When I was preparing the garden for the cabin I used to have, my good friend Andonis and I were talking about a little fence I wanted to make using a plant and I was thinking of having artichoke plants there. They have thorns, especially the wild varieties and I believed that they would be a perfect match. Also their flowers apart from the fact that we eat them, they look quite beautiful as well.
My good friend was joking and he was saying that I should also plant some lentil plants on that fence as well.. Anyway... 
In the garden here in the house I did plant a few along the fence at the back but because that part of the garden is very shady and artichoke plants need a lot of light they did not do very well there... Will plant some in the front garden that receives more light... 

If my cousin Vagelio reads this page she will be amazed. I am sure she remembers how I hated artichokes when I was a kid and my mother made me eat her bloody Artichokes ala Polita. For some reason I didn't like them at all. I think that they have a very distinct taste that was too powerful for my taste buds. But I guess it is an aquired taste and that as you grow older you get to like. Maybe it all started when I started having them raw, or maybe when my friend Hellen made a huge dinner with various dished made from artichokes.. Anyway! I really love it as a plant. 
I bought a lot of them last time I was at the farmers market and cooked them in 3 different ways. I will upload these recipes on the website in the next few days so you will see them for yourselves. 

As food they are full of antioxidants and they lower your cholesterol level and also because they help produce a lot of bile they help with your metabolism and certainly boost it so by eating artichokes you end up loosing weight.

So what else do you want? 

So prepare for nice recipes and you will certainly love them! 

The daisies of the park.. 

So many memories. There is a place in the park where we live where the daisies go crazy every year. I remember being very little and being shorter than them... Remember going in through the plants and turning yellow from the pollen and with so many bugs on my clothes and in my mouth... 

Later in Spring we would collect them to make the 1st of May wreath for the house. I remember my mother teaching me the right way to pluck the flower, put it in the bag and continue with the next one. Then threading them with some string and using these strands to build up the wreath. 

A couple of days ago I thought to make a cake. Wanted to make it with lilac flowers infusing the cream with their tiny beautiful flowers. But it did not turn out as I had hoped... The scent would not infuse the cream and so that idea went to waste. And so I decided to bake another cake. 

As I had moved away from the reds of Easter to the yellows of Spring I decided to make a Lemon Ombre cake with three layers. Did not want to fill it with buttercream so I decided to make a white chocolate ganache and use that as a filling. Then since it would be yellow I thought to take the whole thing further and use Limoncello and lemon juice and rind to give the cake a lot of character. And since I had some home made lemon and orange curd I decided to fill the cake with that as well... 
I also decided to frost it with Swiss meringue buttercream and that too would be with lemon flavor. 

And then I thought of the daisies and decided to decorate the cake with them! So in the beginning I was thinking of calling the cake "Cake Margarita" like the pizza but then decided against that and since we as kids would ask the flower if our beloved one loved us by pulling each petal out I decided to give that name to the cake. 

Hope you find it suitable... 

So... Shall we see the ingredients?