Rhubarb and blueberry sorbet

I've been growing rhubarb for the first time and was initially impressed with how well my little plug was progressing. Its leaves gradually withered though as the constant wind and rain took its toll and I began to regret not harvesting what I had when the red stalks were very still very small but looked juicy. 

The plant is back on track and is making steady progress now the pot is safely tucked under the cover of my makeshift plastic greenhouse and I still hope to taste its fruit in a couple of weeks time. 

Meanwhile, the UK weather has done a complete volte face and has gone from hail and torrential rain to a full on heatwave. It was 34 degrees in our garden today, which suited the Mediterranean herbs quite well but did the seedlings I was potting out no favours. 

Escaping to the cool indoors, I investigated what we could have to quench our thirst. Iced tea and coffee, especially a refreshing roiboos, but there's also a stash of pureed rhubarb my friend Susi gave us a while ago. 

I've cobbled together a DIY sorbet recipe, adding 150g of blueberries to the green rhubarb mix and a dash of mint. Ginger is a good alternative to mint, while most recipes use strawberries for the colour and additional sweetness. Several recipes I found online suggested a dash of spirits such as gin or vodka - this Kimberly Hasselbrink one looks amazing - to break down the tartness of the fruit. 

I don't have an ice cream maker so blended everything in the food mixer to make it as smooth as possible and then kept nipping indoors to stir up the mixture as it froze - a good discipline for ensuring I didn't get too much unseasonal heat. 

Rhubarb and blueberry sorbet recipe

Place 200g of stewed rhubarb (thaw out frozen stewed fruit; use fresh if available) in a heavy-bottomed saucepan. 

Simmer with 100g blueberries, 150ml of water and around 50g of caster sugar. 

Add small sprig of fresh mint or half a teaspoon of freeze-dried mint

Slowly bring to boil, stirring frequently

Remove from heat and allow mixture to cool

Whizz up the mixture in a blender until it becomes smooth

Pour into an airtight container and freeze for around two hours or until begins to firm up. Stir or break up into chunks and blend in food processor using the chopping blade. Return to freezer and allow to freeze. 

Will need around 15 minutes to become sufficiently defrosted to serve. 

Serve with fresh fruit and/bitter chocolate cookie or mouse. Add a mint leaf for decoration. 

Great British Jubilee Bake

Now that's what I call a cake. Edd Kimber's Great British Jubilee Bake

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine posted a photo of an incredible-looking cake on her Facebook page and threw down the gauntlet to her friends to try and bake a Jubilee-themed Victoria Sponge cake too.

It wasn’t an entirely random challenge. Vinnie works as a PR and one of her clients is Bart Spices. They’d got Great British Bake Off winner Edd Kimber to come up with a new spin on the good old Victoria Sponge using some of their spices sourced from various Commonwealth locales. That's his creation pictured above. 

There’s a competition running until 11th June inviting wannabe bakers to come up with their own Jubilee-themed cake: A baking masterclass is at stake.

By way of enticement to get involvement, I was sent the recipe and spices to have a bash at recreating Edd’s cake. To say I messed things up would understate things somewhat. Attempt number one was hastily abandoned after an accident with the spice grinder. This set me back a few days as I waited for a replacement to arrive. My next attempted bake tasted great but fell apart even before I’d tried the tricky feat of horizontally slicing each half of the cake in order to stuff them with creamy icing and blue and red berries.

Fingers crossed it’ll be third time lucky as there’s only a few more days left to submit entries and I don’t want to be a laughing stock on Facebook, where voting takes place: www.facebook.com/bartspices.

I'm dearly hoping it's anonymous. 

Red, white and blues

I don't know about you, but I'm finding all this British jolliness a bit wearying. Red, white and blue is a cheery trio of colours and I've as fond memories of the 1977 Silver Jubilee as anyone else. We had a lovely street party, the sun shone and I remember being made very welcome by the ladies who were pleased to have a young volunteer for buttering sandwiches before we all tucked in to a vast picnic.

