Gingerbread cookies

It is SO cold here (-1 when I left the house) that its really unpleasant. I really really dislike cold weather, but it does make the festive season really quite Chirstmassy. One only has to consider the number of Christmas markets available for visiting (we chose Zurich; more on that another day) and look at the crazy lights on Regent St / Oxford St to get an idea of how hectic Christmas really is in Europe. The best thing of course is that its the season to be watching Love Actually again!

Anyway back to the food... I was sitting solo in my local Pho Cafe (yes its actually called that) munching on pho and spring rolls tonight - the food isn't particularly awesome but its local and I do like the flower tea they have there (this is the jasmine one); its so pretty!



As I was eating my thoughts turned to chocolate cookies and gingerbread for no apparent reason. Since the house is stocked with supplies for making both, I wandered home thinking I'd decide then, but as I walked past Starbucks I saw the gingerbread latte sign --> time for gingerbread. I haven't made gingerbread for years, but it occurred to me that I should try and improve on the disappointing dry tasting one from Munich (see the last picture of  this post) at some stage. There's no family favourite for gingerbread so I went over to google Nigella Lawson's one and compared it with the one in my Stephanie Alexander book. Is it just me, or is it weird that in both of these recipes there is no actual ginger in gingerbread??? I decided to put some in anyway for good riddance - the spices are practically identical to those used in pumpkin pie or pumpkin spice latte.

Fortunately for me, gingerbread is pretty simple and there's not a lot of ingredients and measuring which immediately sold me to making it. Its another one of those lovely things where the ingredients just fit on the table nicely and there's even room for Stormy my toy mini schnauzer to sneak in the photo behind them.



 

Kate's gingerbread recipe (adapted from Nigella):

Ingredients

• 1 cup of flour


• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder


• 1/2 teaspoon each (around 2 shakes of the spice bottle) of cinnamon and ginger


• 1/4 teaspoon each (around 1 shake of the spice bottle) cloves, all spice, nutmeg


• 60g butter


• 1/4 cup brown sugar


• 1 egg


• 2 tablespoons golden syrup (or honey if you don't have any)

Method

1. Preheat oven to 170 degrees


2. Cream together butter and sugar


3. Add in egg and golden syrup (or honey) and keep mixing


4. Add in flour and spices and combine to make a ball of soft dough (there's really no need to be precious about measuring out the spices)


5. Roll it out on a floured surface and cut out shapes (you may need to put the dough in the freezer for a few minutes if its too soft to work with). I tried manually cutting out Christmas trees initially but then decided it was too much hard work for a Thursday night so I ended up grabbing the baking powder lid and using it as a cookie cutter (no idea where my cookie cutter set went... either left it in Sydney or lost it in the shipping somewhere!)


6. Bake for 5-10 min till golden on top (I'm sorry I can't be more precise on the timing of this - our oven is a bit funny with temperatures so its a guesstimate plus keeping an eye on it!)

Note that this isn't a particularly sweet gingerbread; I think most people like to eat theirs with icing. Since I'm not a royal icing fan (I don't feel the love for using raw egg whites in my icing... I'm going to have to get over this one day), I made a lemon glaze instead.

Lemon glaze - No measurements required, simply take a few big spoons of icing sugar, add a few drops of lemon juice and mix with a spoon (I do recommend always adding the lemon juice to the sugar and not the other way round - this way you can control the consistency / runnyness / thickness without wasting an excessive amount of sugar).

By the way, this is the first time I've baked cookies using a silicon mat and I can report that its completely superduper. There's absolutely zero sticking and no baking paper required! No idea how I have only discovered this in the last 6 months!

Mr T decided it would be fun to dye the glaze different colours so we could have a proper edible Christmas tree - here is the resulting kindergarten style artwork. The round face is meant to be a replica of Heath Ledger's joker face (Mr T just got back from a Xmas party where he dressed up as Heath Ledger's version of the joker) and the bottom round one is a tree on an island with a plane going past.



