Round 'Em Up!

So here we are folks! The first two weeks of my last placement all done with, & I’m now three days into the last two weeks!

Before I talk about Dunbar though, I feel it’s only right to sum up my last week at Two Magpies  =)

I had a fair bit of fun last week actually, even though the cake shift is far more stressful than the bread shift!

They do a fairly wide range of sweet treats at Two Magpies; cookies, muffins, various full sized cakes, little brownies, cake slices, gluten free treats, granola bars, all of it made on site, & mostly by Rebecca!  The bakery is so popular these days that she’s struggling to keep up with demand, but she manages to do it every day, & it all looks amazing  =)

Cake is a complicated beast, full of fiddly, time-consuming stages, whereas bread is really a fairly simple creature, & while I do love to make the occasional cake or tart, it’s generally only for a special occasion (or if I’m really feeling the need).  I really don’t think I do it all day every day, I just don’t think I’ve got the patience!

But it has been rather nice to be all delicate & fancy, decorating little cakes & what not  =)  I even got to make my lemon & poppy seed madeleine’s, which was great!

It really has been my favourite placement thus far.  Don’t get me wrong, I loved working at Shrewsbury Bakehouse & at Holtwhites, but there’s just something about this bakery, about the people, about the place, that really clicked, that just felt right =)

I finally went on the Adnams Brewery Tour, to learn a little more about the history of the brewery, & of course to sample some more beers!  ;)

I’d tried Ghost Ship in the pub Monday night, & treated myself to a bottle of Innovation a couple of days later, & enjoyed both of those very much.  On the tour, I tried Broadside, Southwold Bitter, Gunship & a couple of others, including Native Britten, their newest beer.  It’s been on the shelves less than two weeks, & was brewed to commemorate the 100^th anniversary of the birth of Benjamin Britten, a composer from not so far away.  It was lovely!  It’s made with honey & thyme, so it has this lovely rich, caramely flavour to it, really very nice  =)

But alas, I’ve said farewell to this stretch of seaside, & am now in a different seaside town at the opposite end of the country!

I’m not exactly sure what I was expecting from the Bakery Dunbar; I suppose given previous feedback from students & the bakery’s stint on ‘Britain’s Best Bakery’, I was expecting something bigger & brighter than it actually is.

So far I’ve done two nights on the bread shift with Natalie, the girl I’m staying with.  The shift starts at the same time as at Two Magpies, so in theory I should be on the same sleeping pattern still, but I’m not!  It didn’t really help that my being on the night shift Sunday evening was a surprise; I didn’t know until Natalie told me as we walked from the train station.  I was supposed to be in with Ross at 7am Monday morning, but a member of staff who usually works nights was taken ill, so it was all a bit last minute & meant I only got just over an hour of sleep before doing a full nights work!

So needless to say, after a couple of days travelling long distances & not quite as much sleep as I’d normally like, I’m feeling really rather shattered…

Dunbar is nice enough though, & I should have some time to go explore properly this weekend, hopefully I'll get up to Edinburgh too, which should be fun =)