Belfast Taste & Music Fest 2011

The annual Belfast Taste & Music Fest marks the 2nd anniversary of my blog and what a 2 years it has been! Perhaps I’ve lacked the time & motivation to blog as often as I intended but I’m glad that I’ve managed to at least try to catch up with my baking endeavours and not let the blog completely slip away from me.

I had been looking forward to our visit to the taste fest pretty much since we left last years event and I’m glad to say it didn’t disappoint. The weather wasn’t exactly cooperating but we came prepared this time with our own chairs and a multitude of umbrellas at the ready.

We visited Botanic Gardens on the Sunday afternoon, arriving at 1.30pm and leaving at approx 5.30pm. I must say that the admission prices aren’t great so we always make sure to arrive before the price changes to evening admission. 12noon – 4pm was priced at £6 and from 4pm onwards it was £10. I’ve never been a fan of the entry price at all but £10 is quite a high price to pay considering how much people will spend on tokens and drinks. I know that the entertainment is one reason for the entry fee but to be honest I’m there for the food, if its someone I like its a bonus for me. I guess not everyone feels like that and may go at night to enjoy the bands and the bar in conjunction with the food.

So we paid £6 entrance fee and bought one set of 20 tokens at £10 to start us off with the definite intention to buy more (as we always do). We found a spot and even managed to nab a table to congregate around.

I had come prepared with a spreadsheet for each person which included each restaurant, chef and the dishes they were serving. I decided to gather up all the token costs for each dish so that we could decide the best course of action for joining the queues and making sure we had a variety of dishes to share that were still hot.

I took pictures as quickly as I could of each dish and then gathered comments and scores from everyone to compare the different dishes that we shared. I’ve included pics of nearly everything we tried with scores on taste, appearance and overall comments afterwards. Each token costs 50p, I’ve included token cost and £ cost after each dish. Some were definitely worth the higher token price in terms of either taste or quantity while others definitely didn’t warrant the higher cost.

Cake catchup

Well hello folks (that is if there’s anyone left out there reading my blog!)

A quick catch up on cakes from the past few months to get us up to date before I attend the Belfast Taste & Music Fest this weekend. This year I’m even more organised and have created a spreadsheet with all the menus including space to score each dish and add comments. I’ll be doing a lengthy blog post in order to give an overview of the fest next week.

Onwards with cakes. I’ll start with my most recent and one of my favourites. This was for the ever lovely Sera who wanted to celebrate her son’s 1st birthday in style by throwing a fabulous Pirate themed bash. This was so much fun to make, I even found a coin making machine and made all the booty by hand, the coins were Galaxy or Milkybar chocolate. All other decoration is fondant, the lid was constructed from card and covered in fondant.

The rest of the pics are after the jump….