parsley to garnish.

If making this recipe for vegetarians, use vegetarian suet and replace the bacon with mushrooms.

My most recent article for Country Kitchen was flowerpot baking. I just loved writing this article and experimenting with little cakes in tiny pots. This was our favourite cake!

Rose and lavender drizzle cake

Everyone loves lemon drizzle cake – it is always a teatime favourite. The rose and lavender petals add a delicate floral fragrance to the lemon drizzle. This is a perfect “garden” cake served in its flowerpot.

Preparation time 15 minutes, plus 25 – 30 minutes baking.
Makes one 8 inch cake

225g/8oz margarine
225g/8oz caster sugar
4 large eggs
225g/8oz self raising flour
Zest and juice of 3 lemons
1 tbsp of dried culinary lavender and rose petals
2 tbsp icing sugar

Preheat your oven to Gas Mark 5/375F/190oC. Line an 8 inch flower pot with grease proof paper, cutting a circle slightly larger than the base and a long rectangle curled round the sides of the flowerpot. Cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in the eggs one at a time and then gently add the flour and lemon zest. Bake at Gas Mark 5/190oC/Aga Roasting oven below a cold shelf for 40/50mins until the cake is firm to touch. If the cake starts to brown too much before the cake is cooked cover the top with foil. Just before you remove the cake from the oven, heat the lemon juice with the icing sugar and lavender and rose petals in a saucepan until the sugar has dissolved and you have a light syrup. Pour the syrup and petals over cake as soon as it comes out of the oven and leave to cool.

My favourite (and perfectly me) purchase in New York was this new cupcake book - Hello Cupcake! The ideas in it are fantastic and if you are going to buy one cake book this year, it just has to be this one! The fish bowl cake is my favourite - it had never occurred to me to decorate cakes on their side to use as a flat upright surface - very clever indeed. My other purchase in New York was a set of 100 icing nozzles so I can't wait to get over my jet lag and try them out on some of these new cupcakes!

Thank you all for your wonderful suggestions for New York - we managed a fair few but definitely need another trip back again soon to experience all the rest! The highlight of our trip was a birthday lunch for my brother at Jean George. With its 3 Michelin stars and $28 price tag for a two course lunch, this has to be the most exceptional value meal I have ever had. We definitely recommend it (and thanks to the blog reader who recommended it to us). Their Fois Gras Brulee made it to dish number 3 of last years Time Out "100 best things we ate in New York" and is definitely worth trying. Among the other dishes we tried were parmesan confit chicken with lemon butter and basil and delicious confit duck with white asparagus. The dessert plates (chocolate, citrus, apple and winter) at $8 (£4!!!!!) were such a bargain that we could have had all four! My favourite was the jar of home made marshmallows that they cut at your table - heavenly! This is a definite thumbs up recommendation and a must visit place in New York.