Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day and Easter are all looming, all heralding spring. But how to ring the changes in the gift line?

Aah, well, just sometimes we are able to sample something extraordinary, mark you, we knew it would be because our contributing editor, Margaret Graham, has a special fondness for Yorkshire, in particular North Yorkshire, and when there she homes in every time on Bettys Tearooms and shops, of which there are six. They are her absolute haven of deliciousness, and she raves about them. Well, you can see that she does.

They are proper tearooms: lovely tea, lovely buns, lovely staff. Big fat rascal scones are her downfall, so sampling some of Bettys new season gifts was NOT a chore. Have a look at the three we all pitched into.

The sponge cake 13CM DIAMETER | 500G | £12.95 Hand-decorated with a pretty spring flowers design in Royal icing, this light almond sponge cake is sandwiched with raspberry preserve and buttercream. And surely that was white chocolate on the bottom? Or so Margaret and her daughter thought. The mix of flavours, even in the icing, was fascinating, and worked extraordinarily well.

Bang went the diet.

That is presented as an Easter or Mother’s Day cake. But we fear it’s addictive, and can be on any table, at any time for any occasion, so enjoy.

We tried the NEW  Saddleback Chocolate Pig 12 X 7 X 7.5CM | 130G | £9.95 which was such a lovely image, and we had to pace ourselves as the tasting was leading to a disgusting exhibition of greed.

And the hand made small chocolate eggs made in Bettys craft bakery…

And myriad other gift boxes of chocs.

But let’s have a look at  Valentine’s day.

It would take the hardest heart to remain unmoved if any of these were the gift of the day:

With Love Chocolate Selection BOX OF 15 | 16 X 9.5CM | 140G | £19.95 An exquisite collection of Swiss Grand Cru milk and dark chocolates, with ganache, fondant cream and caramel centres.

Or try the Valentine’s Gift Box BOX: 25 X 19.5 X 9CM | £30.00 Contents:

• Chocolate Heart Assortment • Grand Cru Ganache Chocolate Cake • With Love Butter Biscuits and Strawberry • Strawberry, Cherry & Rose Tisane 2. Vanilla Caramel Hearts BOX OF 15 | 16 X 9.5CM | 150G | £17.95 Grand Cru Swiss dark chocolate filled with creamy vanilla caramel and finished with a dusting of gold lustre.

3. Champagne Truffles BOX OF 15 | 16 X 9.5CM | 165G | £17.95 Grand Cru Swiss milk chocolate filled with Moët & Chandon Champagne and Marc de Champagne ganache and finished with a melt-inthe-mouth raspberry powder.
4. Chocolate Heart Assortment BOX OF 7 | 22.5 X 3.5 X 2.5CM | 70G | £8.75 Includes: Blackcurrant Ganache, Champagne Truffle, Cru Sauvage Truffle, Raspberry Ganache, Rose Fondant, Violet Fondant and Vanilla Caramel.

Easter

These are the MOST BEAUTIFUL EGGS YOU CAN GIVE THIS EASTER. Forget Faberge, these are works of art. We weren’t sure we would be able to tuck into them. Oh come on, of course we could.

Bettys founder Frederick Belmont was a chocolatier and a Swiss master chocolatier. Nearly 100 years on, the Chocolate Room at Bettys remains a haven of true craftsmanship where our hand decorated Easter eggs are still made to Frederick’s exacting standard employing great attention to detail and using the very highest quality Swiss chocolate.

Take as an example the Spring Bloom Egg 19CM HIGH | 315G | £30.00 This is a strikingly colourful egg. Made with eau de nil coloured white chocolate, and finished with a silver lustre, it is decorated with bluebells, primroses, bumble bees and a sugar paste butterfly.

These we have mentioned are just a little bit of a taster, there are many others to choose from. Where?

Online www.bettys.co.uk Telephone 0800 456 1919 or 01423 814008

Shops Visit one of the six shops in Harrogate, Ilkley, Northallerton and York. Have tea while you’re there.

Corporate Gifts Service Please contact: pr@bettysandtaylors.co.uk or telephone 01423 814186.

There are many more fabulous gifts to be found on their website. We don’t always endorse so enthusiastically, but this time yes. We do just wish that we were sitting in one of Bettys Tea Rooms rather than in the office.

