As I was up in Shropshire last weekend visiting friends and meeting their babies (and consuming large amounts of cake, pizza and crisps), I figured I may as well stick my walking boots in the car and do something productive on the Sunday.

I decided on a short walk along Stiperstones. Starting from The Bog visitor centre car park, walking to meet the Shropshire Way and following that along the ridge past the trig point, then another big obvious path back again.  Just over 5 miles in total.

Nipstone Rock, and some sheep

It rained.  Also it was quite windy, but that's to be expected walking along a ridge! I saw a grouse near the trigpoint - they make a very strange noise...

Only took a few photos, using my phone, because I didn't want to stop and dig my proper camera out of my bag in the rain (should have packed the waterproof one!).  Didn't check the map much either for similar reasons, which might partly explain why it took half a mile to realise I'd turned south instead of north right at the start.  ahem.

But we'll pretend that little detour was part of the original plan - without it I wouldn't have seen Nipstone rock, pictured above, so not all bad I guess!

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Met up with friends for a bit of a cakefest last weekend.  This was my offering:

Looks tasty enough, right?  But this cake has a bit of an added surprise up its sleeve... spots!  Inspired by this recipe, but it's easy enough to do:

1. bake mini cupcakes with a lot of food colouring
2. attack with a melon baller to produce coloured cake balls
3. eat remaining cake scraps
4. make yet more cake batter
5. pour into cake tin, add balls, cook.
6. cover in icing and decorate with matching colours of M&Ms

Et voila!  You'll have to excuse the crappy cameraphone photo, but it got devoured rather quickly...

The cupcakes in the background of the first photo are another bit of experimentation... cheap ready made chocolate cake mix (urgh, I know....), mixed with cherry coke rather than eggs/water.  They actually weren't that bad!

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