12a Club, Cambridge

Cambridge Market Square
View over Cambridge's Market Square from the 12a Club

I live twelve miles outside Cambridge, far away enough that the only traffic is tractors and the occasional little girl on a horse. I’m in town a few times a week, but you’ll have noticed that I don’t have a lot to say about Cambridge on Gastronomy Domine. It’s not, to put it politely, a restaurant or bar destination. The city has what the papers call a “carbon-copy high street” problem: a survey last year found it the third worst town in the country for independent retailers and restaurants.

There’s a historical reason for this. Almost all of the property in the city centre is owned by the university colleges, and their monopoly on rents means that they can raise prices to a level that’s just not attainable for small businesses. As a result, the city centre has silted up with chains. It’s kind of depressing to reach the realisation that Jamie’s Italian is the best you’re going to manage without hopping on a bike or getting a cab. (You’re not going to be driving; the parking situation is horrible too.) The bar situation is, if anything, even worse – massive chains like B Bar, All Bar One and Revolution crammed to sweaty unpleasantness with student rugby clubs and belligerent sixth formers.

So when my buddy Douglas asked me to come with him to check out a new bar right on the Market Square, about as central as you can get, I was unenthusiastic. “It’ll prolly be horrid,” I texted back; “Central Cam, ffs. All the bars here = rubbish.”

I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy to be proved wrong in my life.

The 12a Club is on the upper floors of one of the only privately owned buildings in this part of town. The colleges and city council have the ability to impose some rather stringent licensing restrictions on new openings, and the restrictions they hit the owners of 12a with would have stopped most businesses dead in their tracks. The licence says the bar has to operate as a private members’ club. There can be no advertising; all new business has to come in by word of mouth. And 12a isn’t even allowed a sign outside the door. Add to this the fire department’s refusal to grant a hot food licence because of the age of the building, throw in some health and safety regulations about not being allowed to open the lovely Victorian sash windows, and you’ve got the sort of business that’s going to require some very creative thinking and a couple of air conditioning units to get underway.

12a Club
Main bar area, 12a Club

We were buzzed in through a little door between a touristy Italian restaurant and Marks and Spencer, climbed a narrow flight of stairs – and found ourselves in a 21st-century speakeasy. This is the direction the restrictive licensing has inspired the owners to take the place in: quietly masculine dark woods, raw brick and distressed leather, decoration recalling the 1920s, huge vases of lilies, and a soft vintage feel. The room pretty much instructs you to sit back and get comfortable with the aid of some snappy waitress service; the handsomely stocked bar provides all the extra encouragement you’ll need.

The champagne and wine list is, in keeping with the secretive nature of things in these parts, hidden in the back of an old book. A bookmark turns out, on closer inspection, to be a cocktail list: fantastic, grown-up, pre-prohibition cocktails of the sort we’ve almost forgotten about, all Aviations, Gimlets and Gourmets. This list is only a suggestion, meant to set the tone for your evening; even if you’re more the pink girly drink kind of person, they’ll happily knock up any cocktail you ask for. There are some people seriously educated in the art of the cocktail behind this bar, though, and it’s worth trusting their expertise and widening your horizons a little beyond strawberry daiquiris. There are six different kinds of bitters on the bar, floral syrups, a jar of house-made limoncello infusing away, and by far the most comprehensive and eclectic list of spirits that I’ve seen this side of London.

Menus and top hat
A stack of wine lists masquerading as books

It was the little details that really caught me at 12a. The smell of wood polish in the main room; the ice in my drinks (not cubes, but hand-carved spheres, so your cocktail isn’t diluted by a fast melt); the exceptional drinks smarts of Mark, our host, who works front-of-house and performs alchemy behind the bar. He offered to “surprise me” with a cocktail – and he’d been listening so carefully to my waffling about food and drink over the preceding hour that he managed to get my taste down absolutely pat. An Old Fashioned with Gosling’s dark rum and shavings of dark chocolate, pepped up with one of those bottles of bitters (I wish I’d had the presence of mind to ask which one) which married the rum to the chocolate so smoothly it was almost enough to bring a tear to the eye. Hands down my favourite cocktail so far this year. A visit later in the week with a whisky-hound friend from New York saw Mark speak to him for a minute about his preferences and come back with a soft whisky finished in sauternes barrels which, he said, suited him so well it was as if Mark had read his mind. On our original visit, Douglas was presented with a Cambridge Butterfly: a work-in-progress cocktail that isn’t yet on the menu. Grapefruit, Butterfly absinthe, and god only knows what else. I hope it makes it onto the permanent list; I don’t think I’ve tasted a cocktail with such an interesting flavour profile before, swinging wildly in the mouth from citrus to liquorice to sugary sweetness to a floral intensity.

