Lavender time

On a house outing to Box Hill (as visited by Jane Austin's 'Emma') last year, with our fabulous friends from college, we stumbled across Mayfield Lavender. It was a gloriously sunny day, we'd had a cream tea picnic on Box Hill and visited the ruined Folly. With laughs and walking, it really couldn't have been topped.

Then on the way home we discovered a sensational field of bright blue. One of our cars had noticed it on the way and much to our joy it was open to visitors and had a shop!!!
If you're in reach of Surrey, Mayfield Lavender, is well worth a visit. They do have an online shop but being there in person is so much better because the smell is amazing.

The day was growing into a beautiful evening and we were standing in the middle of rows upon rows of lavender taking photo upon photo. Of course I bought a massive bunch of lavender, enough to divide amongst my friends, and to spread across the flat in various vases (dry) and to use for lavender sugar.

Another reason to love Vanessa Kimbell's Prepped! is the delicious lavender chapter. I can't wait to make my trip to Mayfield lavender and then get on with the recipes. Take a sneak of the types of glorious flavours in Vanessa's lavender chapter with the post on Mail Online 'Lavender and Lemon Cake'.

Twitter & the Prepped! book launch

For a while now I have wondered about twittering myself, and with gentle encouragement I have decided to take the plunge!

On the main I'm looking forward to keeping in contact with friends who already tweet, but there are also lots of lovely bloggers who tweet so I'm looking forward to that too.
My tweets will probably include lots of things I thought I might blog about but never actually get around to.
You can find me as @trulygoodwoman I'm going to see how this user name feels for a while, I'm not too sure about branding myself as truly good, but hopefully people will realise my intention when they link to my blog.

Talking of lovely bloggers, I had the joy of making it to the book launch of Vanessa Kimbell's Prepped! at Rococo Chocolates Motcomb Street in Belgravia. It was brilliant of course to meet at last Vanessa, but it was also lovely to meet other fellow recipe testers. Vanessa so kindly gave me a signed copy of Prepped! for testing several of her recipes. I know that this will be a book that I come back to time and time again.

Those that were able brought samples of the recipes they had tested and it was a time of foodie discussions, congratulating Vanessa, and browsing and buying some of the delicacies of Rococo Chocolates - I personally bought the Otto Rose, and Otto Lavender.

After the official launch bit we then went onto a nearby pub for wine and continued chatting.
I think what made the event even lovelier was seeing the friendships that had grown from blogging and through testing Vanessa's recipes. This wasn't just the end of the road, it was the beginning of friendships.