Jägermeister at London Cocktail Week

I realise just how lucky I am to live in London when I'm choosing a place to go and drink with my girlfriends. It takes just a short tube ride for us to gather around a table and enjoy cocktails garlanded as the world's best at the likes of Dandelyan (please don't close down, thanks) or Bar Termini. In my opinion, there's nothing better than a well crafted cocktail to sip and savour while catching up with friends. It represents a moment of calm and indulgence in our otherwise frantic corporate weeks, a much-needed foil to harried cups of tea and time recording. We may have moved on a little from the Cosmopolitan, but the old Sex and the City formula is a classic for a reason. That said, a cocktail is only as good as the sum of its parts. So when Jägermeister kindly invited me to London Cocktail Week, I couldn't help but wonder - would Jäger work in a cocktail?

Jägermeister have popped up this year for London Cocktail Week at the Big Chill, a stone's throw from the main festivities at the Old Truman Brewery. Their pop-up is called "Der Wald", meaning 'the wood' in German, and the vibe is best described as "Blade Runner meets après-ski" - creeping ivy intertwines with fairy lights on the terrace outside, while inside is moody and loud, the instantly recognisable Jäger stag's head looming in neon out of the darkness, a modern twist on the typical taxidermied stag's head you might see mounted on the wall in Austro-German ski chalets.

Now, I must admit that Jägermeister is a drink indelibly inked on to the fabric of my university days, a relic of my teenage past in the form of - what else? - the Jägerbomb, a shot dropped into a glass of Red Bull and downed, not often tasted or savoured in any way. I was interested to expand my horizons and taste the digestif as the makers intended: ice cold at -18ºC, and this time in cocktail form. (Although this is no radical rebranding - icy shots are still served at happy hour from 7-8 PM!)

I chose one of the brand's signature cocktails - a Jägermeister Mule, topped with Fever Tree ginger beer, orange and lemongrass bitters and a slice of cucumber - and complete with its own little shot of Jäger, to be uncapped and poured into the drink. I suppose some things never change, though there's something a little more sophisticated about a miniature hipflask of Jäger (rather than its shot alternative!)

 I thought that the ginger beer in my drink really complemented the Jägermeister. It's an unexpected combination, but one that works well - its sweet, gently fiery qualities balance out the complex spices and herbal flavours of the digestif. 

Lukas, my partner in crime and hand model for the evening, chose a contrasting drink - a frothy Jägermeister Sour with egg white and lemon, in which the Jägermeister made a convincing alternative to the whisky element of the drink. While I can't say that I will abandon my favourite gins and rums in cocktails any time soon, it was a novelty to sip both Jäger-based cocktails rather than toss the drink back. These were definitely the most refined iterations of Jägermeister I've ever tasted - refreshingly, both cocktails tasted like drinks to be appreciated and not merely a conduit to get drunk.

 Our capable bartender was also highly entertaining, gamely practising his Tom Cruise shtick for the camera. 

We also took the opportunity to wander around the London Cocktail Week event over the road at the Old Truman Brewery, stuffed to the gills with more drinks brands we all know and love. It really reminded me of Taste of London - only here it was all alcohol and mixers. Which was not a bad thing by any means.

I particularly loved trying Real Kombucha - a darjeeling-based kombucha that tasted amazingly similar to prosecco, only non-alcoholic. I love the design and it was exactly what my cold-wracked body wanted.

Danke schön Jägermeister for expanding my horizons where it comes to the use of the digestif and for allowing me to attend London Cocktail Week. Consider my burning thirst for cocktails re-ignited just in time for the festive season - and on that note, I'm moseying over to Whatsapp to organise a girls' catch-up...

 I was invited to review the Der Wald pop-up as a guest on this occasion, but my opinions remain firmly my own.

Der Wald pop-up at The Big Chill (3-7 October 2018)

Dray Walk

London E1 6QL

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Birthday Celebrations at Beagle

So last week I turned 24! Insert panicked rant here about how time's flying scarily fast, and how I'm in my mid-twenties already (seriously though, how?!)

My birthday fell on a weekend this year, and instead of seeing friends on the actual day I opted for Friday night drinks with my nearest and dearest at Cocktail Trading Co's latest outpost in Farringdon. CTC has long been a favourite of mine for its inventive, delectable cocktails, and I'm glad I chose it for my birthday. It was a perfect space - intimate, but with a specially booked seating area allowing me to buzz around the table, catching up with friends from all the different sections of my life, and quaffing alcohol from snowglobes as well as concoctions garnished with Sesame Street characters. And the best part? Watching my 'normal' friends' jaws drop open in astonishment at the artillery of flashes and cameras that emerged when the drinks were brought to the bloggers' end of the table. Oh man. 

