Lemon, Lime & Poppy Seed Drizzle Cake

As many of you know, I enjoy making – as well as eating – cakes; the regular Friday cake-baking session for our guests is never a chore. A couple of weekends ago I found myself offering to make two large ‘traybakes’ for the Flaxdale Open Garden and as I am always on the look out for new recipes decided to try one of Mary Berry’s Poppy Seed cake recipes.

It turned out OK but looked very speckly and I did wonder whether the crowds at Flaxdale might be a bit apprehensive – it even just occured to me that some of the older visitors might have wondered for a horrible moment about weevils. Remember them? Anyway, nobody mentioned weevils and in fact I was rather surprised but very delighted that everybody seemed to simply love it (thanks, Mary Berry!); lots asked for the recipe.

So by genuine popular demand I reproduce the recipe, which I adapted slightly to incorporate what I did/didn’t have in the larder. I made a large amount in a large Aga Baking tray. Halve it if you want a normal tray bake tin size (sorry to be so scientific). Apparently it is an Australian recipe, and I have just checked up with Sara (in Sydney) who confirms that you certainly so see it around (also ‘Lamingtons’).

Lemon, Lime & Poppy Seed Drizzle Cake
450g SR flour
450g sugar
6 eggs
350g soft margarine
3 level tsp baking powder
Grated rind 2 lemons & 2 limes
12 tbs milk
80g poppy seeds

Crunchy Topping
350g Demerara or granulated sugar
Juice of the 2 lemons & 2 limes

Line your baking tin with foil or whatever you normally use. Grease well.
Put all the cake ingredients into a mixer or bowl and beat well until the mixture is completely smooth. Pour the cake mixture into the tin.
Bake in an electric oven at 180’ or in an Aga (top oven, lowest runners with the cold plain sheet in the second set of runners) for about 30-35 minutes, or until golden brown and coming away slightly at the sides.
Remove the cake from the oven. Mix the lemon/lime juice into the topping sugar and pour it all over the top of the still hot cake. When it is almost cold take the cake out of the tin.

A Very Quick News Round Up from Orchard Farm

Another embarrassing delay for the blog output, but we have been busy and down to London… and today was changeover day, and tomorrow is the first day of Parwich Wakes so there have been other priorities.

And it is nearly midnight now but I just wanted to bob my head up again and briefly break the silence. ‘Went the Day Well’ in St Paul’s  went very well, and more of that to come, tomorrow I hope. London was good; Wimbledon was on and the Pensions strike was on so we expected the train and things generally to be more crowded. Everywhere was littered with policemen but we saw and heard nothing of the march other than two decidedly nearing pension-age teachers in the tube, looking very clean and orderly, proudly sporting badges asking us to protect their pensions.

There was another incident which we completely missed and John didn’t even know about until I arrived late at our planned meeting for lunch on St Pancras station (who would have dreamt ten years ago that lunch on the station could actually be a treat? In the past all one could have was a greasy burger and chips, with a rather distinctive smell of artificial flavourings and slightly stale hot fat, which the (myriads of)  pigeons would do their best to pinch off you).

This other incident was a ‘fire alert’ at King’s Cross. Those of us in the tube hoping to dscend at King’s Cross for St Pancras were told in an announcement – fortunately repeated ad nauseam because it was almost incomprehensible at first – that because of the said alert the tube would not stop at King’s Cross and those that wanted to get off there should descend at Euston. Fortunately I was in good time (train-catching if not lunch-wise) but there were numerous  very harrassed looking passengers hurtling along the pavement, pulling behind them suitcases-on-wheels which were lurching wildly from side to side and toppling over in their owner’s haste.

On the road were ambulances and fire-engines and police cars… Whether it was a real fire or a ‘fire alert’ – whatever that technically is – or  a training exercise I have no idea. Anyway, I got to St Pancras without any problem, too late for lunch but with several minutes in hand before our train left. Since then we’ve heard nothing more about the incident; it’s almost as if I dreamt it all (which I did not!).

Back to Parwich. It’s always the same: you open the car door and instantly smell that lovely fresh, green, sweet air and hear all the birds. Tomorrow with the Oddfellows’ March, a band, a’village market’ on the green, a mini fun fair (if maxi-noisy) for the children and young at heart, a fancy dress parade and lots more, the centre of Parwich will not be peaceful; up here on the edge of the village peaceful it will remain, but the jollity is not far away for those that want it.

