Mango, Passion Fruit and Pomegranate Semifreddo

                   

Last weekend most of the country basked in warm May sunshine and beautiful blue skies. The sunshine is utterly uplifting; I'm quite convinced the mood of nation as a whole improves by around 65% when the thermometer inches above 20°C.

People are nicer and kinder to one another and much more relaxed (surely nothing to do with the correlating increase in beer sales). Here in London, the city glows in the evening dusk, the mouthwatering smell of evening BBQ smoke permeating the still-hot streets and Brockwell Park resembles a beach in the Balerics (hmmm... perhaps the aforementioned reference to increased beer sales has clouded my judgement).

Promotion: 25% off the ticket prices for BBC Good Food Bakes and Cakes Show

                         

Fancy 25% off the ticket prices for the brand new BBC Good Food Bakes and Cakes Show? 

You do?

Brilliant. 

Banana and Chocolate Cake for £1

You may very well have heard of the international anti-poverty campaign, Live Below The Line. Held this month and next it raises awareness and funds for the 1.2 billion people in the world, nearly twenty times the population of the UK, living in extreme poverty each day. Guardian writer, cookbook author and antipoverty campaigner Jack Monroe, previous Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams and Sherlock Actress Amanda Abingdon have all wrote of their experiences joining the campaign by living on just £1 a day.

Smoky Bacon Scotch Eggs with Jacob's

Last month, one balmy Spring evening, we trotted through a bustling Covent Garden to an unassuming gallery just off Charing Cross Road. The location was the launch of Jacob's new marketing campaign, #snackhappy.

It wasn't just any old launch though. The gallery containing fascinating, fabulous cracker portraits of the rich, the famous and even the royal family by renewed food artist Nathan Wyburn. Edible works of art were on display, including Stonehenge, the Tower of London and a rather fancy hat made from Mini Chedders.

Breakfast Granola Muffins

I'm not terribly partial to a muffin.

[That probably isn't the best introduction to a post containing a muffin recipe].

Synthetic and artificial. Joyless, dreary and a disappointing, best-avoided, alternative to a slice of scrumptious sponge cake. Claggy, stodgy and found imprisoned in shrinkwrapped plastic loitering near the tills in 24hr petrol stations.

[Well, I'm certainly not mincing my words am I?]