Notting Hill Carnival has come and gone for another year. Actually, it happened a while back, on the long weekend at the end of August. Last year we went away for most of the long weekend, returning on the Monday afternoon to catch the tail end of the carnival. This year we decided to stay for the whole thing.

On the Sunday, the carnival celebrates children's day when only kids under the age of 16 are allowed to participate in the parade. The kids were very cute in their costumes.


Everything else about the Sunday is the same as Carnival Monday though. Hordes of people still turn up to watch and there is lots of drinking happening on the streets. Personally I think that if the organisers were keen to actually make children's day for the children then they should make the day alcohol free. I guess the logistics of this might be impossible though.

Carnival's main event takes place on Monday. Every year, hundreds of thousands of people flock to Notting Hill to drink, party and watch the parade. 2009 was no exception. Our suburb was packed with people.

On Monday morning, Andrew, Natalie, Gemma, Dino and I went to the beginning of the parade route to watch some of the parade. The judging for the best float happens here at the beginning of the route. We figured that this was the best place to check out the floats when they were at their best.

I liked the Samba school floats most of all. They were very colourful and very elaborate. There were lots of feathers and sequins.


Or sometimes, there wasn't much at all. Two girls from the Paraiso School of Samba had nothing on except body paint and a bejewelled modesty patch. I think that they were very brave considering how rowdy the carnival crowds can get. When we saw the float pass our house later that day, the girls were riding on one of the floats and they had a ring of protectors around them.

This year, there wasn't the violent end to carnival that there had been last year. Last year there was a riot out the front of our house (I blogged about it and we have some closeup photos of the action). Although, this year Andrew and I saw gangs of hoodies pocketing glass bottles (I guess to be used as missiles later on) the police seemed to keep it under control. They were able to prevent a mass riot from happening.

Even though we've lived here for 3 years this is the first year that we've managed to do Carnival. I don't think we need to do it again. It was lots of fun, but for us there was no escape. Everyone else gets to go home when they've had enough of the crowds and the loud music. We live on the parade route so we get the FULL carnival experience from start to finish. I think once was enough for us. We might take advantage of the long weekend and go away for the next carnival.

Tips for Carnival:

• Do you like crowds? If you don't, then carnival is not for you. The place is packed and sometimes you are completely surrounded by people and have no escape route. If you still want to experience carnival without the crazy crowds, come earlier in the day. It's not too bad at around lunch time on the Monday. Children's Day on the Sunday is also a little less crowded.
  
  
• After a hard day of drinking, the crowds start to get very rowdy. Carnival starts to feel unsafe as the evening approaches so I'd aim to leave before sun down. If there is going to be violence, you really don't want to be caught up in the police action or hit by a flying bottle.
  
  
• The crowds at Carnival are a perfect haven for thieves so you have to be very careful with your belongings. A couple of years ago, Gemma had her purse cleaned out by opportunistic pickpockets. I always find that my Hedgren bag is perfect for these sorts of situations. It has an across the body strap and it sits on my hip. If I'm walking through a crowded area I often place my hand on the bag as further protection.
  
  You might also want to consider tucking a 20 pound note into your bra or undies for just-in-casings. Disastrously, when Gemma had her money and phone stolen, she then lost her friends in the crowd. Poor Gemma had no way of getting home so she had to walk.
  
  
• If you're interested in taking photos of the day, the best place to be is at the very beginning of the parade route before the judging happens. This is actually the marshalling area for the floats so technically you aren't allowed to hang around in this area to watch. But, we found that if you have a Digital SLR (read: impressive looking camera) the security guards just assumed that you were media and didn't shoo you away. Of course, neither Gemma or I had a DSLR on the day so we pretended to be photographer's assistants. We made sure that our photographers were properly hydrated and important stuff like that.

Hrm, my tips don't make it sound like very much fun, do they? It is fun! Maybe just not my cup of tea.

More photos from the Children's Carnival and Carnival Monday on Flickr.

I've been to London to visit the Queen.

Well, not the Queen but one of the Queen's palaces... Buckingham Palace. Every summer when the Queen is on hols in Scotland, they open up the state rooms in Buckingham Palace to the public. Unfortunately, they don't let you take photos inside. So all my photos are of the gardens outside the palace.


