Another year, another birthday blog post!

Last week I was trying to decide what to do for my birthday, I felt overwhelmed with options and that's when I realised that I haven't spent my birthday at home in Brighton for six years. Six! My last Brighton based birthday celebration was before I'd even started this blog! So crazy. I can't believe I've been lucky enough to celebrate my birthday in such amazing places recently, the Monkey Sanctuary in Cornwall (which I'll be re-visiting this summer), London, Berlin, Millencolin Fest' in Sweden and last year's 30th birthday extravaganza in Spain. I adore Brighton so I was super excited to plan a fun day here and Nick and I started with a lazy morning together at home. When I came downstairs there was a helium ballon waiting for me, I love helium balloons, I'm not really sure why but I think they're just super fun and cute!

Nick sneakily bough some Hello Kitty stickers in Japan for decorating future cards and gifts with, he's so adorable!

For breakfast Nick made us our favourite green juice from 365 Vegan Smoothies, it has banana, orange, kale, grapes and lemon juice and I love how frothy it gets. You'd think you wouldn't need a recipe book for smoothies but I'd never made a green juice this good until I bought it so I think it was a good investment! We also had Jus-Rol croissants with loads of Vitalite, two of my favourite accidentally vegan products!

Of course there were presents! Nick gifted me some graphic novels which I was super excited about, I read them so quickly that I find it hard to justify dropping the cash on them so they make excellent presents. He also got me some gorgeous Oracle brass ear weights, I'd been coveting them for a long time so I was super excited and I've been wearing them almost every day!

After our lovely slow start to the day we grabbed a Car Club car and headed for Raystede Animal Sanctuary. It's one of my favourite places to spend time, Nick and I visited last year for an Animal Carer Day and I try to go back whenever I can. I'm looking into volunteering there right now but it's surprisingly difficult to get to without a car.

Our first stop was the cattery, you can't go inside but you can peer through the windows at the kitties being all adorable. I always get so sad reading the reasons why cats end up at the shelter but it made me extra glad we decided to foster Rorschach until we were able to find him a perfect forever home. Our second stop was the goats. Best photobomb!

After a walk around the lake we checked out the donkeys and ponies. I love this part of the sanctuary, it's so beautiful and there are some really little ponies who are obviously super adorable.

Look at their ears! I love donkeys, they're like an extra fluffy horse!

On the way home we listened to one of my gifts, the latest Me First and the Gimme Gimmes CD. I love this band, they play punk rock covers of classics and this has to be the best album they've released for ages. There's even a cover of Cher's Believe complete with ridiculous synths and auto-tune!

We were starving by the time we got back into Brighton so we headed for VBites for one of my favourite meals, the 3Bites plate! It comes with one each of the VBeefy, VFishy and Classic Beefy burgers and a side of fries. I blogged about it with a better picture here, they've definitely made the burgers smaller since the trial period but it's definitely still one of my favourite meals to eat in Brighton right now.

Obviously everyone needs cake on their birthday, or ice cream if that's more your style. One year I'd love to have an ice cream cake, I've never tried one but they sound perfect! I'd had breakfast at Infinity Foods Cafe with some friends a week or so before my birthday and the cakes looked amazing so I was excited to go back. I chose the Chocolate Cheesecake and Nick went for a slice of Chocolate Chip Banana Cake.

I'm not normally the biggest cheesecake fan but this one was tofu based and very mousse like, I really enjoyed it and I'll definitely be going back for more soon. Nick loved his cake too and the little piece I tried was super moist and bananaey with huge chocolate chunks throughout.

That wasn't enough cake for one day though so we wandered down Kensington Gardens and picked up a slice of Lemon, Poppy Seed and Polenta cake and a piece of Chocolate Tiffin from Iydea and a Chocolate Raspberry cupcake from Cloud 9.

I loved the tiffin, it was ridiculously rich and chocolatey and full of chunks of biscuit and cherry. I'll definitely be buying it again. I was a little disappointed by the other two though, the lemon poppyseed tasted strange and I think for me there were just too many poppy seeds which gave each bite an odd mouthfeel. The cupcake from Cloud 9 was ridiculously dry and crumbled as we tried to eat it, the frosting was nicely flavoured but texturally it didn't hit the spot. Cloud 9 have only recently started making vegan cakes and I've seen a promising looking Oreo mud cake whilst walking past so I will be giving something else there a try soon. My recommended spots for cake right now are definitely Infinity Cafe, both of the slices we tried there were excellent, closely followed by the cake we ate recently at Our Cornish Pasty Shop. I'll also give a little shout out to WaiKikaMooKau who stock my Operation Icing cupcakes but don't go out to eat my own cake, that'd just be silly!

