Oh no, oh no, oh no. I would like to start this post with an apology/panic. I just had a chat with one of my heavily pregnant chums, who is due to have a baby a mere nine days before my impending nuptials. She informed me that she only has 11 and a half weeks left, and I’m guessing doctors are better at maths than I am. So I checked, and it turns out I have 13 weeks to go until our wedding, rather than the 15 I’d been expecting.
I have not done enough on my to-do list (14 days less to sort out a cake topper, argh!).
But, onto this week’s post. Last week, The Boy and I went to have our tasting at our wedding venue, Heatherden Hall (some parts of wedding planning are more fun than others). As we’re having afternoon tea, some people thought it was a bit odd that we were planning on having a tasting, but we did so for three reasons:
- We wanted to make sure we were giving people enough to eat;
- We wanted to make sure our guests would like what we’d chosen, and
- Most importantly – I really like afternoon tea.
And it was good. Really, really nice (and not just because the chef had prepared enough afternoon tea for us to have taken our extended families along with us). Unfortunately, despite taking lots of photos, I’m under strict instructions from The Boy not to ruin the surprise, so you’ll have to wait until after the wedding.
Instead, I’ll share photos of another lovely sandwich-and-cake-situation we found ourselves in this week. As I’ve mentioned before, our wedding photographers are the fabulous Lina & Tom, and as well as creating some fabulous snaps on the day, we were also lucky enough to bag an engagement shoot with them too.
The date was set for Friday, and we approached it with much excitement (well, I did. The Boy kept asking me what I wanted him to wear, despite the fact that for the past nearly-six-years, I have let him wear whatever he likes). The day dawned bright and cold, and then quickly turned to torrential rain. Turns out Lina and I have some sort of hive mind going on, as we messaged each other at the same time regarding the storm of biblical proportions that was raging outside our respective homes.
Luckily, the weather forecasts all said Houghton House, where we were having the shoot, was sunny, so we headed over there anyway, and were met with blue skies. Which was nice.
To fortify ourselves before the shoot, we popped into Cakestand and Crumb in nearby Ampthill, a lovely little vintage tea room that I would definitely recommend. Be warned though, it’s down a little side street, and you need to know what the road is called, or you’ll end up in the housing compound next door (yes, of course that’s where we ended up first). The Boy and I were a mere 15 minutes late, after he had a crisis of confidence as we were heading out the door, and ran upstairs to change. Twice.
And everyone thinks it’s me who’s high maintenance (I am, of course. That’s the first time he’s done that in the entire time we’ve been together, and I probably didn’t help by saying “Look, wear whatever you feel most comfortable having immortalised forever and ever”). Lina & Tom were very understanding, which makes me like them even more.
To the tea and cake! I went for peppermint tea, which came in this funky glass teapot, with a tea strainer I could actually work out how to use (as someone who rarely drinks tea, these things are important), and a tea trio that I was tempted to ask if I could borrow for the wedding:
And look at all these teapots! Could also have done with some of those for the wedding, as we’re still 19 short…
Anyway, back to the food. I had one of the specials, chicken, ricotta amazingness in a muffin. It was so good that I forgot to take a photo before cutting into it. Sorry – food blogger, I am not:
The Boy has toasted teacakes, but I was too busy scoffing my face to take any pictures of those (and I didn’t want to be weird and ask Lina or Tom – who I feel like we know quite well, but in reality we’ve met twice – if I could start snapping their food). Then, to the cake! The Boy played it safe with Victoria sponge (which looked delicious, but I couldn’t comment on how it tasted, because I didn’t want to share my raspberry & chocolate concoction, which meant I couldn’t do the old “Oh, do you want a bit of this?” trick so I could try a bit).
Then, with sugar zipping its way around my system, we went over to Houghton House, and discovered that the wind had blown up out of nowhere, and we made jokes about getting blown away (I won’t spoil the surprise, but at one point, I thought we might be).
After a stroll down the long drive, where after making an amazing Lion King joke, I discovered The Boy has never seen the film (I know, I know. He will before the wedding, do not fret), Lina asked us to face each other, hold hands, and play a game where we each had a letter of the alphabet (I had A, The Boy had B, I took C, etc) and had to say something that reminded us of the other one beginning with that letter.
“You both write, you should be good at this!”, she left us with. So, I decided to live up to her expectations, and started us off with “Apples…because I buy them for you every week”. I’m sorry to say mine did not get better (another one being “……..yacht. Because we’ll never have one….”). Nor were my attempts in the car on the way home any better.
We had a great time, despite the weather, and having seen this sneak peek of the shoot, I’m really excited to see our wedding photos already (there we are, it’s a good thing we have two weeks less than I thought…oh no, the panic’s setting in again).
And for the shoot, I wore my favourite lipstick, MAC Russian Red. As you can see, it stayed put despite ending up all over The Boy’s lips too. It’s a damn good lipstick.
Something Definitely Happened 