Tea and Cakes

It’s been a long weekend here in Ireland, and the weather has been fab, so apologies for the lack of posts, but I haven’t been at the computer much.

What have I been doing then?

On Saturday we cleaned the apartment, tidied the patio, and had a barbeque for dinner, with loads of lovely salads. Then we watched Walk the Line, and drank much wine. (sorry, couldn’t resist the rhyme – there, I’m at it again)

Sunday I went to the garden centre to select some new victims plants for the patio. Then I planted them, along with some spinach, rocket, various herbs and courgettes. Strictly speaking it’s too late in the year to be planting these things, but the weather’s been poxy, and last year’s courgettes were killed by a late frost so I’m taking my chances with late planting instead. Now the patio looks less like a plant graveyard and more like a garden.

I also baked a Coffee Cake:

To be fair to me, the picture doesn’t do it justice. It’s delicious. Tastes like village fetes. It should really have walnuts on top but I don’t have any. In fact, it’s Delia’s recipe, so should really be in two layers, have walnuts in it, be made with instant coffee insetad of espresso and be filled and iced with cream instead of espresso-butter icing, but, well, mine tastes good too.

Today we decided to go to the beach. Skerries to be precise. It was a beautiful, clear, bright, sunny day in Dublin. This is what it looked like in Skerries:

Here’s the Martello Tower:

There was some sort of random intense sea mist covering the village. We strolled on the sand for a bit, but it wasn’t that nice, so we gave up, and went to Ardgillan Castle instead, which is just up the road, but far, far away from the evil sea mist. It was lovely and sunny there.

Ardgillan castle’s not really a castle. It’s a country house. That’s ok though, because country houses have tea rooms and walled herb gardens and the like too. There were a lot of families picnicking in the car park, which struck me as a little odd, given that the grounds are massive and open and a public park. We left them to it.

I did have cake, and I did take a picture, but I don’t want to take away from my coffee cake here, so you don’t get to see it.

Instead, here’s the glass house:

A door in the rose garden:

A rather cool purple flower:

And some very lovely forget-me-nots:

One thing I didn’t do much of this weekend was knit, but I shall update on that at some point soon.