A snapshot of 2025

It’s been a very busy year and I must say that I’ve rather neglected my website.  It’s been a year since I last posted and an awful lot has happened since then.  It’s impossible to choose one event to write about, so I thought I’d cherry pick some of my biggest/more unusual/more memorable events and say a little bit about them and throw in a few photos.

In April I did a 50th birthday party for a lovely lady.  She and her husband are musicians and the entertainment was a band featuring her husband and 3 of his schoolmates.  They had only performed together once before (when they were at school) but you would never have known because they were AMAZING!  They were warming up as I prepared and set out all the food, which was great and certainly made the time pass quickly.  This all took place at the Hot Tin in Faversham which was somewhere I’d driven past many times but never been into and it’s a fab little venue, very cool and atmospheric.

I make cakes for a couple of local tea rooms, Doddington Place Gardens and Belmont House and Gardens, throughout the spring and summer.  I make quite a lot of cakes over the course of the season, but this year in May I made the most in one go that I’ve ever made and I had to take a photo of it.  I think it was 28 cakes and 50 scones!

In June I did a large private party at the Marlowe Theatre for 100 people.  It involved assembling a lot of canapés in a dressing room as the kitchen was unavailable!

In July I did a joint 80th birthday party for a couple heavily associated with both the Kent Gardens Trust and the National Garden Scheme, which was a 3-course sit down lunch.  They had twice-baked cheese soufflés on dressed baby leaves; hot-smoked trout, goat’s cheese, pea and fennel salad with new potatoes; and lemon tart and summer pudding for dessert.  There were 46 guests seated at 6 tables in the couple’s beautiful garden and it was especially memorable because the heavens opened during the main course and everyone had to briefly abandon their seats and head for cover!

In August I did a 60th birthday lunch for a lovely lady in Westwell.  I don’t have many photos, but I had to take one of the table because it looked so gorgeous.

In September I did a wedding at a venue I hadn’t been to before, Wilderness Weddings.  I must admit I approached it with slight trepidation as I knew I was going to be in a catering tent preparing lunch with an oven hired in for the day.  However, I needn’t have worried because the catering tent was lovely: huge, with a wooden floor and plumbed-in sink and the venue itself was lovely.  The main area was a vast tepee and everything just looked so gorgeous.  They had a 2-course lunch of tagines and accompaniments followed by a selection of puddings and it all went pretty smoothly despite a bit of rain.  There was no vehicular access to the catering tent so initially the food had to be transported from my car to the tent in a golf buggy!  The day was a great success and lots of fun.

In October I went on holiday!