Foodies Festivals, Syon Park, London, on Bank Holiday Monday and more all year

Problem
I hate battling crowded car parks, buying tickets in advance to commit when I can't predict the weather. However, the food festival this year looks so good. What's good?

Answer
FREE
The lure of goody bags and beer if you get in fast with the code.

SEE - CELEBRITY CHEFS
'Great British Bake Off winner 2017 Sophie Faldo baking live in The Cake & Desserts Theatre, as well as top local talent 
64 degrees & Great British Menu winner Michael Bremner, 
Michelin-starred Matt Gillan of Pike & Pine and 
Michelin-starred chef of Ockenden Manor Stephen Crane all cooking up a storm in the Chef's Theatre'.

SEE - RAINBOW CAKE
The cake and bake festival with my visual favourite, the multi-coloured rainbow cake. The question is, how do you get it to taste as good as it looks.

SINGAPORE
If you are travelling to Singapore, or on a stopover to Australia or anywhere else, look around Singapore or the airport.

Singapore is like one long food festival, with mutli-national stalls on the cheap hawker centres and department store food courts.

My unfavourite food is the so subtle green pandan cake popular in Singapore which rarely tastes of anything and has no much or crunch. However, try anything once.

Pandan cake. Photo from Wikipedia.

Yes, Singapore has rainbow cake too.

Back to England - flavoursome rainbow cake sounds great.

MACAROONS
What if you love desserts but want to save calories, and costs, and leave room to eat something different later? Macaroons are the thing. They usually have great colours and flavours.

PROSECCO
Cheap and cheerful, I like Prosecco, more than Cava and Champagne.  It's less alcoholic, too.
The alcohol includes:
Champagne
Gin
Prosecco
Beer
If you really want to cut down on the alcohol, try the beer. Or the Tea Tent.

What about children? Yes, cookery for kids.

Anything sensible and savoury (yes, Cheese) or healthy and fruity?

COLOUR
If you don't want more to eat, feast your eyes on the red aprons advertising the foodies festival. Not just in London. They hold events at places as far apart as Brighton in Sussex on the south coast of England and up north in Edinburgh, Scotland. You might have missed the one in Brighton early this year, and if you miss the May bank holiday event in London, there's Brigmingham in June and several more run by the same company. And they are not the only company.

Plus coastal areas have seafood celebrations.

More information from:
http://foodiesfestival.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_food_festivals_in_the_United_Kingdom

Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker. 

Translating a sales email from German and how to teach German with rainbow cake

Problem
I am learning German and can recognise such useful phrases 'as the horse is in the field' or 'the plate is on the table' or 'the boy is eating chicken'. However that doesn't help me when I am emailed a German sales pitch. I was going through my inbox and about to delete it when I thought, let's translate this so that next time it's easy to see what the sender is on about. Here are the results

I tired Google translate, word by word, watching whether I could gain by learning both the words in a phrase and the whole phrase if it made a new concept, just as kinder is child and garten is garden but kindergarten is a pre-school class.

I managed to keep two screens open, one for my blog and the other for the translator, the third for the original German text. Using the F3 key on the top line of my keyboard I could open all these windows, but they only separate on the screen in thumb nail size.

(Aside: The very first computer  had, years ago. allowed a split or slit screen for when you were correcting a text so that you could compare the new and old versions. I am surprised nobody has yet devised an automatic setting to do this for comparing two or four screen.  I shall do an online search and hunt for it.)

b l e i came up as lead but b l e i b came up as follow. The entire phrase was different .

German - English
bleib auf den laufenden - keep up to date
folge uns auf - follow us on
laufenden - current
mitfeiern - celebrate
r e g e n s b o g e n t o r t e - rainbow cake

English - German
arc - bogen
celebrate - mitfeiern
current - laufenden
follow us on - f o l g e  u n s auf
keep up to date - b l e i b auf den laufenden
rain - r e g e n
rainbow - regenbogen

I was thinking about translating from English into German. The John Lewis slogan 'never knowingly undersold' is related to but not identical to other phrases such as: We won't be beaten on price. Bargain. Good value.

Another group of English phrases in sales advertisements and letters is:
Free for every customer.
For the first 100 customers only.
Competition. Free to enter. No purchase necessary.

