On Saturday, I got up disgustingly early (5am?!) and drove for four hours with a somewhat hungover passenger.  We ended up in Diss (and on a side note, the A14 is a very very boring road).

Obviously there was good reason for this - a weekend away with friends from Keele   Scarily, this July will mark 6 years since graduation, thus 6 years of camping trips, days out and sleeping on other people's floors.  All good.

I refused to do any more driving that day, but off we went to the seaside at Southwold.  Which has a pier.  Quite a nice pier actually - obligatory amusement arcade, but then the rest of it is nice little shops/cafe, arty bits, and a collection of crazy machines.  The weather helped too - lovely sunshine (but a cold sea breeze), and also the fact that it's not mega busy tourist season yet.

looking back to land from the end of the pier (it's a T shape)

An evening of food, drink, gossip and rock band followed.  Two lessons to be learnt here: don't take indigestion tablets with vodka, and always keep an eye out for people filming you singing/drumming/fake guitaring.  Oh dear.

Sunday was not as sunny, and the fountain in Diss Mere was switched off so no photos of that.
We headed for Thetford Forest, which has the most over the top forestry commission car park ever.  Automatic barriers, touch screen ticket machines, £1.90 an hour car parking charge (included on the list of 'things this pays for': access to free-to-roam land.  riiight). And not really much else, which was a bit disappointing!  We had a quick wander around the kiddies 'adventure play trail', and it started to rain.  So that was the end of that, and off home we went.

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ahh, the one day of the year where I can be arsed to eat pancakes*...

Yesterday's worked surprisingly well.  I used a slightly different recipe from normal (well, I always use a different one as I never remember/write it down) - bit more adventurous, using buttermilk rather than normal milk.  Anyway, the batter looked thicker and more gloopy, and it did look like the pancakes might come out fat and rubbery (I like 'em thin and crêpey). But they were actually very good - and tossed brilliantly!

So for future reference:

• half a pot (140ml ish) buttermilk
• 150g flour
• 2 eggs
• and a little bit of cocoa powder in the second half of the batter, because I was feeling experimental

(close up photo because I'm disgusting and my hob is still covered in bits of Monday's stir fry)

The cocoa powder didn't seem to make much difference, other than to the colour.  Mind you, covering them all in melted chocolate and/or honey probably masks any change in flavour of the actual pancake anyway

* though I have a vague recollection of eating some in Slovenia last year.  And will no doubt find a crêperie in France this summer, yum yum yum

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