Sticky Ginger Cake with Lemon Icing

So I was sneaking a piece of this ginger cake from the kitchen when I realised that I hadn't written a blog for OVER A MONTH. 

There's a lot going on, of which more, I hope, in a few weeks when 'the lot' has concluded and I can tell you all about it (I expect you are intrigued now).

I don't know why I was sneaking the cake, because there was no one else in the house, and only my thighs will tell the tale but anyway, there I was taking a guilty bite of this delicious thing and realised that it just had to be shared with the world before, like everything else I've made, my culinary adventures, in the last few weeks, it's been eaten and forgotten, a blissful memory... The ramson pesto, in all its green, wild-garlicky glory, for example,

the crumpets I made (so chuffed), 

the brilliant burger, 

and, of course, THE LOBSTER will simply have to wait - may be even till next year - only immortalised in my Instagram feed until then...

It's not just 'the lot' either ('the lot' that I don't want to jinx by talking about it)  - generally life has been incredibly busy. We've also had the Easter holidays, visitors, and just the most beautiful run of weather. And because everyone says "Oh, yes, Wales, well it's bound to rain again soon", you just have to get out and make the most of it. Not, exactly, a hardship, when getting out and making the most of it involves lots of this

and plenty of that

and quite a bit more of the other, 

but I'm starting to think that this is part of a conspiracy to keep this most fantastic of places a secret. Sorry if I've just blown it, but, honestly, this is the most stunning place, and the weather is not nearly as bad as you might have been led to believe...

But back to the blogging, I am afraid I've been spending a lot of time on the beach, my floors are covered in a fine dusting of sand, and I've gone a little bit more native and taken up crochet. I won't, you'll be pleased to hear, start blogging about the crochet, but neverthless, it's eating in to time I'd otherwise have spent tapping away.

This cake however, fits perfectly with the season and the weather. It's ideal beach cake, I made a slab of it to take camping with friends last weekend on the Gower. A combination of Martin Dorey's The Campervan Cookbooks' sticky ginger treacle cake, and Nigella's fresh ginger bread from Domestic Goddess, it's old fashioned and delicious and just what you want to eat with a cup of tea after a day on the beach.




Sticky Ginger Cake with Lemon Icing

200 ml semi-skimmed milk
3 tbsp black treacle
100g butter
75g plain flour
2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1/2 tsp cinammon
200g soft brown sugar
125g oats
A good chunk (maybe 3 inches or so) fresh ginger, peeled & finely grated

Juice of half a lemon (although you may not need all of it)
175g icing sugar

Grease & line a 20cm square cake tin, and pre-heat the oven to 150C (130C fan)

Tip the milk into a small pan. Add the treacle and butter and slowly bring to the boil so that everything melts into the milk.

Keeping an eye on the pan, sieve the flour, bicarb and cinammon into a large bowl, and mix in the sugar and oats. 

When the butter & treacle has melted into the milk, add the grated ginger, give it a quick stir and pour into the flour mixture, then stir to combine.

Pour into the prepared tin and bake in the pre-heated oven for about 50 minutes.

Leave to cool in the cake tin, then make the icing. Sieve the icing sugar then slowly mix in the lemon juice to make a thick, spreadable icing - not too runny, you want a layer on the top (preferably one you can leave teeth marks in) rather than dribbles down the side - and smear it over the cake. When the icing has hardened, cut the cake into 16 pieces, wrap in greaseproof paper and head out.

Mary Berry Cooks... Rich Chocolate Traybake with swirly icing

Yes, I know, you've got the book or seen the recipe online, and it's not swirly icing, is it, it's feather icing. Piped lines of white chocolate artfully smudged with a cocktail stick to make pretty, Mr Kipling-esque 'feathers' across the top of the milk chocolate ganache.

Yeah, right. Like that's ever going to happen for me.