As we all know, drinking must be followed by dancing. We headed up the road to Piano Works in Clerkenwell which, unbeknownst to me, wasn't a cool little bar with acoustic music but an underground club with a live band shelling out pure cheese: Taylor Swift, Oasis, the Christmas classics which have soundtracked every birthday night out I've ever had, and, at midnight, R Kelly's Bump 'N' Grind, requested on a napkin by a friend who knows me far too well. Thanks to everyone who came to the various stages of the evening - love you beautiful ladies (and gents) long time. 

After a hellishly expensive Uber ride home (though not as expensive as that one time I inadvertently took a €300 ride from Pisa to Florence - true story) I woke up on Saturday morning, miraculously hangover-free. At the base of my bed was a veritable Kilimanjaro of presents from my wonderful and thoughtful friends - seriously, Christmas came early for me this year! I spent my day luxuriating in front of Netflix, nibbling on chocolates (about 50% of my presents this year were food-based, of course), and in the evening we headed to East London to celebrate my 24th at Beagle, under the railway arches at Hoxton.

For me, the best birthday venue is always somewhere I've only vaguely heard of (like Ember Yard in 2014), leaving me with an open mind and non-existent expectations. Beagle fit the bill perfectly, and their excellent modern British dishes had me grinning like an idiot. Tout d'abord...oysters! Luscious and juicy (and legitimised by the month ending in R); with these and a glass of fizz in hand, I slipped effortlessly into celebratory mode.

To start: grilled cuttlefish with freekeh (aka my favourite word) and coriander. With full-bodied flavours and a range of interesting textures, this was an instant winner.

Two of us ordered the aubergine, tomatoes and labneh atop griddled bread. The hunks of aubergine were delightfully smoky and almost meat-like. Full marks.

For my sister: a sweet, fresh Dorset crab and chilli salad. 

Mains: roast cod with leeks and mussels (not pictured as it got eaten far too quickly for me to take a decent shot!), roast pork with crackling that brought me right back to childhood...oh, and the T-Bone to end all T-Bones.

A thing of beauty is a joy forever.

Especially when it's accompanied by an exquisitely creamy celeriac and anchovy gratin. 

B and I shared this outstanding aged Longhorn forerib, and even our combined herculean effort barely scratched the surface. We decided to tapau (takeaway) with not even the slightest hint of shame. Meat of this caliber is too good to leave behind! The bonus roast bone marrow was great too, especially when sprinkled liberally with salt crystals and accompanied by a hefty forkful of watercress and duck fat chips.

Second stomach syndrome: Even if you're full to bursting after your mains, there's always space for a little something sweet. Particularly when it's a top-notch Valrhona chocolate mousse with malt ice cream and praline. 

I ordered the innocuous-sounding pistachio ice cream with cardamom biscuit, and the flavours of the ice cream were just that: innocuous, dare I say it, a little bland, the milky sweetness reminiscent of Indian kulfi. (Life is hard when you've had the very best pistachio gelato available in Sicily!) But my oh my, that cardamom biscuit. It seized the mild kulfi flavours and took them on a magic carpet ride. I was so bowled over that I only remembered to take a picture when I was halfway through. 

Thank you to my friends and family for ensuring that I had such a special birthday weekend! I felt incredibly lucky and very loved, and hope that I can reciprocate the favour to you all throughout 2016. Twenty-four years seem a lot (my scrumptious banana and salted buttercream birthday cake was groaning with candles!) and honestly, I feel a bit shocked when I'm telling people how old I am now - it seems like I was 17 just a moment ago. But as one of my good friends told me, it might actually be a number that suits me. Perhaps I'm finally growing up. 24 - I'm ready for you. 

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A Life Update (& The Art Car Boot Fair)

Hello all! It's been a turbulent few weeks which culminated in good things: a much-needed spell in volcanic, tempestuous Sicily as well as my first ever 'real' job offer! At the end of July I was delighted to win a training contract at a City law firm. The actual work starts in 2017 and for the next two years I'll be going to law school, sponsored by the firm. It's weirdly amazing to have my next four years planned out, and I feel like I'm embarking on a new chapter of my life. My course starts in September, with the first year dedicated to the GDL (Graduate Diploma of Law), essentially a three-year law degree condensed into eight months. It's terrifying but exciting, and just goes to show that a lot can change in a year! I left university in June 2014 uncertain of the path I wanted to take and after a lot of mental wandering and feeling lost, I'm incredibly lucky to have found something that makes me feel both challenged and fulfilled. 

So anyway, I hope you'll forgive the unintentional radio silence! I have lots to share with you from the past couple of months. I'll begin with a short run-down on my visit to the annual Art Car Boot Fair off Brick Lane back in June. The Art Car Boot Fair is a great place to pick up pieces of modern art that cater to every budget - small prints under £30, more expensive prints and woodcuts by big names such as Tracey Emin and Sir Peter Blake, and actual car boots - well, bonnets - painted by artists like Jake and Dinos Chapman and Bob & Roberta Smith and sold via auction. The proceeds from the sale of the bonnets go to charities, this year Just For Kids Law and Hepatitis C Trust.

