The Travel Day Bag, Oversized Travel Bag and Travel Camera Bag are based on the relaxed satchel shape of our beloved Alexa, but have their very own twist. Creative Director Emma Hill and her team were looking at vintage steamer trunks and were inspired by the detailing – giving our own Travel Bags metal corner tips and retro metal nameplate reminiscent of the old-school luggage.
Blake Lively
Juno Temple
Olivia Palermo
Hayley Atwell
Laura Carmicheal
Mary Chateris
“This is a recipe we have at Tom’s Kitchen – a seven hour shoulder of lamb cooked with balsamic vinegar and onions. It’s delicious and easy plus one-pot cooking means less to clear up!” Tom Aikens
SLOW ROAST SHOULDER OF LAMB WITH ONIONS, THYME AND BALSAMIC VINEGAR (Serves 6)
INGREDIENTS
1 shoulder lamb (weighing 2.5 kilos)
1 bunch of thyme
8 whole medium sized onions, peeled
2 garlic bulbs, peeled cloves
250ml balsamic vinegar
2g Maldon sea salt
150ml olive oil
EQUIPMENT
1 large casserole pot with lid (big enough to fit the shoulder of lamb)
Tray
“Depending on when you are going to be eating this dish, either lunch or dinner, you want to put it into the oven ‘a meal before’. So for lunch time you want to put it into the oven at 8am and for the evening I would put it in at around 2pm. It will take between 6-7 hours to cook but it is one of those dishes that does not need any attention at all.”
METHOD
Oven at 180°C.
1. You can marinate the lamb leg for a day in the olive oil, with 6-8 sprigs of thyme and some extra thinly sliced garlic.
2. Before you cook the lamb take the lamb out of the fridge for a good hour if not two so the meat is at room temperature.
3. If you have marinated the leg, remove the thyme and garlic then season with all of the salt and some fresh black pepper. If not, rub in the olive oil and then season with salt and pepper.
4. Place a little olive oil into the bottom of the casserole pot, which is at room temperature.
5. Place in the onions, drizzle in a little olive oil and a little seasoning as well, place the lamb on top of the onions.
6. Place the casserole into the oven at 180˚C for 15-20 minutes, until the lamb and onions have coloured.
7. After this, turn the oven down to 110˚C. Add the thyme and garlic and cook this for 1.5 hours – with a lid on. During this time, stir the onions every 20-30 mins.
8. After this time, the onions and garlic should be soft, remove them from the pot and place on to a tray. Place the lid back on to the pot and continue to cook for a further 4.5 hours with the lid on, checking every so often.
9. Remove the pot from the oven, remove the lid and add 250ml of balsamic vinegar. Turn the oven up to 150°C and cook for a further hour, basting the lamb every 15 minutes.
10. The lamb by now should be nice and tender, remove the lamb from the pot and place on to a tray. Add the onions back into the pot and place them on to a medium heat and reduce until sticky.
11. The lamb should just fall off the bone so I generally use a spoon as opposed to a knife. If you need a knife, then the lamb is not cooked enough. Serve with mashed potato.
We pulled Tom Aikens away from his restaurants and into the Savile Club kitchen for one evening to cook for our London Fashion Week dinner. After a manic day, our guests were pleasantly surprised to be served a gorgeous British supper based on a traditional roast, using locally sourced British ingredients. During the break between first and second courses we stepped the other side of the kitchen door to talk food memories and Britishness.
On what he likes to cook…
I would say I am fairly traditional on the weekends and on my days off, anything from a simple carrot cake to a lemon and rosemary roast chicken, I am very happy to be pottering around in the kitchen all day cooking and eating, even making waffles for breakfast is a real treat!
On his earliest food memory…
On one particular trip my father booked us into a Michelin Two Star restaurant, by complete accident. He only realised the magnitude of what he had booked when we arrived at the hotel to find our car surrounded by four guys wearing white gloves and bow ties. My father was never one for looking in a guidebook it was all one by word of mouth or a Frenchmen telling him to try this place out.
That evening we had the most amazing meal and it is one of those inspirational gastronomic moments that I will never forget. It was still the era of nouvelle cuisine so tiny portions and lots of courses. The tastes and flavours were stunning! I had the most beautiful tomato salad with simple olive oil, basil, finely diced shallots, course sea salt: A fillet steak melted in my mouth – a tall tower of beef fillet that had been larded with beef fat , it was sublime and perfection in one, the waiters lifting endless cloche for my parents with course after course, we also had the best chips ever, an accompanying stacked tower of perfectly cooked and cut potato. The tastes were sensational, I was in heaven and as I say I’ll never forget it.