Off for a final hoorah of the summer holidays this weekend (camping for a good friend's 40th birthday, on the campsite that she and her husband and kids have just bought. How cool is that? Our friends - our camping buddies - own a campsite. How COOL is that??) though, cake was called for and traybake was going to fit the bill.

But first, I must digress.

I haven't written much about camping this summer. Truth is that a couple of things have conspired. 

Firstly, I feel strangely coy about our decision, subsequently executed at the beginning of the year, to sell our beloved Daisy and upgrade to Sadie (or Wussie as she seems to be referred to mostly, based on an unfortunate number plate). We all loved Daisy, our 1989 T25, and selling her wasn't an easy decision but she was viciously uneconomical in the petrol department and we weren't content with pottering down to Dorset every couple of weekends. Already planning trips into Europe, and knowing in our hearts that she wouldn't be up to it (or, rather, our holiday fund wasn't up to funding her guzzling petrol all the way through France), the move to Wales was the final nail in the coffin - her paintwork would never have survived the salty atmosphere living by the sea. So Daisy went to a good home (I won't go into details, but I felt like she was continuing the good work she started with us) and we searched for our next van. We have upgraded massively, and on every level Wussie is superior. I miss Daisy. But not enough to feel too sad.

Secondly, we haven't actually done that much camping. Plenty of day trips, and having the van has meant we can stay out longer, take food with us, but as I may have mentioned before, living in such a coastal and rural area, well, the need, the desperate desire to escape to the sea that certainly I used to feel, is just not there. We did have a fantastic weekend camping down in Newport, a mere 20 minute drive away, and of course, the holiday in France, all made possible by Wussie, but, really, that's it.

But this weekend, the last of the summer holidays, we're off camping on our friends' campsite for Liz's 40th. Liz is awesome, and she's going to be such a fantastic campsite owner. At the moment, the site they've bought isn't licensed for tents, but they are working on it. And if you have a caravan or camper and need somewhere near Chippenham/Bath to stay, let me know...

In the tradition of several awesome camping birthdays we've been to, there's an element of everyone mucking in together to bring tonnes of booze salads, puddings and cakes. 

Incidentally, does anyone get the feeling that as you get older, there's a formula that should be applied to ensure you don't bring too much booze to events like this? I haven't quite worked it out - I bet I'm not the only person to have experienced these weekends where everyone forgets that they have kids and responsible jobs (either in or outside the home) and enthusiastically brings the same amount as they would have aged 23...

Anyway, digression over, and cake is where I was. I made 2 Mary Berry traybakes in preparation for the festivities. I'm not a huge fan of Mary Berry, and my views on the whole GBBO caravan have already been documented -  I wouldn't know exactly what happened in recent episodes, because I'm not watching the latest series, but I'd just like to say that the suggestion of 'naughty editing' by the BBC to make more out of the Baked Alaska issue than was there, painting a darker picture of the actions of one of the contestants, only goes to convince me that I'm right, and this show is not really much better than Jeremy Kyle...

But my mother in law gave me a Mary Berry cookbook for my birthday, and I'll concede that conniver in carcrash TV or not, Mary Berry does make a good tray bake. Her lemon drizzle traybake is pretty hard to beat for quick and easy, and I've made it a number of times, and, for this weekend, I also made her rich chocolate tray bake with feathered icing. Very straightforward, chocolate sponge, chocolate ganache, and then white chocolate.

The white chocolate should have been piped in straight lines (ha!), evenly spaced across the cake, and then I should have dragged a cocktail stick through to produce the 'feathers'.

Well there was no chance. I'm not great at decorative icing, and while I did toy with attempting a white chocolate "Happy Birthday Liz", I thought better of it and decided swirls would be a good option. And so they were. Melted white chocolate spooned into a piping bag, I snipped the end off as close to the end as I could and simply swirled.

