Aqualuna - High Tea on the High Sea

Wow - I cannot believe we have been at sea for 14 days. I’m honestly not sure what I’ve done with my time other than read, eat and sleep. Obviously I had to get in training for limin’ around the Caribbean, but this is ridiculous. So today I decided that I needed to be a lot more productive. And what better way to do this than to have a bake-athon in order to celebrate, not only 14 days at sea, but also dropping below 400 miles to run to Grenada.

First of all we had some bananas that needed using up. I bought very green ones in Mindelo in the hope they would last for much of the journey. In the early stages, this felt like a serious error of judgement as they stubbornly refused to ripen, to the extent that I thought I must have bought plantains by accident. And then of course they did ripen - all at once - and we couldn’t eat them fast enough.

So banana bread it was - and with plenty of time on my hands, I decided to adapt a basic recipe by adding orange zest, real vanilla (from an actual pod!), cinnamon and walnuts. Unfortunately nothing could improve the basic stodgy texture of it and we realised that essentially ‘Tiggers do not like banana bread’.

On the other hand, my fruit scones were considerably more successful - and in fact much better than anything we have achieved at home surrounded by every baking gadget know to man. We enjoyed them warm from the oven with home-made blackberry and rhubarb jam and whipped cream. Yes - even though we had not actually made this jam ourselves, we managed to keep double cream in the fridge all the way from Las Palmas and my mother will be brimming with pride somewhere in the universe.