Translation is very tricky. You have to get it just right. You don't want to mislead customers. You have to consider goodwill, plus legal requirements. One new business offered a free cupcake on a voucher site. A small item. But they were more successful than they dreamed, could not cope with the speed of the demand. They had thousands of requests which they had to honour and went bankrupt. That's why you see wording such as first fifty customers only. They are not trying to cheat you by saying they've sold out. They really do need to be prepared for too much of a good thing - success. So, translating as a ghost writer one has to consider the consequences to the writer or seller and the reader.

I have a friend in Singapore who teaches French and German to a mostly English and Chinese speaking group of students. Other friends of mine teach French in schools such as the International schools. Others teach English as a foreign language to teens and adults.

If I were to teach German to a group of student in a class, I would split them into groups and give each group of two or three or four or five an email or advertisement. I would have translated the text myself in advance. They would have ten to twenty minutes to translated it and instruct their representative on what to read back to report to the whole class. Then we would go round the group. For homework, they would have all four texts and be asked to translate all four and list the words dictionary style, English to German and German to English. if we had time, I would then ask then to make up their own advertisement or sales letter. They might do a short, succinct version of one or more of the letters. Or they could create a new subject, using the same phrases.

Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker, teacher of English and other languages. Please share links to posts and have a look at my books.

Rainbow bagels and rainbow cakes: colours and fruit flavours, or just plain

When I was a student in the Sixties I went to a park in San Francisco where hippies were serving free bread coloured pink. You didn't need to take drugs. You were high on the excitement of the weirdness of it all.

Children are excited by colours. Everybody is excited by colours. That's why a school in England is trying to ban red clothes, only allowing tiny amounts of red for fear of overexciting the children.

Intu shopping centre in Watford emailed me a series of suggestions for activities to amuse children over the holidays. One of their suggestions was watching a video on how to make rainbow bagels.

I watched the video which had amusing pictures but I was disappointed to find that:
a) The rainbow in the dough was only food colouring - no flavouring.
b) Sugar sprinkles were adding calories and sugar to what is already a high calorie and not brilliantly healthy bagel. The sugar prevents you from adding anything other than cream cheese. I suppose that's better than nothing.

Picture in public domain from Wikipedia.

I previously wrote a blog post about attractive rainbow cakes which I discovered in Singapore. One of many other bloggers on the subject of rainbow cakes had surveyed several Singapore shops and delis and cafes to find the best looking and tasting rainbow cake. Other people had offered recipes, or tried making their own and reported on the results.

I was delighted to find websites which offered fruit colouring, not made with mere food colour from bottles, but using fruits and vegetables adding flavouring as well as nutrition, plus the excitement of the varied tastes matching the colours. Regrettably the verdict reached by most of them was that you could not get sufficiently intense flavour from the vegetable dyes from fresh fruit alone.

If you want really bright red desserts with delicious flavouring, try the English favourite summer pudding. You can make your own or buy it from supermarkets.

If you want to make your own, it's so easy that it's hard to get wrong. Use a bowl shape mould to make a lining of white bread. Fill it with red fruits such as strawberry, raspberry, blackcurrant and red currant. Seal the base with a circle of bread, pressing the edges together.  Cook it. Serve hot or cold, with or without white yogurt or cream.

Decorate with red grapes. Or contrasting colours.

If you want to make more desserts, in separate colours, try a blue one with blueberries and / or prunes.

Make an orange one with mangoes, apricot, oranges, mandarins, and/or kumquats.

 Make a yellow one with lemon curd or apricots or white peaches and custard. Make a green one with greengages and mint.

Any recipe for smoothies will give you suggestions.

Celebrations: Birthdays, Parties, Weddings, National Days
If you want a rainbow party, with everybody wearing rainbow clothes, rainbow bagels, rainbow cakes, rainbow cocktails, rainbow cheese. For rainbow cheese choose (orange cheese, blue cheeses, white cheeses, cheeses with  red such as Wensleydale with Cranberry, or lakes of chutney.

If a rainbow is too complicated, pick three colours to match a flag, such as red white an blue (UK, USA, France), or orange or red white and green. This would be fun for a summer party, national holiday or wedding.


