Tag: house

Polka dot cake

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Cake idea

What a year it’s been!  To celebrate my daughter, Scarlett, turning a whole one year old, I thought I might make a cake for her birthday tea party.  Fine.  Then I started looking to Pinterest for a little inspiration.  This is where it all blew up, because there are some AWESOME cakes out there!  Up to now, my nephew’s Spiderman cake of ’12 was by far the best cake I’d made, and I really, really did not know what I was doing.  Yeah, I can bake a cake, but I really have little clue when it comes to icing and decorating.

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I drew out the little doodle above after all of my Pinterest madness.  My bird actually ended up looking pretty much exactly like this!  Yes, it looks a bit like a duck.  As well as all the amazing cakes, I was inspired by the polka dot birds hanging in her room.

Luckily for me, I have a bona fide cake expert in my friend Lenka, who creates beautiful and yummy delights (check out her facebook page!) – she made Scarlett’s Christening cake.  She repeatedly set me on the right track.

A week before Scarlett’s birthday, Lenka dropped into conversation that I needed to be making the decorations for the cake so that they’d dry in time.  Cue panic stations!  To combat said panic, Lenka provided me with:

  • 2 x 12″ cake tins
  • 2 sets of letters to spell out Scarlett
  • The number 1
  • The top of a piping bag to stamp out polka dots
  • A cake smoother.  I’ll get to this, it’s BRILLIANT!

So, if Lenka hadn’t been involved, I would have pretty much had a plain cake, with whatever Tesco’s Dr Oetker display had to offer thrown at it.

Cake decorations 1A week before the big day, I baked four cakes.  Yes, you read that right.  I had a dream of a graduating pink creation.  We’ll brush straight past that one, because it didn’t work.  I didn’t put enough food colouring in.  I then stacked the cakes in colour order (I was still crossing my fingers at that point) and froze them.  With Barry’s family coming to stay, I thought I wouldn’t have time to bake, ice, and decorate a cake as well as clean, etc.

The following day, I started making the decorations in two shades of pink.  Here are the polka dots, along with birds, letters, numbers and I iced the cake board for good measure.

Cake decorations 2For the birds, I drew around the ones in her room onto greaseproof paper and cut them out to draw around.  I made so many decorations because I thought some may crack and break, which they did.  I do wish I’d had a bit more patience with the letter R, because it was very stubborn and ended up looking, erm, full of character.  My friend Jemima said I’m not allowed to say it was crap.

I then waited a week to put it all together, but I won’t make you wait that long…

There’s a hole in my ceiling

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holey moley

Dear Liza, dear Liza.  Our living room lights decided to stop working last week.  If you’re a regular reader, you may already be in possession of the very useful fact that we have 13 lights in our living room.

These are the holes that poor Barry has had to saw into the ceiling that he painstakingly plastered after putting the lights in.

holey moley 2

He’s decided to forgo sourcing the problem after we lost count of the holes, and has instead run another wire from the kitchen into the living room, bypassing the problem area before the ceiling fell in on our heads.

Barry’s mum and dad are visiting at the end of next week (for Scarlett’s first birthday, already!), so the pressure’s on to make it right!

House valuation

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Barry’s bedtime reading at the moment is looking at houses online.  We’re not planning on moving any time soon (if any of my colleagues are reading this, don’t jump to conclusions!), but it’s nice to look.  He went as far (too far, in my opinion!) as sending an email asking for more information on one particular house, which is quite near to where my mum lives.

The estate agent called and left a voicemail the next morning to say that they’d arranged for an agent from our local office to come and value our house on Saturday at 9.45am.  Very proactive.  A bit too pushy.  But Barry thought, hey, why not?  We were interested in seeing whether the work on the kitchen (in which we sacrificed a downstairs bathroom and hallway for twice the kitchen) would have affected the value.

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Adult proofing

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Stair gate

Our house is now stair-safe for Scarlett, but a hotbed of tripping danger for me and Barry.  She won’t be able to get up or down the stairs until she grows about three feet and gets some serious manual dexterity going, which is excellent.

