Last big meal before the wedding!

I'm sure it won't surprise you to hear that I'm currently in strict 'wedding diet' mode. The big day is less than a fortnight away so I'm spending even more time than usual in the gym and obsessing over eating healthily and cutting out any rubbish from my diet. Boring, but essential for my sanity!

I went out for lunch with my lovely work colleagues yesterday as this is my last week in work before my wedding and honeymoon leave. We decided to go to the Cedar Tree Farm restaurant in Cardiff Bay as we hadn't been there before as a group. You can read my previous blog post on this amazing place here. I fully intended to be healthy and to restrict myself to a very small helping from the carvery, but this just didn't happen. I can't say no to food when it's right in front of me!

I went for the beef option as I haven't tried it before and it looked very lean. So I started well! I then said yes to a yorkshire pudding and stuffing, and things just snowballed from there...

I even went for the 'small plate' option instead of my usual 'standard plate', but it didn't seem to reduce my portion size. I just piled things even higher than usual! My plate mainly consisted of beef, yorkshire pudding, stuffing, roast parsnips, roast potatoes, swede, carrots, red cabbage, some kind of cauliflower cheese concoction and onion gravy. Diet fail! I probably did manage to squeeze in my 5 a day though, on the bright side.

After insisting from the beginning that none of us were having dessert, we eventually decided to share a slice of the Galaxy cheesecake between the 7 of us as it looked so beautifully decadent. We weren't quite prepared for the sheer size of the portion...

We didn't manage to finish the magnificent slice (if you can even call it that) even though there were 7 of us there to tackle it! Yes, most of us are on diets, but that still shows how massive the thing was. It was so good though... the biscuit base was absolutely beautiful and there were two different layers of chocolate mousse which were both mouth-wateringly delicious. I only wish I'd managed to finish the whole thing off, but I did have a tiny bit of a conscience left at this point which strongly insisted that I'd feel guilty later if I ate any more. Put the spoon down! I consoled myself by mentally pencilling in a guilt-free date to return after the honeymoon in order to conquer one of these fantastic desserts. Well, I say 'guilt-free'... I don't think anyone could consume that much sugar/fat/chocolatey goodness without feeling a bit guilty. 

Needless to say, I was too full to eat anything else substantial all day and I worked extra hard in my Spin class after work. 

So I've (hopefully) had my last big meal before the wedding day... I'm glad it was such a good one! 

Easter in photos

I had a long five day weekend over Easter and took lots of photos of what I got up to, so I thought I'd publish an 'Easter in photos' post just to summarise my weekend. I'll be blogging about some of these activities in more detail over the next week or so, but here's a little taster. 'Taster' is a good choice of wording here... I ate rather a lot!

My weekend started early with a trip to Pizza Express on Thursday

with Edwina and Sarah

Options hot chocolate in my Easter mug

My Easter nails

Bit of gardening...

Carvery at Cedar Tree Farm

A wander to Cardiff Bay

Went to the pub and had a hot chocolate!

Neil cooked dinner one night.

Stuffed peppers, salad and continental meats to start...

...and bacon, leek and asparagus cheesy tagliatelle for the main course!

Toasted hot cross buns for breakfast

We spent a lot of time in IKEA

As a consequence of our visit to IKEA, we built some furniture

Reduced Easter chocolate 

Aldi's Mini Eggs are nicer than the real thing!

Lovely walk around Cosmeston Lakes

Jack Daniel's burger in T.G.I.Friday's

Went to see The Amazing Spiderman 2... it actually was amazing!

More cooking from Neil. Spanish scrambled eggs!

Easter present from Neil

Last hot chocolate of the weekend in Caffe Nero,

with a sneaky Lindt bunny!

What did you get up to over Easter? Did you take as many photos as I did?

Restaurant Review: Cedar Tree Farm

Newsflash... I might have found a new favourite restaurant. Cedar Tree Farm is a relatively new pub/restaurant which is located in the Cardiff Bay Retail Park area. Neil and I went there on Sunday evening with a few of Neil's friends, and I'm still raving about it. I know I talk about food a lot, but this place really is worth talking about.