Fried Bacon Sandwich - or how to recover your camping mojo

My love of camping and the great outdoors is nothing new. There's almost nothing I like better than heading off in Daisy, our camper van, for a week, a weekend, or even a night, exploring new places and heading back to our home from home at the end of the day. I love eating outside, sitting out under the stars, but am equally happy (OK may be not quite so happy, but you know, happy enough) huddled in under the canvas awning, or even in the van, with a bottle of red wine playing Uno as the wind howls and the rain lashes down. I've eulogised plenty about it all before so I won't go on about it...

Sometimes, though, there are moments when it's not quite what it cracked up to be. Don't get me wrong it doesn't put me off for the next time, but there are definitely challenges that make unbidden thoughts flash through my head. 

Mainly "What on earth possessed you?" type thoughts. 

We had a moment like that this last week, camping on Shell Island in North Wales. The campsite itself is an odd sort of place - out on a causeway, you can camp in the sand dunes or facing inland with views over the salt marshes to the mountains beyond. It should be the best place to camp in the world ever. For various odd reasons, it's not quite that good, but we still had a great time. However, one night, the wind got up, blowing straight across the site.

"Will the kids be alright?" (they sleep out in an awning most of the time)

"Yeah, sure"

The wind got stronger. We went to bed ourselves, having checked everything twice.

The wind got stronger. 

There was banging and flapping. Noises we couldn't identify.

The Husband valiantly got back out of bed to do more checking.

In the end, we just couldn't cope with the idea that somehow the wind would whip up the awning, blowing the kids straight over into the salt marshes that we were camped right on top of, so we brought them in to the van and I spent a largely sleepless night with Pink on one side of me, out of her sleeping bag, legs thrown over mine, muttering to herself as she tends to do, and the Husband, family duly safe and protected, snoring loudly in my ear on the other... It could have been worse, I suppose - Blue got to sleep on the floor of the van, nose to nose with the dog.

After a night like that, the best thing of course is a morale boosting bacon sarnie (sorry, all you vegetarians out there, but it really is), but no ordinary bacon sarnie - allow me please to introduce (drum roll please) 

the Fried Bacon Sandwich. 

For this, you need to make sure you are the person cooking the bacon. And really, given that just looking at it makes your arteries tense up a little, it should only be eaten in dire need. But it is so good.

Cook the bacon up for all the sandwiches you are making - then make everyone else's sandwiches first (part of the treat is that only one person gets it). DO NOT clean out the pan you cooked the bacon in. At the same time, make sure there's a coffee on the go somewhere. We take a stove top espresso maker with us - it has justified its van space on many occasions.

Butter 2 slices of pappy white bread, and lay one butter side up on a plate, or the table, or wherever, and put your own bacon on the bread along with any sauce you choose (red tends to be my choice). Heat up all the left over bacon fat/oil that's still in the pan, then place the second slice of bread, butter side up, in the hot fat and fry gently till crisp. Depending on how much fat there is in the pan, the bread may absorb it all. You won't be eating these often, so that's OK. Once the bread is crisp, remove from the pan, and place butter side down (the butter will have gone all melty, by the way. Mmmmmm).

Slice the sandwich in 2, take your sandwich and cup of freshly brewed coffee somewhere far away from husbands, children and dogs, with a view, and enjoy 5 minutes peace and quiet. 

Mojo restored, you can crack on with the rest of your day - whatever that might involve.

Camping Cake

Camping cake comes in many forms. The main thing of course is that there is cake when you are camping and beyond that it's really up to you, but in case you were needing a bit more guidance, here are my thoughts on what constitutes good camping cake.

Let's get one thing straight. Delicate doesn't cut it. If you're going camping, the last thing you need is delicate cake. You need something fairly substantial. 

Anything that includes filling or buttercream is out on grounds of practicality and the fact that in the unlikely event that the weather is good, it's likely to melt.

If it's got oats in it, you're onto a good thing - you use up a lot of energy with all that fresh air and out of doors stuff. 

