Mornflake: The Oat Project

Oat broth with honey soy salmon by Oatopia

I've had the most amazing time this Summer working with one of the oldest family-owned brands in the UK, Mornflake Oats. It's been really hard not to talk about it, but I've had to keep it under wraps until recently, as I was photographing a top secret project!

The Oat Project is a marketing initiative working with Instagram and YouTube influencers - that's people who have gazillions of followers. The influencers were invited into the Mornflake Mill Kitchen to make some of their favourite recipes using Mornflake oats. Warble Entertainments created videos of the recipes and I did the still photography of the influencers and the food.

Having tasted all of the recipes, I can highly recommend them. You can find them all on the Mornflake website in the Recipe section.

I still get a buzz from seeing my images on clients' websites.

Here are just a few of the shots from the four days (I still can't release some others as they aren't public yet), but keep checking into the Mornflake site or Instagram periodically to watch for new recipes.

The guys from @Oatopia1

Chocolate pudding with whisky infused raspberry compote by @Oatopia1

Banana, blueberry and oat bran muffins by @Healthy_twists

@Gains4Girls sample one of their recipes

If you have a food-related business and need some mouth-watering images please get in touch and also take a look at my food portfolio. More recent images can also be found on my Instagram feed.

I also run workshops and offer one to one tuition in Food Styling and Photography. Details can be found on the Love Your Lens website.

Much more than just coffee - Barista workshop at Food Sorcery Didsbury

I LOVE coffee! I also love the cafe culture and scene that has ever growing popularity in our towns and cities. I consider myself a bit of a coffee snob, looking down on the national and global chains, preferring the superior coffee taste and ambience offered by the independent coffee shops. However, I met some serious hard core coffee lovers today (I can't tell you what they thought of my admission to owning a Nespresso machine) and I learned an enormous amount about the ritual of brewing a proper cup of coffee.

I booked a place on Food Sorcery's Barista Workshop as I wanted to learn how to make a latte that would look great on my food photography shots (more on this later). The workshop took place at their cookery school in Didsbury and was led by Gavin aka @brewxtillxdeath on Instagram. Gavin has been making and serving coffee for almost twenty years and has opened his own coffee shops, the latest being in Lloyds Bank in Manchester.

He started us off with a cold brew, served with ice and tonic water. Bizarre but I'm told very refreshing and increasingly popular (I have had an aversion to cold coffee ever since a childhood rough sea trip mixed with strong cold coffee ended badly).

Luckily for me we quickly moved on to various ways of brewing hot coffee. Well, when I say 'quickly' it was a lot more involved than chucking a Nespresso capsule into the machine and frothing some milk!

Making the perfect cup of coffee involves weighing, grinding, timing and lots of equipment I've never seen before. It was a new world of coffee jargon and techie gadgets that my husband would have loved!

Who knew that you needed special scales ("the sort drug dealers use to precision weigh their product" quipped an innocent-looking Australian lady...) to weigh out 18g per cup?

We were also introduced to a V60 and a specialist kettle with a gooseneck spout for targeted pouring. My Christmas list grew longer as the workshop went on.

Gavin shared lots of great tips on where to buy the best coffee beans from and then how to combine the right amount of ground coffee and water to get the taste just right. We learned that we had to 'bloom' the coffee, time the 'extraction time' to perfection and 'stretch' the milk.

We all had a go at steaming the milk and then at creating latte artwork... with varying degrees of success. I'd love to say that the above tulip was my own work but unfortunately my 'masterpiece' required some artistic license to interpret.

I am still slightly wired by all the coffee I drank this morning, but would highly recommend this workshop to any coffee-heads or would-be baristas. I don't think there's anything Gavin doesn't know about coffee and he's extremely passionate about it, as evidenced by his tattoo.

At home I had a go at my own latte art using my totally unsuitable Nespresso machine. Needless to say it was less than impressive. However, I've decided to blame the weather, as I was told by an expert today that the weather does affect coffee! It will be a while before my latte art will be good enough to grace my food photography shots. Until then I'll leave it to the experts!

I'm running a workshop at Food Sorcery in September, where you will get the opportunity to cook, photograph and eat Mexican food! To book and for more information click here.

Say cheese! Capturing the close partnership between a Yorkshire dairy farm and an award winning cheesemonger

I recently had the opportunity to photograph a wonderful cheesemongers in the heart of the Yorkshire Dales. The Courtyard Dairy is a specialist cheese shop and cafe, selling thirty varieties of cheese from the UK and continental Europe.

Kathy and Andy Swinscoe

The owners, Kathy and Andy Swinscoe, are passionate about promoting and supporting the few remaining independent farmhouse cheese makers in Yorkshire.

They have formed a strong partnership with Tom and Clare Noblet of Whin Yeats Dairy Farm, about ten miles away.

The photography brief was to convey the story of the two  businesses and to promote their locally made farmhouse cheese.

We visited Whin Yeats Dairy Farm and were warmly welcomed by Tom and Clare and their four children. The working day on a dairy farm is hard, with 5am starts and no real time off, but the couple were very laid back and their children delighted in their 'giant playground'. They take part in daily chores like feeding the lambs and know the names of the many cattle.

In the milking parlour

Life on the farm at Whin Yeats

Tom and Clare produce two varieties of unpasteurised, pressed, cloth bound cheeses that are both sold at the Courtyard Dairy. Whin Yeats is one of just two farms in Yorkshire that produce farmhouse cheeses.

Andy and Kathy are very passionate about the cheeses they stock in their shop and use in their cafe and it's fair to say that cheese is their life.