The 12a Club is pretty new, and they’re still tweaking the formula. There are ideas for a salumi room; for a less tightly-focussed wine list (at the moment most of what’s on offer is Italian wine, which can be a little impenetrable for some); for monthly tastings of wines, whiskies and rums; members’ events like a 1920s New Year’s Eve party; and quarterly charity nights. A change I’d really like to see is the addition of an espresso machine, but given that this is the only thing that occurred to me after a couple of weeks’ considered attempt to find something wrong with the place, I’d say that they have things pretty much down pat as it is.

Behind the bar
Behind the bar

As of June 7, there’s a plan to open in the day so that members can have access to the two very private upstairs rooms, which have all the audio-visual equipment needed for business meetings. At the moment, these rooms are free to use on a first-come, first-served basis for members. (They’re also very pleasant for less serious get-togethers.) This sort of focus on business clients is a smart move; I can’t be the only person in these parts who has an occasional need for meeting rooms, and my experience elsewhere in the city has been both expensive and totally uninspiring. These rooms are much more up my street: beautiful, comfortable…and with waitress service and a champagne list.

The club has a bare-bones website with contact details and membership information. Head on over to have a look!

Bob Bob Ricard, Soho, London

Bob Bob Ricard interiorI’d been invited to Bob Bob Ricard (1 James St, Soho W1F 9DF – see the restaurant link for menus, phone and email reservations) to try a new cocktail: an English 75 with an Earl Grey syrup. What was meant to be a quick sip at the bar turned into a lengthy series of vodka shots in tiny, iced crystal glasses; a selection of really interesting cocktails; and several jewel-like little plates of Russian appetisers, the better to set off the drinks. Leonid “Bob” Shutov, one of the two owners (Richard Howarth is the “Ricard” part of the equation), spent an hour or so leading Douglas and me through the menu, structured around English club food with the odd injection of Russian standards; around the restaurant, outrageously lovely in a sort of Trans-Siberian-Express meets Japanese lacquer box way; and through the cocktail menu and extravagantly stocked wine cellar.

I’m not usually much swayed by good interior design in a restaurant, being approximately 95% motivated by food even when I’m not eating, but the attention to detail and quirky beauty of BBR’s dining room is so good that it acts as a seasoning. I mentioned to Leonid that I seriously, seriously coveted the wallpaper panelling the room, all midnight blue flowers and tiny flocks of sparrows sweeping in gorgeous waves across the walls. “It’s Japanese bookbinding papers. We had to do it four times before it was right; the pieces the paper is supplied in are this big.” (Uses hands to demonstrate a disquietingly small rectangle.) I spent the rest of my visit staring, but I couldn’t see any joins anywhere.

Bar, Bob Bob Ricard
Downstairs bar

You’ll find a gold “press for champagne” button at each Pullman-booth dining table, marble panelling feathered with veining so sumptuous that I thought it had been painted on, bronze lap dogs to guard your umbrella, magnificent deco lighting, marquetry floors and handsome brass fittings. As it turns out, the restaurant was designed by David Collins (the Wolseley, Claridge’s bar, all that good stuff). It’s highly individual, and such a beautiful space that I decided I needed a spot more exposure to it. I finished my surprise lunch and immediately booked a table for later in the week – BBR was so interesting that I was very keen to see what the evening service was like, and how things go when you’re not there as a guest of the owner. (In brief, things go very well indeed – it’s a wonderfully romantic spot for an evening meal, and the quality of what was on our plates didn’t waver.)

