Meat Pie Sausage Roll C'mon England

Everyone got up super early this morning. Moo knocked on our bedroom door and shouted "coffees ready, get up". We got ready had breakfast and got on our bikes and cycled the whole of the village in two hours. Today was the Hamlets Garage Sale. A lot of the houses have garage sales at the same time. Normally we would walk around and it would take all day but cycling is a much better way to get around. We left our purchases and Huffle and Small collected them in the car later.

We bought a solid oak table for my sewing, a golf bag for Huffle for his early morning run rounds, skis for Moo, plants, two games and three expanding lizards!!

They haven't grown yet - they need 72 hours

When we got home there were so many people mailing about that we decided to bring up all of our unwanted stuff from the basement. We sold an ugly fireplace that came with the house and a small fire we used to have in the loft. The boys sold some of their old books, a puzzle ball, two small wheelbarrows and some toys. They made about $18 for themselves. We also had a lot of comments about how good our garden looked.

Moo and I left all the boys selling and drove off to the other side of Toronto for our Chocolate Making Workshop. Huffle bought this for me for Christmas but I didn't want to go by myself so we bought an extra one so Moo could go with me. The traffic was horrendous and for some reason my at Nav took us straight through Toronto. However we got there on time and entered the building going up the lift and down the stairs!!! In the room we were greeted with some very nice hot chocolate, an apron and a leaflet. We sat at a table with one lone girl on who didn't really speak and were soon joined by a grandma and her granddaughter and two other couples. Our end of the table proved to be the best. We had a laugh and it seemed we were sitting with a real chocoholic who helped us to secure much more chocolate than anyone else.

We started by tasting three different flavours of ganache. Cinnamon was the first (not my favourite), then chilli and ginger. Next we decorated a lava cake. We were given white chocolate, cocoa powder and coconut to do this.

We were shown tempering and then given a slab of chocolate, cutters, some melted chocolate and we made truffles and cut out chocolates and decorated them. Plus we ate some too and decorated a couple of marshmallows. While our chocolates and cake were cooking and freezing, we had a talk on different chocolates and tried one from Uruguay which tasted of mushrooms, earth and something else. The other was from Equador and was supposed to taste floral. The first was bitter and the second was better.

Then our chocolates and cake came out and we were handed boxes, gloves, ribbons and pretty bags and we sat at our tables and packaged our stuff up to take home. Most of the other people were gone except for Moo and I and the chocoholic couple with us. We ended up with extra hot chocolate, extra cups of ganache and they emptied the white chocolate into cups for us.

We drove home, this time along a different route. Much better traffic and slightly less time.

Huffle and Small had been to the golf range where they did chipping and range hitting. Small shot over a 100 yards drive and Huffle hit the car on purpose which is in the middle of range(which is 200 yards away).

Smallest went to his Gymnastics party and had a good time though he complained it wasn't as good as it was last time he went there.

Moo and I picked up a few bits and came home. The football had just started.

We ate our jacket potatoes watching the football and Moo made jelly and blancmange for tomorrow.

 

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