The Food Monologues

Last week I went to a carboot sale and came back with an old fashioned cooking book with some really cool recipes like battenburg cake. Tim likes marzipan alot, so he pressed me to make the cake and it went down rather well. Its an interesting recipe and involves quite a lot of excess cake bits once its made. Its one of the more difficult cakes that I have tried to make in a long time and I have been making quite a lot of cakes and pies recently. There was banoffee pie, pumpkin pie, chinese egg tarts, walnut and coffee cake, coconut loaf, batternburg cake, chocolate muffins, herby cheesy muffins, pork and onion pie, chicken and mushroom pie, date and walnut cake and chocolate and marble cake. All this in the space of a month - I guess I am making up for lost time.

Krispy Kreme donuts opened a concession in Selfridges today and after hearing the heavy promotion on the local radio, we went down to Bullring after work to check out what was so special about the donuts. Well when we got there at arount 5.30, there was still a queue of people, so naturally we went to see what the fuss was all about. The queue moved very quickly and as I reached the end of the queue, I was startled to be confronted by one of the cashiers.

"Hi, I'm Sandy and I will be serving you today", she piped enthusiastically. "What would you like to order?"
"Um..... What have you got?" I queried, bemused since there were so many people that I didn't even have a chance to look at the menu.
"We have plain, raspberry, blueberry...." the list went on for a while, but in the end I asked for a custard filled chocolate donut - since I heard that they were nice on the radio.

The verdict? The cost of the donut was £1.10 and it was very nice. Not exactly crispy, but the dough was quite light and the cream was nice and custardy. However, Greggs do a very similar donut for 37p, so off we went to the Greggs about 100 metres away and joined its even longer queue and bought a custard filled donut as they are called there and did a taste comparison. The difference in taste? Not much. The Greggs donut was slightly doughier and it had been chilled - but I imagine that when brought back to room temperature, there would be very little difference to the Krispy Kreme donut and a third of the price. However Krispy Kreme donuts taste a lot like Dunkin Donuts that my sister used to buy us when she worked in Town years ago, so there was nothing new or special. They do have some interesting flavours that I wouldn't mind trying like the lemon cream one.