Before you launch on anything else, you’ll need to make a cocktail/wine decision. Cocktails are superb and enjoyably imaginative (I ended up going the cocktail route with Dr W, so more on those later), but BBR’s wine cellar and markup policy are something rather special. The restaurant has a cellar to suit the wine tastes of any business tsar (sorry) you bring for dinner, but marks itself out by never charging more than £50 markup on any bottle of reserve wine. This curious bit of policy means that where you’d spend £923 on a bottle of 1999 Bollinger Vieilles Vignes at somewhere like Le Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons, that very same bottle at BBR will rock up at a positively reasonable-sounding £294. A 1986 Chateau Leoville Las Cases is £338 here (£905 at le Coq d’Argent) and, for dessert, a 2002 Chateau d’Yquem that costs £310 at Ducasse at the Dorchester is less than a third as expensive, at £96. This is still a bit too rich for my blood, but for a very special occasion, I can see myself jumping on a bottle of 03 Sassicaia Tenuta San Guido at £129 – especially given that you can’t actually find the wine anywhere else in the UK. BBR bought up the whole stock from that year.

Happily, there’s plenty available for less hair-raising prices, and plenty on offer by the glass too.

Keta on quail's eggs
Keta on quails' eggs

James Walker, ex of le Pont de la Tour, is in the kitchen doing all kinds of thrilling things with quail eggs and caviar. The menu here is a funny amalgam of Edwardian nursery/chophouse and Russian swank, and I loved it. The rich, salty, oily Russian starters on the menu (denoted with a little Russian flag beside each item) are the perfect foil to the gloriously austere Kauffman collection vodka or the slightly fiercer Russian Standard Imperial – drunk before a mouthful of yolky quail’s egg topped with keta (Russian salmon roe), a bite of cured herring, a darkly salted cucumber or a fork’s tip draped with a silky, beautifully fresh quail eggs mayonnaise. These little shots, clinked together in shimmering little crystal glasses straight from the freezer over some unashamedly pretty food, turn out to be a perfectly joyous way to start an evening out, and a great sharing experience with friends. And the prices on these lovely little bites (you might look to share four as a starter between two people) are very encouraging – the keta with quails’ eggs was £4.50, the herring £3.50.

Jellied oxtongue with creamed horseradish
Jellied oxtongue with creamed horseradish

At a Russian friend’s wedding a few years ago, we ate a braised beef brisket, cooked for hours and shredded, then suspended in a disc of aspic. A delicious thing, a bit like the inside of a very jellied pork pie without the crust. Most of the wedding guests at our table were squeamish British sorts, and Dr W and I found ourselves the only people at the table to finish the dish and then to steal it off everyone else’s plates. I’ve not seen the same preparation since (despite some concerted effort at eating Russian in Helsinki), until lo – BBR has a version as good as anybody’s aspic fantasies. Here, the meat used is shredded tongue, and the little roundel of aspic is packed with sweet, fresh peas, slivers of carrot cut into fanciful shapes with an aspic cutter, threads of cress, and more dense, beefy flavour than you’d believe you could fit into such a small space. (There is also a quail’s egg in there, of course.) A little timbale of a sweet and mild Russian horseradish is a beautiful foil to what turns out to be a weirdly delicate, literally mouth-melting plate.

Although wild Beluga is available, most of what’s on offer caviar-wise is the farmed roe from Aquitaine. I’m a huge enthusiast for farmed caviar; it’s a reliable product and it’s helping to democratise the price of a very special ingredient. The nutty, pearly roe is served with blinis, or as part of an Eggs Royale – an Eggs Benedict with smoked salmon on the muffin instead of ham, a gout of really good hollandaise, a plump poached egg…and a giant dollop of caviar. It’s the first time I’ve come across caviar treated as a condiment, and thinking about the dish is still making my mouth water nearly two weeks later.