Finally, all the photos today have (perhaps obviously) been Instagrammed, as one camera is in for repairs and the SD card is missing from the other camera - what do you think? I actually don't mind it since its something a little different from my norm. In fact, I might even use this a little more often for happy snaps of food ...

Till next time, Happy Eating everyone!

Seven layer vanilla cake

Layer cake, and not a regular one. I don't even know where to begin with this, except to say that Mr T's belated birthday party gave me the perfect opportunity to go all out and do something a bit different from the norm. I'd read about Zumbo's V8 cake (8 different vanilla flavoured layers) somewhere on facebook when a lucky person was surprised with such a cake! Me being me, time to adapt it - I wasn't even going to try and make a replica because....

• I can't follow recipes to the letter. Zumbo has far too many complicated and weird sounding ingredients which I don't think are required for my home baking. I mean, titanium dioxide? gellan? Definitely the too hard basket - if I need to get it from a super specialty store then its not gonna work for me.


• Time constraints - I had the birthday dinner to think about as well as the cake!


• I needed something foolproof and wasn't really willing to gamble with things that had a high potential for fail (I know I'm crap at stuff like custard and creme chantilly so just had to find a substitute layer instead)


• I'm not really into total replicas anyway since it doesn't have a "me" stamp on it!


• I'm into shortcuts,e g. using vanilla bean paste instead of scraping out vanilla seeds from the pod saved me washing extra knives, a chopping board, wasting all the actual pods themselves

The other option was the 8 texture chocolate cake by Quay, as suggested by Miss G, however Mr T isn't really all that into chocolate, and I thought that doing alternate chocolate / vanilla layers might still just be a bit too chocolatey. However, I will try a version of the 8 texture cake as well. Recipe is here if you're interested in what that looks like.

 

I ended up with 7 layers (no recipe posted since I don't have one for 4 of the 7 layers - though I have put a * where I borrowed the recipe from Zumbo):

1. Dacquoise* - not sure if this is a fancy way of saying meringue; the method of making it certainly made it feel meringue like. This was the bottom layer and had to be sufficiently dense to hold up the layers on top.


2. White chocolate ganache - white chocolate version of regular ganache. Mine wasn't setting properly in the time given and was too runny to spread properly, but the internet suggested I whip it up with electric beaters to stiffen it, and I ended up with wonderfully whipped thickened ganache. No idea why I didn't think of this before... if my ganache has whipped cream in it of course it will whip! Duh...


3. Brown sugar crumble - regular crumble you'd put on a bog standard apple crumble, except with brown sugar.


4. Chiffon cake* - lovely smooth textured cake, but a pain to make. Next time I'll go with a regular vanilla cake and slice it up.


5. Macaron* - almond meal, icing sugar, egg whites, similar to the dacquoise. Isn't it amazing that the same few ingredients can yield a whole bunch of different textures???


6. Cream cheese frosting - since I was in a hurry I didn't have time to be precise in measuring out perfect circles for every single layer and making sure everything was exactly the same height. Unfortunately this also meant the cake looked a little like a dessert burger so I needed the cream cheese frosting to cover all the gaps. Unfortunately I didn't make quite enough and so the sides of the cake are not perfectly regular.


7. Piped whipped cream roses - Mr T thought the top of his cake was looking rather bare. I was going to pipe a picture of the Sydney Opera House but he wanted something that would provide more coverage.. so I pulled out my trusty Wilton 2D and he ended up with a lot of roses and flowers instead. It looks a little wedding cake-ish (that was not the intention!) since I got slightly carried away. Oops.

All in all it was a pretty tasty vanillery (is that a word?) concoction. I would really have liked to reduce the sugar level, but frosting wouldn't be frosting and the macaron / meringue layers won't set without sufficient amounts of sugar.

Happy Birthday (again) Mr T and I hope that you enjoyed it as much as your carrot cupcake.



Ideas for the next cake experiment anyone?

