White Almond Sicily

This week marked one year of the lockdown in the UK which means for me one year of lockdown baking, mind you I never need an excuse to bake but lockdown gave me the time to get creative and try new recipes.  I have always enjoyed baking cakes and as a child I would help my mum with her weekly cake which she used to make for our Sunday tea. I also remember going with her to cake decorating classes before I started school.  During the first lockdown in the UK there was a problem with buying flour as everyone went baking crazy and started to make cakes, bread and pizza at home. Banana bread seemed to become the most popular choice.  I made a special cake in June to celebrate our lockdown 25th silver wedding anniversary which we enjoyed as part of a picnic at beautiful Painshill Park in Surrey.  It is now sixteen months since we turned the locks and closed the doors on our Sicilian house and we would have never thought back then that we would not know when we would be able to return. Next

"I do not envy the Heaven to God because I am well satisfied to live in Sicily" King Federico II of Sicily, 1194 - 1250 AD Last year I received a multitude of emails and messages from people asking my advice about buying a house in Sicily and about life on the island.  I think that with a lot of us spending more time at home in lockdown that many people were using their time to follow a dream of looking for a place in the sun with Sicily in mind due to the amount of coverage in the media about towns selling houses for €1 and also due to the island becoming a more popular destination for holidays.  We did NOT buy our house for €1, our story is a unique one.  This year it will be sixteen years since we first visited Sicily and we immediately fell in love with the island, its culture, its food and its people, so much so that after just three trips we decided that we wanted to buy a house there. This is our story ..... We first chose to visit Sicily after I read an article in a g