CocktailsThe cocktail list is enormously good fun. A rhubarb gin and tonic (the restaurant’s signature cocktail, now available year-round), made with a poached rhubarb syrup and one of the pinkest, prettiest drinks I’ve had in ages, uses a gin without too much in the way of botanicals to let the floral, rosy headiness of the rhubarb sing. There’s a clear Bloody Mary, made with the clear juices of fresh tomatoes, extracted overnight. It’s a drink that packs a glorious vine scent and a real hit of umami on the tongue. There’s intense tomato flavour with no redness – it’s positively discombobulating. You’re given a little bottle of Tabasco and some Worcestershire sauce to spice your own drink with, so the beautiful clarity of the drink isn’t spoiled before you’ve had a good chance to play with it for a bit.

Pork cheek was poached in a dense, rich jus full of star anise and tomato. Glossy and malevolently dark, it’s served with some very fine Yukon Gold mash. And I went for the evening’s special, a rose veal Rossini, which came in at a positively bargainsome £24.50, giving me a great excuse to order another cocktail. I’ve always liked veal better than beef in a Rossini; the more delicate flavour of the meat works better, for me, against the strong flavours of foie and truffles in the dish, and this was cooked to a lovely pinkness, moist and tender to the tooth. My little lobe of foie was seared glass-crisp on the outsides, melting velvety-smooth inside. And the truffly, oily, garlicky smear of duck pate on the crouton that sat on the side of the plate was so good that Dr W, having been offered a bite, made a noise I haven’t ever heard before.

The plate of cakes we asked for for dessert was a bit dry, and each of the six little bites was really rather ordinary. I was so full I didn’t really care, though – and an Affogato coffee was exactly the sort of alternative I was after, the ice cream shot through with vanilla seeds.

You can go to BBR and spend your entire inheritance in one night, if you try. You can also go and, with some judicious ordering, come away with a wallet not particularly lightened. Head along at night, when the restaurant positively twinkles, explore the more curious corners of the menu, and tell them I sent you.

Hot buttered rum batter

For years, I thought I didn’t like hot buttered rum very much. An oily smear of butter floating on a thin pool of rum-flavoured hot water – nobody’s idea of fun. And then last winter, I saw someone in a restaurant at Lake Tahoe (Ciera at the Montbleu hotel – pricey but pleasant) drinking a creamy, hot, cinnamon-smelling glass of something wonderful. I asked the waiter what it was – hot buttered rum. I ordered a glass: rich and buttery, spicy, full of heat and kick from the rum, and silky smooth. How did they get it to emulsify in the glass like that? The waiter said he wasn’t allowed to give me a recipe, but did say that the chef made it with a sort of batter he prepared using butter and ice cream, and kept it in the freezer. It’s the ice cream which makes the mixture, butter and all, emulsify so pleasingly and creamily in the glass (or mug, if you’re at home); and a tub you’ve made for yourself will keep for months in the freezer, so it’s an excellent thing to have on hand for surprise guests. As far as Christmas/winter drinks go, this one’s approximately 100% bad for you (do not do what I did last night and have four of them in a row if you don’t want to feel a bit unwell), which unfortunately means it’s also about 100% delicious.

I made up a few different sets of batter from recipes I found on the Internet. None of them really hit the spot; in common with a lot of American recipes, I found most of them very, very sweet and a bit bland, relying on the vanilla ice cream for much of their flavour. The recipe below is my take on things, rather less sugary than most of the US recipes. I’ve also used maple syrup along with soft brown sugar for its flavour; and I’ve spiced quite aggressively, especially when it comes to the nutmeg, which has a wonderful affinity with rum. Allspice, like the rum, is Jamaican in origin, and works incredibly well here. And don’t save this mixture just for dolloping in your hot rum and water: as I write this, I’m drinking a lump of the stuff dissolved in a strong mug of coffee, and it’s heavenly.

Things like this make winter a bit less grim.

To make just over a litre of batter to keep in the freezer, you’ll need:

500ml vanilla ice cream
500g salted butter, softened
200g soft brown sugar
200ml maple syrup
1½ tablespoons allspice
2 tablespoons ground cinnamon
1 whole nutmeg, grated

Let the ice cream sit at room temperature until it’s the texture of whipped cream. (You can also make this once the ice cream is completely melted, but I prefer the lighter texture you can achieve using a half-melted tub.) In a large bowl, use an electric whisk to cream together the butter, brown sugar and maple syrup until you have a thick, fluffy mixture. Dump the spices on top with the ice cream and continue to whisk for about five minutes, until the batter is smooth and light. Transfer to containers for freezing.

