My Lovely Blogaki

One of the things that has surprised me most about England is that there is no cake shops, patisserie, as such. You can find patisserie or pasticceria in London, but these are foreign imports, it is a new culture.

There are sweet shops, but they sell only candies. If you want cakes, you have to go to bakery, yup, bread shop.

At the beginning, I thought it was because the British people do not really have sweets culture, but then, I found out the British sweets, which they call "puddings", are very good! It is no doubt partly down to the excellent quality of dairy here (i.e. milk, butter and cream, but cheese is probably not as good as in France or Italy), but not only that. The English people do make very nice cakes!

Some examples, although probably not the best ones. I bought these from a chain bakery shop called Bakers Oven near our house.

This oblong cake is called "Custard Slice".



The icing is super-sweet, but the custard isn't and make a good combination. I love custard, and although it wasn't the best example (I don't expect so much for the price I paid), it goes very well with white tea (meaning "tea with milk" here).

And these are custard tarts.



The eggy thing inside the casing is not custard cream, but custard pudding. The moisture of the pudding infiltrates into the case and it is pretty soft. Probably I have never told you but I LOVE custard pudding, so I loved these too. They were not very sweet. It costs 50p (US$1) for one.

They were so nice and made me happy

Hello friends!

My last post was about unseasonal snow in Birmingham, and I thought I need to do some up-date. Since the beginnings of May, it has been pretty warm, or rather hot here. In London, the temperature gets as high as 27 degrees, and even in Birmingham where it is somewhat cooler, it gets 25 celsius. If you live in a warm or hot country, you think it is not that much, but here it can be as high as it can get in the middle of the summer.

Anyway, I took some photos to show you how the season changed here since the snow in April.



This is the flower that I find often here in May-June, but I don't remember the name. I will tell you when I remember it.

They are gorgeous.








As it has been pretty cool until recently we still have cherry blossoms.








View of a park, 30-min walk from our house. Very green. There are many young people picnicking on the grass eating sandwiches. What a good idea!












Small blue flowers in the park. It looked almost like an impressionist paining!










Blue bells. There are lots of these in the photo above.








Our garden. I mowed the grass yesterday. It need to be mowed every two weeks in the peak season. Now maybe in 3 weeks. It is pretty annoying.



I wish you enjoy your summer wherever you are!