But 1977 was a full 35 years ago and there ought to be some more relevant cultural signifiers than Union Jacks being enthusiastically waved and its familiar motif being spattered across anything able to take a print. The good old red, white and blue is having a dreadful effect on fashion, as a stroll down the aisles of most high street retailers proves. Bed sheets with elongated Union Jacks, floor length and with enormous armholes at the sides are neither maxi dresses or beach cover ups. They're just dreadful.

Last week I witnessed the daubing of the Union Jack right across both windows of one of the most prominently placed pubs in the Leicester Square/Covent Garden tourist zone. Sure enough, when I walked past the next day, not only was the view from the windows completely obliterated, but a giant fry-up and a call to come on in for some Great British Grub was superimposed over the top. We have a tough enough time convincing sceptical overseas visitors about the excellent cuisine to be found in the UK, without reminders of such unhealthy examples. Ok, I'm being a bit of a snob here, but I do think we're playing up our dear old stereotypes when there's no need.

This year's Jubilee is also responsible for an outbreak of bunting - and here I'm guilty of encouraging it as I thought some simple garter stitch pennants in bright colours would be the ideal project for a knitting workshop I'm helping run as part of our local community arts festival.

There are numerous examples of kitschy flowered fabrics snipped into shape and finished with crimped edges - perfect if you want to put on an afternoon tea and serve it on your lawn or in a summerhouse to ladies of a certain age with pressed curls, faces powdered and defiant red lips. I'm afraid I don't know many ladies like that and I'm just as fed up with the tweeness as I am as the giant flags adorning every surface.

Luckily, bunting doesn't have to be kitsch or monarchist - it simply signifies celebration. So while I'm sticking to bunting for its conveniently small size and speediness to create, I'm also slipping in a few non-traditional motifs of my own. After all, Her Maj is Queen of the Commonwealth, which currently comprises 54 countries. That gives us an awful lot more scope than simply red, white and blue.

Why Pinterest needs you

I've been spending a bit of time with Pinterest. A friend warned me of the danger of doing so: it's rather a visual vortex. One intriguing looking photo leads to a slew of others and before you know it you've pinned and followed hundreds of posts and digital cork boards and half a rainy day has disappeared.

I can't see myself idling away hours on a sunny day - Pinterest doesn't say anything; it just shows you stuff. The appeal of Pinterest is that it's all lovely stuff. Beautiful homes, perfectly styled hair and fashion, cute pets and admirably well executed home crafts. There are photos and paintings too, along with some shining examples of architecture and product design.

Pinterest began as a closed shop, open to crafters and bloggers and anyone with an established web presence who would recognise how sharing boards of beautiful things might catch on. The social sharing site is now in a loose 'invite only' mode but actually has more than 18 million users and is soon set to become mainstream. It's not quite Facebook yet, but it shares some of that site's attributes and works directly with it, as it does with Twitter.

Twitter's similar, in that it offers an instant means of sharing items you like. With Pinterest, it's about the pictures rather than clever words. Perhaps recent Facebook acquisition Instagram is a better example. Once something's 'pinned' it can be seen forever (unless you unpin it, of course) on your Pinterest board.

You can pin video as well as photos, so there's scope to pin 'funnies' and all sorts that you might previously have shared on Facebook but that disappear off your page once a few more posts appear in your Timeline. I recently berated Videojug for its not always funny funnies. Get them on Pinterest and let the world decide.

It's this sort of engagement (and that Videojug and Vimeo do within their own environs) that Pinterest desperately needs. It could be a cool place to hang out, but it's dominated by photos of wedding dresses and cute designer things for kids. It needs rescuing from its saccharine coating and to be given some balls. 'Bloke' stuff, punk stuff, not quite so comfortable to look at stuff.

Corkboards use pins for a reason, so you can jam them in with a thumb and show the world that 'this' is what's worth looking at. Duh!

