The weather is as bitter as gall here in rural England. It's so cold you could freeze a rice pudding on your head! A man with the whitest face and beetrooty marks on his bulbous forehead - looking disturbingly like Mikhail Gorbachev - is presenting the BBC Weather Forecast every five minutes pontificating that this is "the Beast from the East": a savage cold front raging in from Russia, taking no prisoners. We've just had six inches of snow; with day-time temperatures peaking at minus 1c.
My house, Raffles, is surrounded by 12-inch deep snow and the villagers of Brill are walking on the tops of hedges, like Elizabethan paupers heading to church for their dry bread roll and cheap mutton soup. As a punishment for my staff's insubordination, I've ordered the hand-servants to dig out the grand drive using only silver teaspoons so I can get my Rolls Royce out for a leisurely slut-crawl down to Soho, London, as I want to buy a set of sexy Chantilly under-garments. If it's too snowy for the drive, I might take the helicopter!
Having grown up in arid Texas (where the annual average temperature is enough to flash-cook a chicken wing in the shade in just 5 minutes), snow is a gross novelty to Fanny: when it does snow, I feel I need to go out into the grounds, strip naked and roll around in the cold, wet stuff, just to see if it's real. I'm amazed by the brightness of it.
However, on this occasion, I felt incredibly adventurous and decided to turn my hand to culinary creations involving another phenomena which I know jack-shit about, that is, yellow snow. I'd never heard of naturally-occurring yellow snow, but apparently yellow snow can be found in many public parks and commons, especially around lamp-posts.
It is said that Eskimos have over 50 words for snow; conversely, us Texans, given our native, desert-like surroundings, only have one phrase for anything closely resembling snow: "ice cubes".
I don't know how yellow snow occurs or why, but it's out there if you look!
Now, Fanny has an exceptionally creative hand in the kitchen and when Mother Nature has turned the Great Outdoors into a vast refrigerator, there's no time better to go out and collect up indiscriminate amounts of snow, armed with an ice-cream scoop and a scrubbed-out old margarine container, and lovingly fashion the icey mush into extraordinarily-beautiful yellow ice lollies. As it's yellow snow I'm lucky enough to scoop up, I really don't need to bother with food colourants like beta-carotene:
As you will see, my Press Office came up with the idea of printing on the ice lolly stick the words "Aunt Fanny's Yellow Surprise". I do think that's a fitting description for what surely is a wonderful icey surprise. Snow never lasts in England but it got me thinking about business entrepreneurialism. Maybe I'll sell my lovely yellow ice lollies to Waitrose. Goodness, they could do with a lift in their frozen foods section! In the meantime, I've taken the four dozen yellow lollies I've made down to the Brill Womens' Institute. By the looks of them, they need something nice to suck on.
In true Blue Peter style, here's another one I made earlier. I think, unfortunately, there's some sort of garden worm or bug caught in the ice, a careless but very minor oversight; other than that, it's a great-tasting ice lolly, made by the fair hands of Fanny Love and now for sale in the village shop for a mere snip at £22.99 (all proceeds to the registered charity, The Fanny Love Barbados Charity Fund):
My house, Raffles, is surrounded by 12-inch deep snow and the villagers of Brill are walking on the tops of hedges, like Elizabethan paupers heading to church for their dry bread roll and cheap mutton soup. As a punishment for my staff's insubordination, I've ordered the hand-servants to dig out the grand drive using only silver teaspoons so I can get my Rolls Royce out for a leisurely slut-crawl down to Soho, London, as I want to buy a set of sexy Chantilly under-garments. If it's too snowy for the drive, I might take the helicopter!
Having grown up in arid Texas (where the annual average temperature is enough to flash-cook a chicken wing in the shade in just 5 minutes), snow is a gross novelty to Fanny: when it does snow, I feel I need to go out into the grounds, strip naked and roll around in the cold, wet stuff, just to see if it's real. I'm amazed by the brightness of it.
However, on this occasion, I felt incredibly adventurous and decided to turn my hand to culinary creations involving another phenomena which I know jack-shit about, that is, yellow snow. I'd never heard of naturally-occurring yellow snow, but apparently yellow snow can be found in many public parks and commons, especially around lamp-posts.
It is said that Eskimos have over 50 words for snow; conversely, us Texans, given our native, desert-like surroundings, only have one phrase for anything closely resembling snow: "ice cubes".
I don't know how yellow snow occurs or why, but it's out there if you look!
Now, Fanny has an exceptionally creative hand in the kitchen and when Mother Nature has turned the Great Outdoors into a vast refrigerator, there's no time better to go out and collect up indiscriminate amounts of snow, armed with an ice-cream scoop and a scrubbed-out old margarine container, and lovingly fashion the icey mush into extraordinarily-beautiful yellow ice lollies. As it's yellow snow I'm lucky enough to scoop up, I really don't need to bother with food colourants like beta-carotene:
As you will see, my Press Office came up with the idea of printing on the ice lolly stick the words "Aunt Fanny's Yellow Surprise". I do think that's a fitting description for what surely is a wonderful icey surprise. Snow never lasts in England but it got me thinking about business entrepreneurialism. Maybe I'll sell my lovely yellow ice lollies to Waitrose. Goodness, they could do with a lift in their frozen foods section! In the meantime, I've taken the four dozen yellow lollies I've made down to the Brill Womens' Institute. By the looks of them, they need something nice to suck on.
In true Blue Peter style, here's another one I made earlier. I think, unfortunately, there's some sort of garden worm or bug caught in the ice, a careless but very minor oversight; other than that, it's a great-tasting ice lolly, made by the fair hands of Fanny Love and now for sale in the village shop for a mere snip at £22.99 (all proceeds to the registered charity, The Fanny Love Barbados Charity Fund):
I can't explain it but Tommy Steele's Little White Bull sprang to mind whilst reading this post. Could it be the start of dementia? The weather has been apalling, I've already been whoops a gaysy on the high street, I was helped up by a Peggy Mount lookalike walking her dog, when I was laid out flat on the pavement I noticed the dog had his lipstick out, I think he was pleased to see me.
ReplyDeleteHi Mitzi, sorry to hear about your fall in the street during this snowy weather and being helped up by a Peggy Mount lookalike.
DeleteI'm most disturbed that this woman's dog 'had his lipstick out' at you. Don't you need a license for that sort of thing in England and Wales?
Fanny xx
We eat yellow snow all the time here in Stockholm... it's a university hazing tradition... but, of course, the worst is brown snow.
ReplyDeletePussy Godiva x