Cake!

Making friends in a new city is much harder than you imagine. In my experience and that of friends, you really need to get involved in some sort of activity in order to meet people who share a common interest. My passion is food and Y's is music and we've met some of our loveliest London friends through our secret supper club and Y's band Motor City Revue. We've met people we may only ever see once, but we've also met people who have become our very good friends - 2 of whom are the charming host & hostess of our favourite secret supper club, The Shed. So of course we were thrilled to be able to celebrate The Shed's 1st supper club birthday yesterday, along with 28 other Shed enthusiasts. Mr Shed (that's his real name obviously) and Nicola served up an amazing spread of food (and quite frankly we have learned to expect nothing less from them) and the afternoon was a jolly one, enjoyed by all.

Now it's not a birthday party if there's no cake, so I made this cake to take along. If you like your chocolate cake moist, then I suggest you give this recipe a try. The cake is Nigella's chocolate Guinness cake and it's dead easy. You make the whole thing in a saucepan on the stove and it's difficult to stuff up. I doubled the mix to make this rather large cake to feed 30. You must make the cream cheese frosting too. Nigella says the iced cake, with such dark cake and light frothy top, resembles a pint of Guinness - an effect which is lost ever so slightly if you decide to smother the cake in smarties, as I did.

So back to my original theme of the friends we've met through supper club and cake ... on Saturday night we held our first supper club in our new home. One fabulous guest brought us these amazing cupcakes. They look quite beautiful and boy do they taste good! These ones are peanut butter & chocolate cupcakes with cajeta frosting (a type of caramel). It's not my style to rave unnecessarily, but these cakes have to be tasted to be believed. They are made by the very talented (wait for, b/c the girl has a seriously good name) ... Melody Bobo. She has a day job but makes the cakes on the side and would happily deliver these and other delicious flavours (such as chocolate & banana with honey frosting, or carrot cupcakes with lime zest and cream cheese frosting) to north and central London if you ask her very kindly (bobosbakery@sky.com).

I love my foodie friends - so much more fun than joining a netball team.