Bath

Saturday the seventh of June was a trip to Bath Spa.



Due to my lateness in booking, and a recent letter from my bank, I ended up on a 7 am train (the very cheapest) out from Paddington - too early for a Saturday start. Naturally, after a marmite sandwich and a snooze, my first thought on arriving in the city of Bath was where to have a coffee? The first coffee is always the best of the day and I was anxious not to ruin it. It is no compensation to have a good coffee after a bad coffee: there is only one bite at that particular cherry.

Indulging myself, I took my favourite approach to a new town and ambled about without a map. I rounded a street corner to see the Abbey in its full splendour and sat in the sunny square, contemplating it. After heading up a main street and down several backstreets, acquiring the newspaper essential for browsing with the coffee, I chanced upon the Boston Tea Party http://www.bostonteaparty.co.uk/

So serendipitous that I had no choice but to go in and order homemade museli with banana and yoghurt and a Boston latte. In a way it was the lazy choice, as I adore the Exeter branch of this company, and could still allow myself to be snobbishly righteous about not using Costa, Starbucks et al. But I do love to compare.

A waiter carried my museli past while I still stood in the coffee queue, so I had to shout out to him and then stand in queue, holding my meal. Lucky it wasn't a hot breakfast. The coffee was as good as I remember from the Exeter branch, so I was happy. The newspaper looked promising - an article on sorrrel by Hugh F-W - and Andrea was on her way to find me. Sadly, the museli was less promising. Very dry, I tried to mix it with the yoghurt, however the bowl was so full that I couldn't move the spoon without the museli-sawdust flipping out of the bowl and breathing over my sleeve. I had to asked Andrea to fetch me some milk when she went in for her coffee. There were nice nuts and the yoghurt was nicely sour - one of those set yoghurts that look a bit lumpy when you spoon them out. I would have prefered it with something like Yeo Valley's full fat plain yogurt, and also some honey on top. And having maybe granola or Bircher museli underneath.

After the amazing spa, with its four flavours of steam room, foot spas, hot tub on the roof etc., I was hungry again. Our friends met us back at the Boston tea party for lunch where I ate delicious fritters of grated courgette, feta and pine nuts, with a minty, yoghurt dressing, on a salad. The salad was good and substantial enough, but the potatoes had perhaps been re-heated in a microwave as they had that slightly wrinkly, dry edged look. But they were covered in butter, and I was starving. On the whole I didn't go a bundle on their food, but the fritters rather inspired me to do something similar at home.

After a walk in the Botanical gardens we stopped at the Jazz Cafe, mere metres away from the Boston Tea Party. Although they didn't serve 'proper cake' and tea, as we had hoped, they did do desserts. The other three chose chocolate torte, which I hope you can see from the photo was similar to chocolate cups put over a biscuit base. Beautiful. It even had the sort of grain marks from the knife slicing through, and lifting away, from the chocolate. It tasted a little more creamy and a little less grainy than the chocolate pots I made, and perhaps slightly less dark. Each slice was vast, and too much for two out of three of my friends; quite a bit was left on plates. More than Mr Manners requires, anyway.

My lemon cheesecake was the winning bullet in the russian roulette that is eating shop-bought cheesecake. HG and I agree we make the best cheesecakes known to man (egos aside), and are invariably dissapointed by shop bought versions. Sometimes shop cheesecake is even quite horrible. So imagine my delight at a Proper Cheesecake - so obviously home baked, with its uneven browned edges and raised sides, with a moat of sunken cake inside. There was a crumb base to please HG who abhors 'pastry-stuff' as as a base and it was beautifully lemony.

The slightly less exquisite elements were a scoop of ice cream - a bit too sweet and not needed with my lemon cheesecake - and the phallysis fruits on each plate. I like to eat them, but somehow they seem a bit naff.


p.s. I have no illusions about the sophistication of my tastebuds or opinions: I wrote this whilst eating straight out of a 400g bar of Cadbury's Dairy Milk!!