The Orchard, Grantchester, Cambridge, UK

I do like a scone. And one of the best places to eat one is The Orchard in Grantchester. And don't just take my word for it- Rupert Brooke, Virginia Woolfe, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jawaharlal Nehru and, ummm, Stephen Fry all thought so too. Well their thoughts on scones might actually be unknown, but they all definitely frequented The Orchard during their time in Cambridge.

You only have to travel a mile or so out of the city to find the village of Grantchester. It's filled with lots of lovely little cottages, a couple of pubs, The Orchard, and not too much else. The Orchard, as the name indicates, is an orchard of apple and various other fruit trees with lots of deckchairs dotted about it. The site also has a little Rupert Brooke museum marking its link to the poet who immortalised it in verse, and more importantly a tea room from which you can buy savoury things for lunch, a range of cakes, and importantly scones. It's self-service so you will have to queue up with a tray canteen-stylee, but with tables scattered randomly all over the place I don't think waitress service would work very easily here.

So on what now appears to be one of the last sunny days of the summer, the male companion person and I took ourselves off in search of a cream tea. The Orchard can get ridiculously busy at the height of summer with students, tourists and residents all competing for available deckchairs. But in late August we had a bit more choice when selecting our dining spot. We went for a classic choice of freshly baked scones, clotted cream (Rodda's), jam and tea for two (which came to around £11.00). The scones were huge, but not too dense or doughy, and perfect smothered in cream and jam. The tea was an adequate if not very exciting Twinings Earl Grey, and I do think that The Orchard could jazz up this side of things. But overall this was still an excellent cream tea.

My only gripe with our tea was due to some highly annoying winged visitors that decided to join us. I guess sitting in a fruit orchard with pots of jam in summer is probably asking for wasp trouble, but it was bloody annoying nevertheless, though my shrieking and arm waving probably didn't help things. Note to self- if running away from a wasp maybe do not grab the jam-filled scone in panic too, as this is not likely to make the wasp go away.

Thankfully the wasps did eventually lose interest and left us in peace to laze around in our deckchairs. And after a while I thought that the best way to get over the recent wasp trauma was to, ahem, eat some cake. On offer were Victoria sponge, carrot cake, chocolate fudge cake, and coffee and walnut (all around £3.00), which I eventually plumped for. The light coffee sponge, and the not too sweet buttercream icing, meant that despite eating a huge scone quite recently, fitting in this piece of cake too was in fact a piece of cake (see what I did there?!).

So if you want to follow in the footsteps of poets, philosophers and prime ministers, and enjoy a scone while lazying about in the sun in a deckchair I thoroughly recommend a visit to The Orchard.

The Orchard Tea Garden
45-47 Mill Way
Grantchester CB3 9ND

NB The Orchard is open all year round, not just during summer, and has an indoor seating area too.

Wimbledon lunching

The Wimbledon mens finals are one of those very English events that occur during the summer, so I thought I'd try to prepare something equally English to sustain myself and the male companion through watching it on TV. Good thing too as it turned into an epic match. So we started off with traditional cucumber sandwiches, open sandwiches with smoked salmon and cream cheese mixed with wasabi, and errrr...crisps. Hard to go wrong with cucumber sandwiches but I did impress myself with the salmon and wasabi combo. The wasabi provided just enough of a sharp kick to cut through the richness of the salmon without over-powering it. I used the S&B brand which comes in a tube, so it was incredibly easy to mix about one-ish heaped teaspoon (adding a bit at a time and regular test tastings required) in with about half a tub of cream cheese.

So onto course two. I was inspired by a recent post by Hollow Legs to try making some scones. I am not a natural baker, having produced a range of rock hard breads and semi-raw pastries in the past, but this looked like quite a straight-forward recipe and the picture was too drool-inducing to ignore. I cut the scones quite small as I wanted something relatively dainty (and also because I used a beaker rather than a scone cutter). And the results......not bad at all. As you might be able to tell from the photo they didn't really rise as much as I expected (cause unknown, but if anyone can enlighten me that would be great), but tasted lovely. Though anything served with huge dollops of clotted cream and jam is always going to taste pretty damn good.


All was accompanied by Pimms- could we get more English?


Cost: S&B wasabi £0.99
I rate it 8/10

Cost: Tesco Finest Cornish clotted cream (by Rodda's) around £1.40
I rate it 8/10

Cost: Tesco Finest strawberry conserve around £1.35
I rate it 7/10 (tasted fine but no different to any old strawberry jam)