A summer of afternoon teas

Before last month, I'd only been for one afternoon tea in 2018. Can you believe it?

Thankfully, this precarious situation has been rectified over the last few weeks and I've been for two afternoon teas with lovely people. The first one was a brand new experience and the second was in one of my favourite haunts, so I thought I'd blog about them both to give you a bit of a flavour!

Sarah bought a voucher for a Mad Hatter's afternoon tea in Llety Cynin for my birthday back in June. We decided to book it for a Saturday in mid August as a mid point between both our birthdays. I stayed in Sarah's house on the Friday night to make a proper weekend of it, and we drove to Llety Cynin on the Saturday afternoon with high expectations.

From the minute we arrived, we definitely weren't disappointed. The function room was smaller than expected and only had about six tables, but this was a good thing as it meant our food was brought out quickly and it was nice and quiet. The room was perfectly themed and we even had photo props on our table. It was immediately clear that a lot of thought had gone into the whole afternoon tea experience as well as the food itself.

I had a peach iced tea to start which was tasty and refreshing. We were told we could have tea, coffee or iced tea to drink, or all three if we were so inclined! Unlimited drink refills were also made available for us if we wanted them, free of charge. 

The food came out within about ten minutes and it was a very impressive sight, to put it mildly. I loved the effort that had gone into the presentation, mostly because it made it very instagrammable. We had a selection of sandwiches, chive scones with cream cheese and parma ham, and an amazing selection of cakes.

The cakes were all homemade, including the Jammy Dodger, and the macaron was one of the best cakes I've ever had at an afternoon tea. I didn't need to eat anything for the rest of the day which is always a good sign that they didn't skimp on the portions. 

A few weeks after my great experience at Llety Cynin's Mad Hatter's afternoon tea with Sarah, Liz came to visit for a few hours on a lovely sunny day. We booked a table at Pettigrew Tea Rooms as it's one of our old favourites, and Liz also brought Abigail along (her 8 month old baby) for her very first afternoon tea experience!

One of the many plus points for Pettigrew Tea Rooms is that you have loads of choice when it comes to your drink, sandwiches, scones and cake. They have a great choice of flavoured teas on offer, as well as coffee and hot chocolate. I went for the Mango Noir tea as I'd never tried it before, and I managed to drink an entire teapot of it. 

We chose egg mayonnaise, brie and fruit chutney, and cheddar and tomato on mixed bread for our sandwiches, and we also had fruit scones with all the trimmings. And, as is customary at Pettigrew Tea Rooms, we had a massive slab of cake to finish. We both opted for the Passionfruit, Lime and Coconut loaf cake to take away and it was scrumptious. I was a little bit gutted that I offered to share it with Neil.. that'll teach me for trying to be thoughtful. 

I'm on a mission to make sure I book in a couple more afternoon teas before the end of 2018, and I've already got one booked in tomorrow with Amy which I'm very excited about. As always, keep an eye on my Instagram for updates. 

Do you have any afternoon tea recommendations for me? Let me know in the comments! 

Ten days of pre-Christmas celebrations

December is my favourite month of the year. Partly because it contains Christmas Day, but also because the build-up to Christmas is just as exciting as the day itself for me.

As I've enjoyed quite a few pre-Christmas celebrations during the last ten days, I thought this would be a very appropriate topic to blog about with just four sleeps to go before the big day.

One of my favourite Christmassy traditions is the annual office Secret Santa lunch with my colleagues. We all bring in a different item of food (the food list is planned with military precision to avoid duplication), we exchange our Secret Santa gifts, and we partake in a quiz and laugh a lot. I was so happy with my thoughtful and completely perfect gift this year... 100 collectible postcards from Disney's Golden Age! I can't wait to frame some of these beauties over the Christmas holidays.

A few hours after our Secret Santa lunch, we went out as a communications team for a few cocktails at our new favourite bar - Be at One. When the menu is about 30 pages long and the cocktails seem to be 'buy one, get one free' whenever we go there, what's not to love? Although we didn't stay out late as we were working the next day, it was lovely to spend some time with the team outside of work and to indulge in some very delicious cocktails on a school night! 