Ditto fruit/veg because if you can get it in cake form, well that's got to be a bonus.

It must be 'cup of tea' cake. Cake your tea would be too wet without. I'm not suggesting you're going to dunk it or anything, just that if you've got a cake that tastes perfect with a cup of straight up builders tea, you can't go far wrong.

This cake is based on one from the Camper Van Cookbook. I like the Camper Van Cookbook, although the recipes aren't necessarily ones I'd choose to cook while we're camping. Only a very few of the recipes are actually by Martin Dorey, and I'm not sure the author of the bulk of them has done much camping - her recipes are quite ingredient and utensil heavy, and time consuming. That's not to say they aren't good recipes - what I have cooked from the book while camping has always turned out well. Lamb Burgers with spring onions and feta and Lemon Cup Cheesecakes are particular favourites, but I remember the burgers took quite a long time to put together, and with limited utensils, out in the fresh air, I think I'd be just as happy with some good sausages...


There is, however, a section of pre-camp bakes: stuff you'd make to take with you, and I cannot recommend these highly enough. They are great cakes (and biscuits) that absolutely hit the spot in the fresh air. This one is one of Blue's absolute favourite cakes, and went down very well in Suffolk the other weekend .

Sticky Ginger Treacle Cake

200ml milk
3 tbsp treacle
100g butter
75g plain flour
200g soft brown sugar
125g porridge oats
2 tsp ground ginger
2 tsp ground cinammon
1tsp bicarbonate of soda

Line a 20 cm square tin with greaseproof paper and pre-heat the oven to 150C/130C fan.


Place the treacle and butter into a small pan with the milk and gently bring to the boil till the butter is melted. Set aside to cool a little.

Seive the flour, ginger, cinammon and bicarb into a large bowl, then stir through the sugar and porridge oats.

Stir the melted ingredients quickly into the dry ingredients, pour into the tin and bake for 45 minutes.

Leave to cool in the tin, then cut into 16 squares and store in an airtight container. This is sticky cake (the name gives it away) so if you need to stack, separate layers with greaseproof paper. 

Of course, you don't have to go camping to make this cake, but I really think you should give it a go

BBQ Ribs for the best weekend ever

We have a great local butcher. 

The other week, I was in there and had my head turned by some mighty fine racks of ribs he had in the chiller cabinet. I bought 2 racks, intending to feed them to the children as a playdate tea, but I got my weeks wrong, and the ribs went in the freezer.

This can only have been a good thing, as it meant we could BBQ them last weekend in what will surely be pretty high up on my list of "best weekends of the year" - even though we've only had just over half the year.

 
Yes, we had a hot, sticky and fairly slow journey to darkest Suffolk on Friday night, but once we were there, well, everything was brilliant. The site is very much 'of the moment' - plenty of bunting and hand written signs around, low density camping. A few Dorset bell tents to rent, the option to camp in the woods, Swattesfield Campsite is one I would definitely recommend if you like low key relaxed camping. It's just quite a long way from Hampshire for the weekend...




The weather was awesome, the campfire burned bright at night and the Pimms flowed. The children were occupied in the woods that surrounded the camping area, and the adults were mostly occupied with a wood fired pizza oven that was on the site (of which, more in another post), and we had a gourmet BBQ on Saturday night. And then Murray won Wimbledon as we chuntered back down the M11 in the sweltering heat of Sunday afternoon. Pretty much perfect.

So back to the ribs, which were our contribution to the gourmet BBQ. Ribs are great at any time, but marinaded and cooked over hot coals, they take on a smoky loveliness that can't be beaten. Not the cleanest and tidiest things to eat, but, you know, who cares?

The marinade is based on the one Hugh Fearnely-Whittingstall includes in his fantastic Meat book. In a fit of whirlwind organisation, I managed to decant about half the ingredients into their appropriate amounts into various small containers, and then just chucked in the bottles of anything else I needed into the van, but forgot the recipe - not even in scribbled form, so once the time for marinading came round, I had to wing it. 