On his new restaurant…
It’s fun, not over-formal and I love some of quotes and historical foodie facts on the walls:
“Cooking is like love. It should be entered into with abandon or not at all.” ~ Harriet van Horne
“Never eat more than you can lift.” ~ Miss Piggy
“Worthless people love only to eat and drink, people of worth eat and drink only to live.” ~ Socrates (BC469-BC399)
On his five favourite British things…
The things that sum up why I love Britain: summers of Pimms and lemonade and picnics on the lawn, open air concerts on warm evenings, the royal family, fish and chips, Afternoon tea at the Connaught Hotel in London.
To go with our monster theme for Autumn Winter 2012 we had cute monster truffles made and put into bespoke mini boxes. They were prepared and packed in the Claridge’s kitchen.
A mini monster truffle waits to be packed
Finding their new home
Eyeing up a fellow monster on our bespoke drinks labels
Claridge’s also created a mini chocolate monster of their own and left it in our hotel suite!
A Claridge's mini monster
We want to say a huge thank you, as always, to Claridge’s for all their help and dedication – without them the show would not go nearly as smoothly!
Mathias Van Hooff’s team turned the models into our fresh-faced Mulberry girls for the Autumn Winter 2012 show.
The team work on the models backstage
Our Fashion Week contributor Jenny Dyson talks to Emma Houlston, the illustrator commissioned to create the Mulberry Monster, exclusively for the blog.
Don’t be scared. According to illustrator Emma Houlston, the Mulberry monsters she drew are of the friendly kind. Daddy monster was stood either side of the runway and looking just a little bit startled to have found the whole of planet fashion in his secret lair. ‘I initially thought it was a bit mad for Mulberry to commission me to create monsters when they make such posh handbags’ Emma says. ‘But when I delved a bit deeper into the world of Mulberry, I discovered it’s very playful and magical as well.’ And of course Emma is right. ‘Mulberry sprinkles a bit of fairy dust on its fashion story-telling, so after last season’s giant ice cream cones, of course there could be monsters!’
For the Mulberry monsters Emma drew inspiration from the likes of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, the creatures in the film of the book created by Spike Jonze, plus a smattering of naughtiness from David McKee’s Not Now Bernard, a brilliant children’s book in which a little boy is ‘eaten’ by a naughty monster (or becomes a monster, depending on your interpretation).
The Mulberry monsters are friendly and gentle. They’ve tumbled out of a cupboard into the world of fashion. ‘They build nests like magpies and love to decorate them with shiny gold things’ adds Emma. No wonder, then that they feel so happy in the Mulberry world with its giant, shiny golden padlocks, a playful nod to the label’s iconic hardware, not to mention the covetable golden turtle on the Del Rey, the brand new bag shown on the London Fashion Week catwalk on Sunday.
If you happen to meet the Mulberry monster, Emma’s advice is to hide your iPad. ‘He’s really greedy and he’ll eat anything, including gadgets. He might accidentally eat your handbag, too!’
Stay tuned for more monsters making an appearance at Mulberry stores this autumn.
Hair Stylist Sam McKnight and his team transformed models into Mulberry girls for our Autumn Winter 2012 show. According to Sam the look for the hair was ‘wild school girl living in a forest’. Here’s how he styled it:
1. Divide hair into three sections.
2. Plait three cornrows, one along the front, one at the back
and the third at one side.
3. The plaits can be raised, others can be regular.
4. Keep it rough by running your fingers the wrong way up the plaits,
this is not a neat and tidy look.
5. Pin the plaits up onto the head in a raggedy fashion.
6. If needed, fix with hairspray and if hair a bit too squeaky clean,
dirt it up with Clay before you start.
(No combs or brushes were used in creating this look!)
A glimpse behind the closed doors of a Savile Club supper, held on the night of our London Fashion Week show.
We hosted an intimate supper at The Savile Club in London’s Mayfair last night, with very special guests including Michelle Williams, Lana Del Rey, Elizabeth Olsen, Vogue’s Anna Wintour and Alexandra Shulman, Alexa Chung, Michelle Dockery and others, hosted by Ronnie Cooke Newhouse and our very own Emma Hill.
On the evening of our show, we hosted an intimate dinner for eighty friends in the 18th century, oak-panelled antique ambience of the Savile Club. The Mulberry monster left his mark on the gorgeous golden lair, and the grand staircase was lined with a dazzling trail of giant golden padlocks inspired by the iconic refined padlock used on Mulberry accessories since the brand’s inception.
We’ll be sharing more pictures very soon.
Night by candlelight