When you come to make up your drink, just put a dollop of the mixture at the bottom of a mug or glass (I like about three heaped teaspoons in a small mug – your mileage may vary) and add a measure of rum with a small pinch of salt. The salt won’t make the drink salty, but it will act to lift the buttery flavour. Pour over water straight from the kettle to fill the mug, stir until the batter is dissolved, sit down in front of the fire and get drinking.

Pimm’s Fruit Cup

Summer in the UK is a fragile, short-lived and unreliable thing (yesterday, in flaming June, we had tornadoes and hailstones), so when the sun shines and the air is balmy, especially here in Cambridge, we tend to overcompensate slightly with garden parties, great strings of barbecued sausages, silly hats, flowery frocks and that sine qua non of chi-chi English outdoor gatherings: a few jugs of Pimm’s Fruit Cup. A sweet, pinkish liqueur based on gin, Pimm’s is available in every off-licence and supermarket in the country; and we mix it with lemonade and what bemused foreigners interpret as a fruit salad, kick back and proceed to get completely sloshed in the sun. There’s a certain class thing at work here. Shakespeare in the Park? We drink Pimm’s. Wimbledon? Pimm’s. May Balls? Pimm’s. Opera at Glyndebourne? Pimm’s. We also drink it because it’s delicious, potent and tends to render pretty 20-year-old students of both genders delightfully cuddly.

This fruity, aromatic, rounded cocktail base was invented by James Pimm, who ran a tavern in the City of London. He came up with the drink, based on gin with fruit, herbs and quinine, some time in the 1820s, soon finding it was so popular that he was able to produce it on a large scale to be sold to other taverns and clubs. It’s been a popular summer drink ever since, although the amount of alcohol in the stuff has definitely been reduced by the company that now owns the trademark (Pimm’s has in my lifetime reduced its alcohol percentage from 35% ABV to 25%). You can remedy this by adding a splash of gin to your cocktail.

Pimm’s is a substance sadly missed by those who come to the university here for a year or so from overseas. When visiting friends we made at university who have since moved back to America or other Pimm’s-free lands, we usually try to bring a bottle for them so we can all spend an evening reliving our glided youth. But I bear glad tidings for the overseas summer alcoholic. You can actually make the base mix for your Pimm’s (which we shall now call ‘fruit cup’ – and indeed, Pimm’s is not the only available brand; try Plymouth Fruit Cup for a rather more aromatic option, or Stone’s Fruit Cup for a distinct ginger kick) out of a mixture of liqueurs you may well have in the drinks cupboard already – use 2 parts 40% gin, 2 parts red vermouth, 1 part Cointreau (or your favourite orange liqueur), 1 part sweet port and a dash of Angostura bitters. It’ll be a bit stronger than the pre-bottled stuff, but it tastes very fine indeed. If you do decide to make your own fruit cup from scratch, Hendrick’s gin, with its cucumbery overtones, really comes into its own here – and if you use Dubonnet for your red vermouth, you can award yourself the Queen Mother seal of approval: Dubonnet was her all-time favourite liquid.

You should build your drink in a large jug by gently muddling a small handful of mint in 1 part Pimm’s or home-made fruit cup, then adding 1 part lemonade and 1 part ginger ale, with a good handful of soft English summer fruits, some sliced cucumber and fresh mint bobbing about in the jug with some ice. I like raspberries frozen into ice cubes, so they float rather than sink to the bottom initially – this means that you can arrange for some raspberries to end up in everybody’s glass, and the freezing makes the cell walls burst, so once the cubes have melted, the liquid at the bottom of your glass will be syrupy with raspberry juice. Borage flowers (a blue flower with a taste reminiscent of cucumber) are a traditional addition, and look lovely in the drink if you can find them. One jugful will be enough for a lovely boozy evening for two.