Junk food: Australian style ... aka my personal convenience store

One of the things I miss the most about Oz is my junk food. Sure they have it here too but its just not the same, particularly when it comes to chocolate. I'm so partial to chocolate but for some reason the Cadbury here just doesn't stack up. I did wonder whether we were just being neurotic when we first noticed this, but a blind tasting resulted in definitely being able to tell the difference.



Imagine my joy when Mr T came back with a whole suitcase full of all my favourite junk food, my old cupcake carrier and some new  vege peelers (I became such good friends with the ones I had from kmart I just had to have more....)

This is totally my version of being Charlie in Willy Wonka's chocolate factory, check out my table full of awesomeness!

(By the way, can you tell what the food outlier is? There's only one variety of non-Australian food in the picture. Check out my post here which talks all about it!)



 

 

Tim Tams - Perhaps one of the best known Oz favourites, every single expat I know puts packets of these in their suitcases each time they go home. I like the plain old no frills milk chocolate ones. When I was little my mum used to buy them only if they were on special at Woolies or Coles for $2. Now you're lucky if they're on special at 2 for $5! and they reduced the number of biscuits in each pack. A few years ago they came out with mint flavour, cherry, caramel ... but personally I think these were a bit try hard. I will mention Mint Slice which is my other favourite. Its a chocolate biscuit with mint cream on top and the whole thing is then dipped in chocolate, and there's nothing like it here (if you know something similar, give me a shout!)



 

Other confectionary - Minties, Fantales and Freddo Frogs, I am so sorry I ever took you for granted and from this day forth, I promise to never ever walk past a charity box selling $1 Freddo Frogs without buying one. Or two. Or three. And I also promise to savour every single bite. Violet Crumble, you are my favourite shade of purple and it is truly the way it shatters that matters. Cherry ripe, so coconutty and lovely, you make my whole day brighter.



 

Flavoured tuna - This sounds weird, but I was reliably informed by Mr M that this is an Aussie thing - he found flavoured tuna on the Australian shelves of the World Food section of the supermarket... in San Francisco. To further support this, I have one English friend whose mother in law in Brisbane posts flavoured tuna to him (true story!). Chilli is definitely my all time favourite.



 

Savouries - Nacho Cheese Shapes are actually a Mrs A favourite and not mine, so these are mostly for her. Annoyingly, this particular flavour of Shapes does not tend to be sold in the inner city supermarkets besides the IGA in Pyrmont so one has to drive out to the suburbs (think Castle Hill Coles or North Parramatta Coles) to get them. Personally I don't think you can beat the big burger taste of Burger Rings though, and my life has tended to be pretty straight with Twisties. I did once see chicken twisties for sale at the Oriental Costcutter in Bayswater (I think they were made in Malaysia) but I've never seen the cheese ones for sale anywhere here.

 

Now this is just a sampling of all the wonderful junk food from home - Mr T could easily have brought back several suitcases, and there's also stuff that can't be carried back like golden gaytimes ... Other things that spring to mind (in no particular order) are chicken salt, BBQ sauce, Smith's chips, Pavlova Magic - the Aussie Food Shop I think has a lot of it covered. Yes I could just buy all my supplies from there but a) I'd be the size of a house from eating all the junk b) I'd also be broke since everything there is obviously imported. So for now, when my lovely expat friends ask if I want anything from home, I'll be picking one or two select items and savouring those for a long long while. For now, back to eating and dreaming.... till next time!

Photo blog: Venice

Venice is not a place that requires any introduction - despite the hoards of tourists (us included), it is still a pretty special place and I was super excited to see it. We went there back in October for my birthday and spent 3 days there, a good amount of time to absorb the things we wanted to see without too much rush. It was a nice time of year to go, though probably a little on the chilly side, but fortunate as well since San Marco was flooded literally the week after we were there. Looks like November got even worse so it was lucky we didn't hold off until Mr T's birthday to go! Check out these flooding photos from National Geographic photos here. Oh, and as a starter here's a some photo fun - a miniature, and some people gawking at a photo shoot next to the Doge's palace.