A few days after our Secret Santa lunch, it was time for the annual work Christmas party. We went for a meatylicious meal in Viva Brazil, followed by drinks at Kongs/ Two brand new places for me! The Prosecco was flowing and it was a great evening with lots of laughing and catching up. I even bought new sparkly shoes and a sparkly bag for the occasion. If you can't wear sparkly shoes at Christmas, when can you? 

We were supposed to go out to Neil's work Christmas party the night after my party, but we were both exhausted so we had a Saturday night in with two massive Papa John's pizzas and Home Alone instead. I then continued the excessive eating the day after by driving to McArthur Glen to meet Sarah in Frankie and Benny's. I had a cajun chicken wrap but didn't photograph my food... I must have been REALLY tired! 

On Monday evening, we went to Tony's in Penarth with Sophie and Bryan as we hadn't caught up with them for a while. We had a lovely meal (I went for pasta rather than my usual pizza, due to the pizza overload over the weekend), then we all went back to our house to play Monopoly on the Nintendo Switch. Jessie was ridiculously excited about having visitors... there was a lot of barking, leaping and general over-excitedness on her part. 

I finished work for Christmas on Tuesday and Neil randomly had the Wednesday off work, so we took the opportunity to go in to Cardiff to see Star Wars: The Last Jedi. I was slightly lost for parts of the film as I'm not a Star Wars fan and haven't got a clue about the back story, but I thought it was a pretty good film overall. Also, I love love love BB-8. 

Lastly, to finish off this very Christmassy ten days, I went for afternoon tea with Jo in my favourite place - Pettigrew Tea Rooms. We've both had a rubbish couple of years in many ways so we thought we'd treat ourselves to afternoon tea just before Christmas. I had to get my slice of cake boxed up to take away because I was too full to eat it after my massively indulgent hot chocolate, sandwiches and scones! But don't panic, I ate it a couple of hours after I got home and loved every bit of it. 

I'll be blogging about our actual Christmas celebrations next week, if I'm not in a food coma by then... in the meantime, hope all my readers have a lovely Christmas! 

Celebrating our third wedding anniversary

My regular readers (hello to all three of you) will already know that Neil and I celebrated our third wedding anniversary a couple of weeks ago. I've already blogged separately about a few of our anniversary celebrations, but we managed to fit loads in this year so I thought I'd write a post to summarise what else we got up to.

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We were determined to make the most of this anniversary as I was in the middle of my cancer diagnosis nightmare on our second wedding anniversary. I had an urgent MRI scan on the actual day of our anniversary last year so it wasn't going to be too difficult to improve on that! My parents kindly took us out for a meal in the evening as they'd accompanied me to the hospital in the afternoon, but that was definitely the only saving grace.

The weekend before our anniversary, we visited The Making of Harry Potter studio tour in Watford. I'd had a difficult couple of months and Neil had been insanely busy in work, so we both really needed this long-awaited weekend away. We had a great time and I blogged all about the studio tour here. After spending the whole afternoon at the studios, there was a conveniently placed TGI Fridays right next to our hotel so we had a lovely meal and cocktails there on the Saturday night. I think a good old Jack Daniel's burger might be on my 'favourite meal ever' shortlist!

We got back from Watford early Sunday afternoon and spent the rest of the day with Jessie as we'd missed her so much while we were away. We initially didn't have any plans for the bank holiday Monday, then Sophie and Bryan invited us over for a barbecue which fitted in perfectly with our plans for the long weekend. The sun was shining and we spent a relaxing few hours talking, laughing, eating, and drinking wine (and some fruit juice).

Bank holiday Monday came and went all too quickly, but luckily we both had a few more days off work. The day before our anniversary, we went for afternoon tea in one of my favourite places in the world - Pettigrew Tea Rooms. I can't believe it's been over three years since the first time I visited there on my hen weekend... I must have been about 25 times since then! As always, the food and service was amazing and it was the perfect way to continue our anniversary celebrations.

