Cake and Something to Read While You Eat It

Our kitchen has a skylight (great for saving a few pence on electricity for the kitchen lights; bad for spending a few pence on heating to compensate for the drafty glass) which tends to be our personal weatherperson, since any noise from up there means it's raining. Strangely, the rest of the flat is fairly soundproof, so I can be in the living room with my back to the covered window and have no idea it's raining until I go into the kitchen for something. Well, today the skylight was roaring with noise from the moment we got up and the Saturday started out pretty dark, cold, and wet, so we scrapped our initial plans that would have involved being outdoors for most of the day, bundled up, and walked for two whole minutes to our favourite local oasis, Belle Époque, a wonderful boulangerie/patisserie that's a French culinary wonder right in our neighbourhood.

The coffee (imported from France)! The bread (baked with flour imported from France)! The friendly staff (speaking French)! The wonderful atmosphere (right in Hackney)! But, oh, the pastries:

In honour of the rain and chill, we splurged and had two wonderful lattés and shared the house's signature Belle Époque: an incredibly rich combination of dark chocolate ganache, orange chocolate mousse, and an oozing crème brûlé centre, all topped with the most wonderfully tart gooseberry. Sufficiently fortified, we wrapped up again and headed out to find that the rain had disappeared, so we headed over to another local wonder, and our planned destination before the skylight spoke, The Geffrye Museum. The free museum is a fascinating place for anyone interested in design, furniture, and plain old people's history--since we only had time to see a few exhibits today, we'll definitely be back. The reason we didn't get to see much of the museum itself was because of today's festivities:

Oh, oh, more cake! The Geffrye and its courtyard were a perfect setting for what turned out to be a lovely late-afternoon celebration.Those of you who know us well may know that we have a lot of books in storage back in Vancouver, even though we sold a ridiculous number of books at our garage sale and to various Vancouver secondhand bookshops before we left Canada. So, our London flat has felt a bit empty, bookwise, and although we're not aiming to recreate the number of possessions we have in Vancouver, a few books would be nice to own. Well, after we left the Geffrye, we came across a thrift shop where all the books are 59 pence (about $1.35 CAD). The selection is fantastic and many of these books would be much more expensive (if you could even find them secondhand) in Vancouver. We were happy with today's haul,
although when I was practically jumping up and down at having found such a deal, Bob brought out his serious teacher voice: "We're not accumulating tons of books in London. We have to read these before we can get more." Well, three are reference books, so those shouldn't count, and I've already read the Ondaatje (and suggested Bob would enjoy reading it while we're here), so that doesn't really count, and the Michael Moore one is Bob's, so I don't have to read that, so really, just three books stand between me and a return visit to the 59-pence shop! Let the accumulation begin.