I should say that Pimms had been consumed at this point, but not too much, and so I'd take this as a guide rather than as a definitive recipe. Just keep tasting as you go...

For 2 racks of ribs - approximately 24 ribs in total. I didn't count. I was drinking Pimms.

3 cloves of garlic, roughly chopped

2 tablespoons dark muscovado sugar

3 tablespoons ketchup

2 tablespoons soy sauce

1 tablespoon Dijon mustard

freshly ground salt and pepper

sherry vinegar to taste - probably about 3 tablespoons

Mix everything together and marinade the ribs for a good hour or 2 - longer if you can.

Cook on a suitably heated BBQ (let your friendly BBQ king take over at this point, if this is not you). They will take 10-15 minutes, may be 20 depending on how much meat they have on them.

Serve as you like. We had potato salad and a rather fancy broad bean (double podded no less, at the insistence of Mrs L) and chorizo couscous. We do like to camp in style...

I'm linking up to the Four Seasons Food challenge hosted by Anneli at Delicieux and Louisa at Chez Foti which has BBQ as the theme this month.

If it's meatloaf, we must be camping

Well, not always, but meat loaf is fairly synonymous with a camping trip in the RJ household.

This is a recipe I picked up from the Good Food magazine, and the original recipe is on the website: Cold meatloaf with squashed tomato salsa. With the emphasis on the cold. This is what we usually take to sustain us on the Friday night trip, especially if the trip is likely to be a bit longer than average. There's also usually enough left over for sarnies over the weekend too, and the 'chutney'/'salsa' that you make to go with it is a perfect foil for the loaf. It's got lots of herbs in, which count towards your 5 a day, always helpful when camping tends to major on the meat and carb end of the food spectrum.


This weekend we're heading off to Suffolk. It's madness, I tell you, via Farnborough to pick up the Husband who can't finish work till around 5, then the all the joys that the M25 clockwise on a Friday night with a good forecast for the weekend will bring, till we peel off on the M11 or A12 - haven't decided which, and a final obligatory skirmish round the back lanes once we leave the main road. The last thing we need is complicated food. And yes, we could stop and buy tea at a Little Road Break, or wherever, but frankly, a bit of good food, and everyone's spirits are lifted, just in time to fight with the awning and get the cork out of the wine bottle sharpish once we arrive.

There is a perfectly good reason for travelling so far - we're camping with my lovely school friend and her family. Normally there would be a third family camping but my other school friend (mum in said family) has recently had a knee op, so instead of camping somewhere relatively centrally for all 3 families, this time we're going to camp near her house.

I'm very excited. The campsite is in Cool Camping. There's a pizza oven we can use. Camp fires are allowed. Apart from the long journey, it's sounding practically perfect. And then of course, there's the forecast. But let's not tempt fate...

Camping Meatloaf with red pepper and tomato salsa

450g pork sausages
500g beef mince
50g breadcrumbs
1 onion
1 clove of garlic
large handful of flat leaf parsley
3 large stalks of rosemary, leave only
2 eggs
salt & pepper

Salsa
2 red peppers
sprinkle of smoked paprika
2 cloves of garlic
olive oil 
2 tsp sherry vinegar 
1tsp caster sugar

400g cherry tomatoes

Leave plenty of foil to overhang

Start with the meatloaf. Line a 2lb loaf tin with silver foil, with enough overhang to wrap the loaf in eventually once it's all cooked and cooled (you'll thank me for this tip later!!). Pre-heat the oven to 180C/160 fan.



Finely chop the onion, garlic and herbs - I whizz it all up in a food processor. - then split the sausages and empty the meat into a large bowl with the mince and mash it all up together with the onions and herbs and breadcrumbs, eggs and some salt and pepper.


Empty the mixture into your lined loaf tin and squish it in, leaving the loaf mixture nice and mounded on top.





