The Belgian Bun, or the native Chelsea Bun (similar, but not fondant-iced) set into a loaf: a visual pun of 'bun in the oven' or 'in the pudding club'. Baba, a rum-soaked unleavened sweetened bread also has raisins (dried fruit absorbs alcohol and releases it slowly); originally Polish, whereas the Belgian bun seems to be of unknown origin.  The word 'Baba' is also used to refer to baby or bunny.

"Sing a Song of Sixpence,
A bag full of Rye,
Four and twenty Naughty Boys,
Baked in a Pye."

I love Wiki - all those bods out there with a real interest in in what they edit, investing their time, expertise and energy entirely voluntarily, for the love of their subject, anonymously. So, according to Wiki, "the first verse had already appeared in print inTommy Thumbs Pretty Songbook, published in London around 1744, as above. The next printed version that survives, from around 1780, has two verses and the boys have been replaced by birds. A version of the modern four verses appears in Gammer Gurton's Garland, 1784, which ends with a magpie attacking the unfortunate maid." Oh dear.

Todays Ingredients

12oz shortcrust pastry with an egg glaze
24 cocktail sausages


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sing_a_Song_of_Sixpence

Old Mother Hubbard
Went to the cupboard,
To give the poor dog a bone:
When she came there,
The cupboard was bare,
And so the poor dog had none.

It's thought that this is a political satire, but I don't think so. The full version of these lyrics, originally published in 1805, have remained largely unchanged, and so has the sentiment behind it. The dog gives Old Mother Hubbard the right run-around, and I wonder if that's applicable to some relationships in our lives.

Happily, I have a bone here.

Birds Nest Soup is a classic Cantonese delicacy made from the spittle nests of the Cave Swift. yàn wō (燕窝), translates literally as "swallow's nest": salty and sweet, hence the seaweed and seafoam (sugar). Larousse states that the Cave Swifts feed on gelatinous seaweed before breeding, but when the nests were first discovered by European travellers in the C17th, it was thought that the nests were made of lime and seafoam.

Todays Ingredients:
Noodles
Seaweed
Lime (dried slices)
Sugar

What a fanciful Romantic notion - that the foam of the waves crashing against the rocks could be a foodstuff for the Swifts...

I trundled in this morning with all my stuff - it takes a while to set up each day, and the staff at the Cafe Society are brilliant, and I try to keep mess to a minimum and work quickly. This morning, Tina, the owner, had arrived back from her holiday - she was away for 4 days, a testament to how hard she works, running two businesses - most people go away for a week, 8 days... two weeks. Not Tina. We had a chat, and she passed on to me some of the concerns her customers have - the raw meat I was using in my sculptures (if we can call them that, I reckon they're assemblages) was really offputting to customers. So, the first thing we agreed on was no more raw meat. That's okay by me.

So, 'Home is where the heart is' - and the heart had to be taken right out of it. This assemblage was designed to have a lambs heart sitting under the roof, and the gingerbread platelets and pasta evoked the beautiful shapes that can be found in microscopic photographs of blood. I thought an egg sandwich was a kind of homely food, and eggs are big on the agenda with me - my grandmother used to collect semi-precious gemstone eggs (about the size of  hens' eggs) and the egg as emblematic of a life-cycle is something that crops up regularly in what I do.

No heart in "Home is where the heart is'. The eggs were fried, not beaten or scrambled, but that's work for another day.

There's nothing worse than no way of telling the artist what you think - the art is there, in the public domain - 'site-specific', we call it - and we're wondering what on earth is that, who on earth made the decision to put that there and how much did that cost... a fine example in the newly-rebuilt Victoria how-many-lanes that have unravelled from the roadworks. Here we are: www.southendstandard.co.uk/news/8943172.__50_000_sculpture_for_Vic_Circus_is_revealed. 58 comments later, there are some sated critics lighting cigars. Public consultation is always a tricky business, and maybe that was sidestepped with Councillors looking for Value for Money. Blimey.

Here on my home ranch, considerably less storm-in-a-teacup - but some lovely comments, and some not so lovely, you'd wonder who would be so unsavvy to air quips that possibly belong elsewhere. Anyway, the 'veggie option' got me thinking about the ethical aspects of what I'm doing - I had thought about them anyway. My mother is an excellent housekeeper - nothing left to waste, food seasonal and freshly cooked or spiced and preserved (she still uses a recipe that includes gunpowder for her Spiced Beef at Christmas), and the old dictum 'waste not want not'. Quite a puritanical upbringing but having been a child during WW2, running a tight ship was part and parcel of doing one's duty. I consider it a challenge to produce what I'm doing with efficiency, conscientiousness, clarity and purpose.

To produce an artwork made from food that lives for only one day seems, on the face of it, to be hedonistic, wasteful, and trite, but for me - the outcome - the end product - is the stimulation in others to comment, the communication, shared or different beliefs.  I can see some of that happening in these comments, and with the dialogue that I have with customers to the Cafe Society, as I set up each morning. I value, just as much, the photographs that come from the artwork, and these will stick around far longer than what's in the back of my fridge.

Charity begins at home - that's what I was brought up with. Putting coins in food goes a long way back for me - my mother still puts coins in her Christmas puds... when I was a tiddler, the height of excitement was finding 1p or 2p embedded in a sticky ball of fizzy something called a fizzy bomb...

I bumped into George on the High Street this morning, and as he waited for his hairdressers to open, so he came with me and we had a cup of tea. George is very highly skilled - french polishing for one, and he took to assembling this birdbox like a duck to water. We had the opportunity to chat; he is far away from his family, here in the UK, with his own two children, and we talked about taking care of children. There's peanut butter all over this birdbox, sticky goo that some kids love, but I have to say he did a great job.

Sausage meat, scotch egg, bacon bows.

What are little boys made of?
Frogs and snails and puppy dogs tails,
That's what little boys are made of.

This nursery rhyme goes back a long way - originally, 'snips' and snails and puppy dogs tails - 'snips' being eels. We don't breed frogs for eating in this country, as far as I kno, and being near the Estuary, eels seemed to me to be more appropriate.

Recipe:
I iceberg lettuce (water source for the slug and snail)
2 fresh outcrop of slug-friendly mushrooms
1 eel
9 toothpicks and some pins
5 puppy dog tails (or shaped wholemeal bread if you prefer)
1 slug
1 snail

Method:
Assemble and play spot-the-snail

Is that what little boys are made of? Maybe so.

Gingernut birdbox Recipe:
6 slabs gingerbread
1cherry
1 flake
glue: icing sugar and tea

Mathod:
Assemble and poke the bits in the holes.

According to wiki, ' Bird Box, or nest box is a man-made box provided for animals to nest in. Nest boxes are most frequently utilized for wild and domesticated birds in which case they are also called birdhouses.' I think birdbox is a great combination of two words - bird, slang for woman; box, slang for hindquarters or intimate areas. This series of birdboxes - 16 days - 16 sculptures, explores notions of sexuality through the icon of a birdbox or nesting box, and the ideas about 'home' - what that means - temporary or permanent, at home where we are, in our own skins, and how often we want to be somewhere else - a wistfulness or hankering for escapism - going on holidays, travelling... and the yearning to go home, quite often not to a place but a time in memory, as the physical place of home is a constantly changing physical space, place, reflecting the constant change in our lives.

A birdbox is a temporary home for most birds, but a place to be returned to, season after season, to rebuild and regenerate. Cherry and Flake, a boy/girl thing, makes me smile. I hope it does for you, too.