Bake a Cake on Mother’s Day

In the spirit of embracing the traditions of my new home, and of treating my body to a calm Sunday afternoon after a great St Patrick’s Day celebration last night, I’m enjoying a refreshing peppermint tea at one of my favorite tea rooms in London, Camellia’s Tea House in Soho.

The British celebrate Mother’s Day, or “Mothering Sunday”, today, on the 4th Sunday of Lent. I heard it’s customary in some parts of the UK to treat mothers on this special day to an afternoon tea and, of course, with the tea comes the cake! So, it’s a particularly good day to visit a traditional English teahouse. I’d like to think that some of the smiling ladies sipping tea and sharing scones, muffins and cake around me are mothers with their loved ones.

Apparently it’s also tradition in the UK for mothers to bake a cake on Mother’s Day. The custom was born because fasting rules for Lent were relaxed on this day in honor to the “Feeding of the Five Thousand”, a story from the Christian Bible. The cake especially associated with this day is called a Simnel cake, a fruit cake with two layers of almond paste, one on the top and one in the center. It looks good!

Below are a couple of recipes for Simnel cake for those of you who are interested:

Traditional British Mothering Sunday Simnel Cake – Food.com

Simple Simnel Cake – BBC.com Saturday Kitchen

Hopefully this time next year we’ll see a few events on Epicurely celebrating mother’s day with traditional English cakes and tea! That would be fun. 

Epicurely v1 - Design Sneak Peak

Over the past couple of months our team has been working diligently to bring Epicurely to life. Between the three of us, we have traveled thousands of miles working across multiple time zones (New York to London to Tokyo to Bogota to San Francisco), but thanks to the glories of the Interwebs and innovations like Gmail, Skype, Dropbox and Basecamp, we’ve made steady progress on what we expect to be a kick-ass product.

While we’re not quite ready to open Epicurely up to the world, we are excited to be able to share some screen shots of the latest designs with you.

The first screen provides you with a glimpse in to how users will discover nearby “feasts” in their area. Users will be able to see when the feast is, the type of feast it is, who’s hosting, who’s invited/attending, etc.

The second screen is for a specific feast. Here you can dig in to the details, see who’s going and what they’re contributing (food, drinks or cash), RSVP to the event, as well as post comments and pictures.

Pretty cool, huh?

We’ve had the good fortune of working closely with a talented and passionate user experience & design agency in San Francisco. Our friends at Momentum Design Labs worked closely with us to evolve initial mockups, wireframes and rough designs into a cohesive and elegant user interface. We threw lots of ideas at the wall, saw what stuck, and worked iteratively to achieve a design we are all proud of.

We’re pretty excited and we hope you are too…

Epicurely v1 - Collaborative Dinner Parties

Epicurely: connecting people through food

Food touches all of us

Wherever I happen to be, I’ve found that people are genuinely happy to share their food traditions and customs. People have emotional connections with food that run deep. These connections are part of who we are. They are part of our personal and cultural identity. Food touches the best in all of us, which is why we’re so open to sharing our food traditions with others. Food evokes warm memories from the past; vivid recollections of our favorite meal as a child, exotic flavors from a memorable trip, the culinary traditions of our home country. Oftentimes, these memories present themselves in full force, transporting us to distant times in an almost unparalleled level of detail. Marcel Proust famously captured these sensations in his novel, In Search of Lost Time (Remembrance of Things Past).

When from the distant past nothing remains, after the beings have died, after the things are destroyed and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, yet more vital, more insubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of everything else; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the immense architecture of memory.

Yet again I had recalled the taste of a bit of madeleine dunked in a linden-flower tea which my aunt used to give me… immediately the old gray house on the street where her room was found, arose like a theatrical tableau…[1]

Like Proust’s madeleine, even the most negligible, the most unexpected treat, has the power to evoke rich involuntary recollections that may otherwise lay dormant for years. Food is deeply rooted in our warmest memories and thus, it’s easy to understand why we feel a sense of pride, an implicit awareness that we’re sharing part of our personal story, whenever we share our food traditions with others.

Food bridges social and cultural barriers. It’s a universal language that connects us regardless of who we are or where we come from.

Epicurely’s Mission

We are on a mission to empower anyone who loves cooking to share their food with others. We want to make it easier for people to organize food-related events and meet others sharing similar interests.  Concretely, we are creating an online marketplace for home chefs to share their creations and spaces with food enthusiasts in their area.

Please subscribe to our blog to receive all the latest news, updates and photos as we turn Epicurely into a reality and help connect people through food!

The team behind Epicurely

Santiago (@SirTeno), Kim (@Kimtaro), Kirk (@McMurrak)

[1] Marcel Proust, Du côté de chez Swann (1913) in: À la recherche du temps perdu vol. 1, p. 47 (Pléiade ed. 1954)(S.H. transl.)