Veritable Quandary, Portland, OR

I have been skiing vigorously all day, and I’m as tired as a dog – so what you’re getting here is going to be a spot shorter than usual. Veritable Quandary (VQ to locals) is a bar and restaurant serving killer-fantastic cocktails, and food which is thoroughly decent if not extraordinary. It’s right next to the Hawthorne Bridge in Portland, with an excellent view of the Willamette river. Look out for the portrait on the inner wall of the conservatory featuring someone looking like a female, Victorian Charles Atlas.

The drinks are simply fantastic. At the top of the page is a VQ-8 – the house Bloody Mary, made with a home-infused beet vodka, making it a gorgeous, lurid magenta and giving the whole drink wonderfully earthy depth. Try the aromatic martini made with limoncello and a lavender-infused vodka (again, made in the bar) – wonderful stuff.

Another time, I think I might be tempted to visit VQ for their drinks and bar snacks alone. I had one of those bar snacks as a starter – these dates (left), wrapped in pancetta and stuffed with goat’s cheese and Marcona almonds. Lovely sticky, sweet, salty, crispy, squashy things to nibble alongside a drink. Dr W’s snackish starter was a very tasty rabbit terrine (below), served with huge hunks of fresh, toasted brioche, a couple of mustards and some chutney.

Main courses thrilled me less. Barbecued boneless beef short rib was always going to be unsophisticated, but the saucing was altogether too much, and the meat itself felt sad and overdone (although this could have been a result of a too-fierce sauce masking the joint’s own flavour). The barley risotto it was perched on top of, though, was great, full of chunks of apple and roast butternut squash. Dr W’s steak was…a steak. A perfectly nice steak, although we both felt we could have happily swapped it and the short rib for a few more of those far more interesting starters.

Full of meat and cocktails, we had two $1 truffles for dessert. They were sticky, dense and coated the inside of your mouth beautifully. I’ve since heard from friends that other desserts are also great – the home-made ice-creams and sorbets (look for flavours like roasted hazelnut, spiced cider and red wine-pomegranate) and the souffles got a particular mention. Head to VQ for views, cocktails, dessert and nibbles – and, like many other Portland restaurants, uncommonly attractive waiting staff. What’s going on there?

Sangria

I know plenty of books and Internet commentators will tell you strictly that you should only ever cook or mix cocktails with wines you would be happy to drink on their own. I thumb my (adorable button) nose at them. I’ve made this sangria twice in the last week with two different £3 bottles of Rioja, and I can assure you that using a more expensive bottle will simply be a waste of money – I cringe to imagine you stirring orange juice and sugar into a really good wine. On the other hand, it is worth buying a good lemonade for this drink (lemon soda like Sprite for Americans, not the fresh stuff). I like Schweppes.

You should make and drink your sangria in the same evening. If it hangs around for more than a few hours, the wine can oxidise and sour. The evening you make it, though, your sangria will be delicious: it’s a drink full of sunshine and goes very well with some salsa music and tapas.

To make 2 l of sangria, you’ll need:

1 bottle Rioja
3 large, juicy oranges
2 tablespoons caster sugar
1 lime
1 apple
1 small wineglass brandy
Lemonade
Ice

You’ll need a 2 l jug, preferably with a wide neck, to mix this in.

Dissolve the sugar in the juice of two of the oranges in the bottom of the jug. Slice the remaining orange, skin and all, into thick pieces with the lime and the cored apple, and drop them into the jug. Pour over the bottle of wine and the brandy, then add a large handful of ice and carefully fill the jug to the top with lemonade. Stir and serve immediately.

Disco gin and tonic – yours to make at home with some electronic engineering

Regular readers will be aware of my tragic addiction to all things Las Vegas. It’s been nearly six months since our last visit, and I am pining for bright lights and cocktails. Few things make a drink nicer than some coloured lights in the vicinity.

Dr Weasel, ever alert to the causes of his wife’s grumpiness, decided to cheer me up by making me an animated, brightly lit drinks coaster.