After a long day of adventuring in the sun it was time for some quiet time and I read books on the sofa for the rest of the afternoon. Hunger struck early evening and Nick and I got into the kitchen to make some serious birthday food, mac & cheese pizza!

This isn't the greatest pic but as you can probably imagine this pizza was totally ridiculous and delicious and an awesome end to the day!

We'd made the Roasted Red Pepper Mac & Cheese from Isa Does It the previous night so we just needed to slather some jarred pizza sauce on to a store bought base (the Sainsbury's hand stretched kind is my favourite), top it with the mac and then top that with the last of the Follow Your Heart cheese we brought back from NYC in January. For some reason if you shred a block of Follow Your Heart and freeze it for around 6 months it doesn't melt anywhere near as well as before so next time we'll just buy the pre-shreded bags. It was still gooey and close to melty though so it was all okay!

Don't think that my celebrating ended there though! I'm a firm believer in the birthday week especially when your birthday falls on a Tuesday so come Friday evening it was time for the extravaganza to continue. I met Nick when he finished work and we walked down Western Road to Gourmet Pizza Kitchen, a cute little pizzeria that I only heard about a few weeks ago.

GPK have one vegan pizza on the menu, the Vegan Pesto, and then they have vegan cheese so that you can veganise some of the veggie options or create your own. I picked the Vegan Pesto and Nick ordered a Margherita with veggie pepperoni. My vegan pesto pizza was covered in a generous amount of toppings which, as well as the pesto and cheese, included caramelised red onions, black olives (my faves) and cherry tomatoes. I enjoyed it although I think Pizza Face currently holds the best pizza in Brighton crown. The Margherita was definitely slightly lacking in the topping department, I think pizza should be almost drowning in tomato sauce especially if the toppings are as simple as cheese and pepperoni and I think the lack of marinara sauce resulted in a slightly dry pizza. I would definitely go back to GPK, I can't think of many places you can go out to eat vegan pizza in Brighton in the evening (I think it's just here, perhaps La Cucina and Pizza Express where you'd need to take your own cheese or go cheese-less ) and I would order the vegan pesto pizza again, the crust was nice and thin and I liked the restaurant itself.

It was definitely a good plan to fill up on food because our next stop was Boho Gelato's frozen cocktail night held at Slice Sussex. I've been to this event a couple of times before and I last blogged about it back when the event began. I've always thoroughly enjoyed it and this time was no different. We were meeting some of the friends I've made in the last year from the local vegan group on Meet Up and I'm still so glad I bit the bullet and joined last year. Working from home isn't the best way to make local friends and whilst I have some amazing buddies scattered all over the world I felt like I was lacking in local mates to grab food or beers with on a regular basis.

The menu at the cocktail night is always split into two, dairy and non-dairy. Non dairy doesn't always mean vegan but they'd done their research and knew that the Campari in the Boho Aperitivo needed to be replaced with something else.

I love lemon so the Limoncello Classic seemed to be a good place to start the evening, this gorgeous frothy delight definitely ended up being my favourite cocktail of the night. I think I could drink these all day. I won't, but I totally could!

The next drink I tried was the Hendricks + Cucumber Slushy and before the event it was one of the drinks I was most excited about. Unfortunately I think it worked better on paper than in reality. It wasn't a slushy and I think the rose in the rose and cucumber sorbet distracted from the gin cucumber combo that should have been delicious.

Lastly I tried the Boho Aperitivo which consisted of blood orange sorbet, limoncello and gin. This was apparently better than the kind with the Campari which I'm counting as a win for veganism.

This night's not only good for the drinkers among us though, the guys behind the bar were quite happy to whip up some non alcoholic cocktails for the sober among us and they were a super bargain at £2!

My third and final birthday celebration took place yesterday afternoon at the lovely Terre à Terre, somewhere I will always find an excuse to visit! Nick and my bff's Tabitha and Sal were more than happy to accompany me for afternoon tea. The vegan friendliness of the tea is pretty new and we were all excited to try it. Sal and I upgraded our tea to prosecco for £6 extra which is a wonderful choice for anyone celebrating something or for people like me who just dislike hot drinks!

I won't give you a full run down of everything on the tiers, some people will want to be surprised and the rest of you can read the full descriptions on the online menu here. The tea is designed to move from salty to sweet to sweeter and I loved this approach.

The savoury tea layer included some beautiful local heirloom tomatoes in a multitude of colours which accompanied some of my favourite nori crackers. There were also sesame crusted tofu bites and one of my favourite menu items, the Arepas Chilli Candy which even I can manage to eat as long as I remove the biggest chunks of chilli from the sticky sauce!