Deseed the peppers and slice them fairly thinly. Spread them out on a baking tray, toss in a tablespoon or so of olive oil and sprinkle over some smoked paprika.

Put the loaf in the oven with the tray of peppers on the shelf below and cook for 30 minutes, during which time, quarter the cherry tomatoes and peel and finely slice the garlic.

After 30 minutes, remove the tray with the peppers on it, stir in the tomatoes & garlic, the sherry vinegar and caster sugar and put back in the oven for another 40 minutes or so till the meat loaf is cooked and hot all the way through (test with a skewer) and the peppers and tomatoes are all soft and squidgy and a bit caramelised.

Pour off any juice that has collected round the meatloaf and leave to cool. Squidge up the peppers and tomatoes and put in a sterilised jar or container suitable to take with you.

Once cool, wrap the meatloaf up in the foil and seal the jar with the peppers. Great in rolls, served with the salsa and with potato salad (which you also made in advance!). And don't forget some good cake...

Dinner sorted (cake included!)

Happy Camping!

The herbs are a great addition to this loaf and add a little extra greenery. I'm linking up to Karen at Lavender and Lovage 's lovely Cooking with Herbs Challenge.

Camping food - Cheese & Marmite Pasties

We had another camping trip this weekend. A quick one in that we didn't head off till Saturday morning, and didn't go far - just to where we keep a sailing dinghy on Southampton Water. The view is not beautiful (Fawley oil refinery, although it does have a certain industrial beauty) but it's situated in a lovely country park, and there is a camping field attached to the club. Nothing grand, but a flat sheltered field - and frankly that's all you need.

Anyway, now we have Daisy the campervan, which is fully stocked and ready to go at a moment's notice from a 'kit' point of view, my main concern (well, isn't it always) is food. Clothes too, but I've long since learned that for a weekend trip, there's no point packing much in the way of 'changes of clothes'. I just try to make sure there's a jumper and some waterproofs, for any inclement weather that might be rude enough to strike, and appropriate easy access footwear (crocs or wellies). If you were looking for it, I can't really offer much more advice than that on the packing front as far as clothes are concerned. I also don't have a 'master camping list' to share with you - of a type which I once saw passed from one friend to another, kept as a reference document for future trips. As long as I know there's gin on board, I can live with out a dustpan and brush...

Not just gin, but treats. Some form of cake (this weekend, there was brownie). Bacon, for sandwiches on Sunday morning. Proper coffee (Daisy has her own stovetop coffee maker - yes, I know, proper coffee probably smacks more of glamping than camping, but I don't care - you can't beat an alfresco bacon buttie with a mug of proper coffee of a morning). This weekend, we also had cheese & marmite pasties.

Pasties are a great thing. What's more, I don't know a man who doesn't find his food infinitely more attractive if it's wrapped in pastry. I might try wrapping myself in pastry one of these days and see what reaction that provokes - or may be not.

Despite dashing the collective male hopes in the RJ household when the response to the question "Have they got meat in them?" garnered the response "No.  Well, they do have Marmite", the verdict was that they were pretty good.

They started out as  Good Food recipe, but frankly, I am always suspicious of pasty filling quantity these days, having over produced on several occasions, despite having followed filling to pastry ratios in a number of recipes to the letter. So I reduced the filling ingredients to something I thought more likely, and added in a good handful of chopped parsley.

Cheese & Marmite Pasties

Made 7 decent sized pasties and a small one.


500g shortcrust pastry
350g peeled, grated potato
100g grated cheddar
60g fresh breadcrumbs
4 spring onions, finely chopped
1 large handful of flat leaf pastry, finely chopped
1 large & 1 medium egg
salt & pepper
1 good tablepoon of Marmite Line a baking sheet with greaseproof paper.

Pre-heat the oven to 160C/140 fan, and line a baking sheet with greaseproof paper.

