Review: Holbrook House Hotel, Wincanton, Somerset

After my alpaca walking experience, my 'hens' and I went on to the Holbrook House Hotel in Wincanton, Somerset. The rest of the hen weekend consisted of drinking wine, dinner with some games and more wine, then back in the hotel and more wine, and then a well deserved spa day and massage the next day.

I'd had no idea where we were going so was surprised when we crossed into Somerset, but it wasn't actually far from the alpaca place in Dorset. Holbrook House is a Georgian-style country house hotel set in 20 acres of woodlands and was very pretty, as you can see from the picture above.

The rooms were spacious - I shared a double with my sister - and apparently not a bad price either though as the bride I wasn't allowed to pay. The bathroom in our room was also really nice with White Company toiletries.

This was the view from my window:

 

The spa was excellent, with two treatment rooms - I had an aromatherapy massage - a pool, Jacuzzi and steam room. The only thing I thought was lacking was a seating area near the pool - it would have been nice to have a swim then lounge around with my friends, but this is also a health club where locals come to use the facilities, so it's more of a pool for swimming lengths than lounging around beside. Still, that would have been an added bonus!

 

As well as the main lobby, which houses a small bar, there is a large sitting room with a couple of sofas and books and board games, which is a nice touch. The only thing that really let this hotel down was the breakfast. For £15.50 (I'm not sure if ours was included in the room price or not) you get:

fruit juice

tea, coffee

cereal

fruit salad and stewed fruits

Greek yogurt

croissants - which ran out repeatedly and were really small and a bit disappointing

Plus any hot item from the menu, which included a full English breakfast, porridge, eggs benedict, egg Florentine, or boiled egg and toasted soldiers - or, for an additional £3.95 supplement, you can have smoked salmon and scrambled egg, smoked haddock and poached egg, or egg royal with smoked salmon.

 

It was disappointing that so many of the cooked options carried a surcharge, and while I know you can eat as much as you like from the continental buffet, if I had paid $£15.50 and just had fruit juice, coffee, a bowl of cereal and boiled egg and soldiers I wouldn't really feel like I'd gotten my money's worth.

 

Two of my friends ordered the Holbrook Grill, which is basically a full English, but they weren't that keen on it - one said her sausage was undercooked and the other just said she didn't think it was very good. I had the eggs benedict - two English muffins with poached eggs, bacon and hollandaise sauce. I think my expectations of this were a bit unrealistic after the most amazing poached eggs I had at the Dana Hotel in Chicago, while these poached eggs from Armadillo at Gatwick airport of all places were also very good. So it would have been hard for the Holbrook's poached eggs to match up anyway, but as the yolk was partially set, to me these were more like soft boiled eggs.

 

Unfortunately, they had completely burnt my English muffins to the extent that they were inedible (at least the one I tried was), so when the waitress came over I explained (or thought I had) and asked if they could do me another muffin; the waitress started to leave, saying "you'd like an extra muffin, sure" and luckily my friend realised she'd misunderstood - and as my friend is more assertive than me, she told the waitress my breakfast was burnt and they needed to replace it. So it meant that almost everyone else had finished eating by the time my breakfast came back! It was a shame as otherwise this hotel was really good and I had a lovely hen weekend here.

 

 

 

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Meal Planning Monday Week 23

On Friday and Saturday temperature is expected to be around 21 but showers are forecast. I have some barbecue food in the freezer that needs to be defrosted before it can be eaten which is why it's annoying that we haven't had a good enough weather forecast for a couple of weeks for me to know we are definitely going to eat out! So I will defrost something and then either switch around the menu or cook it in the oven if we have to!

My weight loss has been really helped by eating spiralized vegetable stir-fries I think. I don't normally like repetitive meals but with only a few weeks to go until I get married, if it's working I'm going to stick to it! I think there's something about the fact that it takes longer to eat that you feel more full.