The sweet tier came next and I was so impressed with it that I took a picture of it separately. You can also see the gorgeous hand painted card Tabitha made me in the background, she's ridiculously talented.

There were a couple of mini churros each, and the two little polenta cakes, one with an orange filling and one with a chocolate filling were delightful bite sized treats. I enjoyed the snappy pistachio wafer way more than I thought I would and the little chocolate cake with freeze dried raspberries was also delightful.

Lastly we ate the scones, two little ones each which was perfect. They were served with almond cream and homemade jam. I would have loved to see some homemade vegan butter here as that's how I usually roll with crumpets but this was still wonderful and everyone else agreed that the cream / jam option is more traditional.

I had such an amazing birthday week surrounded by friends (human and animal), eating great food and generally living it up! I also really appreciated everyone who tweeted or instagrammed birthday wishes in my direction, you're all lovely! Bring on 32, who knows where I'll be!

Celebrating Thirty.

I recently turned thirty and what better way to celebrate than to travel somewhere mellow and relaxing with your besties. Nick, Sal, Tabitha and I headed for Southern Spain where we rented a villa up in the mountains near El Gastor. It even had a view of this beautiful lake. 

As soon as we arrived we went food shopping crazy at the huge Carrefour store near Malaga airport. I always like to head to Carrefour at the beginning of a self catering holiday because they have all of the essentials as well as a good natural / eco section full of tofu, seitan and soy yoghurts.

We cooked an awesome first night meal of seitan steaks and paprika and garlic chips accompanied by a simple green salad.

The next morning Nick whipped up one of his epic tofu scrambles and Sal and I re-purposed the leftover chips into home fries and fried some mushrooms whilst Tabitha made toast - by far the hardest job because there was no toaster and the grill was super erratic!

Later that day we went on a trip to Seville where we made a beeline for Veganitessen. I'd read about them online and I am always excited to try a new vegan bakery. I'm in awe of their boxes, I wish I could afford boxes this pretty for Operation Icing!

We bought almost everything. My favourite thing was the Chocolate Coconut cake you can see peeking out at the front underneath the vanilla glazed palmerita.

There are also chocolate covered croissants in there somewhere but more about that after lunch!

After a little more shopping at the Centro Ecológico Gaia health food store we went for lunch at their restaurant, Restaurante Ecológico Gaia, which is just a few doors down. We started the meal with some of the tastiest beer I've ever had. I'm not a huge beer person but it's certainly growing on me!

Before our meal they brought us delicious bread and a plate of some of the most amazing oily potatoes and tomatoes I've ever eaten. I took the worst picture of these so you'll have to pop over to Sal's blog, Alien on Toast, to see her pictures.

Not realising how huge it was going to be I ordered the gazpacho...

...and the hummus plate.

I did a frankly terrible job at finishing both of these perfectly simple and delicious plates of food because that soup was really huge and I'm the slooowest soup eater in the whole world! I don't know what my soup issue is, I can take down a burger in a matter of minutes but soup defeats me. What the hell stomach?! Thankfully my fellow diners helped me scoff the leftovers. My favourites were the regular and beetroot hummuses (hummai?!) and Tabitha was a bit in love with the moroccan dip.

After lunch we walked around the city.

And stopped off by the river to eat some dessert. I decided to go for something small and this chocolate covered croissant was perfect. We wished we'd bought more of these but we were buying a lot of stuff and it would have been rude to the people behind us in line to clear them out entirely!

My actual birthday couldn't have been more perfect. I woke up to everything the five year old living inside me dreams of, there were banners, balloons, and a whole lot of pink and Hello Kitty! What's even funnier about this is that my friends didn't decide on a theme, they all just brought a few things each and this happened. They know me so well!

After a present opening frenzy Sal and Tabitha made Oreo Pancakes with Cherry Syrup for breakfast. There were no recipes they were just winging it because they're awesome like that and obviously they were delicious.

We spent most of the morning and afternoon lounging by the pool, listening to music, and swimming. It was the best day. After lunch Nick surprised me with this cake he'd baked the night before. Okay, so it wasn't really a surprise. It was a small villa and he kept calling people into the kitchen to help him with his "special project", so, not subtle, but still awesome! Nick's never baked before so to whip up a cake this delicious in a kitchen with no measuring equipment and only one glass oven dish is crazy impressive.

The cake was lemon and it had an apricot glaze on top. Perfect. I love lemon cakes and I hardly ever make them myself.

We ate the cake poolside with some pink champagne sipped out of paper Hello Kitty cups. Classy!