Try the mail order gifts, AND try Bettys Tea Rooms and shop whenever you see one.

Deliveries & Charges Bettys delivers to homes and businesses across the UK, as well as to Europe, North America, Australasia and the Far East.

Delivery charges start from £3.95 for the UK and from £12.95 internationally. Last order dates for Easter UK, Highlands & Islands – Friday 23 March UK, Mainland – Tuesday 27 March EU & Rest of world – Tuesday 20 March

My wife and I attended a Gala Dinner entitled Looking for the Perfect Food at the Osteria dell’Angolo Restaurant. Since childhood, I have had a personal mission to seek out the perfect jam roly poly. I had it once and it was superb, but ever since nothing has matched up to it. I know it’ll be my tastes that have changed just as much as the roly polys.

Often these days we are rushing about and eat only as a way of refuelling, so it was interesting to spend an evening with people who see food as an important part of family and culture.

Having a three-course dinner, created by the Head Chef Demian Mazzocchi at this friendly Italian restaurant in the shadow of Westminster Palace, is a great way to seek perfection. The exclusive evening was to celebrate one of the oldest and healthiest of foods in the world: extra virgin olive oil.

The mission: to create a menu showcasing a different extra virgin olive oil for each course. The oils, naturally, all emanating from Italy. Even though European production occurs in Spain, France, Portugal, Greece, Croatia, Serbia, Albania, San Marino, Cyprus, Slovenia and Malta as well.

My mission: to sit down, drink wine, chat to complete strangers and enjoy myself. Think I could manage that….

Starter

Risotto con broccolo “Romanesco” e baccala mantecato all’olio ‘Olitalia’

That’s a sublime risotto with Romanesco broccoli infused within it, cooked in a Venetian style. This broccoli is the green spirally cauliflower that uses the Fibonacci number system when it grows (Google it!). The olive oil used was Olitalia.

There was a generous serving, but sat here in the heart of an Italian evening, chatting food and lifestyle with our new Italian friends, I watched them enjoying the differing textures of the dish. Even though, as one of them whispered to me, olive oil is not traditional in risotto, they cleared their plates in no time, adoring it. I did likewise. Olitalia is, however, the world’s most widely distributed olive oil brand and no meal should be without it – even if it’s just used for dipping chunks of bread into!

Main

Costata di Manzo con timballino di patate, datterino confit, salsa rucola, aceto balsamico olio ‘Terre Alte’

This gorgeous rib-eye steak rested on extra virgin olive oil fried potato and confit cherry tomatoes. The rocket sauce and aged balsamic vinegar added punch, whereas the Terre Alte extra virgin olive oil provided a fruity sweetness followed by a pepper hit.

The melting meat vanished far too quickly even though the portion was not small in any degree.

Terre Alte extra virgin olive oil  is from an area of southern Tuscany known as ‘Meremma’ – a location that, along with its traditional harvesting methods, makes the oil’s fruity taste (albeit with a hint of artichoke) and its green to golden yellow colour.

This could not get any better. Could it? Oh, yes…

Dessert:

Crostino dolce con gelato all’olio ‘Redoro’ e rosmarino glassato

Sweet Crostino bread with Redoro extra virgin olive oil ice cream, garnished with a little rosemary.

That’s basically, ice cream on toast! A slight hesitation from me. Peter Kay’s cheesecake and garlic bread sketch coming to mind: ‘Ice cream. On toast? Ice cream. On toast?!’ But it’s more than that. The Crostino bread was drizzled with more of the Redoro – produced in the hilly areas of the province of Verona and having a golden green colour (if that’s possible!) with a fragrant, fruity bouquet – and I ate it like it was a canapé: holding it and biting into it. It was a bizarre sensation of textures: crusty bread and soft ice cream; warm and cold; savoury and sweet. We all agreed this was something special, something extraordinary. My wife is not a fan of desserts but she said it was one of the best things she has ever eaten. She has repeated this non-stop since. And I can’t help but agreeing with her.

Mind you – she never tasted the original jam roly poly that I did, all those years ago. Ah, memories…

Redoro

Olive Oil is good for you. Fact. Italians have known this for centuries and these three examples of cuisine show how olive oil – quality Italian Extra Virgin Olive Oil – can not only be an ingredient but the star of a dish, creating something unexpected and delicious.

