A trip to the wonderful Sipsmith distillery in West London has left me wanting to make cocktails every chance I can get. Making a really good cocktail is so much like crafting a perfect cake, so I am naturally drawn to the task. The subtle but true and beautiful flavours of the Sipsmith London Dry Gin is a wonderful backdrop for some very exciting cocktails. Jared Brown, the master distiller, gave us this recipe which we went straight home and tried. It is my new holiday drink (sharing a place next to last year’s egg nog). It is a purply pink and lovely and frothy.

Sloe Gin Fizz (makes 2)

100ml Sipsmith Sloe Gin

25ml fresh squeezed lemon juice

1 egg white

ice cubes

Champagne to finish

Add the sloe gin, lemon juice and egg white to a cocktail shaker and shake well to get a nice froth. Add the ice cubes and give it a few more shakes. Divide into two white wine glasses and top with Champagne.

Filed under: Recipes, Travel by Violet | December 16th, 2011
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The Hours

I was given dozens of roses by a photographer friend recently after he had completed a Valentine’s Day shoot.

The buckets of them filled the back of my old Mercedes estate and when a friend walked me to my car, she proclaimed, Mrs. Dalloway! I laughed and nodded. It reminded me how much I love that book. Worth a re-read.

What are you reading at the moment?

Also, have you seen that we extended our hours of operation?

Filed under: Broadway Market, music, Travel, Wilton Way by Violet | February 15th, 2011
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More Morocco Memories

Here is my friend Stevie’s column in The Telegraph about our trip to Morocco. xx

Moroccan recipes: Sweet meats of Marrakesh

Our new cookery writer Stevie Parle goes to pot for a taste of the Maghreb

Stevie Parle, above prepares ingredients for a ‘kind of? Moroccan salad Photo: ANDREW CROWLEY

A few weeks ago I went to Morocco with my family. We stayed in a beautiful house in a quiet neighbourhood in Marrakesh, north of the Medina and close to the extraordinary Jardin Majorelle. The days were warm, the nights were cool, and the food was delicious. I spent much of my time poking around the local food markets and peering into the shops and stalls near our house, then rushing back to try things out.

It’s great to have the use of a kitchen on holiday; I would have hated to miss the chance to buy delicious bunches of wild asparagus or big bulbs of fennel because I had nowhere to cook them

Each neighbourhood of Marrakesh has a hammam or bath house, and the one closest to our house was particularly charming. What I loved was not the massage or mud scrub; not the steam or the beautifully tiled interior; but the huge wood-burning oven used to heat the water for the baths.

This oven also doubled as a community bakery. All morning a steady stream of people of all ages, from young children to grandmothers, brought wooden trays with flat loaves of bread covered with personalised tea towels. The loaves were baked by the hammam oven operator, left on racks with the tea towels on top and retrieved later by their owners.

During the evening, people brought tall ceramic urns called tangias to the hammam. These are filled with beef or lamb, a little water, cumin, olive oil and salt, then buried in the cooling ash of the oven; this gentle cooking creates a beautiful dish, delicately flavoured and enjoyed with plain steamed couscous. I bought a tangia to experiment with in the ash of my tandoor oven at The Dock Kitchen.

We shared our house with my friend Claire Ptak and her husband. Claire is an excellent pastry chef, and the owner of Violet (www.violetcakes.com) in Hackney, one of the loveliest bakeries around. So we had an eye for the pies with which Moroccan cuisine abounds.

French colonialism has left Morocco with a surprising number of bakeries, but one I was most fascinated by made warka pastry. It is an amazing feat of patience, not so much a pastry as a wet-yeasted dough, dubbed and spread onto a hotplate very thinly, and cooked briefly. It is then whipped off, creating a thinner-than-paper pastry, a little like filo, that forms the basis for the classic pastilla: pigeon and almond pie. In this bakery they used warka to make delicious baklava-like pastries, stuffed with mixtures of nuts, honey and orange flower water – they are really sweet but tasty with a bittersweet Moroccan tea.

In fact, Moroccan cooking is often on the sweet side. Meat is frequently cooked with dried fruit or preserved lemons, and the meze, such as Moroccan salads, are often seasoned with sugar and orange flower water. Pigeon pastilla is dusted with cinnamon and icing sugar. Main courses are generally slow-cooked meat and vegetables, usually in the famous conical tagine. It took time to get used to, but I soon started to love this delicate, fragrant, savoury-sweet cuisine.

Filed under: Recipes, Travel by Violet | January 18th, 2011
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HOLIDAY HOURS AND A POEM

VIOLET WILL BE CLOSED FROM 24 DECEMBER – 12 JANUARY

Thanks so much to my lovely customers for a fab 7 months

a poem by charles bukowski

there’s a bluebird in my heart that

wants to get out

but I’m too tough for him,

I say, stay in there, I’m not going

to let anybody see

you.

there’s a bluebird in my heart that

wants to get out

but I pour whiskey on him and inhale

cigarette smoke

and the whores and the bartenders

and the grocery clerks

never know that

he’s

in there.

there’s a bluebird in my heart that

wants to get out

but I’m too tough for him,

I say,

stay down, do you want to mess

me up?

you want to screw up the

works?

you want to blow my book sales in

Europe?

there’s a bluebird in my heart that

wants to get out

but I’m too clever, I only let him out

at night sometimes

when everybody’s asleep.

I say, I know that you’re there,

so don’t be

sad.

then I put him back,

but he’s singing a little

in there, I haven’t quite let him

die

and we sleep together like

that

with our

secret pact

and it’s nice enough to

make a man

weep, but I don’t

weep, do

you?

Filed under: Travel by Violet | December 22nd, 2010
1 Comment »

Violet cupcakes in Berlin

Coconut and blood orange mini cupcakes

Last week at the 60th Berlinale Film Festival, the lovely Alice Waters asked a few of us Chez Panisse alums to join her in making a meal overlooking the Brandenburg Gate. The occasion was to honour her friend, the incredible artist Christina Kim who is the creator of the beautiful and socially responsible clothing company DOSA. Based in L.A., Christina makes the softest scarves in the world and the lady knows how to wear neon pink like nobody (see below)! This year the Berlinale commissioned her to make a curtain to cover the Brandenburg Gate that was then pulled back for the opening of the festival to reveal a newly remastered print of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

The Mayor of Berlin came along with the Berlinale’s entire international jury and Tilda Swinton too. She looks so stunning in real life, you just feel like jumping in a trash can. But she is completely cool and bohemian and she brought her adorable kids who gobbled down the mini cupcakes!

Watching the curtain go up

The curtain

Metropolis at the Brandenburg Gate

view from the dining room

It was freezing, but we wore our vintage furs and new fleeces and puffer jackets to source organic food from the Berlin area for the dinner. Here are some pics for you of the process.