Tom’s Barn and Douglas’s Barn Facebook Page

Ideas, please! What can you suggest for our Tom’s Barn and Douglas’s Barn Facebook page to make it fun, interesting and useful for friends, holiday cottage guests and family?

We’re so new, there aren’t too many friends of our site yet to let us know, but hope somebody will!

Some of you may vaguely remember a blog post in February bewailing a) my general ignorance and b) despite this ignorance the fact I had  the last two or three years rather neglectfully run a total of three Facebook sites! Needless to say all three are the wrong sort of page for a business which our two family run romantic cottages for two in the Peak District technically are and sooner or later I will have to close down the two barns-based ones, Tom’s Barn and Holiday Cottages in the Peak District.

I had been lazily hoping for the problem to disappear but since the launch of the Peak District Premier Cottages page, and an inspirational  Facebook workshop run last week by our friend and colleague, Martin Hofman of Wheeldon Trees Farm Holiday Cottages, we have taken the plunge!  ‘We’ actually means me: John is more than happy to hand-hold and keep us supplied with lovely photos but is less inclined to launch into the Facebook world himself (which you have to do before becoming an administrator of a business page). Other members of the family have happily agreed to step into the breach.

Still floundering but rather less so since the workshop, ‘we’ are now anxious to make it a genuinely useful site, not just for chit chat or thinly disguised sales pitches… And we have no intention of neglecting the blog but hopefully making the two work together usefully in an as yet not totally clear way!

Please have a look at our page and let us know what is missing, wrong, could be done better and or more attractively. I am sure the scope is endless, even if one’s time isn’t.

Trying to Keep on Top…of everything

We really do try to keep on top of things, as best we can… On one level that is relatively easy, trying to keep a critically objective eye on the state of the barns, decorating and replacing before necessary rather than after, so that the barns always look pristine and well-equipped, although there are areas in the rapidly developing audio-visual/electronic equipment department where we feel distinctly less confident.

Talking of which, we go to lots of wonderfully stimulating workshops and conferences on using the Internet effectively, but every time one touches the same subject again things have already moved on apace, so we just do the best we can. Since earlier this year we have a wonderful new format for our website, thanks to a lot of hard work by our web-man/guru/friend, Jeremy Brough and I must add, quite a lot of input from us this end, too, as we realised how much of the original material needed refreshing, rewording or just completely rewriting!

We now have (almost) full control of what is on the website and blog, and are still learning (HTML codes etc). There is quite a lot to do to keep the sites fresh and reasonably interesting and relevant; we love our life here and all our guests, and writing for the website always feels like writing a letter to friends, or chatting on the phone, so that aspect is no hardship at all! But sometimes one is too close to see the obvious and we do genuinely want suggestions from people about our new website – what else we should do, what is misleading, confusing, unnecessary, hard to find.

Someone told us that our Policies (lurking under ‘More Info’) were difficult to locate so that is something to address. Another constructive suggestion came from Derek and Jenny – click on the link and see the comments below the post. Ensuring the comments on the various pages are kept up to date is quite time consuming and because not urgent, has tended to get left to last. So we have taken on board their suggestion that I may (probably already have) run out of steam  and will gradually remove most of the comments from the various pages, maybe leaving one or at the most two (perhaps we shouldn’t date them, then it won’t be so obvious – there’s a thought)!

So anyone who wants to see what other guests have said will have to click through the various links to posts on the blog. There are straightforward comments from the Visitors’ Books, but also sometimes we have really useful comments and recommendations about walks and places to eat via email which is slightly different. But first, I must copy in the latest batch of snippets from the Visitors’ Books…

Tom’s and Douglas’s Barns Proud Link with the BAFTAs

A bit of a cheeky title really, but we have been watching the BAFTA awards this evening, scouring every table for views of our daughter, Ruthie who we know was there and our nephew, Tim Cragg, who should have been there but we didn’t see him either… ! Not a glimpse of either of them did we spot but to our enormous pleasure and pride,  Flying Monsters 3D with David Attenborough – the film ‘starirng’ Sir David Attenborough that they all at Atlantic Productions have been working on with Sky3 won the specialist factual award.