Monday
Dinner - working late, will probably have to grab something from Tesco on the way home

Tuesday - my fiancé's mum's birthday - we are having a takeaway at her house

Wednesday - spiralized veg stir fry with some chicken or salmon

Thursday - spiralized veg stir fry with some chicken or salmon

Friday - We will either barbecue today or tomorrow. I didn't make this mackerel with ginger, chilli and lime. on the plan from last week as we didn't barbecue so I'd like to have this, plus some chorizo chicken kebabs and he will want burgers no doubt

Saturday
Lunch - bacon sandwich for him, quinoa risotto for me
Dinner - turkey breast steak for me and chicken breast for him following this piri piri recipe which I planned to make last week but didn't; I can do it with potato wedges.
I also bought all the ingredients for the 'choc berry mud' from I Quit Sugar and didn't make it last week so will aim to do it this weekend.

Sunday
Lunch - with my parents for my mum's birthday
Dinner - probably home late so something from the freezer, depending on what we had for lunch

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Alpaca Cookies and Alpaca Adventure, Dorset



 

I wouldn't say I'm alpaca-mad... I just have an alpaca cuddly toy, an alpaca hat, a scarf made from alpaca wool, alpaca writing paper, stickers and post-it notes, and a bag that says "alpaca bag" (geddit?). Oh and some alpaca cookie cutters.

 

So it perhaps wasn't surprising that when my friends and my sister came to organise my hen night that they decided alpacas should be involved! There's a place very close to my wedding venue called Alpaca Adventure, run by the very hard-working Wendy (and I think her husband) who has a full time day job as well as running a farm with over 30 alpaca plus sheep, hens and a pig. She takes the alpacas to competitions and has won several rosettes for effectively 'best in class' and sells the wool to a mill which uses it to make clothing.

 

She also does alpaca walking, which means you can basically go and walk an alpaca round a field on a lead. It sounds a bit random, and perhaps it is, but it's great fun!

 

First we fed some lambs, then we petted the pig, then got introduced to our alpacas - mine was a gorgeous guy called Teddy Edward. They each wore a bridal and we basically went for a walk for about 45 minutes around a field, leading our alpacas who were very sweet and docile, if occasionally trying to stop and munch some grass or sniff each other's bums.

 

 

Look at this dude!

This is what alpaca walking looks like

It's also pretty inexpensive and only cost £10 each - not bad given I imagine it costs a lot to keep the animals! The only thing I would say is that if you are booking this as a surprise for someone's birthday or hen night, make sure you tell Wendy that it's a secret - I'd actually met her at an event and she let the cat (alpaca?) out of the bag that I was coming here for my hen night even though I wasn't supposed to know!

After my hen night I wrote my friends some little thank you notes as it seemed a good excuse to use my alpaca writing paper! My fiancé got me this for Christmas - he knows me so well :-)

I also thought it was a good opportunity to use the alpaca cookie cutters he got me at the same time!

Here are my cutters:

I used a basic sugar cookies recipe and rolled out the dough and cut out the shapes

Ready to go in the oven

And here they are. These could easily be llamas and I think they could pass for giraffes too, but if you look at the necks, I think you can see the fatness that suggests the big fluffy wool of an alpaca.

I made up some royal icing as I wanted to recreate the thick wool of the alpacas, but I got the quantities slightly wrong and the icing wouldn't set enough and even though I piped it in dots, they all ran together. Still, you get the idea! I gave these to two of my bridesmaids when they came up the weekend after the hen night for their dress fittings as a nice reminder of the hen night!

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Low Carb Fish Pie with Cauliflower Mash

My low sugar diet also means low carb, as the starch and glucose in potatoes raises your blood sugar, so I've been looking for some good alternatives. I like cauliflower and wondered if I could make a fish pie and put mashed cauli on top, and found a few recipes online doing just that.

I followed this recipe for the cauliflower puree but I couldn't get mine smooth enough; I think if I had cooked the cauli for longer so it was softer that might have been better. I wouldn't have thought to add cheese and cream into it as well; it was quite nice, though to be honest I would have preferred mashed potato!

For the fish pie, I cooked a mixture of fish - I think I had white fish, salmon and smoked mackerel, and added some chopped leaks and made a white sauce.

I put it in a pie dish, spread the cauliflower mash over the top and popped it in the oven to brown.

