Phil's Workbench

According to recent research, we need 7 portions of fruit a day, not the 5 previously recommended.

In terms of hard-hitting news, this can safely be filed under "No S**t Sherlock" as there can't be many people who hadn't worked out that more fruit and veg was better for you than less. It was probably a slot news day or something.

Anyway, you will be pleased to see that someone at the Leamington & Warwick MRS has taken this to heart because look what we found on the tea bar this week - lashings of fruit cake!

The members, also having read the research and taken it to heart, tucked in with enthusiasm and soon there were healthy modellers all around, stuffed to the gills with cakey currents and blueberries from the mini muffins.

Who says railway modelling isn't healthy hobby?

Elsewhere, I had borrowed Kimble, the club O gauge layout, as a background for some photos of a model I've built.

While waving the camera around,  grabbed this rather nice shot of the engine shed from the station overbridge.

Regular readers will remember that a couple of weeks ago I announced that I would be selling my old cutting board. It was slightly famous thanks to some magazine appearances, and completely knackered which is why I was getting rid of it. The plan was that some of the money would be used for a muffin, as seen above, with the rest going to the RNLI collecting box at my local model shop.

The board duly appeared on eBay and at the end of the week was won by Matt Dawson. He not only paid up for it, he generously donated a few more quid for the lifeboats. Thanks Matt, this review is dedicated to you.

Chocolate Muffin
Supplier: Pumpkin Cafe, Platform 1, Leamington Spa Station
Cost: £1.79

How many ways can a baker rework the traditional muffin recipe ?

Loads. He can produce appley ones or lemon versions or something with blueberries in, but at the end of the day (about 6:30am for bakers) he knows that only people who knit their own tofu buy anything other than chocolate. Let's not kid ourselves, muffins can only help you lose weight as part of a calorie controlled diet. One that involves eating a muffin and not much else for the rest of the day. They aren't a health food no matter how many blue squishy lumps are in there. We want chocolate with chocolate lumps in it.

Which is why I bowed to the inevitable and chose the dark brown version from those on offer. Once I'd parted with the cash, I was the proud owner of just of 120g of cake.

Just like any layer cake, there is a strong temptation to split a muffin in half for consumption. I could ignore this but that would make this a rubbish review. Therefore the top section was pulled away from the base and separated cleanly. The spongy bit was nice and springy but perhaps not as moist as other makes. It peeled away from the case cleanly enough that no embarrassing nibbling at the paper would be needed to consume every last crumb.

The top was crunchy but not burnt in any way - you don't want a burnt crust after all.

Very pleasent and probably big enough to last from Leamington to Hatton. Might be a bit peckish by Acocks Green though...


Fighting my way inside, it's a tiny shop and there were customers, I extracted the boat shaped collecting tin from the counter. Sadly it's not one of those where you drop the money in and the lifeboat launches and rings a bell (remember those, fabulous things) but for my purposes this didn't matter.

The fiver was posted with a little difficulty into the "notes" hole followed by the coinage into the slot. Then the tin (can you call it a tin when it's made of plastic ?) was then returned to the counter even fuller of money than before.

So, a result for everyone. Matt has a new family heirloom whose value will increase sufficient that he needn't worry about saving for a pension any more*. I have eaten a muffin and the RNLI have a few more quid to spend hauling people out of the sea.



Note: This wasn't an entirely frivolous activity. I wanted to see if I could generate some traffic to this blog from the eBay posting. The answer to this was: not much. About a dozen visits. Still, it was worth a try.

*assuming he doesn't mind spending his old age in poverty anyway.

We have a handy celebrity for the Leamington exhibition - Pete Waterman. Since he is building a model of Leamington Spa station and a local lad to boot, he always brings some stuff down to the Saturday of the show and happily sits and chats to people. He enjoys himself and hopefully gets a little more information to help the model along and we get a name to act as a draw for the show.

As it happens, last Saturday was his 64th birthday so we thought it would be a good idea to get a cake. It's a nice thank you for coming to the show and doing a radio interview for us.

Now I might be reasonably good at making things but I'm out of practise with cake - baking it anyway, eating it is fine - so it looked like something horribly generic would be required. Then I remembered getting a cake printed for a promotion I ran years ago at work. A quick web search for "photo cake" revealed that Asda could do the honours.

All I needed was a picture. Now Chris Nevard took some photos at Mr W's railway a few months ago and a quick e-mail found me a with a choice of pictures. I liked the blue "King" a lot. It's a pretty colour and will probably anoy the GWR enthusiasts. Best of all, when I saw it in real life and queried the colour, it seemed to be a particular favourite of the birthday boy.

At the store I had to poke my head into the bakery section, not over a counter or anything handy, and ask. The lady behind was ever so helpful and showed me the two sizes and prices. I plumped for the bigger one, handed over a 6 X 4 printed photo, then a couple of minutes later changed my mind and ordered both sizes on the basis you can never have too much cake.

As it turned out, this was a good move. The photo I had added "Happy Birthday Pete" to didn't fit the big cake format properly so we used it only on the small cake and the word-free version on the larger one. Total cost for the two cakes was just over £23. The technique is simple, they print the photo on a sheet of icing and stick it to the cake in a pre-cut rectangular hole.

At the show the results went down well when presented at 3pm. This was by far the tastiest GWR loco I've ever eaten, what with being made of sponge and jam. We had plenty for the the hungry hoards behind the stand and it lasted well enough that it wasn't stale on Sunday, or at least the bit I had wasn't. Yum.