Where To Buy and Try
USA - New York, USA
UK - Brick Lane bakery, East End of London, England

UK supermarkets
See TripAdvisor for the latest reviews. You can also buy plain bagels and bagels with poppy seeds and sesame seeds in London supermarkets such as Tesco and Morrisons. And a retired restaurant owner tells me he thinks you can buy better and cheaper in bulk from Costco in North Watford. Another option is B and K sat beef bar which has branches in Edgware and Hatch End.

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/shortcuts/2016/feb/24/i-can-eat-a-rainbow-new-york-psychedelic-bagels-light-up-london
You tube video on rainbow bagels:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-H1wAtCKlIE
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_flags_by_color_combination
http://wikihandbook.info/how-to-make-rainbow-bagels.wiki

If you want to find the places in the USA, New York and elsewhere, which went viral with rainbow bagels, looks at internet sites.

http://www.eater.com/2016/3/8/11171396/rainbow-bagels-cronut-cruffin-milkshakes
http://www.bagelartist.com

http://travelwithangelalansbury.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/rainbow-cake.html


Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, researcher, author, public speaker.

Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer.

Rainbow Cake and Cake in a Cup

More oddities and excitement form the food and wine show at Expo in Asia.

Rainbow cake in a packet.


And the most delightful shapes, everything for baking professional or as a hobbyist.

www.rueflambee.com (They are Italian.)
(More pictures for you later.)


More novelties for the food, wine, hotel, restaurant and catering businesses from
www.foodnhotelasia.com

Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer. 

Singapore Visitor's Sights

Attractions, Museums and Gardens
Areas to see: City centre, Chinatown, Little India.
Hotels to see: Raffles; Shangri-la (waterfalls); Hyatt (waterfall); Sheraton (waterfall); Marriott by Tang's department store (palm trees in lobby); Marina Bay

Gardens By The Bay. Photo by Angela Lansbury. Copyright.

Gardens By the Bay Flower Dome

Gardens by the Bay Flower Dome.

Photo by Trevor Sharot. Copyright.

Gardens By the Bay
Gardens By the Bay riverside walks
Night Safari
Zoo
Bird Park
Marina Bay Sands top floor
History Museum
Philatelic Stamp Museum
Peranakan Museum
Bridge, pedestrian, painted
Bridge, pedestrian, helix
Changi
Old Ford Factory

Fish head curry. Banana leaf. Photo by Angela Lansbury. Copyright.

Tours and Rides
Singapore Flyer
Duck tour
Sentosa Island
Hop on hop off bus. (Check whether you get a free bus tour from Changi or around the city by showing your Singapore Airlines ticket.)

MRT
A must see. Stunning stations include the busy and delaying multi-storey, multi-walkway Dhoby Ghaut station. Go to the latest station which opens Dec 27 2015, Cashew Road, and ride the loop where the windows suddenly go white and block the view as you pass within feet of the windows of skyscrapers built beside the stations and tracks.

Shopping
Orchard Road
Mustaphas (Western, Indian, large sizes)
Underground walk from ION to basements 1 and 2 from Orchard station to Ngee Ann City
Chinese department store in Chinatown

Special Restaurants and Foods
Fish Head curry and rice and curry served on a banana leaf in a restaurant in or near Little India such as Muthu's.
For a cheap meal, go to a hawker centre, a circle of fast food kiosks of various nationalities including Chinese and other Asians and usually a Western one and if you are lucky a fruit and justice bar, in the basement or top floor of most shopping malls.
For moderate to expensive fun at an informal place try IO.
For a special occasion, book drinks or dinner Raffles Hotel or at the top of Marina Bay. Or gourmet.
For tea time, try the rainbow cake. (See my earlier post.)
For a gourmet dinner, try the place I reviewed in an earlier post, where the chef makes surprise dishes for you (Fratini restaurant).You might also like the buzz of the waterside restaurants along Boat Quay and Clarke Quay. You can also dine on a boat.

Seasonal foods:
Moon cakes (autumn), all flavours, sold in restaurants, department stores, special shops which pop up, bakeries, markets, delis, even ice cream shops.

