I Love Cake

Coffee and walnut cake. Ingredients: butter, caster sugar, SR wheat flour, free range eggs, Fair Trade coffee, vanilla extract, walnuts, icing sugar.

Compared to a Shop Bought Cake. Ingredients: palm oil, sugar, glucose, fructose, invert sugar syrup, dried egg powder, skimmed milk powder, wheat flour, corn flour, modified maize starch, soya flour, disodium diphosphate, sodium hydrogen carbonate, glycerol, emulsifiers, flavourings, potassium sorbate, xantan gum, tragacanth and salt. 

What's to compare?

Glass Finds

Today in Ilkley I popped into Cakewalk for a chat with Emma and a browse in her lovely shop. Cakewalk is a mixture of hand made loveliness and vintage finds and I was delighted to find three vintage Murano glass animals on a shelf. 

I love original Murano glass animals as they remind me of my childhood when we had "nick-nacks" on small wooden shelves. My middle sister collected Whimsy animals and my eldest sister had a Murano deer, complete with little gold chain.  This little fish has Millefiore at its centre and also a tiny shard of Gold Stone, which is not a gem stone as those people who sell rocks would have you believe, but is glass. 

Aren't these two tiny dogs just delightful? They are less than 2" tall but the detail is exquisite. I have a large shoe box full of this kind of glass, all carefully wrapped in tissue paper. They aren't displayed because I don't want them to break and I don't want to dust them either! 

Buying vintage Murano glass is very much a case of "Buyer Beware". Much of the glass you see on eBay is not real Murano, particularly if it comes from Hong Kong or Russia. Vintage Murano animals have a quality to the glass that shows they have been made with a torch and mandrel, not poured into a mould.