Here it is under a gin and tonic:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xB8pWBLnvlw]

And here it is, glass-free, displaying a spinning galactic ice-cube.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QZgs8Dla2Q]

The coaster can be driven from any PC with a serial port and will display any 10×10-pixel video you wish. Over to Dr Weasel for his version of a recipe (100% less lead-free than the recipes you’ll usually find here).

You will need:

30 1K 0805 resistors (R1 – R30)
30 MBTA42 NPN transistors (Q1 – Q30)
10 100 Ohm 0805 resistors (R31 – R40)
10 FMMT717 PNP transistors (Q31 – Q40)
5 74HC594 SOIC shift registers (IC1 – IC5)
4 100nF 1206 capacitors (C1 – C4)

and finally:

100 TB5-V120-FLUX-RGB8000 RGB LEDs (LED00 – LED99)

The LEDs can be hard to get hold of at a decent price; eBay is once again the friend of the penurious electrical engineer.

Manufacture one or more PCBs using these Gerber and drill files. A double-sided PTH process is required, so it is probably best to use one of the various small-volume professional PCB manufacturers; I have found PCB Train in the UK to be fairly reliable. Assemble the board, taking great care when soldering the surface mount components. I found this one to be right at the limit of my dexterity.

Attach power and data cables to the connector in the bottom right of the board. Seen from above, we number the six pins:

1 2 3
4 5 6

The corresponding signals are:

  1. XVOLTS – drive voltage for LEDs. Connect to 4V current limited supply.
  2. SERIAL_CLOCK – shift data from SERIAL_DATA on positive-going edge.
  3. SERIAL_LATCH – latch 40 bits from shift register to LED control on positive-going edge.
  4. GROUND – common ground.
  5. 5VOLTS – supply voltage for control circuitry. Connect to 5V supply.
  6. SERIAL_DATA – input data for shift register.

To scan the display, clock 10 4-bit numbers into the shift register. To clock in a bit:

  • bring SERIAL_CLOCK low
  • modify SERIAL_DATA
  • bring SERIAL_CLOCK high

Once 40 bits have been clocked in, the SERIAL_LATCH signal can be brought high to transfer them to the LED control circuitry. Each 4 bit number selectively enables the red, green and blue LEDs in one row, and selectively disables all LEDs in one column. So if we clock in a string:

0011 0100 0111 ...
RGCB RGCB RGCB

This sets all the LEDs in row 0 to blue, all the LEDs in row 1 to green and all the LEDS in row 2 to cyan (green + red). It disables all the LEDs in columns 0 and 2. By rapidly clocking in various combinations of values (typically with only 1 of the 10 column-disable bits low), we can scan the array to build up an image, and use pulse-width modulation to give a range of apparent intensities.

This firmware can be used with an Atmel ATmega644 to generate the required signals in response to serial input from a PC or Mac.

A couple of words of warning. Modern LEDs can be very bright indeed. You could probably hurt yourself pretty badly by dialling them up to full intensity and ignoring your look-away reflex, so don’t. Also, when debugging your firmware it is easy to stall the scanning process and burn out the precious LEDs. Use a decent current-limited bench power supply, with the current dialled back to a few tens of milliamps to avoid this happening.

Literary cocktails

I am female and approaching 30 at a headlong rush. This means I like cocktails. I am fortunate, then, in living near Cambridge, where the River Bar and Kitchen perches above the river, over a gym whose window gives a splendid view of a hot tub full of svelte ladies which you have to sidle past to get to the bar.

The Kitchen part of the River Bar and Kitchen is not as glorious as the Bar part, so I’ll gloss over it; I ate there with some friends a couple of weeks ago and was rather disappointed (dry meats, vinegary preparation, identikit saucing). The cocktails, though, are well worth a visit.

A few months ago, gurgling happily over a Manhattan (equal measures bourbon and vermouth, with a cherry and some orange zest and a dash of bitters), I was told by a friend with something pink and creamy on the end of her nose that I only like pretentious grown-up cocktails. I think this means that I prefer cocktails which aren’t sugary and full of things squirted out of a cow, but I will admit to a certain mental frailty – I get a tiny kick (OK, a massive one) out of the Literary Cocktail. Knowing which brand of lime cordial you should use to make a Gimlet like the kind Philip Marlowe enjoyed, and being able to argue with the barman about it. That kind of thing.

