I promised you an update about my trip to Peak District. I do not usually write about my plans for the weekend. To say things before they happen… not my style. I just don’t like to tempt fate. So I can’t reckon why this time I announced here on the blog. Remember? I told you I was going to spend a couple of days in a cute village in north of England, looking for the perfect pub experience and long walks in the nature.

I usually post a few pictures about my little trips here and there, but only when I’m back safe and sound and mildly satisfied with the pics I took. This time…. this time I’ve got nothing good to show you because – as I announced on facebook – my camera lens failed me. The functional 18-55 kit lens I use to take my “everything but food” pics dropped to the floor of a public toilet in the train station of Sheffield. Ouch.

As a result of this “accident” and unfortunate weather conditions, I spent the weekend in pubs guarded against hailstorm, cold and rain.

I used the mobile camera to shot a few pics you can see on my Instagram profile and turned my hiking weekend into a slightly odd gate-away, rather freakish because I managed to spend it almost entirely in local pubs without drinking a drop of beer. Picture this situation: it’s cold outside, there are only two pubs in the whole village (Edale), no shops and no way to access the accommodation of the day before 5 pm.

I’m in the one of the two famous pubs. The atmosphere is familiar, dark in the sense of dark solid wood of the tables and gloomy light through the small Victorian windows. Hikers are gathered around a fireplace wearing soaking wet clothes after a vigorous walk in the rainy countryside. The smell of beer is pungent. The pub is a drenched-beer place for Sons/Daughters of the Soil but I can only drink coffee and think of finding the best spot for a wi-fi connection. Meh. That’s when I realize I’m an internet addicted Italian expat Daughter of the Big City life.

Back to London, a few days before this weekend; in my bakery planning there is a Danish Apple cake.

I baked a good cake (containing raisins from Denmark) but healthyfied or, to be precise and technical, Danielafied, which is the destiny that all my sweet recipes share. It requires butter and sugar? I can’t help with the recipe and at the very last moment a mysterious force makes me replace butter with olive oil and caster sugar with coconut palm sugar. Which, if I think about it, it is rather in line with the fact that in a countryside pub I am the one who asks for wi-fi passwords and order coffee. It all makes sense, in the end.

p.s. Please feel free to pay a visit here to say goodbye to my lens and admire (!) the very first pictures I took with it not too long ago. Rest in piece little lens.

Print Recipe Olive Oil Apple Cake Ingredients 1/2 cup olive oil

80 g sugar I used natural coconut palm sugar

3 eggs

175 g self-raising flour

1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

500 g golden delicious apples

1 tsp ground cinnamon

1/2 cup natural yogurt Instructions Pre-heat oven to 180°C. Grease a 22-cm cake tin.

Beat sugar and eggs with an electric mixer. Sift flour into mixture, fold in thoroughly and add the yogurt, bicarbonate of soda and a pinch of cinnamon.

Peel, core and quarter apples, then slice them. Spread half the apples in the bottom of the cake tin and cover with the batter. Arrange the remaining apple in a spiral pattern.

Mix cinnamon and white sugar then sprinkle over the apple slices.

Place in the centre of the oven and bake for 35 minutes.

