Mother's Day and Easter

It's a month since I last wrote in my blog....I let the momentum go, and I've misplaced my camera. However The Bay Tree and I are both well. I have been using Camelias from William and Tanya's garden for the tables for the last week or so, and although they don't last very long (3 days max), they do look great at first. I used them on Mother's day first of all.
 We offered a nice lunch menu for Mother's day, and had a lot of bookings, even turned a few people away, but were then a bit disappointed when some of the bookings were expecting breakfast, not lunch. Communication and organisation problems. We'll do better next year!
My cup cakes are slowly improving. I have learnt a new little trick with an apple corer. That is to remove the centre with the corer, and insert some lemon curd or fruit or some other tasty stuff, put the little tuft back and then pipe icing over the now uneven top. It works brilliantly. I am becoming more assertive with the piping bag. Cup cakes apart, I am going to make a Simnel cake in the next few days, with its eleven balls of marzipan on top, representing the eleven apostles who went to heaven. I wonder if it will sell. Maybe it's not naughty enough. If I had to choose between Pecan pie and Simnel cake, I would definately go for Pecan pie.

Go! Bay Tree

We have had our take away shop for almost 2 years now. It is located just opposite The Bay Tree door, within the courtyard. We sell primarily cinnamon scones, but also soup, chowder and sandwiches. Ideally, we sell anything that we serve in the restaurant, and, also ideally, we make some things in Go! that we don't serve in the restaurant. We have been experimenting with new flavours of cinnamon scones....currently we make apple ones. People are curious-ish, but prefer the old favourites. The difficulty with Go! is that there isn't quite enough space to bake easily. Storage is another problem, as take away needs a lot of packaging. HOWEVER, I love our take away, and feel it needs more attention, more research and more application. To this end I have bought 3 new cake books on Amazon.....Lorraine Pascale (who makes it all so easy on TV), a new Hummingbird book, and one other whose name I have forgotten, and which I probably didn't need.
I am still making the red velvet cup cakes, but need to find a source of red food colouring in larger quantities. Must phone cash and carry today about that. I saw a great cup cake stall at a market in Manchester city centre a couple of weekends ago, and had to walk past several times memorising the flavour combinations, and then scribbling tham down! I obviously havn't got to the creative stage of cup cake making, as I still need so much inspiration from others. I shall keep working at them.....I think William is coming round to the idea (see second last post)