Spain has a whole lot of vegan friendly snacks, my friend Carmen introduced me to these Tortas de Aceite in Barcelona last spring and I saw them all over Andalucia. I didn't see a single non-vegan packaged version of these sweet, flaky, anaise flavoured treats but obviously check the labels.

Palmeritas are another delicious sugary sweet Spanish pastry, I saw vegan versions in every supermarket I went to.

I was also pretty excited when we spotted these ice creams in Spanish supermarket chain SuperSol. They were just like a miniature vegan Magnum.

We hadn't planned on eating out much on this trip but we'd heard that there was a restaurant with a beautiful view in nearby village Zahara de la Sierra that apparently had some vegetarian dishes hidden away in their meat heavy menu. We figured we could just drink the cocktails and look at the the view if there was nothing we could eat so we decided to check it out.

The chef at Al Lago turned out to be from the US and both him and his wife know their stuff when it came to veganism. It's always reassuring when someone hears vegan and says "so vegetarian but no eggs or dairy?" Yes, pretty much! That's a way better jumping off point than the blank stare you're sometime met with as a travelling vegan.

We ordered the Paella which you can see was full of plenty of veggies and topped with delicious sweet roasted peppers. I normally hate peppers but these were super delicious and we polished off the paella in no time.

Tabitha ordered some grilled asparagus which looked perfect. Their was also a vegan gazpacho on the menu and I'm pretty sure there was one more veganisable thing but I can't remember what it was.

We were also excited to find that there were vegan sorbets on offer. There were four fruity flavours but the lemon contained egg so we picked between the mango, green apple and berry. I went for green apple because it's not a flavour you see often and OMG it was delicious, I wished I'd gone for the triple scoop.

After dinner we took a walk through Zahara de la Sierra's winding streets, it's a really beautiful place with it's whitewashed homes and wonderful views.

On our final day we had to check out of the villa early and our flight wasn't until the evening so we had the whole afternoon to explore Malaga. Obviously we headed straight for the first entirely vegan restaurant of the trip, El Piano. There's an El Piano location in York and I hadn't realised that they're actually a small family run chain with two Spanish locations as well.

This cute little take out spot has a few tables outside and there was so much delicious vegan food to choose from that we all had a tough time making a decicion.

You get to pick four items to pop into your large food boat and in the end I chose the mushroom and spinach stuffed crepe, a fruity cous cous salad, falafel and potatoes with oregano. I topped it off with a super garlicky sauce. Other options included chilli, dhal, paella, hummus, salads and mini shish kebabs.

My favourite part of the boat was the stuffed crepe, the mushrooms and spinach were cooked in a beautifully creamy sauce. I'm thinking that I need to re-create them at home soon.

Obviously we had desserts, Nick and Tabitha chose chocolate brownies...

...and Sal and I went for chocolate raspberry and chocolate orange tarts.

I enjoyed the chocolate raspberry, the raspberry topping was a little like jelly which I thought was a good thing but Sal disagreed! She much preferred the orange custard tart with the chocolatey base which I would have also happily eaten more of. The less said about the brownies the better, I think Nick put it best when he said "you can tell this place is sin gluten"! Now this isn't entirely fair as I've had some great gluten free brownies but these were a bit of a miss.

Overall El Piano was a definite hit, it's in a great part of the city, the people working there were downright lovely and aside from the dry brownies the food was delicious.

We had the best trip, I love Spain and I feel super lucky to have been able to spend my birthday with such rad people. So far being thirty is awesome!

Nick and I with Zahara de la Sierra in the background.

Stockholm

For my birthday this year Nick and I headed to Sweden for Millencolin Fest, a little punk festival put on by Millencolin to celebrate their 20 year band-a-versary. For those of you thinking "Birthday? Wasn't your birthday in June Jojo?" Erm, yes, I'm a little behind, let's move on...

The festival was in the band's hometown, Örebro. They headlined both nights & it was amazing to see in my birthday dancing around to one of my favourite songs. The festival campsite was set up just down the road from the festival site and we stayed in a super cute little cabin. The campsite also had a water park so we spent plenty of time playing on the slides and in the wave pool, I definitely think more festivals should be set up like this! The festival wasn't great food wise, onsite this blue candy floss was the only vegan thing I spotted, but hey, I love candy floss!

Luckily there was also a supermarket between the campsite and the festival ground and they didn't do anything silly like ban you from bringing food into the venue so don't worry, we didn't starve! We ate plenty of fruit, bread, crisps and Swedish Glace ice cream cones which are called Tofu Line in Sweden. Yum!

After the festival we spent a few days in Stockholm. We'd wanted to visit for ages and it would have been rude to just fly in and out of the airport without spending any time there!