Moon cakes.

Chinese New Year - restaurants and clubs have New Year dinners, at which the main dish is a mixture of foods in a communal bowl eaten with chopsticks, starting by everybody tossing food in the air above the plate, called Yusheng. (See Wikipedia, Hungry Go Where and lots more sites.) Wear washable clothes.
See my previous posts on Singapore

Seasonal events
Formula 1
Great Singapore Sale
Chinese New Year (lights in streets and lion dances)
Boat trips to islands

Events:
Guided tours of museums.
(Talks. Join Friends of the Museum.)
Speakers' Groups. (See Toastmasters International website, find a club.)
Hash House Harriers. (Running through the jungle.)
See the free newspapers at the entrances to railway stations.
Buy The Straits Times. You may find a copy on your plane or in the airport lounge. Singapore daily newspapers are online.

Lions and lion dances, Chinese new year

Cassata Siciliana from IO italian Osteria.

Discounts -
see maps which are free from Changi airport and major hotels.
Bargains - fixed prices in some shops. But get a Chinese friend to negotiate bargains even in shops with fixed prices. If assistants follow you around, try looking keen to buy, asking price, then walking out and see if they chase after you offering a lower price.

Angela Lansbury has been a resident of Singapore for more than ten years.

Christmas and New Year novelties: cakes, chocolates, wine

All around the world people are making Christmas cakes. In England the favourite is the heavy fruit cake with white icing topping decorated with little figurines of green trees and red Santas, nowadays skiers. In France the favourite is the Yule log, a chocolate spiral roll covered in chocolate cream.
Here's a visual trip around ten of the best log cakes in Singapore. My favourite is the pistachio green log  cake from the Regent hotel, with it mango filling and little white mushrooms, which a DIY cake maker could model with cream, icing or meringue.

I remember the rainbow cake in Singapore.

(More details about buying of making rainbow cakes in a previous post.)

My favourite Xmas novelties:

Pick A Penguin Cake?
Marks and Spencer Penguin cake
Family fun cake in the igloo penguin cake.
You could also try making your own novelty cake, snow scene topping.
Lots of great DIY cake ideas, recipes, colourful pictures to enjoy here:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-3311637/Forget-anti-gravity-cakes-season-s-hottest-showstoppers-HIDDEN-CENTRE-cakes.html

Rainbow cakes, like the ones I saw in Singapore (see one of my previous posts); cakes with a short name through the middle, hearts, love you, marry me, and a circular xmas cake. A great snowflake mould shaped like a five point star.

Chocolate Ball
Waitrose recipe books and magazines and website
Cheap luxury look chocolates for a Christmas party from Waitrose.

Lindt reindeer chocolate advent calendar

Waitrose Big Ball Lindt ? Lindor Ball
with truffles

Want Lindt super soft smooth chocolate, more bite size to share?

For a party, or a gift, plates for Stilton. from Waitrose.

Red for romance, and red for Xmas from Waitrose.

 Hearts for romance, from Waitrose.

How to keep the children quiet with chocolates with out a brown mess - white chocolate coins from Tesco, only 50p.

Snowman cake from Prosecco and cake bar in Intu shopping mall in Watford.

To finish your table at bargain prices, you can buy salt and pepper Santa shakers for £1, and a red santa hat chair back cover for the same price.

Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer. Author and speaker.

Rainbow Cake in Singapore, Rainbow Cocktails in London, or make your own cake and juices

Rainbow cake, Singapore.
More details of restaurant and recipe later. It's in the HillV2 complex ground floor.

This is a great treat for a holiday, birthday or special occasion. Also a centrepiece for a party.

I forgot the name of the restaurant where I saw this cake. Fortunately, as usual I had taken the photo of the food with a copy of the menu (or name card) as a reminder. Dean and Deluca, in HillV2, 4 Hillview Rise, Singapore.