The visit was organised really well. With 50,000 visitors every summer, I guess they had to fine tune the process so it runs with clockwork precision. You're allotted a time slot for your visit. When you arrive, you're herded into a special shaded area before you have to pass through a security check. Then you're handed an audio guide and sent on your way.

One of my favourite bits of the tour was at the very beginning. They play Handel's Zadok the Priest - the Coronation Anthem on the audio guide as you walk up the grand staircase. It made me feel a little bit queenly. Here it is for you to listen to so that you can feel a bit queenly as well. Just imagine that you're walking up the grand staircase at Buckingham Palace while you listen to it.





You also get to see the Queen's secret door in the White Drawing Room. She uses this sometimes to make a discreet entrance at a function (she comes from her super secret lair after she's been out fighting crime, I'm sure. That's what secret doors are for right?)

Each Summer, there is also a different exhibition on at the palace. I guess it's a way to draw repeat business. This year it was The Queen and the Commonwealth. It showed all the presents given to the Queen by different nations of the Commonwealth and all the outfits that she wore on her visits to Commonwealth countries.

The dresses are beautiful and could still be worn today. Each dress was designed with the visited country in mind. For example, the one she wore to an Australian event was a golden yellow with a wattle design embroidered on it. You can see some pictures from the exhibition here.

After our visit, we headed out into the gardens to the outdoor tea rooms. We'd been a given a tip that the strawberry cake was the cake to try. It was more like a command. That's right, it was an order! So of course we obligingly stopped in the garden cafe for a spot of afternoon tea. The strawberry cake was definitely a winner. It was fit for a queen.

Tips for visiting Buckingham Palace:

• If possible, visit on a weekday. If that's not possible, maybe pick an early morning time slot. We went on a Saturday afternoon and the place was packed. It was so crowded that we had to queue to the see the special exhibition. There was a real bottleneck in this area. It's possible that a weekday or early morning time slot might be less crowded (untested of course).
  
  
• The no photos ban starts from when you enter the palace grounds. This means even no photos in the waiting area. It's up to you though if you want to wait to be told that you aren't allowed to take photos. Andrew and I often wait until we're explicitly told by a sign or a person because it means we might be able to sneak a few naughty shots off (bad Wilsons!)
  
  
• Fill in the Unlimited Admission form at the back of the brochure they give you when enter the palace. Get it stamped by the official at the end of your visit (just before you leave the gardens). Then you can go into the palace as much as you like for a 12 month period.
  
  Great for those of you who live in London. If you go at the end of the season, the next year you can go at the beginning of the season. This way you can see the next year's Summer exhibition for free.
  
  For those of you who don't live in London, technically there is nothing to stop you from filling out another person's name on the form and getting them free entry to the palace. You have to show your ID and the form when you go back to the palace and the information on the ID must match the information on the form. However, you don't have to show your ID when you get the form stamped. But you wouldn't do that would you, because that's fraud! (wink wink, nudge nudge, say no more.)

More photos on Flickr.

We're checking a few more things off our Explore London list this Summer... this time it was Last Night of the Proms. We went to the Last Night of the Proms Concert in Hyde Park... along with 40,000 other people. I've always wanted to go to the Last Night of the Proms. I've seen it on television a couple of times and it looks like lots of fun.

(We weren't special enough to go to the concert at Royal Albert Hall. To qualify for a seat at the hall you have to have bought tickets to 5 other Proms concerts. To get a standing ticket - a Prommer - you have to queue. Some people camp out for weeks beforehand to get tickets to be a prommer.)

Obviously they were keen to make it an authentic British experience. We had to queue for almost an hour to get into Hyde Park.

The headline act for the Hyde Park Proms Concert was Barry Manilow. I think a lot of the people at the concert were there just for Barry. They knew all the words, while we didn't recognise most of the songs. We did get up and bounce along to Copacabana and Can't Smile Without You. Gotta love the cheese.

Traditionally the night ends with the singing of some unofficial British national anthems: Rule Britannia, Jerusalem and Land of Hope and Glory. Then at the very end they sing the British national anthem, God Save the Queen followed by Auld Lang Syne. Luckily, they put the words on the screen so we could sing along too.