As soon as we got off the train from Örebro we dropped our bags off at the hotel and headed to Herman's Tradgardcafe to find lunch.

Herman's is a vegetarian buffet style restaurant with loads of outdoor seating and super amazing views of the old town across the water. The woman behind the counter was super helpful and she happily gave us a guided tour of the vegan options, everything was vegan except for one hot and two cold dishes that contained cheese. 

As you can see we loaded up our plates with a bit of everything! My favourite parts of the meal were the tofu and herb spread which I smeared all over some delicious homemade bread, the potato salad, wedges, pasta salad with olives, and the carrot and raisin salad. As is traditional with buffets I accidentally picked one thing that was far too spicy for me but it was worth a try and I got Nick to eat it so that it didn't go to waste!

We sat outside and enjoyed the view...

...and as it was my birthday I wasn't going to skip dessert even after that humungous plate of food. I went to see if anything was vegan and as is always ideal in this situation it turned out that everything on the dessert table was vegan! I went for a piece of the most decadent looking chocolatey thing there.

This chocolate torte came with homemade whipped rice cream, I'd normally turn down any kind of cream with dessert, I just find cream icky, but I said yes this time because we were sharing and Nick wouldn't have been impressed if I'd said no! He convinced me to try it and I was pleasently surprised, it was really light and airy and not cloyingly sweet. I'd definitely say yes to whipped rice cream again.

We loved Herman's so much that we went back there on our last day. We were in a bit of a rush to get to the airport so I didn't take any pictures but the buffet was super vegan friendly again and it was a great last meal.

One place I really wanted to visit whilst in Stockholm was Kafé 44. Kafé 44 is a cafe, anarchist bookstore and music venue run by three different not for profit groups.

This place reminded me of The Cowley Club in Brighton. We shared a super cheap slice of delicious chocolate torte...

...and a Cuba Cola. I love it when places sell fun Colas like this.

We'll definitely head back to Kafé 44 next time we're in Stockholm. It was a really relaxed atmosphere and it was fun to see different groups meeting up there to work on projects.

We ate dinner at Kokyo twice during our trip. Kokyo aren't a veggie restaurant but they do have a separate vegan menu. We were super excited to find out that they even have an English menu, we weren't expecting that and we'd written down a few Swedish words to help us choose what to eat.

Whilst the restaurant advertises itself as a Japanese restaurant a lot of the menu seemed Chinese and there are a few reviews on Happy Cow that confirm that this is more of a Japanese/Chinese fusion restaurant.

On our first visit I ordered the Vegetarian Chef Special which came with a small plate of sushi to start.

We both love sushi & I was very pleased to see both Inari tofu and avocado on the plate. The main with the special is the Kokyo Wok.

As you can see this is a simple vegetable stir fry with tofu and seitan pieces. I have to say that this was nothing special, I wouldn't order it again and I'm surprised that this is the chefs special as everything else we tried had way more flavour.

Nick chose the Gongbao Surou. Soya protein, carrot & roasted peanut in an aromatic sauce with a side of steamed rice.

We loved both the tofu and the sauce but Nick wasn't impressed that they had replaced the carrots with two of his most hated veggies, red pepper and courgette!

We decided to go back a second time because we enjoyed the Gongbao Surou despite the change of veg, we loved the sushi, and we wanted to try a couple of the other dishes on the menu.

Of course to start we ordered more sushi. I love that this place makes their own tofu and the avocado was nice & ripe.

We also got some Dim Sum, fried dumplings filled with soya meat, shiitake mushrooms & vegetables.

We loved these, perfectly fried and stuffed full of yumminess.

Of course I forgot to take a photograph of the rest of the meal but we ordered the Braised Vegetarian Balls to share and it was our favourite main out of the three we tried. There were plenty of meaty balls (hehe!) and the brown gravy-esque sauce was delicious. It was pretty huge too, which is always a win in my book, although we were a little sad that we didn't have any room for more dumplings!

Our other favourite place in Stockholm was Naturbageriet on Gamla Stan. It was a short walk from the Gamla Stan tube stop and in an area we really wanted to explore. We'd just planned to grab a quick breakfast from there but there were so many great vegan options that we took stuff to go for lunch too.

For breakfast we had a Kanelsnurra.

 This delicious sweet pastry was perfect and we took two more to eat on the plane.

For lunch we took one of these Spinach & Tofu pasties...

...and a veggie sandwich stuffed full of avocado, sprouts & tomatoes in a delicious homemade roll.

We really loved Stockholm, well, Sweden in general really! We can't wait to go back one day. We thought the countryside was really beautiful and the city was remarkably chilled, peaceful & easy to get around. Perfect.