Of all the silly nonsense, this is the stupidest tea party I've ever been to in all my life!

Actually it was a lovely tea party, but I just wanted an excuse to quote Alice in Wonderland, because it was my favourite film as a kid.

Now I must start by apologising because the pics I'm about to post are fucking dire - even by my standards - and don't really do the food justice but I wanted to post about it anyway.

Last weekend, my cousin and I met up in London and she had booked us into the restaurant of La Suite West in Bayswater, London for Vegan Afternoon Tea.

From what I could gather from chatting to the (lovely and super passionate) Maitre D, the restaurant changed to an all vegan and high raw place earlier this year.  Also, there's no alcohol served at any time there, much to the chagrin of my cousin, but as there were pubs right around the corner, we managed to make do without for an hour or so for afternoon tea.

So here's the menu:

 

I chose earl grey for my tea and as it was a vegan place I didn't have to worry about the lack of soymilk!  (I did warn you the photos were crap - the lighting was terrible in there and I didn't want to use flash....)

Sandwiches... My favourite was the Portobello mushroom & pesto, but all of them were nice. The only one I didn't love was the butternut squash one, my cousin felt the same about it - nice but the flavours didn't quite work. Also the aubergine could've done with a bit longer cooking, but still tasty.

 

Then the star of the show for me - warm fresh scones!  Delicious and they came with a side of coconut sauce (they say whipped coconut cream but it had a more pudding-y texture, it'd obviously had cornstarch or something similar added to set it) and fresh strawberries. The texture of the sauce was a bit off but the taste of it was lovely and went really well with the fresh strawbs.

 

 

The last one was a trio of chocolate thingies. I am not sure if they were all raw, I don't think the sesame halva one was, but they were all really good.  The raw coconut/chocolate cake - I'm still not convinced that was raw because it tasted like sponge and it was delightful. (that's the one at the back with the strawberry 'hat' on!) I took this pic with flash because it was so dark by then that without it, you couldn't see anything at all - yeah I know it doesn't help much! 

So my take on this place is that it's not perfect but it's pretty damn good and their evening meal selection looks really interesting, so I'd be into trying it out for a full meal sometimes too.

Have a good weekend all.

Laterz
xXx

DUDE. SWEET!

Hurro everyone.

Mondays suck, so here's some pictures of a couple of sweet things I've made recently.

Starting with the fluffy pancake pillows from Isa Does It. I've been dying to try these for ages and I was not disappointed.  Although I did accidently leave out the half cup of water you're meant to add in, so I was wondering why I only got 5 instead of 6.  But actually the thicker texture meant they were even bigger! WIN.  (I've since made them properly and they are just as rad, just a little thinner and larger because the batter spreads out a bit more.)

Instead of maple syrup, I boiled a punnet of blueberries with half a cup of rice syrup for about 10 minutes for a lovely fruity syrup.  The rice syrup meant that it wasn't overly sweet.

And last week was Daddy Alien's birthday so I asked if he would like a cake or cupcakes and he said cupcakes. Then went on to talk about the awesome black forest gateaux that my mum used to make for his birthday years ago. Apparently there were fisticuffs over the last piece of cake!! haha

So taking that as inspiration I made the basic chocolate cupcakes from VCTOTW and modified them a wee bit. I took a pack of cherry pie filling and sieved out the cherries, then reserved 12 for the tops and the rest went into the cake batter.  The topping was just plain vanilla butter cream with the reserved cherries to decorate and the cherry syrup drizzled over, with some choccy sprinkles to finish. 

These went down really well with everyone, but then, who doesn't love a cupcake?!

Hope that makes your Monday a little sweeter. Have a good week everyone. 

Oh and shameless plug - but if you're on Instagram, come follow me for more food pics, make-up and pics of Me Jazzy* (I don't think the button on the right works properly but this blog is way overdue an overhaul anyway!!).  I'm @sal_on_toast if you're into Instagram.

*Jazzy is my cat, you dirty birdie!!

Lotsolove.

Laters
xXx

Thread title courtesy of this awesome piece of ridiculousness.

I'm gonna pop some tags, only got 20 dollars in ma pocket....

Helllloooooo everyone. Has it really been over a month since MoFo ended?  October was a really busy month, ending with a fantastic holiday. I spent a glorious week in Ölüdeniz in Turkey and totally fell in love with the place, the weather and the people .... but not so much the food. 

The food was ok, don't get me wrong, but it's a fairly meat-centric (kebab) food scene out there. So I ate a lot of vegetable shish!  But I did have some lovely food too.  However, I am a massive numpty and didn't realise until I was half way to the airport, that I had left my phone at home. So no food pics.  To make up for this, I'm going to recreate some of the better things I ate when I was there and veganise some Turkish food and do a post or 2, at some point in the future.

Anyway, this past weekend I got it into my head that I needed to make fresh pasta, as it's something I'd never done before.  I was hoping to find a second hand cheapo pasta machine in a charity shop (mainly so I could use this song as inspiration for the post title - I'm using it anyway because I can't think of anything funny and pasta related!). I had no luck though and I'm impatient, so I went into TK Maxx and bought a Jamie Oliver one for £25, which I thought was pretty good.

Everybody - meet Jamie.... Jamie - meet everybody.  Charmed and all that. 

Moving on.

I haven't quite got this pasta recipe right yet and my filling was pretty predictable (tofu ricotta & spinach), so once I've perfected it I'll post a follow up and a recipe. I'm pretty sure I can come up with a more inspired filling! haha.

Also, I think that rolling the dough out all the way to the lowest setting made it too thin.  The pasta was soooo delicate and I think it needed to be a wee bit thicker, so next time I will stop on 3 or 2.

Doesn't look that great in this pic does it. Looks kinda like a bowl of brains. BRAAAIIINNZZZZ!

Saucy!

I added some pan-fried pieces of Cauldron's new Italian Tofu as well for a bit of extra tofuiness.  Yes that is a word.  (I can't find this on Cauldron's website, which is weird, otherwise I'd link to it! I swear I didn't make it up!)

I also made tagliatelle, which is super easy because this machine has a cutter for this.  Unfortunately I have no pic of the dinner I made with it because I overcooked it and it was proper mooshy!  It really only does need about a minute in the water, not 3! But here's a pic of the uncooked pasta!

"I wear your granddad's clothes, I look incredible, I'm in this big ass coat, from the thrift shop down the road!"

ehhheheh, good luck gettin' that out your head!

Hope you're all having an excellent week & happy humpday.

Laterz
xXx