I have never seen so many flags being waved at once. It seemed that everyone in the audience was waving a union jack. It was all very patriotic.




I'm a little bit jealous. We don't have anything similar in Australia. We don't even have any songs that we all know. Some of us don't even know the words to the national anthem.

More photos on Facebook.

At the Make Lounge on the weekend, Natalie and I learned how to make cupcakes look pretty. During the workshop we learned how to ice cupcakes using a piping bag, how to make decorations out of marzipan and how to add delicate touches with a small piping bag.

The most important lesson I learned though was that glitter makes everything look better. One of the first colours of icing I made was lilac. Well, that's what I wanted to make. When I added the purple colouring to the icing, I expected it to go lilac and it actually went a horrible purple grey colour. It looked horrible in the bowl and horrible on the cupcake. Luckily, after I added some pink marzipan hearts and a liberal dose of glitter to the "purple" cupcakes they once again looked edible. Actually, I think they even looked a little bit pretty.

After the poor results with purple, I switched to pink and yellow. You can't go wrong with either of these colours. I think my favourite cupcake was one where the icing had a pink & yellow swirly effect. The effect can be made by putting two colours of icing into the one piping bag. It was pretty.

I found the workshop really useful. I'm a self-taught cook, so often I don't know all the little tips and tricks. Like folding the piping bag over your hand to make it easier to get the icing in. I've had some messy experiences with piping bags in the past. Now I know how to do it properly. Often I come home and tell these things to Andrew. He had a baking mentor so he usually just says "duh!".

I took the cupcakes along to a dinner party with the Holicka family. Gaby (age 7) made a beeline for one of the pink cupcakes. It had pink icing, pink hearts and glitter on it. It was the definition of girliness. I was a bit worried that all the cupcakes would be too girly for Dylan (age 4) but he picked the pink & yellow swirly one. I called it the fire cupcake.

The cupcakes were a big hit with the kids and also with this big kid. I'm really impressed with how easy it was to make them look so good. I just need to practice my piping and I'll soon be churning out beautiful cupcakes like a professional.

Some cupcake baking tips:

• Bring all ingredients to room temperature before using. Adding cold eggs or cold milk to a mixture will cause it to curdle.
  
  
• If the mixture looks as if it may curdle when incorporating the eggs, add a spoonful of flour.
  
  
• When adding the flour, stir only until it is all mixed in - over mixing at this stage will result in a heavy, rubbery sponge.
  
  
• Bake at a lower temperature than most recipes call for.
  
  
• Turn cupcake tray around in oven halfway through for even baking.
  
  
• Foil cupcake cases will retain cake freshness longer than the paper variety
  
  

More photos on Flickr.

The other day, Natalie and I were on a bus from Angel into the city. As we passed Bea's of Bloomsbury, Natalie mentioned that she had always wanted to go there. Bea's of Bloomsbury is famous for its afternoon tea. It was named by Timeout as one of London's best tea rooms.

It was an easy decision. We got off the bus at the next stop and walked back to Bea's for a spot of afternoon tea.

Natalie and I decided to share so we could try a few of their cupcakes. We decided to try the Red Velvet, the Victoria Sponge and the Chocolate Caramel Explosion (I've just made that name up as I can't actually remember its name. It was a chocolate fudge cupcake with a gooey caramel centre.) We decided to eat them in order of richest to lightest.

What was the verdict?

The Caramel Explosion was far too rich for my tastes. The caramel centre didn't really work either as it has sunk to the bottom of the cake and was just a congealed mess at the bottom of the patty.

Next up, Red Velvet. We picked this one because it is our favourite flavour from our favourite cupcake store, The Hummingbird Bakery in Notting Hill. Bea's Red Velvet did not measure up. Although the cake bit was quite tasty the cream cheese icing (which is really what the cupcake is all about) wasn't as good. Bea's went with a fancier mascarpone icing. I wasn't a fan.

Finally, we tried the Victoria Sponge. A light vanilla sponge, with cream and jam in the middle. Just like a normal sponge cake but in an individual serving. Perfect! This was definitely the favourite of the day. So much so that I might just try to bake them for a picnic this weekend.



Thanks to Caitlin for featuring this post on her blog, Goosberry Fool. Check out all the other great foodie links in her weekly round up.