Chocolate and speculoos at the Gare du Midi

I made an astonishing Nutella and hazelnut cheesecake at the weekend. Just astonishing. A Nigella recipe, I think from her most recent Italian cookery book? One of those cheesecakes you wonder whether it is a cheating recipe because it just seems too simple to taste authentic. But it tastes quite fantastic. Cream cheese, Nutella and vanilla filling; digestive biscuit, Nutella and butter base. Yum, yum. These days my weekend baking tends to result in one cake, and a batch of something that can be divided into around 24 portions. This time it's chocolate and speculoos squares. These things are made with ingredients sourced entirely from the Gare du Midi in Brussels, en route to the Eurostar departures lounge. Seems like a weird place to go foodie, really. But if you are a baker, particularly a chocolate baker, anywhere in Brussels is sheer heaven. Gare du Midi does a fab job of titillating your chocolate tastebuds into chocolate overdrive even as you fish for your passport in your overloaded bag. Just out of the Metro station there is a chocolate shop selling high end pralines. Godiva, Neuhaus...they have "curated" (I cannot believe I am even using this word to describe a range of chocolates - this tells you more than almost anything else could about my obsession with the stuff) a range of pralines that would make you weep. I travel to Brussels a lot these days and on this particular trip my eye is caught by a tub of Speculoos paste. What is it? You mean you haven't tried this stuff? Speculoos is a kind of spiced shortbread. In Belgium, they make practically everything from the stuff. Speculoos biscuits, yogurt, ice cream, cakes and chocolate. I buy the paste, bring it home, put it on the table, look at it, think to myself, if it were a jar of peanut butter, what would I do with it? I get out a square tray, scrape out the Speculoos paste, add butter and soft brown sugar to it, and press it into my tin. Then I take the other bag out of my wheelie suitcase, empty out a box of pralines, take several deep breaths, and put them in a bowl over a saucepan of boiling water so that they melt into a maddeningly fragrant, marbled pool of chocolate. I pour this carefully over my speculoos crumbs so that it covers them completely. Put the tin in the fridge. Take it out an hour later, cut up the block into squares, et voila. Gare du Midi on a plate.

Party clothes are nostalgic

I have a generally emotion-free approach to my wardrobe. Every year, when December comes around, I take a good look at my clothes, piece by piece, and anything that didn't see the light of day at least once in the previous year, finds its way into a binliner which then finds its way to my local Oxfam. I have an ulterior motive for this - my birthday is in January, and my Mother generally celebrates my birthday by taking me clothes shopping. Got to have space for all those new clothes! - so this is not a space saving process, it is more of what civil servants would call a Policy Refresh. Clear out your outdated, ill fitting numbers for your swishy look that is infinitely more suited to the more Mature You. I go through jackets, dresses, skirts and trousers, shoes and coats and assemble a pile and when rejected items leave the house the sight of the bag raises not so much of a sigh. But this year, beginning my usual clearout process, my hand falls on a hanger on which sits a beautiful black, long, fishtail party dress with diamante decoration around the heart shaped neck and the straps. I take it out. I wore this two years ago at a very special party. Why did it survive last year's clearout if I haven't worn it since then? Although a Frank Usher dress, it actually cost me 15 quid in a designer label warehouse sale so it's not the price of the thing that is making me hold on to it. A thought occurs to me and I pull back my range of dresses, not unlike the key scene in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. Lo and behold I see 6 or 7 hangers of clothes that I have passed over almost instinctively in my otherwise rigorous, emotionless decluttering exercise. Party clothes. There are clothes in this section that I first wore in my late teens and haven't put on since. One of them is a truly evil garment - a onesie with knickerbocker legs, in electric blue with checks. OMG. What was I thinking. On the other hand, I remember that I wore this thing to a New Year Party at which I met some bloke...I put it back again. Next to it is a blue (blue is a uniting theme of my earlier years - I loved the colour, principally because I grew up a tomboy, so it was a symbol of rebellion to counterbalance my sisters' preferred signature colours of pink and lilac) ra ra skirt, which I remember wearing with cowboy boots to a Christmas disco in the mid eighties, where I met this guy...I put it back again. I sit on my bed and contemplate this awful range of clothes. I am not a fan of vintage. In my opinion, fashion evolves for a very good reason - we should be able to look back on the eighties with satisfying shudder, not spend the 21st century resurrecting it. Nostalgia is a retroactive emotion, that is why it is nostalgia. Resurrecting these clothes is backward facing, and I am a relentlessly forward facing kinda gal. So why can't I throw these clothes out? I think about it. Parties. There is something so very momentous about choosing a special outfit for a special occasion. Thinking about it beforehand, planning it carefully, dreaming about its accessories, getting hair and make up just right, anticipating the fun that will be had, feeling the surge of confidence that comes with putting on something spangly, swanky, clingy, loud, clashy - something that makes you feel like you stand out. Not, stand  out of the crowd, but stand out of your normal everyday self. You think I give work clothes anything like this attention? My work dress regime goes like this. I have a staple set of items, one of which I pick at 6am when the whole world is so dark I have to concentrate really hard to ensure I don't grab the wrong coloured tights, I slap my basic blusher/eyeshadow/mascara and I run, without a backward look in the mirror. Any major wardrobe malfunctions get fixed in the office loo on the 7th floor after I've bolted my porridge. Party dressing? I start my party dressing hours, sometimes days before I actually put the clothes on. And that means that the experience of those occasions gets stamped on to the outfit I wore for them. Hmm. I go to the wardrobe. Take them all out, even the fishtail dress. Put them in their own binliner. Label it "Party memories". And put the binliner back on the floor of the  wardrobe. There. More space for my next round of birthday fashion spree, without compromising on my own party heritage. Win win.

