By now, we were full of crudités, soup, fish pie, cheesecake and sorbet. But there was more! Lauren brought out a plate of her trademark dark chocolate truffles to finish us off. As we enjoyed them the tealights along the centre of the table began to burn out one by one – Suzy hastily rearranging them if one dared to dwindle out of sequence.

Continuing the quiz theme that had sprung up after my CDWM evening, Lauren brought out a box of general knowledge trivia questions for us to take turns asking and answering. Trivia is much more my area – no useful information here, no siree – , but there was no score-keeping. So technically, I won.

Then our hostess revealed  that there was one more treat for us and we were each presented with a cardboard box, with a personalised, hand-stamped gift tag. Inside … more food, but food to take home with us this time: a whoopie pie. I’d not heard of whoopie pies before, but very much enjoyed it a couple of days later with a cup of coffee. It’s two chocolate cakey-biscuity things sandwiched together with marshmallow goo in the centre and proved to be a very tasty memento of a great evening. And we got to keep the boxes. Seriously, stationery and food – Lauren has me sussed.

With the way I’ve loaded my recent photos to Flickr, you could be forgiven for thinking that Lauren had provided the The Red Arrows as mid-meal entertainment. She did not. But she did have a handy-dandy sofa in the kitchen onto which we could collapse between courses while she whipped up the next culinary delight. A tip for anyone doing a Come Dine With Me evening: provide comfy seating for your sated guests and they will mark you well. True, they may also fall asleep and whine about having to get up for the next course, but that’s the chance you take.

Lauren’s dessert was a New York baked cheesecake with a delightfully palette-cleansing raspberry sorbet. Mmm, raspberries. The story she told us of how carefully the cheesecake had to be treated – please to pull on your kid gloves and lay out a red carpet before it – put me off ever baking a cheesecake myself, but the result was great.

Does anyone spot the reason that Lauren was so good at matching flags to countries in the quiz at Helen’s Come Dine With Me? This world map hangs on the wall by her kitchen table and serves as a great talking point and impromptu “find X” on the map competition. It’s fun to see how far we’ve travelled over the years and to plan where we might go next.

Lauren’s main course was fish pie with spinach and carrots. Not just any old spinach and carrots though. The spinach was cooked with garlic and lemon and the carrots with orange zest and rosemary.

Our fish pies were not just in individual portions, they had been personalised to suit each person’s particular taste – for me there was less chili, because I’m a complete baby when it comes to levels of spiciness and for Helen, her fish pie was devoid of prawns, prawns just being too far along the weirdness scale of seafood for her liking.

Then having suffered so very much walking from the kitchen to Lauren’s room on the top floor to record the video about the starter we moved filming location and I carried the laptop outside. You may have noticed how our videos have developed over the course of this food venture. We started with very organised videos at first and always listed exactly what we’d had to eat. Now we don’t repeat ourselves as much in that regard and instead use the energy saved to heckle each other more.

While we were nibbling our nibbles and then talking about them Lauren was busy at the stove preparing our starter. It’s so nice being a guest at these evenings. You get to just kick back and watch someone else work. Maybe that’s why restaurants sometimes have open kitchens: to really underscore the patrons’ enjoyment of “it’s not me who has to wash up”.

The starter was roasted tomato, red pepper and saffron soup, which was decidedly yummy – no Heinz tomato soup from a can here. The saffron had apparently been a bit troublesome, tasting too much like flowers for Lauren’s liking, but she completely saved it with a splash of tabasco. As someone who is very sensitive to anything spicy/hot, I found the tabasco very interesting in that its heat was not accumulative. While a dish with chili gets hotter on me the more I eat, the soup had a zing to it that wasn’t tiring.

Accompanying the soup were home-made bread rolls – full-size versions of those we’d had as nibbles. Seriously, Lauren made everything herself for this meal. It wouldn’t surprise me if she set the table with cutlery she’d forged herself next time.

I hope you’ll excuse all the heavy breathing and complaining in that video. I’ve always approved of the layout of Lauren’s townhouse: you enter on the same level as the living room; kitchen and garden are downstairs, bedrooms and bathroom are upstairs. Great, you get home and you don’t have to go far to collapse on the sofa. Except when we were there the living room was being the plasterboard and power tools room, so we went from the kitchen to the top of the house to record our video – which, when you’re stuffed full of food, is very hard work. Perhaps Dave could install a lift for us as his next DIY project?

A few hours later we were being welcomed by our hostess (wearing a pink dress) and shown to the kitchen, where the table was so beautifully set. Suddenly it was clear why we’d been asked to dress in pink and white: everything was pink and white.

As I had expected Lauren had not just been busy at the stove, but also with needle and thread. On each plate lay a personalised, hand-embroidered napkin, which we were to keep as a memento of the evening.