Here's a guide to rainbow cakes all over Singapore, with the warning that some places sell out early in the day. (Don't they have a chef on site who makes another when the cake is three quarters sold out? Don't they have a second cake in the freezer which can be brought out?)

http://www.ladyironchef.com/2014/01/rainbow-cake-cafe-singapore/

Want to make it yourself?
http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/3028705/rainbow-cake

I am keen on natural colours and different flavours. Why would anybody recommend food colouring? The BBC's trouble-shooting or FAQ site warns cooks that natural colours might fade during cooking. But too much food colouring can give an unpleasant flavour. Back to natural ingredients. In summer with fresh fruits abundant and cheap, a good time to make juices and flavoured cakes.

English Summer Pudding - red fruit
In England in summer many restaurants will be offering summer pudding, encased in a simple white bread outside, contrasting with the most, succulent strongly flavoured centre filling of red summer fruits such as red currants, raspberries, strawberries and blackcurrants. You could make a two or three decker summer pudding with two or three contrasting colours, red fruits, green kiwi, and another.

Australian and New Zealand Pavlova - Rainbow effect
Australia and New Zealand have as their national dish the Pavlova, a meringue with a high bowl ending and mixed fruits in the centre. At home or for a party you could create a rainbow effect in the middle simply with contrasting colours of fruits, cut into circles or semicircles, laid in lines. If you want a hotel or catering company to do a summer dessert for a party or wedding, you could ask them to create a rainbow effect Pavlova.

Another version would have concentric circles, perhaps with strawberries around the outside of the meringue. At home, or for a charity event, even a small child could create the pattern, if an adult washed and cut the fruit, and ensured the child washed their hands!

Rainbow Cake
Singapore's rainbow cake is dense, not light like a Victoria sponge, because you want the layers to hold their shape.
Good. I've always been disappointed by sponge cakes which disappear in the mouth like Candy Floss (one of the great culinary disappointments of my childhood. I must admit to liking solid foods such as suet pudding).
http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/howto/guide/how-make-our-rainbow-cake-frequently-asked-questions

Contrasting Colour Cocktails
In London you can get rainbow cocktails at a Chinese restaurant in Harrow. The price of the cocktail was as much as or more than our main dish, but the highlight of the meal.

I first saw these made at a French wedding (our au pair girl Caroline nee Jouy, married name Mention. I've hunted for her all over the net). The colours settle due to the different density but you simply have to pour them in the correct order.

http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-Make-Rainbow-Shots/

One recipe suggests 1/4 oz of each of
Creme de Cacao,
Creme de Violette,
Yellow Chartreuse,
Maraschino,
Benedictine,
Green Chartreuse and finally
Brandy.

Seven ingredients. If you have a well-stocked cabinet you probably have two or three already. If you don't have all the ingredients, you could make yourself a Christmas list and ask each member of the family to buy you one of the ingredients (or all buy a bottle for each other).

A simple sandwich drink of three contrasting colours could be equally amusing. (Nobody actually wants to drink all these different flavours. In my experience it's just a muddle and too much alcohol. You just want to see it.)

There's some simple scientific way of finding out which order to use the drinks you already have by looking up the number. Anybody in your family with a scientific or methodical mind could do it.
An alternative version

Rainbow Juices in Contrasting Colours
You don't like alcohol? You are driving? You want non-alcoholic drinks for health freaks or a children's party, or drivers early in the day?

You also find a mixed fruit juice will separate out into contrasting colours. This happened to my juices at The Tanglin club Tavern restaurant in Singapore.

Or just make a selection of teeny tumblers or throwaway plastic cups with juices of three different colours different colours. I saw this done at the Grove Hotel north of Watford for a Jaguar car test drive organised by Spire. Orange from oranges and carrots. Green from kiwi fruit. Red from watermelon or mixed red fruits.

Can't be bothered to make your own juices? Want a detox? Health food shops and internet suppliers can provide bottled juices. Here's just one of several I found on the net, from the USA.
http://www.rainbowjuices.com

If you are in Singapore, one of the delights is that most shopping malls in buildings with multi-storey shops have a food court in the basement or on the top storey, or both, with at least one juice bar serving juices.

Kiosks serving juices is also becoming a trend in shopping malls in London, England. You will find them in suburbs such as Harrow and Watford, as well as the big, famous malls. If you are planning a shopping trip, most shopping malls have websites so you can check the names of the restaurants and juice bars. Then check the outlet websites for their food, drinks and prices.

Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author, speaker.