Colours, colours, colours

I'm going through a strange and fabulous phase of contradictions. Emotionally, things remain messy with a distinct dark side. And so it is for anyone who is only a month on from the loss of a loved one. Lately this has leaked out through anger. I have to think very carefully on the tube, at work, in the street, at the supermarket check out, to make sure I don't lose my rag over something any level headed and balanced person would take in their stride. That need to control my rage so I don't get landed with an ASBO leaks out in other ways, all loosely under the heading of REBELLION. And this is coming out in colour, big time. Last week I read a fashion article in a Sunday supplement that advised women over 40 not to wear coloured tights. Not a good look for the age, apparently. Women over 40 who want to do colour, need to do it with a small "pop", like wearing a bright pair of earrings with their grey or taupe twinsets. I read this article very carefully. Then went straight out and bought 6 pairs of tights. One deep blood red. One burgundy. One forest green. One teal. One bright acid turquoise. One deep yellow. And have worn them every day since. And, frankly, not with taupe twinsets either. This morning saw me laying out a local community tea wearing a bright yellow Top Shop sweater, denim skirt and acid turquoise tights. Yesterday I pranced up the high street in a purple corduroy mini skirt with yellow tights and brown Fly knee high boots. I am having a ball with this. If I keep going I am probably going to end up looking like a walking Lego box. In fact, if I add my green Gap snood (I love that word by the way. Who invented it?It sounds like an allergic sneeze), I probably already do resemble Lego Duplo.  It should feel counterintuitive, to be processing such extreme sadness with such an outward show of upbeat optimism, which is what bright colours always seem to me to project. But perhaps it isn't so odd. You can shout with colour as effectively as you can shout as a customer service manager, except wearing loud colours means nobody gets hurt (unless they don't have their sunglasses with them, in which case there is that risk of retinal damage).  Do I in reality look like a clown, and will I some day soon wake up to it and go back to Zara to invest in some ubiquitous black or khaki? In answer to the first, well that's a relative question isn't it. As John Malkovich said so brilliantly in Burn After Reading in response to his colleague who accured him of having a drinking problem "You're a Mormon. Next to you we ALL have a drinking problem". And so it is on the streets of London. It is Autumn, and commuters are wearing Sludge. Next to Sludge, any pop of colour is going to come across a bit like Mr Zippo's Flying Circus. Doesn't make it a crime to sport it. And in answer to the second?  No. Never have, certainly not going to start now. Yellow tights. Feels good to know I still have that rebellious streak. Feels even better to be liberated by grief to indulge it.