The motivation for going to Venice was two fold - i) There's no place like Venice - canals, gondalas, architecture, Murano glass... ii) Assassin's Creed 2 - a big big chunk of this game was set in Venice and I feel like I know it already. I was obsessed with this game in 2011, and managed to complete 97% of it. I couldn't get the last 3% because the downloadable content (from Australia) was not compatible with the game disc that Mr T had bought (from Hong Kong) due to some region issue. Needless to say we had to buy a new version of the game and I'm still slowly replaying though with a little less enthusiasm than the first time round.

Being such a popular city, there are an abundance of things to do in Venice, but I thought Jessica summed it up quite nicely. Here is my list of top memories and things worth doing:

Things that take time to do

1) Campanile

This was so worth it for the views, and no one tried to stop us from going round each side again and again, despite being a small space.



2) Doge's Palace

Highly recommend doing this as a sole activity for the day (if you can afford the time), else half a day (and a lunchtime break to recover) to get the most out of the palace. The audio tour was really helpful as well.



3) Murano





Take a ferry to Murano and watch a glass blowing demonstration. The one we went to was arranged by the hotel so we got ferried privately to the workshop of their choice (a bit touristy, but on the upside there was nothing for us to arrange). We watched the glass master a number of items (vases etc.) and at the end he made a green horse statue, After we'd done a load of gift shopping, we were offered a free horse in blue, red or yellow. Mr T was on the ball and asked for a green horse, and the lady went off to the workshop to pick up a green one for us. It was still warm and so it looks like we got the one we watched being made! (or so we like to think anyway).

4) Burano 

Famous for the lace museum, the coloured houses, and one cannot fail to notice the leaning church tower. As we were staying in Lido, I was trying to get to San Marco (a 10min ride away) but somehow ended on a ferry going the other direction and half an hour later it was apparent we were going elsewhere... so we hopped off the ferry at the next stop and there was a sign to Burano, so we went there instead.  It had been on my to-do list (but not the must do list) but I was pleasantly surprised that this became one of my favourite parts of the trip. It was super chilled compared to the rest of Venice and there were a load of great photo ops.

Other things to see

 

Basilica - I know this will be on a lot of people's lists, but having seen so many cathedrals and castles this year I wasn't feeling particularly enthusiastic about an extensive tour (yes, I really just said that). No photo as it was under reconstruction and the degree of scaffolding spoiled the view.

Rialto Bridge - I had to go just because of the Assassin's Creed reference. Screenshot to come once I get that far in the game again on my PC....I was so sad that there was graffiti all over it *shakes fist at graffiti* and banners hanging from it.
Bridge of Sighs - you'll get to walk across this if you do the Doge's palace tour and check out the people on one of the outside bridges all leaning to take a photo of the bridge.

San Marco Square - Europe's finest drawing room according to Napoleon. Its huge, its crowded, its awesome. Check out the bride near the Silvian Heach sign!

Finally, my quick tips for visiting Venice:

• Accommodation location: If your reaction to crowds is like mine (i.e. not pretty), try staying in one of the islands off Venice. We stayed in Lido which is a 10 min ferry ride to San Marco (Cantonese speaking friends, Mr T thought it was hilarious to spend 3 days saying "we are staying at Lido" (as opposed to "gor-do")) .


• Food: Try eating at places that are off the tourist strip. We noticed that the same meal in Lido was 20 euros cheaper (and tastier) than around San Marco. The restaurants were smaller, less busy, and the food was better than the one meal we had in San Marco (which had rated well on tripadvisor). And yes, the gelato is better in Italy!


• Carry a camera: I might be a little photo nuts (around 500 in 3 days), but there is ALWAYS something to take a photo of. Seriously, every time you turn around there's something.