While we raked through a pile of Lauren’s clothes that she had thinned out from her wardrobe, we whetted our appetites for the meal ahead with miniature bread rolls and puff pastry sticks with pine nuts and goat’s cheese with a tomato and olive dip. It should give you some indication of the amount of food we all put away that evening that I’m splitting this Come Dine With Me report into 5 separate posts! For now though, our first impressions:

Here Helen demonstrates what not to do with the electric fly swat. It’s a small racquet with a button on the side, which when pressed allows, I don’t know, a million volts to flow through the wires, zapping whatever flying, buzzing thing you manage to hit with it (others hire magicians and chocolate fountains for their celebrations, we demonstrate the fly swat). Five-year-old Darcie was immensely drawn to this device in Uncle John’s hands and took a lot of persuading that no, she really didn’t want to touch it. If grownups have enough trouble resisting touching the wires when they’re live (and, oh, we do), there wasn’t much hope for her.

After all the talk of how much food we made – and we did, we made a lot – this is the only photo I took of anything edible. These are the famous cinnamon rolls from The Pioneer Woman and they really  are as good as she says. They also win big brownie points by being freezable. Fifteen minutes in the oven from frozen and bam! you can present your guests with a delicious, intricate dessert warm from the oven that you apparently just that moment whipped up when they were distracted by the fly swat.

We had a beautiful day for the party – the sun shone and everyone sat out in the garden to talk and enjoy the food. Nigel had also brought along a few bottles of Farmer’s Ales for people to try, products of his own brewery in Essex. Appreciative noises all round from those who tried them. And from all who devoured the food too. See you all next year!

Once educated on how to attach one’s harness and pulley to the lines there was a low wire walkway to get across followed by a short zipline. A little warmup for what we could discern through the trees of further along the course, with people flying through the air on ropes – and one guy in particular shrieking like a girl every time he did so.

I hope this kid got to take his branch home.

This is Helen’s sister Katherine coming to a stop at the end of a long zipline. The wood chippings may be up in the air here, but if you landed backwards rather than coming in forwards on your feet, they soon made themselves at home in your pants. Or so I hear.

It was quite a workout for my neck, looking up at everybody in the trees. The highest point of the course was at site 2, where the zipline platform was 13m high. I think this may have been the longest crossing of 20.5 metres. Those cargo nets looked like hard work. The ziplines on the other hand looked like so much fun.

Helen, returning to the ground via the longest zipwire on the course – 146 metres long. This is just a selection of the photos I took that day – if you want to see more swinging through trees, the whole set can be seen at Flickr.

So to Suzy’s dessert and the quiz. The multi-page quiz. It was stapled! But it was multiple choice, so that was good – and there were no essay questions. It was of course a quiz on all things English – and a lot of it seemed to be based on alcohol. Which explains the identity of the winner.

We regress to our school years during these quizzes, being sure to write our names on our sheets and we swap sheets for marking. I marked Lauren’s. Note also the form name “7X” – we were all together in 7X through to 11X at grammar school. Then in the sixth form Lauren, Suzy and I were in 12C and 13C and Helen was in a different form, whose initial she probably doesn’t remember, as she probably never stayed in the school grounds long enough to find out has inexplicable blank spots in her school memories.

The dessert was a delicious Eton Mess – just the right mix of good-for-you fruit and bad-for-you cream. Our judgement:

And the final word on the evening from our very English hostess:

When it’s my turn again I’m going to make them do a cross country assault course before they get to their food. But only if it’s winter.

Right, with 7 Days finished, let’s get back to what really matters: food. If you remember, we’d dealt with Suzy’s starter and we’re now on to the main course of beef wellington, cabbage, carrots and red wine gravy. A helpful note to you all, by the way: when the conversation inevitably turns to food, don’t dismiss soup as being something that nobody would ever dream of serving in the summer. Unless of course you want to see the next hostess Lauren crumple into a dejected heap next to you. You’re welcome.

As with the other evenings, there was a little time to let things settle between courses and Lauren took the opportunity to show us a picture online of the dress she’s bought to wear at Helen’s wedding. Just today I paid the balance on our hotel booking, so it’s getting close. A few days in Jersey, with nothing to do but go to our friend’s wedding and then lie about on a beach. Oh yes.

I could tell you what’s happening here. But I prefer to let your imaginations run wild.

This is Clara, by the way, Suzy’s delightful landlady, who joined us for the evening. She fights crime, rides horses and hands out drinks to arriving guests when Suzy the hostess is up to her elbows in flour and vegetables. Earlier in the day she’d been on duty in London, taking sneaky sideways glances at the Queen, while she kept the crowds in check at the royal birthday celebrations.

And the food of course: beef wellington, made with minced beef and packed with mushrooms and a variety of vegetables, rather than just using the more traditional beef fillet and wrapping that in pastry.

Today was Helen’s hen do, which was spent at “Go Ape” in Bedgebury Forest and then at Zapatas Mexican Restaurant. I didn’t go swinging through the trees myself, but staying on the ground, trekking trough the forest being the photographer was pretty tiring too! I spent a lot of time looking up as I watched my friends swing on Tarzan ropes, crawl through tunnels, climb across rope bridges and navigate cargo nets, documenting their every move. I’ll add the photos to Flickr when I’ve sorted through the 600 shots I took!