A walk in the park

I run through the park. Every day. Not in my exercise gear, IPod surgically attached to my arm. No. I run through the park from the station to the office, bags flying. I run through the park from the office to meetings. At the end of the day, I run through the park from my office back to the station. It isn't a sprint or a jog. It's more like something between a trot and a gallop, fuelled entirely by stress. And I do it pretty much without thinking about it. Stepping into the park I am immediately reminded by an automatic guilt switch in my brain that I am not there to enjoy the foliage, I am in the park with a destination in mind and I sure as hell had better get there as quickly as possible, so that...the world will not end? So that my colleagues will not miss a second longer of my awesome brain power than they absolutely have to? So that I will not miss the last ever Northern line train before the world comes to an end? Stupid, isn't it. But it took me quite a long time to work out how contradictory this was. I love telling people that my morning commute takes in a beautiful park, but frankly if you're running so fast you don't notice the trees what is the point. You might as well hit the apocalypse of Victoria station and be done with it. So, after a therapeutic coffee with a mate at work I decided to do something I had not done in 15 years of galloping through this park. I would go out at lunchtime and walk around it, without any bags or phones on me, taking in every sight as I walked. I would go slowly, and tune out any inner thoughts so I could hear the noises around me properly. So off I went. As I stepped into the park, my brain message began to beat the familiar drum. Hurry up! Get those tourists out of your way, they are stopping your ascent up the career ladder! I ignored them resolutely, and to throw my ant march like routine entirely, I picked a different route. I walked slowly by the quite beautiful flowers that the park gardeners had obviously been at some pains to plan out. I stopped and sniffed the lake, and watched moorhens fight swans. Brave lot, those moorhens. Swans, it turns out, take no prisoners. I passed two people snogging passionately among the hydrangeas, and a group of exhausted teenagers moaning about how early they came into London on the Eurostar. And more tourists, Japanese this lot, all with their up to the minute technological gadgets, taking millions and millions of pictures. Including of me. I passed civil servants taking covert sips of tea out of flasks. A couple having a furious row in low undertones so as not to draw attention to their appalling relationship break out, playing itself out among the ferns. I passed Beefeaters walking back from their duty stint at Buckingham Palace. Gardeners digging up summer debris and whingeing about the mess the Olympics infrastructure had left behind. Ducks begging cravenly of ignorant humans hell bent on messing up their digestive systems with stale bread. Squirrels chasing each other from tree to tree, stopping only to snatch bread before the ducks could get to it. Dogs, chasing the squirrels. By the time I got back to my office, I was totally humbled. How was it possible to zone out of all of this world watching? I had walked through the complete panoply of human behaviour and quite a bit of animal experience in the space of 45 minutes. It was a great lesson. A daily park walk is now part of my life. And will no doubt furnish me with endless blogging material as yet more quirks of human interaction unfold in the shadow of the London Eye.