• Souvenirs: From a glass perspective, there are a load of imitations sold at shops near San Marco - you just don't know what you're getting for a dirt cheap price. I got slightly more peace of mind knowing we purchased stuff from the actual factory rather than a retail outlet.

Thanks for my birthday trip Mr T, been looking forward to it for 18 months and it was everything I hoped it would be!

Pumpkin, fetta and parsley muffins

I've been waiting for an opportunity to make these ever since I read Helen's Baketober post on them. The recipe has everything I love about simple baking - minimal ingredients, minimal time investment, minimal fuss when mixing the ingredients, and of course looks wonderfully yummy.So the time was this weekend, when I finally got to a bigger supermarket which actually sold pumpkin (or butternut squash in this country) and fetta cheese (coming from Oz, I'd expect fetta cheese and ricotta cheese to be sold like cheddar cheese, i.e. everywhere, but sadly this is not the case). They were pretty delicious in the end and I don't feel bad about scoffing them down since they are pretty healthy compared to all the cakey goodness I generally like to make (no sugar, only oil this time!)



I don't think Helen's recipe needs any editing whatsoever, its so simple and satisfying. The only thing I did differently was my usual approximation of ingredients since I seem incapable of following a recipe, so I think I used a bit more pumpkin and a bit more cheese than the recipe called for since that was what was in the fridge. Of course you can use whatever cheese and herbs you like (I think ricotta might be really nice since it has a lighter flavour and there would be less chance of overpowering the pumpkin), however the key thing to this recipe I think is the pumpkin.

Ingredients

1. 500g butternut pumpkin


2. 2 cups self-raising flour


3. 150g fetta cheese, chopped into mini cubes


4. 1/4 cup fresh parsley (or basil etc)


5. 3/4 cup milk


6. 1/2 cup olive oil


7. 1 egg


8. Salt and pepper to flavour

Directions:

1. Preheat oven: to 180 degrees celcius


2. Line: a muffin tin or two. I ended up making 18 of these.


3. Chop: pumpkin / butternut squash into cubes, add a splash of water to the bowl and microwave for 9 minutes.


4. Mix: Cheese, flour, and parsley in one bowl


5. Mix: Combine the milk, olive oil and egg in another bowl. Add the pumpkin when cooked.


6. Combine: the two bowls


7. Bake: For about half hour or so.

By the way, do you like my new comedy squid whisk? Part of a package of birthday goodies from my cousin Miss J. I was slightly dubious as to the design and how well it would whisk, but I think as long as a batter is relatively thin (i.e. no thicker than say a hotcakes / pancakes batter) it does fine. Either way, its soooo super cute and I love the pink. 

I think these were a real winner and worthy of remaking, and you can tailor it to however you want - hope you think so too :-) Thanks again for the recipe Helen!

 

Rose Swirl Vegan Cupcakes

So tonight was a surprise birthday dinner for Miss G, who must have been feeling the "unlove" when Mr T's birthday party has been in discussion for several weeks. Somehow Mr M managed to get her to the meeting point without her finding out, though it did require a flurry of deliberately misleading messages and a pretend phone call.

After cajoling Mr M into being allowed to make cake for the occasion, the request was for a dozen cupcakes, with mixed flavours if we had the time - that would allow Mr M to focus on getting a JLO friendly dessert (egg, dairy and peanut allergy). I thought I'd save him the trouble and decided to try vegan cupcakes in all different flavours, and made a base batter to which I then divided up in 3 parts and added different flavours - lemon / strawberry, coffee, and banana. I also wanted a chocolate one as well and a bit of googling for an egg-free recipe resulted in a number of pages with chocolate avocado cupcake recipes (weird but good!), so I started made these as well. Finally I was super excited to have an opportunity to test my Wilton 2D, and I think the roses came out pretty well.