To make the day even better, we managed to get a family selfie after we got home from our afternoon tea! We'd been trying to get Jessie to pose for a photo with us for days and she wouldn't cooperate, so I've decided she must have wanted to give her humans a nice anniversary gift. Or perhaps she was just tired and couldn't be bothered to be stubborn on this occasion...

On the day of our anniversary itself, we exchanged cards and gifts when we woke up. As leather is the symbol for the third wedding anniversary, Neil bought me a pretty leather bracelet from Pandora. This grey bracelet has been on my wishlist for a while so he chose very well, as always.

After going out for an obligatory hot chocolate in the afternoon (well, hot chocolate for me and coffee for him), we took Jessie for her evening walk then got ready for our meal at Etc Penarth. We had a really special evening with exquisitely instagrammable food which I blogged about here. As it was a rare opportunity to get dressed up, I wore my new white dress (sale bargain from New Look!) and my perfectly matching New Look shoes and Kate Spade bag. Colour coordination makes me happy, just in case you didn't know that already.

When we got back home after our meal, we settled down with a drink and watched Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. We're slowly making our way through the films again after visiting the studios... the second one is arguably the weakest film but we couldn't possibly leave it out.

I think you'll agree that this year's anniversary beats last year's, hands down!

Bank holidays were made for eating

I love food... I assume you already know this by now if you follow me on any kind of social networking channel. I usually manage to be relatively healthy during the week and have been known to display some strong willpower, but I'm not usually so disciplined over the weekend.

Bank holiday weekends are no exception. Liz and Pete came to stay with us over the most recent bank holiday and it's fair to say that we ate ourselves silly. I obviously took photos of everything so this post focuses on some of the best things I ate (and drank).

We started off the magnificent weekend of indulgence by visiting Penarth's Villa Napoli restaurant on the Saturday night. Neil and I hadn't been to Villa Napoli for over a year and Liz and Pete have never been so we were all very excited. I had the goat's cheese bruschetta to start and the tagliatelle ragú for my main meal. Not the best quality photos due to the lighting in the restaurant, but definitely good quality food! We also shared a bottle of Pinot Grigio between the four of us and it was a really lovely evening.

After we got home, we cracked open a bottle of Ice Wine. After bringing a few bottles of this wondrous discovery home from Canada, we've now found out that it's sold in our local Lidl restaurant! We're introducing it to all our friends because it's that good. Unfortunately Ice Wine bottles are half the size of a standard wine bottle, so of course we had to move on to normal wine next. Liz had also made her legendary Rocky Road for their visit so we had that for dessert! I feel I must warn you that this is only the beginning if you're already silently judging. 

Sunday was a hotly anticipated day as we were all going to Pettigrew Tea Rooms for afternoon tea! We bought Liz and Pete a voucher for two for their wedding a few weeks ago, so obviously we had to accompany them because it would have been rude not to. 

We headed into town a couple of hours before to do some shopping, then collectively decided to have a quick stop in Caffé Nero before our 3pm reservation at Pettigrew Tea Rooms. I know I know, coffee/hot chocolate before afternoon tea doesn't really make sense, but we were tired and I'm powerless to resist the temptations of a small skinny hot chocolate. 

As usual, afternoon tea at Pettigrew Tea Rooms was everything we dreamed of. I usually have hot chocolate rather than tea as I naively used to think I disliked every variety of tea. However, I've recently discovered flavoured teas so I thought I'd try a simple organic peppermint tea. It was really refreshing and meant I got to have a pretty teapot and cup and saucer like everyone else! Bonus. 

When it came to making our cake choice at the end of the afternoon after scoffing the above, I chose the raspberry and white chocolate cake. It was a bit of a risk as I usually stick to either the carrot cake or the lemon drizzle cake because I know how amazingly good they are. However, the raspberry and white chocolate didn't disappoint! I sincerely hope it's still there when I visit again at the beginning of next month. 

After getting home, we complained about being full for approximately an hour before eating more Rocky Road, Doritos, mini savoury eggs and some tiger bread. There was also a lot more wine. We were all in quite a serious food coma by midnight ('are you surprised?!' I hear you say), and yet I still couldn't stop thinking about that one last mini savoury egg. Snacks are dangerous little beasts!