Ground breaking 3D technology and David Attenborough is an unbeatable combination, and we are very proud of nephew Tim Cragg, who as the Director of Photography had already won the Bafta Specialist Factual Award for this film. Did we know? Not until I discovered by accident a minute ago while looking at the clips of the film – Tim is such a quietly talented and lovely man, so refreshingly modest about his talents – unlike his aunt and uncle, whoi would shout them from the hilltops if only they knew about them. If you look at the awards on his website you’ll see what I mean.

Of Blogs and Books…

A quick snap of Tom's Barn taken by John on 1st May 2011

I was trying yesterday to describe to someone what we used our Tom’s Barn Blog for, what in fact a blog actually was. I struggled slightly, and said that I found it a truly pleasurable way for me to keep in touch with our guests past and present and even possibly future; obviously one delights in telling good news but we don’t at all see it primarily as PR and will cheerfully admit the bad as well.

In many ways it is a luxurious chance to have a natter about whatever subject comes to mind, even if a rather one-sided natter, although we do like comments and would really like more suggestions and feedback…(please!).

As for what a blog is, for fun I looked it up on Wikipedia. “Regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events” it tells me, while “others function as more personal online diaries”. So it looks as if we’ve got it more or less right! Apparently there are approximately 156million blogs ‘alive’ at the moment, so there is nothing unique about this one but it is nice that it is read and enjoyed by some!

Which brings me neatly to what was going to be the subject of this post, reading and books, but on reflection I think that will have to wait until the next post because I am getting carried away on the subject of blogs and as I’m not being interviewed by Mr Humphreys on Today I am free to carry on, regardless.

The third and increasingly important part of our blog is John’s photos, in the Photo Gallery. As many of you know, John is a very keen amateur photographer, with a reputation locally as a rather good one. He is particularly keen on birds (feathered in this case) but also is very good at landscapes and people. He has a good eye, and a real ability to see an unusual slant, or a view no one else has spotted.

He has an enormous selection of photographs on his own computer, a large number on the Parwich blog and puts a selection onto our blog Photo Gallery gallery (link in green on the right hand at the top of each page). Our ‘Gallery Management’ is not yet of the highest order, and we haven’t learnt yet how to arrange the pictures so they look neater but they can be seen and enjoyed, for all that.

He is running a fun caption competition on the Parwich website at the moment, with a £5 prize which is attracting a lot of fun comments. If you want to enter, click here – Friday 6th is the last day!

Where do our guests come from?

At last, thanks to our wonderful web guru, Jeremy, we can show you a postcode map of where all the guests who have booked this year (Jan 1 until March 17 2011) come from. Funnily enough, although we are more or less full until the end of the year, we have only had 36 bookings actually this year.

First of all, there is no set pattern that we can identify. Normally we would have expected to see more from Scotland on the map (maybe they just all made sure to book before the end of last year …). However, we always expect and enjoy the fact that our guests come from all over the country, with what used to surprise us, a significant number of fairly local guests from Nottinghamshire, South Yorkshire, Staffordshire and even Derbyshire. However, they explain that although the journey is minimal (an attraction) once they get here they feel a million miles away from home; on the other hand if pressing work or family concerns mean it is more relaxing to be nearby -think young children or elderly parents, or a critical work situation – that is another bonus.

We always get a lot from London and the home counties, and East Anglia, Kent and Essex. This year. so far, the biggest contingent 5.56% each hail from Cheshire and Cumbria. I suspect London might be the overall winner but because it is a map based on postcodes, there is London /all points of the compass. I could sit down and do the sums but haven’t.

Just to round up, one set pattern that does emerge, year after year… this is the huge number of guests who say they have frequently travelled through Derbyshire and the Peak District without thinking, en route to the Lake District or Scotland, or even Yorkshire and Northumberland. Then suddenly the thought of the Peak District has popped into their mind, and they are unanimously thrilled that it has done so.

We are that much nearer if you come from the southern half of the country, and so surprisingly beautiful and unspoilt. Why surprising? Perhaps the area isn’t so good at the PR, or perhaps it’s all those history lessons about mills and factories in the cradle of the Industrial Revolution.

Anyway, the truth is a delightful secret we’re privileged to share with our guests!

