Alice in Wonderland

Bye-bye October - it’s been a long month but it’s been a good one. This is one of my favourite displays from the Spectacle of Light at Welford Park. So clever, look closer and you’ll see that the sculpture throwing the shadows is all scrap metal; doesn’t really look like a ballet dancer at all!

The other displays were beautiful especially wandering through the lit-up trees with haunting music playing, just lovely.

We stopped for a drink and a pizza and by the time we moved on nearly everyone else had left! We ended up last so as we strolled through the final elements of the spectacle we were discreetly followed by a couple of security guards so they could lock up as soon as we were out of the gates 😀

Welford Park, you may know, is where The Great British Bake-off is filmed. Which is a spurious link to say I’ve done some more baking - I know, twice in one month 😳 I used the remainder of the glacé cherries to make these Cherry and Almond biscuits - yum yum - the dough stayed in the fridge and I cooked batches over the course of 3 days. The first were impossible to bite through 🤭 but after that batch the rest were a perfect snack with a coffee.

Last night we enjoyed Halloween night. Jamie worked on the Boo pumpkin, much trickier (especially post-stroke) than the traditional carving technique, but it’s a good effect.

And we left a little Jack-o-lantern up the allotment, as is our tradition.

All our pumpkins are small this year, all from one Jack-be-Little plant, but they have plenty of flesh and, obviously, played a key role in our Halloween celebratory meal.

We had pumpkin and red pepper soup as a starter - very tasty, Roughly based on this recipe. Unfortunately we had to buy the peppers as our last surviving three growing in the polytunnel had been eaten by rats ^{* go to end of post} 

The main was just sausages in rolls and then dessert was a pumpkin pie roughly based on this recipe, but I roasted the pumpkin and then forgot to add milk to the mixture, which didn’t seem to cause any issues. (So much cooking in this post!) It still tasted lovely with cream and a few lychees with food colouring to make them look spooky (or perhaps disgusting!).

Then we watched Attack of the Killer tomatoes <hmmm> and ate the treats as no Trick or Treaters visited us.

And the song title, well the Spectacle of light had an Alice in Wonderland theme and we kept hearing the voices of the characters. The Cheshire Cat was particularly good as it evaporated into the trees.

The Disney theme song has been stuck in my head ever since, so now I’ll pass it on to you ☺️ I don’t attempt those high notes out loud - make sure there are no glasses nearby if you choose to!

* how do we know it’s rats? Because we saw two in the polytunnel 😳 They panicked more than we did and ran off - so the remaining squashes went home and the polytunnel got a bit of a tidy. The jack-o-lantern will go into the compost bin rather than being left for wildlife this year. The HAHA committee have had a couple of pest controllers visit to check out the rat situation as some plotholders are worrying. But I’m pleased to say they confirmed it’s not an infestation and that it’s to be expected given our spot by the canal. Phew.