After Liz and Pete left on Monday morning, Neil and I had a leisurely day of pottering around the house and garden, doing the food shopping (our lives seem to revolve around food in one way or another) and catching up on a few TV programmes. In amongst all this, we finished off the tiger bread and had a fairy healthy berry smoothie!

What did you get up to over the bank holiday weekend? Did you also use it as an excuse to eat EVERYTHING? Please send me your links if you've written similar posts, mostly so that I can console myself with knowing that I'm not the only one! 

A very belated post... our first wedding anniversary!

It's been nearly six months since our first wedding anniversary, so what better time to blog about it? I'll pretend I meticulously planned it that way rather than quite simply forgetting to blog about it until today. 

Our wedding anniversary was on Sunday 30th August, but we decided to start our celebrations on the Saturday evening as that was exactly 52 weeks from the wedding day itself. This also meant we could celebrate for longer (and eat more celebratory food) which is always a bonus. As we held our wedding reception at Cardiff's Copthorne Hotel with amazing food, we decided to go back there for dinner on the Saturday night. Everything I wore was from New Look, of course!

I chose the goat's cheese and balsamic red onion tart to start and it was really really good. I was a bit worried about the goat's cheese as I hadn't tried it before, but it just made me realise that I've been missing out on a tasty flavour all these years! I had steak for my main meal which was also delicious (although not photogenic enough to appear here). 

It was great to be back at the Copthorne a year on, eating in the exact same room where we ate our wedding breakfast with our family and friends. The restaurant was nice and quiet, and I enjoyed a glass of wine while we were there. I also took the opportunity to pose in one of our favourite wedding photo spots! 

On the day of our anniversary itself, Neil gave me a beautiful 'cariad' locket from Clogau to mark the day. This photo definitely doesn't do it justice! He also printed a tiny wedding photo which fits perfectly inside the locket to make it extra special and significant. It has quite a long chain so it looks great with high-necked tops and dresses, and I absolutely love it. 

In the afternoon, we went to one of my favourite places in Cardiff... Pettigrew Tea Rooms! As usual, the afternoon tea was spectacular and I even got to try a new cake flavour - blueberry and orange. Absolutely divine. 

We went to the cinema after our afternoon tea, but I'm afraid I've completely forgotten what we went to see. This is what happens when I don't blog about an occasion until six months later! I'm sure the film was good, whatever it was. 

I obviously used our first anniversary as an excuse to post a few collages from our special day on Instagram. I love a good collage, and I had hundreds of wedding photos to choose from! 

We went to Florida a few days after our anniversary and enjoyed a few special celebratory meals there too, so it was a really lovely first wedding anniversary all round. 199 days to go until the second one! 

New thing every week in 2015 #4

Hello, and welcome to the fourth instalment of my 'new thing every week' series! You can read the first three posts here, here and here.

I did quite a bit of travelling during this section of 2015...

Week 31 (30 July - 5 August) - Visited Meifod to work at the National Eisteddfod. 

Week 32 (6-12 August) - Went to Clarks Village and found some epic bargains. 

Week 33 (13-19 August) - Went somewhere new for a hair cut... this has reminded me that I haven't had a hair cut for nearly six months!

Week 34 (20-26 August) - Went to London's Ice Bar and REALLY loved it. 

Week 35 (27 August - 2 September) - Celebrated our first wedding anniversary with a visit to Pettigrew Tea Rooms.

Week 36 (3-9 September) - Stayed at Walt Disney World's Port Orleans French Quarter resort in Florida.

Week 37 (10-16 September) - Ate in Narccoosse's at Walt Disney World's Grand Floridian resort (and had glowing cocktails!)

Week 38 (17-23 September) - Bought a chain strap watch, thanks to a Floridian bargain.

Week 39 (24 -30 September) - Went to the British Museum in London for a marketing conference.

Week 40 (1-7 October) - Ate (a lot) at ZaZaBazaar in Bristol during a weekend away with university friends.

I seem to have fitted a lot in between August and the beginning of October... find out what new things I got up to during the final weeks of 2015 in my next post.