Recipes with Yellow Snow

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):

Avoiding Ear Icicles on the Costa Geriatrica

Being of good stock with a strong constitution, Fanny never gets ill.  But this week I suffered the most atrociously English of all afflictions: an ear icicle.  I was only outdoors for half an hour, when a 6-inch icicle formed on my left lobule.  A cold blast from Siberia was headed this way, winds that would flail the shell off a turtle.  Having grown up in arid Texas, I'm not used to these cold spells.

I spent the rest of the afternoon wrapped up in bed, de-frosting my ear lobes on a hot water bottle, with the help of a muscled, tattoed Latino porn actor called Ricardo.  Several hours of gentle ear massage later, I felt marginally recovered.

Given the Arctic front, I'm planning a short trip away.  This time, a luxury trip, not to a Third World Country like Wales or Essex, but to a very pretty and exclusive part of England: Dorset.

More precisely, Bournemouth.   Do you know Bournemouth?

Delightful Dorset, better known as the Costa Geriatrica.
It reminds me of classical Enid Blyton summer days
enjoying the delights of lashings of ginger beer and rampant cottaging.

Here are some facts: Bournemouth is on the south coast of England; it has a population of 168,000, a Mediterranean climate and 7 miles of sun-kissed beaches; and it is the capital city of a wonderful stretch of coastline called the Costa Geriatrica, known for its ancient heritage and fossils. Whilst the Home Counties shiver in sub-zero temperatures, Dorset gets the full effect of the Gulf Stream, meaning it's positively sub-tropical. 
 
What's so lovely about posh, pretty Dorset is that it doesn't have any of the depraved slums or trailer-trash tackiness of other southeastern English seaside resorts like Brighton or Wolverhampton with their kiss-me-quick-fuck-me-slow hats, sleazy bingo halls, ugly shingle beaches and rows of squalid housing converted into Bail Hostels.  

Troublemaking Scum: these Brighton 'chavs' are responsible for
a 78% increase in anti-social behaviour and drugs-related crime in the town

I've never understood the fascination with Brighton (or London-by-the-Sea as many fashionistas call it); to me, it's so passé and an unforgivably ugly town, full of faded drag queens and 'fame whore-wannabes' (Lady Vagina has a council house on the Whitehawk Estate).


Brighton was made so beastly because it was bombed heavily by a group of lesbians called the Lufftwaffle in the 1800s, and was then re-built in a hurry using brutalist architecture in the hope that life would go on as if nothing had happened.

Many parts of Brighton have all the charm of the inside of a cement-mixer; the residents have all the manners of a psychotic pit-bull terrier.  An unhealthy percentage of the population of the town are named Chantelle, Bianca, Britney or Chardonnay.  The regional cuisine consists of Fray Bentos pies. A good night out consists of a brawl on the seafront and then sleeping it off in a police cell in a pool of your own vomit.

Plenty of middle-class English people flock to seaside resorts such as Brighton or Wolverhampton, in the hope of a good time, clearly delusional of the merits of such a trip in the first place.

The Lufftwaffle (pictured above) were a bunch of German militant
Lesbians, part of the Nazis, who bombed many formerly beautiful English towns;  they have
much to answer today, such as why Brighton is still such a shit-hole
after 60 years of redevelopment.

Luckily, Bournemouth wasn't bombed, and is naturally lovely in a myriad of ways - there are no lesbians (so you don't need to bring your pepper spray), everyone drives a Rolls Royce, all the men have six-packs, there are no tattooed women, and the sun shines eternally.  It's also a hotbed for gay and transgendered tourism, and naturally I will be exploring all facets of this, like a fox down a badger-hole.

 
I'll be staying in an exclusive, luxury bolthole called Ghetto, in their Presidential Suite, with my own piano, water-bed, and butler on-call; the decor of the place is very glam-trash.  Just my cup of tea!  All the waiters are naked but for a bow tie and a thong.

Castle Combe - one of my favourite villages

This is a photo I took about a month ago, during the unexpected snowfall.  It is the village of Castle Combe, in North Wiltshire.  Dr Doolittle, the film, was shot here and it is often cited as the most beautiful village in England. 

Set in a deep wooded valley, with the Bybrook flowing through, the village consists of 15th-century Cotswold stone cottages, a turreted church, a stone-canopied market cross and a medieval manor house.  Although it is a good 1 hour drive from my home in East Wiltshire, I visit the village often, but for more debaucherous reasons:

He's one of my favourite toy-boys.   I always have a good time with him, coming back utterly exhausted.  He has just had another tattoo done, immortalising his favourite girlfriend - moi!