We have just returned from The White Blackbird’s latest soiree – Bal Argentee – where we hosted a Liquid Nitrogen Ice Cream Bar. Nitrogen, with a boiling of about minus 200 degrees c, can be a little tricky to manoeuvre in a public environment – a pretty chilly tonic.
Luckily, however, we were able to chaperone it from London to Stoke Place Hotel without any loss of life and aside from the fact that if it touches your skin it will instantly freeze it, it really is very good for making ice cream.
The stuff we made was about the freshest it could possibly be, as we were blending the fruit just few hours before serving it. As the nitrogen boils as soon as it makes contact with the cream and other ingredients, it fills the ice-cream with bubbles making for incredibly light and fluffy frosty feast.
We wanted to do four recipes so eventually settled on:
2099 Flake: A futuristic take on the 99. If flake price inflation continues at the current rate, the price will be approximately £2099 in a few years time (aka the future). Instead of the dull milky whippy stuff, we used home made white coffee ice-cream (with a caffeine boost for late night dancing), based upon a recipe by Emy (who wrote the first ever ice-cream book in 1770-something.) Served with a silver flake, of course.
We also made Brown Bread and Brandy, Raspberry and Red Currant and a Mojito Sorbet.
To our great delight, we also got to enjoy the rest of the evening’s frivolities after we finished serving. Trampolines, trips to the woods and human pyramids… a pretty good party in anyone’s books.
We recently had the great honour of being asked to join the Experimental Food Society. At the time, we were experimenting, in the truest sense, with creating a colour changing cocktail (it’s not the easiest thing to do) for our Halloween event Last Legs Veterinary Clinic. We concluded that the E.F.S. Spectacular would be the perfect place to debut this drink.
After figuring out a non-toxic way to make a cocktail change colour, we had the opportunity to work with the extremely talented and super fun, award-winning mixologist Christian Ozzati on the cocktail’s flavour and serving styles and soon came up with the awe-inspiring ‘Bizarregarita’.
On the big day Robin began preparing the cocktail ingredients at 6.30am (vodka never tasted better), so apologies if he seemed a little out of it. During the daytime exhibition we went all fairground on the visitors and ran a ring toss to win Bompas & Parr Ether Jellies as well as face painting and demonstrations of the Bizarregarita. Hello again to all the nice people we met there!
Ziggurat of Flavour - Big Chill Festival 2010
Complete History of Food
Cryptozoology Tours at the Barbican
Barbican Surreal House - Private Launch Party
Parliamentary Waffle House
Café du Pique-Nique
Funeral of the Glacé Cherry, Hamburg
(Guest starring Rosie Adams)
Apparently the cocktail cherry was dead. And who better to morn it than Germany’s Hendrick’s Gin people. For Bompas & Parr, I made up some mournful jellies scented with cucumber and rose, in mournful green and purple, then Rosie and I gave them a lift halfway on our 1000 mile road trip. But at least they could drive in Germany (and there are no speed limits on the autobahns) and everyone was nice. We set up the jellies and the cherry piñata and waited to serve funeral-goers.
A cherry funeral is a funny idea but these guys took it very seriously - ie a 45 minute eulogy in German (not great for us but maybe for them - the crowed laughed twice). Other Hendricks-y stuff like a gramophone DJ and the lighting only being green created a great atmosphere until someone knocked a radiator off the wall and boiling water sprayed out.
Eventually we were evacuated in spite of everyone actively enjoying the phenomenon. Well it’s better to burn out than fade away, as Kurt said, and that would have been a great end to the night. Except all our stuff was in the building and we weren’t allowed back in…
After no one had heard of the hotel we eventually got through to England, found out the name and got a taxi. The taxi drive was lovely and we chatted a bit. On the way to our hotel we sniggered and commented as we passed through the red light district. The driver pulled over…
“No no. We don’t want to stop for sex. We were just remaking on the sleaziness of the area. Please drive us to our hotel now.” Maybe he hadn’t understood us. Oh no wait his English was perfect of course:
“This is your hotel. Between those two sex shops!” Thanks very much.
So we slept well after hard work and some compensatory Champagne (given to everyone after the radiator incident) to the calming soundtrack of girls and politicians giggling.
The next day we went to the Christmas Market and what better a time or place to do it. It was about -5 and amazing. After a good morning we set of with oodles of time and a motorway with no speed limit. That was before the blizzard.
So half the motorway was covered with about 6 inches of snow and everyone was going 25mph. We missed the ferry and eventually (after a few tantrums (Rosie)) we found a hotel and stayed there. The Hotel Seepaard, which means sea horse. It was a least pretty good and snowy. The next day we enjoyed the Netherlands, changed our ferry time, went shopping and got a toastie.
“Please can I see your ID” She said.
“We just want a cake or something.”
“I know, Holland is very strict.” Actually it’s not as strict as England cause that cafe was a house of sinful drug smoking. With very nice cakes.
After the cakes and toasties we went to the ferry and waited for sniffer dogs to bite our knees of but that never happend and we made it home with one wing-mirror definitly not smashed off. The End.
Architectural Punch Bowl
Another fantastic Bompas & Parr event created the world’s lagest punchbowl - so big that visitors had the chance to experience it while sitting on a gigantic orange slice. A ton (no actually a ton) of Courvoisier and radio-controlled garnishes just made up for the build. I worked on it till 7.30am then left the others still working as I had a meeting at 9am (that went surprisingly not that badly) - i think they must have stopped at some point the next day because the guests turned up at 6pm.
Then came probably the most stressful thing I have ever done - helping people aboard the raft. 9/10 would be sailors said something along the lines of, “I’m so malco. I’m definitely going to fall in.” And I was like “Please don’t. If you do health and safety will make us throw away 4000L of punch and everyone can go home… on day one.”
It was build in Edward “the playboy lord” Davenport’s mansion at 33 Portland Place, home of Killing Kittens (“the classy sex-club”) who was at the time under investigation for fraud.
Check out this interesting character here and note the last paragraph about “alleged” pool of Courvoisier.