As if this wasn't enough, I had a sudden panic that all up I only had just enough for 12 cupcakes and 4 mini samples of the banana flavoured one, which meant that I couldn't really go through and taste test the rest of the flavours. I'm usually pretty confident with my regular baking but vegan? The niggling feeling in the back of my mind that it might be a bit too floury, too sugary, not cook properly ... a whole host of potential unexplored issues could come up and I'd be completely stuffed. Solution? Whip up a batch of regular red velvet cupcakes from a tried and tested recipe just in case.

I've made vegan cupcakes a couple of times now but I must admit that a) I don't know much about vegan baking; and b) recipes often call for unconventional ingredients - I can't imagine that I'll be using a whole lot of xantham gum, agave nectar, ener-G egg replacer ... etc. all the time. I think my biggest fear (which I probably should just get over) is not being able to get the cake to rise properly and it being too dense and heavy, and I have found that soy milk also sometimes gives a strange aftertaste. The recipe I ended up using was the most uncomplicated vegan one I could find as a base batter (i.e. vanilla). Here's my adaptation of Lauren's latest recipe (makes 9-12 cupcakes depending on the size of the pan):

Ingredients

• 1/2 cup butter substitute (I used Pure Sunflower which whips surprisingly well - if you are making cupcakes for someone with a dairy allergy make sure you check the ingredients as olive spread / margarine / i can't believe its not butter often has dairy in it).


• 3/4 cup caster sugar


• Spoon of vanilla


• 1 cup soy milk + 1 teaspoon vinegar (I don't think it matters if you use white / red etc. I only had rice vinegar in the house and that was fine)


• 1 1/3 cups all purpose flour


• 1 teaspoon baking powder


• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda


• Salt

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 180 deg C. Line a muffin tin with paper liners and set aside.


2. In a large bowl, cream butter substitute with sugar. Stir in vanilla extract.


3. Stir soy milk together with vinegar. Set aside to curdle.


4. In a separate bowl, measure out dry ingredients and stir to incorporate.


5. Alternate stirring in wet and dry ingredients beginning and ending with dry.


6. Bake 15-20 minutes or until very lightly browned and toothpick comes out clean.

Frosting

Mr T always makes the frosting so I'm never entirely sure about the quantities. However, the Pure Sunflower worked as well as regular butter - simply whip this up and when the colour has lightened and its fluffy, add icing sugar and keep beating until its icing consistency. Flavour however you want (I made mocha flavour using cocoa powder and a teaspoon of instant coffee mixed with a tiny bit of water [a spoon or two at most], and lemon flavour by adding lemon juice). If this seems too soft to pipe then there's two troubleshooting options to stiffen it up: 1) put it in the fridge; or 2) beat in a small spoon of cornflour.

There's no secret to piping buttercream roses like this; all you need is the magic Wilton 2D or 1M tip (its the one on the left hand picture) and pipe starting from the middle and move in a circular motion outwards. There's a great tutorial by Bella Cupcakes if you're interested in technique. My Wilton 2D came with my piping tip set (see post here).



I made the mass of star looking things (the mocha frosting) using the Wilton 108 tip. These weren't particularly tidy for my standards; I think I was so tired by then since it was 1am on a school night that I was incapable of controlling my piping bag as well as I would have liked.



 

Verdict

We sang Happy Birthday to Miss G and everyone took a cupcake. Mr T tried the lemon vegan cake and it was surprisingly good! Since I had overcatered yet again, our porter was more than happy to relieve us of some cupcakes so I can only assume they looked appetising enough to eat. Think I had better investigate the vegan baking option so I'm less panicked next time round...

Dover Castle

The Dover Castle visit today was an unexpected surprise. I thought it was time to do something National Trust or English Heritage related, preferably something that was not too far from home, can be done in a day trip, weather looking iffy so something not excessively outdoorsy, somewhere that would actually be open (manor house and garden season won't start up again till March!) ... fussy yes, but fortunately Mr D was happy to oblige. Checking out the wartime tunnels at Dover Castle have been on my list for awhile (I had missed out on them on my previous two trips to Dover) so today seemed as good a day as any other. I did go a little photo crazy, think the count was at 195 but not to worry, I won't bore you here with them all (Mr T - this is one of the most interesting and well presented English Heritage properties I've seen - I promise we will go back!!)