This photo was taken from my car window...

There was only one parking space left in the entire car park when we turned up at 5:30pm on Sunday, so you might need to park elsewhere if you're visiting on a Sunday. Luckily Neil's friend had booked us a table (again, booking is essential on a Sunday) so we went to join the rest of the party and salivated over the menu for a while. As well as offering a very impressive carvery, Cedar Tree Farm also provides pub favourites such as chilli con carne, curry, fish and chips, pies, sandwiches, and so on. 

If you choose to go for the carvery like I did, you have a choice of three plates - small, large or mega. I went for the large option as I wanted to leave some room for dessert... I'm always thinking about my next course/meal. You go up to the counter area to order your food then move on to the carvery section to choose your meat/s and help yourself to a copious selection of vegetables. 

You can choose gammon, turkey or beef for your meat option. If you really like meat, you can choose all three! I just went for turkey as I'm not a big meat fan and wanted to pile my plate high with vegetables instead. All the meat was falling off the bone in lovely thin strips... it all looked amazing. 

Although the meat looked impressive, I was mostly impressed by the veg and all the trimmings. Yorkshire puddings, roast potatoes, mashed potatoes, boiled potatoes, carrots, red cabbage, green cabbage, broccoli, swede, stuffing, parsnips, gravy... my eyes must have been like saucers! I LOVE VEGETABLES. I wanted to take more photographs, but the counter was very busy and I don't think people would have appreciated my camera standing between them and this amazing food. 

As you can see, I managed to fit quite a lot on my 'large' plate, including a very healthy portion of parsnips as they looked really delicious. I can confirm that everything on my plate tasted beautiful and I ate every last crumb. I was genuinely gutted that you can't go up for seconds! My highlights were the parsnips, swede, red cabbage, roast potatoes... I'm going to stop there before I name everything on my plate. I'm not even a big fan of turkey usually, but I was even impressed with that. Definitely the most tender turkey I've ever eaten. Everything tasted fresh and of a very high quality, and I wasn't disappointed with a single aspect of the meal. 

In spite of my huge meal, I still wanted to try a dessert as the rather magnificent dessert counter had caught my eye on the way in to the restaurant. After having a closer look, I can confirm that I've never seen anything like it outside of America. The cheesecakes on display were as big as my head! I have quite a big head so that makes them even more impressive. 

I obviously had to post lots of photos of the desserts on offer...

Are you hungry yet? It was an extremely difficult choice due to the vast array of options available, but I decided to go for the Strawberry Shortcake Sundae. Although I was very tempted by a number of the cheesecakes, I was in an ice cream mood. I thought it would probably be quite large due to the sheer size of the cheesecakes, and I definitely wasn't wrong! 

Although the double whipped cream on the top was lovely, it was quite heavy after a while so I was relieved when I hit the ice cream layer underneath. There were huge strawberry slices in the sundae as well as strawberry ice cream, clotted cream ice cream and oodles of crushed shortcake. The ice cream was very creamy and, unsurprisingly, there was lots of it. I was full to bursting by the time I got to the end, but I absolutely had to finish every drop. There was no way I was wasting even a tiny bit of this spectacular dessert!

The atmosphere in the restaurant was very relaxed and homely, and I thought the prices were pretty reasonable. My 'large' carvery plate was £7.95 (it's cheaper during the week) and my dessert was £4.20. The desserts at the Harvester are the same price and they're definitely not as big as the desserts at this restaurant. So if you live in the Cardiff area and fancy a nice Sunday lunch/dinner during the next few weeks, you can pop down to Cedar Tree Farm for a huge and very reasonable meal!

I can't wait to visit Cedar Tree Farm again... the big question is, should I go for a 'mega' plate next time and sacrifice dessert, or should I try a slice of cheesecake? All comments welcomed!