#cloud 23

Not cookery but it's certainly yummy. Went to Cloud 23 for fancy (expensive) cocktails last week. This was called Tart in the City. It's a sophisticated take on the very unsophisticated pudding of my school days - Manchester tart. The little thing on top was a lovely little custard-y miniature tart.

A few weeks ago I was lucky enough to be treated to a night out in Manchester my all my best friends for my 21st birthday. We began the night at one of the nicest bars I've ever been in - Cloud 23. The bar is at the top of Beetham Tower in Manchester, the highest point of the city! And the views were spectacular!

What a way to begin a birthday night out, feeling like very sophisticated adults (although we continued the night at various student bars getting very unflatteringly drunk!!). The night was absolutely amazing and the drinks were top-notch.

Unfortunately, my girls and I didn't exactly fit in at Cloud 23... although we certainly looked the part, I believe the bar accommodates more demure and quiet punters and so after being shot several sideways glances we finished our drinks and got out of there! Not somewhere I would advise you to go with a bunch of rowdy, drunk 21 year olds - perhaps more suited to a chilled out drink with your significant other. However, it was a Wednesday night and so it may be different on the weekends!

I was on a date, in a posh bar. It had that simmering hum of money - no music, you couldn't really hear anyone around you talking, you weren't near anyone you didn't choose to be near. The whole ambience made you feel like keeping it to a murmur.

Into this pool of stillness dropped a disturbance that was small, but in context felt like a hand grenade: a clang and a swirl, like a sound effect from Tom & Jerry. I looked across just as a waitress straightened after picking up the tray she'd dropped on a polished wood floor. She saw me looking and curtsied, the trayless arm artistically outstretched, with the proud seductive smile of a circus acrobat who's just completed the best trick ever.