Due to the often eccentric nature of the artists and attendees, people-watching is almost more fun than hunting through the art. Spotted: a brooding-looking Gavin Turk hanging out behind his stall, a slightly bored and precocious-looking French child hailed as the next artistic genius sitting next to her mini canvases, a man in the most incredibly flamboyant jacket with an equally well-heeled dog in tow (the theme for this year's fair was Dog, after all...)

Other memories from the day? Hopelessly lusting after the True Rocks/Gavin Turk digestive biscuit necklaces, having a little boogie to the rambunctious live music, finger-licking street food picked up from the nearby Ely's Yard next to the Old Truman Brewery, the prettiest symmetrical sketches of honeybees on card and hand-carved honeycomb blocks which I bitterly regret not buying, a fire-in-the-belly taste of the honey whisky and chat with the beekeeper at the Idler Academy stall and browsing through the dusty art historical tomes in the mobile bookshop parked in the lot. 

As an art historian I'm more familiar with wandering around echoing galleries displaying Old Masters or 19th century society portraits, but going to events like this really gives me the bug for accessible, bargain-price modern art. If any of you have been to similar events where it's possible to pick up inexpensive, gorgeous pieces, I would love to know!

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Ozone Coffee and V&A Museum of Childhood

Today I want to share a lovely day Alex and I spent meandering around east London a while back. The day started as every day should: with a hearty brunch at Ozone Coffee Roasters, a very cool little joint just off Old Street that I would definitely choose as my regular if I lived on Silicon Roundabout.

We went for the usual suspects - a flat white for him, a wonderfully smooth chai latte for me. 

As usual, I ordered with eyes bigger than my stomach and was presented with cassoulet baked eggs with beans, confit duck, Toulouse sausage, pork belly and gremolata - and toasted sourdough. It was delicious, but as you can imagine, incredibly heavy; I barely scratched the surface.

Alex went for pork belly eggs benedict on winter bubble 'n' squeak cakes with hollandaise, with a side of avocado. It was a mistake for him to let me have a forkful: serious food envy waves emanated across the table from that moment on.

All fuelled up and ready for a bit of culture, we walked across town to Bethnal Green to rediscover the toys that shaped our lives at....

Though the V&A Museum of Childhood may be linked in name with the Victoria & Albert Museum, it's an entirely different beast. The V&A is all marble floors and chandeliers, gilded objets d'art, housed in a jawdropping mid-19th century building in swanky South Kensington that boasts its own courtyard and modern fountain. The Museum of Childhood, meanwhile, is dedicated to toys - objects that have been pawed and loved by countless generations of children, crowded into cabinets in a slightly hodge-podge manner and identifiable by paper labels printed out on Word. It's pretty obvious that it doesn't have the funding of its sister (parent?) museum. Yet the place has a certain charm, and the building, an airy 19th-century hangar, is really lovely.

The museum's mission statement is "To enable everyone, especially the young, to explore and enjoy the designed world, in particular objects made for and made by children". Although the last time I visited was probably over a decade and a half ago, I still have good memories of its exhibits - so on a personal level, I think the museum succeeds in this respect!

Alex had to endure my yelps of excitement as I ran around the museum, occasionally spotting toys I'd played with as a child. I was always very jealous of friends who had robot dogs or cats - does anyone else remember the Poo-chi?

The Museum has an amazing collection of dolls' houses. The second one down was designed in the Arts & Crafts style in the late 19th century and later bought and carefully decorated by Queen Mary. The houses all brought back memories of visiting a quaint little shop dedicated to dolls' house furniture and bits and bobs in Camden to furnish the Georgian dolls' house Bri got for Christmas one year.

There's a few slightly creepy objects in the Museum - as well as a fascinating insight into Victorian psyche, in which children were treated like little adults. And interestingly, to this day, we continue to sometimes give small children toys that prepare them for adult life - like plastic stoves, little replica hoovers, tea sets, dolls' houses to furnish, toy microscopes and so on.

I remembered this little guy from the early days of my childhood, trailing along behind my little sister. 

Playtime at an end, it was time to pay attention to our bellies (yes, again). And what better childhood treat to indulge in than doughnuts? Alex and I stopped off at Dum Dum outside Shoreditch High Street to grab a couple of these bad boys for the train ride home. Baked rather than fried, they didn't feel too naughty - just the ticket.

I hope you enjoyed this post - it's always nice to get back in touch with one's inner child and remember how important it is to relax and allow yourself to have a little fun in your life. I know I'm pretty tempted to pick up my old GameBoy Colour now and reacquaint myself with my Pokémon dream team, I don't know about you...

And lastly, I just wanted to say thank you all for bearing with me over the past few weeks - it's been a heartbreaking time and those of you who follow me on Instagram may know that this is down to the fact that I lost my granny at the end of May. I'm sure I'll be back to blogging on a more regular basis soon but hopefully you'll understand if it continues to be a bit quiet around here.

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