Montezuma chocolate

I have been a bit quiet on the blog recently. Well, not wholly surprising that in the aftermath of my sister's untimely death, I would find myself randomly unable to complete tasks, or in fact start some of them. So the blog has seemed a bit overwhelming. But you find your way back to most things one step at a time, and my way back to my blog is of course via baking. I started this blog thinking about baking through the lens of adversity - a huge piece of surgery to rebuild one of my feet which made me immobile for months. I had no idea at the time that worse adversity was in store for me, but thank goodness I discovered then the rehabilitative power of baking. It was a skill I drew on, numbly at first in the last month, but increasingly thankfully as day by painful day has passed. When I was kneeling on a chair, my plaster encased foot sticking out awkwardly as I kneaded dough or operated my Kitchen Aid (and yes I did have one of these well before The Great British Bake Off), combining flour, eggs and sugar took my mind away from the daily frustration of crutches. Now, the combining of the same ingredients gives me parameters to which my bewildered mind clings. Every baker has favourite tasks, and mine is the chopping of highest quality chocolate. I was making double chocolate brownies at the weekend - easy enough to chuck Dr Oetker chocolate chips into the mix and be done with it, and up to about a year or so ago I would have been happy to do that. But really, where's the joy in it? Satisfying baking processes involve personal commitment. And my expression of personal commitment, is unwrapping a lump of Montezuma couverture chocolate, sharpening my knife, and cutting carefully so that I get knobbly shards. Anyone will tell you the difference between evenly shaped chocolate chips, and knobbly shards in your double chocolate brownies, is absolutely crucial. The odd huge lump of chocolate in a bite of brownie is pure dark chocolate heaven. A bite of chocolate chip is barely savoured. But this time, I chopped, and chopped, and chopped, and chopped. Carefully, mesmerisingly, almost as if my brain were reminding my hands of the long practised task, helping to re-establish predictability, satisfaction in conducting a task, stability and control into a world that had been rocked by grief. I must have chopped for at least an hour. My recipe gleefully proclaimed that the length of the entire brownie making process would not be more than 25 minutes. I was sorely tempted to add, or 2 hours if using this task as therapy.

Mid life allure

I am struck each week by the number of magazine supplements falling over themselves in their efforts to advise me on how to retain my inner sexiness now that I am offically Past My Best. Chances are you will find at least one feature in every freebie magazine. Of course all these articles have a marketing objective so it is usually linked to clothes you need to buy or skincare to invest in or exercises to buy on DVD. I tend to read these articles with rapt attention, only to experience terminal disappointment. After all, the advice is quite depressingly unoriginal by and large - wear your skirt a bit longer, no more sleeveless tops, go for elegance rather than fashion, start spending hundreds on bags and jewellery because apparently you can afford it in your forties, avoid bright colours as they make you stand out for the wrong reason, if you must wear a bright colour make it just a splash of one in a scarf, and finally, leopardprint shoes are in for any woman over the age of fifty thanks to Theresa May. It takes a great deal of self esteem to look beyond this largely pointless advice, and none of us possesses enough confidence all of the time.  This is presumably why quite a lot of taupe turtlenecks feature in the morning commute among Women Of A Certain Age. Me, I like to stay true to my instincts, which broadly go like this: black is not a colour, and I Do Colour. I stay with colours that flatter my skin tone but I am still capable of going completely oer the top with them - indeed, I often make it my business to do so. Do not wear coloured tights, say the articles. Oh dear, I think with irony, then I had better wear my bright red tights as frequently as possible before I get any older. Invest in a timeless classic, like a really expensive ring, exhorts the fashion advisor. I ponder over that one and wonder who, with kids in middle school, has money to blow on overpriced trinkets when school uniform, school trips, house maintenance, family food, and massive university tuition fees, need to take priority. On top of which, with the amount of dough kneading I do, the chances  of a ring losing itself in batter and turning up on someone's plate, or in their jaws, is frankly too high to risk paying for. Spend a hundred quid on Creme de La Mer anti ageing algae cream. I worked in a pharmacy every Summer for about 10 years and concluded from that experience that a tub of E45 at £2.50 would more than do the trick.If there is one thing to remember when reading this stuff it is that I have spent my entire adolescence wondering what other people think about how I look. The most liberating quality I have acquired with years of life experience, is the ability not to give a toss what other people think about how I dress, speak or move and I'll be damned if that gets taken away from me. So here's the thing. Ongoing recovery of my reconstructed foot, which I have worked like a trooper to restore mobility to, prohibits the purchase of any shoe with a heel, no matter how kitten heel.  So I will commute in trainers and spend my working day in stylish, flat boots packed out with surgical orthotics that nobody can see. Living in a grey climate means I have a daily urge to counteract the weather with colour. Green and yellow are my current favourites. Early morning sport means I need to change fast from sporty to office elegance so jersey dresses and easy, comfortable jackets are massive winners in my wardrobe, added to which they pack up perfectly for short overseas visits. Does any of this chime with advice from the experts? None of it.  Which means that, chances are it's spot on.