Free time me time

Next week, I was supposed to be going to China. I’d have been shown the ins and outs of a number of useful new products that Hewlett Packard are keen to show those of us who cover such exciting things as printers and laptops. We’d be told about the research and development that goes into designing such useful business tools and, back in the UK, we’d eventually get to give our take on what we were shown.

Based on previous business jaunts with HP, the likelihood is that we wouldn’t be allowed to share our thoughts on what we’ve seen until a week or even a month after our return from Shanghai. I certainly wouldn’t have been spilling any secrets about the under wraps gadgetry while I was in China.

Nonetheless, my role as a ‘self-employed business advisor’ did not meet with the authorities' approval and I’ve been refused entry to the country on this occasion. I’ll have to keep my thoughts on printer technology to myself. I'd love to have spent time in such an interesting city as Shanghai, though. 

All this gives me a bit of time on my hands (not something I’m very good with – I keep myself busy at all costs). I’ve done enough work to keep me busy before I went away and when I got back, but I’ve suddenly got a full work week to fill.

My first thought was, how about doing some of the things you couldn’t have done if you were in China. 


I could get political and talk about the silent demonstration in Trafalgar Square last weekend by followers of the Falun Gong. 


I could talk about some of the services that westerners enjoy and the Chinese are denied, the latest being the Google Drive cloud-storage service. It wouldn’t achieve much and, besides, China has its own version of the internet and its own online services. Its people have far bigger issues than whether they get such generous data storage allowances with Baidu.

Instead, I thought I’d plan my unexpected ‘free’ week around things that I couldn’t do if I were in China. 

There’s no excuse not to get out on my bike or haul myself down to a local gym and start sorting out my weak back. My back has been playing me up again of late, but I never make the time to sort it out.

I can declutter the flat and finally get some sort of order in the spare room that was originally planned to be my work-at-home space. Someone else will appreciate those books, those tops and trinkets that have long gone unloved in this home. There's three more tomes beside my bed and I might just be able to read them. 

The weather’s turned and the garden is crying out for attention. It’s not too late to have a second stab at getting some vegetables to grow.

I can dig out my cameras and start properly getting to know how to take worthwhile photos without recourse to clever tech tricks. I've officially got time to knit! 

And there's a certain cake I've been challenged to bake that requires patience and not a small amount of decorating skill. 

I'm beginning to wonder whether I ever had time for Shanghai at all. 

Teenage Cancer Trust kicks right Royal oldies into touch

I’m pleased to see the Royal Albert Hall has announced changes to the way its members are able to dispose of unwanted tickets for charity concerts. Earlier this week there was a kerfuffle when news emerged that a couple of its wealthy patrons were making tidy profits on the secondary ticket resale market, with those for Roger Daltrey and Paul Weller's Teenage Cancer Trust benefit concert selling at up to £299 apiece against a face value of £50.

Members of the Royal Albert Hall pay around £1000 per seat to the charity – the Royal Albert Hall, this is (yes, it does seem rather incredible that such a venerable institution has charitable status) – and in return have a certain number of seats allocated for each performance. This allows them to show largesse and entertain family, friends and clients. Not no one likes every act that takes to the stage, nor has the time to go to every performance, so for those events for which they have surplus tickets, selling them to someone who can use them makes sense.

Giving them to someone who can use of them makes even more sense. Having got ‘cheap’ seats to see PJ Harvey at the Royal Albert Hall last year, imagine my delight when while queuing for the lift to take us up to the ‘gods’  at the top of the auditorium, a lady who holds a number of seats in the stalls offered me a pair for the third row – for free. It was a fantastic gift and a matter of pure chance that I was in the right place at the right time. It’s also in complete contrast to the attitude of the other debenture members who have been criticised for selling theirs and profiting from doing so.

Inability to secure concert tickets is the bane of every music fan’s life. Your favourite act finally tours and you can’t get tickets for love nor constant redial or web page refresh. Moments after the event sells out, tickets magically appear on a secondary sale site at hugely inflated prices. Entrepreneurial, yes, but one that comes at great expense to the average music fan. The same thing happens for other high profile events, but the Glastonbury Festival has become the standard-bearer for this nefarious business.