Our Barns in Alastair Sawday’s Special Escapes

We are proud to have been invited way back in about 2007 to be included in Alastair Sawday’s ‘Special Escapes’ website and at present have two separate entries there, one for Tom’s Barn and a second for Douglas’s Barn.

Anxious to ensure we haven’t slipped below their standard Sawday’s have just arranged a (routine!) re-inspection  this coming Tuesday 15th March and we are using this opportunity to have now not two but just one entry for our two barns so it will be interesting to see how the inspection goes, and assuming/hoping all goes well, reading our new description. Their editors do manage to capture the spirit of a place very  astutely and attractively – quite an art!

Sawday’s travel guides and websites are much respected and our inclusion in the Special Escapes website is an important source of contacts for us and has brought us many delightful guests. It works for us both ways, because  we always tend to look to Sawday’s recommendations ourselves when planning a trip away, most recently and happily on a trip this week to Norfolk for a sad family funeral and inevitable happy family reunion afterwards.

We spent one night at The Windmill at Cley which we knew well already and the second at Burgh Parva Hall in Melton Constable which we didn’t know before but would happily return to.

Once again it has been interesting and helpful becoming the ‘consumer’ rather than the provider. We find we are always learning…

Interesting Facts & Figures or Useless Stats

It is traditional at the start of a new year to look back over the past one, so for those that like such things, here are some stats for 2010, with due credit to SuperControl which has supplied most of them…

Occupancy: Tom’s Barn 98%; Douglas’s Barn 97%  Apart from three unbooked /cancelled short breaks, our barns were full all year during 2010.

Visits:    129 in all, Tom’s Barn 63; Douglas’s Barn 66 (Useless stat: given that it takes approximately 4.5 hours at least on average to get the barns as spotless and fresh throughout as we want each changeover, that equals 580.5 hours of cleaning (not including the washing and ironing). I will not say how much that costs because it is unseemly to see it in print.

Returning guests: Tom’s Barn 24%; Douglas’s Barn 24%. Some have returned more than once, I’m not sure that our stats can cope with that.

Online Bookings: 84;   Admin Bookings 55 This is fascinating, a real indication of how things have changed. We enrolled with SuperControl online booking system in August 2009, sure we were doing the right thing but unaware how quickly it would catch on and how many of our guests obviously find it easier and much more convenient. We worried about the loss of personal contact, but that comes later with ensuing emails and sometimes phone calls.

Advance bookings for 2011: 52.1% (last year it was 43.8% and we were pleased with that). 233/356 days in Tom’s Barn are already booked, mainly but not exclusively by dog owners who are so happy to have found a lovely Five Star cottage that also welcomes dogs. Douglas’s Barn which also has a loyal following but is strictly pet-free has 147/365 days booked already.

Where do you all come from in this country? Intriguingly, this year has a southern/eastern bias but the geographical definitions are inevitably a bit random – London 12; South East 19; Midlands/East 41; North East 20; North West 5; Wales 2; Scotland 4; South West 15; plus some from abroad. We’ve had some really lovely people from Scotland and Wales, do hope we can conjure up some more for 2011!

These are all statistics; our guests are all real people. We feel privileged to welcome you here and love the contact with people from all over who choose to come here to the barns we love to the area we also love.

1/1/11

There is something very pleasing about the simplicity of the date today – it will be even more pleasing on the 11th November and more significant still when we come to the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month…

Anyway, Happy New Year to all our friends, guests and supporters. May 2011 be a good year to us all, in spite of the gloom of the weather today and the rise in VAT (we’re not ‘Vatable’ but the increase will hit us all) and the ongoing surge in oil prices. All the more important that we enjoy and appreciate all that we do have.

Looking ahead: our new brochure has at last arrived after about six weeks at the printers. Our new website will go live, hopefully, next week.  I still have a lot of work to do on that… Apparently Country Homes and Interiors is going to do a little feature on the barns  – or one of them – in their February ‘The Place to Be’ page. We’re always very flattered when this happens. Often we know nothing about a review in the press until the time it comes out; when we are given advance warning but not told what has been said it is intriguing and just slightly anxious-making. Anyway, we’ll soon know and do have a look if you see the magazine (towards the back, apparently).

Finally, there’ll be some looking back in the next post but meanwhile, our two barns are over half fully booked for next year already 52.1% actually.