Dover Castle was a fortress long before King Henry II began building the stone castle in 1160s. It is also nicknamed "the key to England" (can't take England without the castle first) and due to its location, it has played a part in more events than one would care to remember. If you'd like the history lesson on the castle, English Heritage tells the story much better than I do, link here.

The grounds at Dover Castle are huge and trying to see everything and absorb it all in a day is exhausting. The main attraction of Dover Castle is the underground tunnels, 3.8 miles long and set over 3 levels. The two guided tours were a real treat, and additionally a lot of effort has gone into creating a cinematic experience (unfortunately no photos were allowed inside the tunnels).



There was the Underground Hospital - tunnels were dug with the intention of becoming a fully fledged hospital. This was later downgraded to a Dressing Station, kind of like an old school A&E. Sadly, the surgeons and nurses would never know what happened to their patients, for if they survived their treatment at the Dressing Station, they would then be moved off for treatment somewhere else with better facilities. I don't think I can imagine what an unpleasant place it would be to work - the lack of light and ventilation, stench of mud, sweat, blood, mixed in with disinfectant.... ick! And to top it all off, back in WWII days around 70% of the population smoked, and smoking was allowed in the mess area ... so you'd have to add that to the mix too.

The other (more exciting) tour was Operation Dynamo - this was where the planning for Dunkirk evacuation took place, led by Admiral Ramsay in May 1940. There were a number of films, photographs and artefacts in this tour and it was just brilliant. As well as being able to walk through the areas where all of this happened, there were reenactment videos of women plotting out the location of enemy aircraft, the telephone operators connecting and disconnecting the phone wires, and the officers barking out orders to those above ground.

An interesting fact the tour guide mentioned is that during WWII one could see the flash of artillery on the other side of the channel on a clear day and expect a shell to explode close by 75 seconds later. For whatever reason, Dover Castle itself never appeared to be targeted, though the town of Dover certainly was. One plausible theory is that the enemy may have thought that once they got to Dover, having a fortress would be really useful.

I've always been a mega fan of the BBC show Foyle's War (stories of a Hastings detective in WWII), and this experience just made it all the more real (I'm also insanely jealous that Mr D commented that one of his friends knows Honeysuckle Weeks, aka Sam Stewart in Foyle's War). I was also pleasantly surprised to find a sign whilst inside the tunnels which said we were only 3m from the cliff face, and sure enough, we exited the tour at the cliff face. Check it out - we're in the middle of white cliffs. So. Awesomely. Cool. 





Here's the statue of Admiral Ramsay - he did not live to see the end of WWII. Story goes that he hopped on a plane to go to a conference and it crashed shortly after take off. He's now buried somewhere in the outskirts of Paris. There was also all sorts of fixed defenses located around the sites; amongst them a catapult looking thing, and quite a large number of cannons. This was my favourite cannon - the mistakenly named Queen Elizabeth's Pocket Pistol. Hard to imagine that a 12 foot gun would have such intricate decorations on it (see the plaque if you are interested in the story). Oh, its also a called "basilisk" (images of Harry Potter are coming to mind again...)



Finally, some snapshots of the castle grounds and the castle itself. Somehow the mental images of WWII officers wandering around a medieval castle doesn't completely work for me - I guess I'm just too accustomed to seeing swords and shields every time I see medieval buildings! e.g. during the Battle of Hastings - see the post about the reenactment here. Though I wouldn't call Dover the most picturesque town, there were some great views from The Great Tower and I love how the green the grass is and how this contrasts with the stone buildings, something you definitely don't get at home (well, you wouldn't get the green or the castle in the first place so there's zero chance of having the two together really). And with that, I'm now going back to watch more Foyle's War, and maybe the King's Speech as well. Till next time!