Cross-less Cuisine

Today is both Good Friday and our Wedding Anniversary: an unusual occurrence, and I wonder if it has happened previously.

Good Friday means Hot-Cross Buns, and a long-standing tradition with us is that we bake some buns ourselves. You see the results here, after cooking and glazing. Here are the risen buns before they went in the oven, and when the sun was still shining.

Having discovered that the addition of a cross adds much to the effort and little to the flavour, we have long since omitted this one feature that links spiced buns to Good Friday! When our children were still at home, and assisted with the making of the buns, there was always a mock mini-battle, with mother saying that I should not add too much cinnamon, and the children exhorting their father to put in (much) more. You will see from the colour of these 2012 buns (made with white bread flour) that we have not been too sparing with the cinnamon, even without the children to advise us ...

The cinnamon we used was Extra Fancy Vietnamese Cassia, which the label says contains a "very high 6% of natural oil. The cinnamon of Vietnam has long been recognised as the world's finest". We've discussed cinnamon and cassia before on these pages, notably on Sunday 24 March 2012. I refer you to the Wikipedia entry if you want the detail. In short, true cinamon consists only of the inner bark, while cassia contains also the harder outer bark of the plant.

Although we were not following her recipe, we adapted an idea from Ms N Lawson, and included a little cardamom, clove and ginger along with the mix. The overall effect was certainly excellent, and we were lucky that the dough texture was just what we wanted.

After a breakfast of buttered buns, hot but uncrossed, we decided to go for a drive to look for bluebell woods. However, it turns out that we really are too early in the season for them. We found one wood where the display will evidently be magnificent in a few weeks, but not yet.

What we did find in profusion were Beezles (aka Sheep) next to the wood. And these were "real" beezles, matching my daughter's strict specification (ca. 1977) that they have to have white bodies, black faces and black legs.

You might wonder what goes on in a Beezle's (Sheep's) mind. We watched with interest as this extensive flock in a large field decided unanimously to walk together from one end of the field to the other, for no apparent reason. Some time later, they chose to return, an an aimless but orderly fashion. (A few get distracted along the way by eating.)

On the other side of the country road we were on, there was a bit of parkland open to walk across, that held many noisy and cute baby Beezles (Lambs). I cannot resist including here a couple of 'photos from the field:

··· Face off with mother protecting her baby

··· Offspring gets daring!

In the evening, we celebrated our anniversary with a good meal. We chose to eat Jamie's Italian, in town., which is a very fun place with quality food (which we accompanied by 75cl of Sicilian Shiraz and 50cl of Primitivo: and we got home!). Here is a 'candid camera' shot into the kitchen.

And this will suggest how the meal ended.

Note added 11 April 2012

An extended collection of the beezle photographs can be found through this link.