Here you can see the fish and the topping. This felt like a very virtuous recipe and is good if you're cutting down on potatoes and miss having fish pie - but I have to say I would only eat it as "diet food", whereas a lot of the low cal/fat/sugar recipes I make are nice enough to eat whether you are on a diet or not.

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M&M chocolate birthday cake

 

When I made my fiancé this chocolate birthday cake from the Outsider Tart cookery book the quantities given were so large that it made three big layers. I didn't need the cake to be that big so I put one of the layers in the freezer, and used it a few weeks later when I wanted a cake to take into work.

The cake broke a little while it was defrosting but otherwise was absolutely fine - this is a really good cake that includes Coca-Cola in the mixture!

 

I made some chocolate buttercream which I spread on the top and around the side of the cake. It does look a bit messy at the moment, but that won't matter!

To decorate this cake I decided to use up some things I had in the cupboard. I wanted to use things up and I also didn't have much time - we'd gotten back from a weekend away in Wiltshire and I only had the evening to do it before work the next day, and as we'd been away all weekend I had a lot of other things I needed to do!
I had some white chocolate fingers left over from this anti-gravity Easter cake but not quite enough to go around the whole cake, and I couldn't find any more white ones in the supermarket. So I decided to alternate with some milk chocolate fingers which I thought actually made a nice pattern and looked really good.

I also had some M&Ms and larger peanut M&Ms I wanted to use up as they had been hanging around for a while. As they were different types I decided to use some chocolate fingers to mark out sections on top of the cake, but actually the colours all blend together and I probably didn't need to do this.

Finally I tied a ribbon around the cake, which helped to keep the chocolate fingers upright. I was really pleased with this given it was a last minute job using up cake and chocolate I already had in the house!

F is for fingers - chocolate fingers - so I'm sharing this cake with Alphabakes, the blog challenge I co-host with Ros of The More Than Occasional Baker.

As I used up things I already had in the house this was a very cost-efficient cake so I'm sharing it with Credit Crunch Munch, hosted by Michelle at Utterly Scrummy on behalf of Helen and Camilla.

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Quick Make: 60th Birthday Card

I suddenly realised it was a male relative's 60th birthday and I hadn't done any card making for a while, but I wanted to send him a handmade card. I turned to my box of pre-printed patterned card blanks and chose one I thought would work as a base, and added a happy birthday banner. I can't read what the sentiment in the silver square at the top is and I can't remember - something along the lines of 'enjoy your day' I think! I also had some number stickers and stars which I stuck in the various circles on the printed card. Not my best card but I still think a handmade card is more meaningful than just grabbing one off the shelf in a shop - though sometimes you can find the perfect card for someone that suits them to a T in the shops!

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Restaurant review: Debenhams Oxford Street

I took my mum shopping for her outfit to wear to my wedding and decided to make personal shopper appointments in Debenhams and John Lewis on Oxford Street. They bring you different clothes to try on and know what style would suit your body shape. It was a pretty exhausting day as my mum must have tried on at least 15 outfits, but eventually found one she really liked.

As I knew it would be a busy day we didn’t want to take too long over lunch and I had a look to see whether Debenhams had a café. They have four!

We stopped for coffee before we started shopping and went to the W1 Bistro on the lower level; it is a very smart café that looks more like a wine bar, with a mixture of types of seating and a small food menu with things like toasted sandwiches, but we only wanted a drink.

Later, we found ourselves on the 5^th floor near the “family restaurant serving British classics” so decided to have lunch here. Most of the dishes on offer are what I would call “main meals” – fish and chips, pizza etc. They had a range of sandwiches and also a small range of ‘snack sized’ hot food choices, so my mum and I both decided to have a jacket potato with prawns. The potato was nice and fluffy with a generous helping of prawns, though the side salad had no dressing which would have been nice. I always find when I have jacket potatoes in cafes or restaurants that they are much smaller than I would have at home – I always search out the largest potato I can find in the supermarket! So I was hungry again before the end of the day but I expect that was partly because dress shopping when you want something very specific is hard work!

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