Baxter’s Aberdovey Guide!

Baxter the Cocker Spaniel - Loves Aberdovey Beach!

Walking

Not to state the obvious but the beach is the best! They just have so much space to roam and play and it is so nice and quiet this time of year you nearly have it to yourself – we just walk walk walk until our older one looks like he is tired.

Aberdovey Walking Guide This page gives you a few of the best walks in the local area.

 
Aberdyfi Panorama  – this is the route we do the most!
This gentle four mile walk soon gets you up above Aberdyfi, enjoying fine views over the mouth of the Dyfi estuary and south towards Borth and Aberystwyth.

Weatherman Walking - have done this too but bit further to go
Derek Brockway enjoys exploring the countryside around the Dyfi estuary

If you venture further out – we do part of the coastal path walk (The Mawddach Trail) so we drive out to Morfa Mawddach train station, park up and then walk over the wooden railway bridge over into Barmouth, again beach is dog friendly and we tend to grab a bite to eat at the last inn which is again dog friendly and nice sandwiches etc

http://www.mawddachtrail.co.uk/ there is also some bigger walks linked at the bottom of this website if you want to venture out further but aberdovey is nice as it is so no real need to venture too far!

New Precipice Walk

Dovey Guide

Eating and Drinking

Pub wise – Dovey Inn and Penhelig Arms both allow dogs in the bar areas / we tend to opt for Penhelig, they are both Brains pubs but dovey more standard pub grub and pen is bit more gastro pub?!

Get the boys a doggy yoggi from the ice cream shop, and yourself one too, human ice cream that is!

Out and about

Another nice drive, not far beautiful scenery is Tal-y-llyn Lake and the Tyn-y-cornel Hotel allows dogs in their lake facing lounge and do a nice lunch, and there will be walks around this area too.

From the Midlands you can do this route to drive to Aberdovey or to get home as the journey is exactly the same time going this way as an alternative to going through Machynlleth.

Follow Baxter's Adventures on Instagram 

On Monday this week my Mum and I had the pleasure of a fun packed day with Tracy from Cotton and Crumbs as we booked a one-on-one(two) tuition.

Tracy has a really beautiful modern style and creates what I think are the best sugar flowers and so it was no shock that I picked her to make my wedding cake!

I couldn't have been happier and so after we got married I thought, how fun would it be to have a go ourselves.

We booked a private tuition day so we could style it to suit us, and so we opted to make a variety of sugar flowers, leaves and finally to ice a dummy cake, lustre dust it and arrange our flowers on top.

It was an intense day - which should have been 10am-5.30pm but we didn't end up leaving till 7pm as we must have been a bit too slow - so 9 hours later we had our finished masterpieces.

She runs a variety of classes, from half day, full day to three days or even more! Intense stuff.

We won't quit our day job - but we will practise and try to perfect some new skills we have learnt.

You can buy some video tutorials on the Cotton and Crumbs website which are great value to learn some great new skills.

So the gorgeous Baxter has now been with us 5 weeks, which is also the reason this has been very quiet as my time has been totally taken up by this cute bundle of puppy joy!


He would love for you to follow him at:  https://www.instagram.com/baxter_cockerspaniel/

We have the first 'quiet' weekend we have had for quite a long time!! It will be a nice change from hectic plans or being away from home...sometimes a weekend at home to catch up with your life is just what you need!!

Happy Friday and Enjoy your weekend everyone!

They do a really useful taster pack of 12 flavours - a great way of testing flavours without having to buy all the icing sugars and making them to then find out you don't even like the taste! Thumbs up, fab idea! Only improvement would be to

I also got some of the colours from them, in some shades more toned to flowers and leaves than my current selection.

So Easter Monday I had a little bake and play around with a couple of new nozzles.

I learnt I need to work with smaller bags of icing so I don't warm it up with the heat from my hands as I pipe.

I will look forward to the next set when I can play around with colours and more of the new nozzles.