The drink at the top of the page is a perfect example of pretension in cocktail form, and it’s my very favourite cocktail, the alcoholic drink I would happily forgo all others for; a Vesper Martini. This is the original Martini James Bond creates in Casino Royale (1957, the first Bond book), named for Vesper Lynd, Bond girl and double agent. He instructs the barman:

‘In a deep champagne goblet . . . Three measures of Gordon’s, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it’s ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon peel.’

Bond knew what he was talking about; this is a beautiful cocktail.

Kina Lillet is a vermouth, and the guy at the River Bar uses only a tiny breath of vermouth; he says tastes have changed since the 50s. (They certainly have; Tom Lehrer sang about ‘Hearts full of youth/Hearts full of truth/Six parts gin to one part vermouth‘ in Bright College Days, and this is a very vermouth-y Martini indeed to my youthful, truthful tongue.)

My next Martini was a Zubrowka (a vodka flavoured with fragrant bison grass, which is added during distillation) one. I have a great love for W Somerset Maugham. In The Razor’s Edge, Isabella says:

‘It smells of freshly mown hay and spring flowers, of thyme and lavender, and it’s soft on the palate and so comfortable, it’s like listening to music by moonlight.’

Even though her ultimate aim in rhapsodising about the stuff is to drive another character to a sodden alcoholic grave, I can’t help but feel Maugham himself must have been pretty keen on Zubrowka too. (Another Somerset Maugham favourite was avocado ice cream, which is, you may be surprised to learn, absolutely divine – watch this space.)

For some reason I can’t fathom, some apple schnapps and other fruity stuff found its way into my Martini when I wasn’t standing at the bar to keep a firm hand on the barman (there really shouldn’t be anything other than gin or vodka and vermouth – find me the man who invented the chocolate martini and I will show you an man without tastebuds but with an uncanny understanding of what drunk women will pay for), but it was still pretty fabulous. Excuse the lipstick on the rim in the photograph. It is hard to remember to photograph your Martini before drinking it when you’ve already had a few.

My friends were now on the champagne cocktails. In the back here is a Carol Channing. Those who have seen Thoroughly Modern Millie, a glorious film with Julie Andrews, Mary Tyler Moore, James Fox and a biplane, will remember Carol Channing’s dance with the xylophone and her habit of shouting ‘Raspberries!’ A Carol Channing is made with muddled raspberries, sugar syrup, Chambord and raspberry eau de vie, topped up with champagne.

In front is a proper champagne cocktail – that is to say bitters soaked into a brown sugar lump, with champagne poured on top. A lovely drink, and a very, very old fashioned cocktail; it first pops up in 1862 in Jerry Thomas’s How to mix drinks. (Click the link for an online facsimile of the book.) There are only a very few true cocktails in the book (the other recipes are flips, juleps, punches and recipes for flavoured syrups and so forth), and the champagne cocktail is the only one you’re likely to recognise in 2005.

Somebody (as the evening wore on I lost track of who was ordering what. Can’t think why) ordered a Mojito (muddled mint and sugar, rum, lime and soda water). A Brazilian friend has special mint-muddlin
g pots and sticks, like a conical mortar and pestle, for making these; she brings cachaça, a Brazilian rum, home to England when she visits her family, and uses it to makes the best Mohitos and Caipirinhas (lime, soda, cachaça and sugar) I’ve tasted.

I should wrap this post up. Mr Weasel is on his way home from the supermarket; he has gone to fetch a bottle of Big Tom’s tomato juice, which we will adulterate with some vodka I’ve been steeping chilis in for a few months. I love weekends. Those wondering about the Philip Marlowe Gimlets, by the way, should read The Long Goodbye, where Marlowe informs us that ‘A real gimlet is half gin and half Rose’s Lime Juice, and nothing else. It beats martinis hollow.‘ He’s right; Rose’s is the only one made only with real, fresh limes. Try it some time – cut down on the Rose’s if you find it too sweet.