Terre Alte

By the end, everyone was smiling. I certainly think we found the perfect food…

Osteria dell’Angolo restaurant 47 Marsham St, Westminster, London SW1P 3DR

Reservations: bookatable.co.uk, quandoo.co.uk, opentable.co.uk

Aprhodite’s Tears by Hannah Fielding

Already an award winning author, (Echoes of Love) Fielding looks set to tempt us to join her on the Greek island of Helios which is where Oriel Anderson goes to join an archaeological dive team. It’s not just any team but an all male one, bar her. She is there as their leader.

Dumped by her fiancé she is determined to ‘make it’.

But does she?

There are the usual areas of conflict, the dark brooding presence of her employer, to whom Oriel is attracted, but should she be? Will it all end in disaster? Possibly it seems when strange things start going bump in the night. Well, not bump in the night, but strange things occur which jeopardise not just her, but others who come to work on the dive.

The pages turn, the sun shines, the brooding darkness hovers. What’s not to like. Give it a try as Fielding reworks the Greek myth, Aphrodite’s Tears.

Aphrodite’s Tears by Hannah Fielding. HB £15.00 pub London Wall Publishers.

From sunshine to – snow.

After the Snow by Susannah Constantine, journalist, TV presenter and now debut novelist.

We’ve done the elite in Downton Abbey and now for a trawl of the untold story of the scandalous elite in the sixties.

Is it like a modern day Nancy Mitford as Sir Elton John proclaims?

Sort of, is the answer.

After the Snow follows eleven year old Esme Munroe… who wants as a Christmas present her mother to be on one of her ‘good days’ plus she longs for a velvet riding hat

The assortment of wet towels and dirty plates she finds in her stocking fall somewhat short, but at least Father Christmas has remembered her, after a fashion.

Later in the day her mother disappears in the heavy snow. Only the Earl of Culcairn seems to know where she might have gone. As Esme sets about both protecting her mother and uncovering the secrets of Culcairn Castle the one certainty is that life will never again be quite the same.

Mitford’s writing was tight and pithy, and this is not quite up to that almost impossibly high standard, but with Princess Margaret swishing through the novel there is an elite charm which will satisfy many readers. Give this a go too and it will brighten up the dank weather.

After the Snow by Susannah Constantine. pub HQ. HB £12.99

February is one of those months: dry- January is over, February is promising longer days, but it’s still winter. So time for a night out.

The Moor is coming up at the  Old Red Lion Theatre. So first a drink at the bar, then the play.

418 St John Street, London EC1V 4NJ

Jill McAusland (Call the Midwife, BBC1…), Oliver Britten (Walrus…) and Jonny Magnanti (Three Winters…)will form the cast for the world premiere of Catherine Lucie’s The Moor, a tense psychological thriller set in a place where nothing is as it seems.

Bronagh has lived at the heart of the moor for as long as she can remember, but recently she has started having the same troubling dream. Are the voices trying to tell her something? When a boy vanishes, Bronagh has to tell someone what she suspects, entangling herself and her boyfriend in a murder investigation.

The Moor pits Bronagh against her own past and present, dragging her, her baby daughter and those closest to them into something deeper than the marsh on the moor.

In a play that presents a meaty female character who is emotionally and intelligently charged, playwright Catherine Lucie explores what people are capable of when isolated and under pressure.

Director Blythe Stewart comments, I am delighted to be bringing Catherine Lucie’s thrilling and unnerving play to life – it’s an ambitious and bold work. At the heart of this play is a woman trying to make a difference in her life. I’m thrilled people will have the chance to see more than just a ‘strong female character’. Bronagh is nuanced: acute, reserved, ordinary, distinct, and changeable, and her fight is for herself. We are passionate about making work that gives a space for people usually on the edge of society and of our stories.

The Moor: Performance Dates  Tuesday 6th February – Saturday 3rd March 2018 Tuesday – Saturday, 7:30pm Saturday – Sunday, 3pm

Twitter @ORLTheatre, @riveproductions, #TheMoor

Box Office Old Red Lion Theatre Box Office and www.oldredliontheatre.co.uk or 0844 412 4307.

Tickets £18 (£14 concessions). Preview tickets are available at £12.