Watch this space!

After I had been to the baby shower, people really liked the cake and thought they would test my skills by asking me to do their son's birthday cake - he would like a Dinosaur!!

Clearly a novice in this area I got my thinking cap on and had a look on Pinterest for something I felt might be achievable.

I found a design made out of two round cakes, one cut in half as the body and the other into shapes to create the feet, tail and head - this looked like a winner so I set about creating myself a template for the major parts and then excess cake could be used as infill as required.

I made the template out of greaseproof paper and labels the pieces then attached them back to the cake with cocktail sticks - this worked for me but i'm sure there is a more professional way of doing this!

I marbled the cake with green colouring and once baked we could get to work.

I cut all the cake pieces and placed them all on the empty board to check it was going to resemble a dinosaur like shape and once I was happy I did a buttercream base over the whole board, then sandwiched the main body together with buttercream and jam - then placed all the cakes on the board.


Before I started to cover the main body - I did a brown sugar and chocolate sprinkles base to look a bit like mud on the ground.

I then did a crumb coat over the whole body before starting to pipe green icing over the whole cake.

I used a star nozzle and piped all over the body in sections.

I had pre made some spines for the back of the dinosaur in orange and I used some green lustre dust with alcohol to add a bit of interest / design to these to make them more spine like.


I added them onto the dinosaurs back once all the piping was done, and voila we were complete.

The little boy was very pleased as was his mum but I don't want to take on too many of these challenges!

I was pretty busy baking and creating at the weekend as I offered to make a baby shower cake for a friend's shower.

I had an idea in mind...it didn't quite go to plan but still tasted great and everyone seemed to like it.

You live and learn when trying new things.

The cakes and buttercream all went to plan - then the drip...well I did a white chocolate ganache recipe for the drip and planned to colour pink and blue - as you can see the yellow from the chocolate mixed with the blue sadly gave me green haha - but it still tasted ok so not all was lost!

I have always loved cocker spaniels and since the loss of our Oscar pussy cat, the house has been quite empty.

We decided to get ourselves a new addition to add some love and animal madness back into the house!

Meet Baxter!

How many times in your life do you think you will sleep in -5 degree room, on a bed made of ice and purely surrounded by ice and snow! I think it may be a once in a lifetime for me, and what fun it was!

It is hard to explain why you may pick this unusual holiday for a weekend getaway but it really was such a fun experience I am really glad we did it!
We travelled with Discover the World who were great - they charter a flight directly from London to the small local airport, Kiruna, which is only 15 minutes away from the ICEHotel in Jukkasjarvi.

You can opt to have a husky transfer but we saved that for another day and took a quick 15 minute coach transfer to the hotel.

On arrival we had a brief tour and then it was time to check in - our first night was 'on ice' so we couldn't go and unpack as you normally would on arrival - instead you get a locker/changing cubicle depending on your room type and you can get changed and leave all your belongings locked in here.

We got wrapped up in our warm clothes, lots of layers, and headed off for drinks in the Ice Bar to celebrate our arrival.

The bar, deluxe suites and most of the art suites are located in the newly build Ice 365 - which is now, for the first year ever an all year round resort.

We were assigned the Art Suite - Mermaid Fitness which was just fantastic - such works of art, we couldn't believe it.

We had a 'survival' talk at 5pm and were shown the best way to enjoy your night in the cold - and honestly having now done it, you really don't feel the cold if you wear your thermals and snuggle down into your sleeping bag.  I think I went to bed at about 11.30pm and next time I looked at the clock it was 6.30am.

The activities on offer are really great experiences - we enjoyed husky sledging, cross country skiing, feeding reindeers and our finale was a snowmobile trip in search of the Northern Lights - this deserves a post of its own so read more here...

Overall the holiday was a really fun experience which 3 nights, 4 days was just perfect to fit everything in.   It isn't the kind of holiday you do every year, but I would definately return one day - but there is so much more to see so until next time!