When Arctic Monkeys announced their first UK tour as a headline act, I found myself on the receiving end of this. An eBay bidding novice, I grew tired of constantly being outbid at the last minute for every ticket I went for (I soon learned about auto-bidding tools, but not before the tickets were gone and my patience exhausted).

I soon discovered face value tickets were available for the same tour in Germany and Holland, but eventually plumped for Philadelphia – an extravagant option, but less so as I was able to combine it with a long overdue return to visit a dear friend in New York and my first holiday in some years. My ticket cost $15.

Such options have now become fairly standard, with travel packages for festival fans being offered.

In the case of the Royal Albert Hall tickets, of course, something else was at play. Profiting from the fact you are automatically allocated tickets is one thing, but it feels immoral when you’re doing so for a charity concert. The performers and promoters were giving their time and talents for free (and rightly getting publicity and goodwill in return, natch).

I was lucky enough to attend the first ever Teenage Cancer Trust concerts and have been to four in all over the years. One year, having delivered to its modest office some donated items for distribution around the various cancer wards that the Teenage Cancer Trust has been instrumental in creating, I was asked whether I’d be interested in buying a ticket for one of the events. These, I was told, were tickets that supporters of various types were unable to make use of, and had therefore returned to the charity so they could be sold and more money raised.

Surely this is what is supposed to happen. That or give the unwanted tickets to the kids on behalf of whom Teenage Cancer Trust is fundraising. There’s also a group of kids in attendance at these concerts, bravely declaring their intention to battle on through a horrible disease.

I’m sure many more kids – with cancer or without but facing challenging circumstances all the same – would love the chance to attend. Now the Charity Commission, organiser Harvey Goldsmith and the board of the Royal Albert Hall have stepped in to prevent such profiteering, it’s possible many more of them will get the chance to do so. 

Masterchef mischief

Lime cheesecake - the spare bits

Masterchef has much to answer for. I don't just mean the hours we spend drooling over the incredible creations that they manage to pull off, week after week. It's the idea these so-called amateurs implant in us hapless viewers' minds that we too can conjure up incredible culinary creations. 

A few months ago, I wrote of my intention to whip up an easy-peasy panna cotta and use it as a foil for the fun-looking endeavour of spinning sugar and caramel creations into fancy shapes. On that occasion, it was Celebrity Masterchef putting foolish ideas into my head. 

Since I'm vegetarian, it took me a while to find a suitable recipe that sounded easy to make and used agar flakes rather than gelatine to set the pudding. After much searching, the Waitrose store in the basement of John Lewis on Oxford Street came up trumps. 

When I eventually had the right combination of ingredients, time and recipe, I made a right hash of what several food bloggers experienced in Hawaiian cookery had assured me was an easy to make much loved classic, coconut panna cotta. Coconut is mildly less fattening than double cream, which is good, but I didn't manage to get my agar flakes to dissolve sufficiently. When I came to wash up, I realised a fair chunk had congealed in the tumbler in which I'd mixed it and didn't make it as far as the saucepan where it would set the coconut milk 'custard'. 

I'll try the recipe again, as it tasted good, but my expectations of what constitutes simple on a cookery show have been suitably adjusted. 

Lo and behold, one of the contestants in the final of Masterchef this year had to use agar flakes to make an item in a hold (a Michelin-starred chef wanted an edible barbed wire ring). Seemingly, Andrew's first ever attempt was a triumph. Really? Honestly? 

Today's creation looks a little more successful. I've whipped up a lime cheesecake using my wonderful new food mixer. The flan tray I have with a removable base wasn't quite deep enough, so I've got excess filling. Thankfully, some pretty glasses were able to accommodate the spare, so I crumbled in some more digestive biscuit and butter base mix, packed it down and spooned over the lime cheesecake filling. 

Smoothing off the top and neatly transferring the mixture to the glasses wasn't *wholly* successful, as some telltale smears suggest, but if the TV chefs can fudge, so can I.