Mix together the grated potato, cheese, breadcrumbs, spring onions and chopped parsley with the large egg and a good grind of salt and pepper.

Roll out the pastry on a floury worktop and cut out 16-17cm circles of pastry (our cereal bowls are the right size) - as many as you can: hopefully you'll get about 7.

Melt the Marmite in a saucepan with a splash of water, and brush onto the pastry rounds, leaving a border all the way round of about 1-2 cm. Divide the filling between the pastry circles, placing in the middle of the rounds. Beat the remaining egg, brush lightly around the border of each circle, then draw up the sides and squeeze together to make your pasties. Brush with the remaining beaten egg*, then place on a lined baking sheet and bake for between 50-60 minutes (mine took 55) till golden brown.

In an effort to come over all vintage picnic chic, I packed my pasties in my favourite cake tin, lined with a tea towel. Wrapped in foil, or in a plastic bag would do just fine.

I'm linking up to a new blog challenge - Four Seasons Food, which looks like fun!


Four Seasons Food hosted by Delicieux and Chezfoti




*The original recipe states that these can be frozen once the pasties are formed but before you brush them with the beaten egg, and then baked from frozen till the centres are piping hot. I didn't but it's a top tip, guaranteed to elevate you in the pasty queen stakes...

Curry in a hurry? No, on the beach, actually - A review of the Barricane Beach Cafe

So the second May Bank Holiday is upon us. The Husband is still in the desert and I have escaped North for a couple of days, before returning South and taking the kids camping on my own. I won't speculate about my sanity - I lost most of that on the M1 on Friday afternoon/evening -  or the likely success or failure of the planned expedition at this stage. If I'm not totally traumatised by the whole thing, I may share the highlights at some point, but for now, I am reminiscing about the first May Bank Holiday.

It feels like an age away, and yet is was only a few weeks ago, that we went with some great friends, to North Devon, and had a totally brilliant weekend away.

Liz's photo of our camp by night...

If you're interested in the campsite we stayed at, you can read the guest review I wrote for the lovely Yellowfields Camping blog. If you're interested in campfire campsites, and more back to basics camping, you really should visit this blog, but here, as you know, it's mostly about the food.

One of the reasons why it was such a great weekend was that it allowed us the opportunity to eat curry on the beach as the sun went down. In England. In May. 

Allow me to present the Barricane Beach Cafe.

When the Husband and I 'discovered' this place, thanks to a throw away comment in the 'Wild Swimming - Coast' book by Daniel Start (which I would thoroughly recommend if you have even half an inclination to swim in the sea around the UK. What? You don't? Why ever not??) we couldn't believe it. Just round the corner from the surf paradise of Woolacombe, more a cove than a beach, is the lovely Barricane, or Shell Beach, and at the top of the beach, not much more than a shack, outdoor tables only, is this cafe. Al fresco dining at its best.  

On our first visit 3 or 4 years' ago, the kids were too young to appreciate the experience (if my memory serves me well, Pink was particularly objectionable), but we recognised it as 'a special place', and I've been itching to go back ever since.

I have never been able to find a dedicated website for the Barricane Beach Cafe - it crops up, though, on other blogs. Trip Advisor has a whole load of rave reviews on it, and these are ones you can actually believe. During the day, it serves sandwiches, cakes, cold cans of drink - the usual. From 6 p.m. though, curry is served.

Currently £8 for a generous plateful, we had the choice of 'devilled chicken' or 'devilled beef' curry. More Malaysian/ Thai style than Indian, but no less delicious for that. And that's it. 2 choices. With rice and salad. Perfect (although jacket potatoes are available making it an ideal place to go if you need to satisfy less sophisticated palates at the same time).

Thrown in with that is the opportunity to eat your plate whilst gazing out to sea as the sun goes down, and feel awash with goodwill. Which, as the advert goes, is priceless.

Your view - should you choose to accept it...