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On the menu: Kraken Black Spiced Rum; Alice Temperley & Gordon's; Krups EA8258; glow-in-the-dark gin ice cream; artist-in-restaurant

 

Samuel Muston
Thursday 24 October 2013 21:47 BST
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This week I've been drinking. . . Kraken Black Spiced Rum

There’s nothing like a sea voyage to work up a thirst – especially if said voyage is actually a kraken-hunting expedition. Last week saw the people behind Kraken Black Spiced Rum take to the seas to perform an autopsy on a kraken they’d trapped in the Thames Estuary (OK, so the “kraken” was made out of rum cake and the autopsy was delicious).

Back on shore, the kraken hunters were treated to two cocktails created for the event using the yummy rum. The best, in my book, was Sarah Harker’s Earl of Kraken, a heady brew of herbs and cloudy apple juice smoked with apple hickory woodchips and left to infuse (plus a good glug of rum). Thankfully the drink was darker and stormier than the sea trip it celebrated. krakenrum.com

Click here to see pictures of the kraken autopsy

Krups EA8258

Joy came into my life this week, and it arrived in the back of a Krups delivery van. My new bean-to-cup EA8258 coffee machine has a touchscreen which lets me choose what type, strength and temperature coffee I want. But that’s not the best of it. It also has a timer function, which means that every day as I wake, it does too, and has a steaming hot cup of Joe ready for me as I shuffle from the shower. Alas, though, joy doesn’t come cheap: it costs £549. A lot, certainly, but since it arrived I have stopped buying my morning coffee at £2 a throw, so in less than a year it will have paid for itself. krups.co.uk

Alice Temperley & Gordon's

Fashion designers can barely seem to pass a bottle of booze without wanting to redecorate it at the moment. It’s not always, however, a roaring success. When Jean Paul Gaultier designed a bottle for Piper-Heidsieck, the result looked like it had emerged from a cabaret club in Weimar Germany (not in a good way). Simone Rocha’s effort for Cointreau, meanwhile, looked like it belonged in a bridal shop. Alice Temperley and Gordon’s gin might have cracked it, though. She does what few before her have managed: she’s actually improved the look of the bottle. £14.99, waitrose.com

À la carte art

It sounds like a dream commission. For the past six months, the artist Tim Head has dined at the Michelin-starred London restaurant Pied à Terre, nearly every night. His brief: to observe the place and its people and produce a series of paintings for an exhibition there called À la Carte. For the next 10 weeks, the walls of the dining room will be lined with the “artist-in-restaurant’s” work. And don’t worry, you can pop in without a reservation. pied-a-terre.co.uk

Glow-in-the-dark gin ice cream

Unnecessary invention of the week: glow-in-the-dark gin ice cream. The product of the mind of Charlie Harry Francis of Lick Me I’m Delicious, it’s made from “synthesised jellyfish luminescence” (maybe not a scientific term, that) and costs him £140 a scoop to make.lickmeimdelicious.com

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