However, whoever designed the bloody gates with the bar at the bottom (and pressure gates STILL NEED SCREWING IN, don’t be fooled) had a real sense of humour.  Scarlett’s in more danger from me falling flat onto her because I can’t pick my feet up that extra inch.  I think Barry might have shed a little tear screwing gates into the house, especially into the black wall and the wooden bannister.  I could tell he was wondering whether we could move house before fixing the holes.

Socket covers

We’ve also got these things that go in the electricity sockets so she doesn’t electrocute herself.  Good job I’ve got nails for leverage, otherwise there’d be no getting those bad boys out.  And then I would never be able to iron.  Now, where are those nail clippers…

Wedding dresses

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Not for mine, I’ve been married ages, but I’ve been wedding dress shopping with two different brides in the last few weeks.  Both of them are gorgeous and slim, and all of the dresses look amazing on them; so amazing, in fact, that it makes me want to get married again!  Still to Barry, don’t worry.

Confession – I actually had three wedding dresses as it is: one I never wore, one I had to buy quickly as we got married at short notice as my dad was ill, and another for a blessing with our friends and family as the vicar wouldn’t let me wear my actual wedding dress.  So it’s not like I didn’t have the opportunity!  Lace is in at the moment though, and I have a little regret about how plain my actual wedding dress was, even though that’s exactly what I wanted at the time.

After I got married, I started thinking about what a great thing it would be to have a wedding dress shop and make all those brides so happy!  I’d serve champagne, and I would cry when they tried the dress on, maybe even design a few dresses… I’m looking at it through rose tinted glasses.  It would probably be more like me trying to clean fake tan and foundation off the delicate necklines and getting done for serving alcohol to underage relatives.

My new idea is sewing for little people.  I’m getting a bit ahead of myself – I’ve asked my lovely husband for a sewing machine for my birthday (one that I don’t have to turn by hand!) and I have lots of grand ideas of making clothes for Scarlett, and if I turn out to be any good, making them for other tots too.

Birdies

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We’ve finally got the polka dot birdie hooks up on the nursery wall, which means we can hang Scarlett’s hearts on there.  The birds were really cheap from eBay, but I think they look effective and go with the theme of the room and the wall stickers that are on the other side.

About time too, everything was just gathering dust on her windowsill.  We’ve got even more frames that we need to put photos in, but think I’ll wait a bit because we’ve just had quite a few printed.

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My shameful secret

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I may get lambasted for this by the pro-craft crowd, but I’m a bit embarrassed to admit… my name’s Michelle and I like to cross-stitch.  Lambasted for the embarrassment, not for the sewing itself.  I’m not getting any time to do it at the moment, but I started a baby sampler for Scarlett’s room before she was born and I am going to try my best to finish it soon.  Before she’s five.  Definitely before she’s ten.  Would it be a nice graduation present?

I love doing little bits as gifts for people, I’ve only ever had them gratefully received as I think you can see the time, work and care that goes into them.  I’ve sewn cards, bookmarks, and framed pictures, small and large.  I’ve made quite a few birth samplers, including one that I started when I was about fourteen or fifteen and took me years to complete.  It was around A3 sized and a lot of it was a deep blue – I remember clearly taking care over every stitch.  Couldn’t wait to start another colour.

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Simple recipes: krispie buns

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You know they’re ker-azy because they’re spelled with a Z.

This is another adaptation of my mum’s recipes from when she was at school (for her easy peasy buns/cake recipe, click here).  The adapted bit’s where I lick the golden syrup spoon.  These take about 5 minutes to make.  Less if you set everything out on the counter like in Jamie Oliver’s 30 minute recipes.  In that case, this would take about 3 minutes.

krispie buns

Ingredients

  • 2 level tbsp sugar
  • 2 heaped tbsp cocoa powder
  • 3 tbsp golden syrup
  • 100g margarine
  • 100g cornflakes or rice krispies

Method

Melt everything except the cereal in a pan, don’t let it boil.  Take off the heat and mix in the cereal well.  Use spoons to share the mixture between around 12 bun cases, pretty ones if possible.  Lick spoons.  Lick pan.

Here’s some I made for the NCT crew this weekend.  Nom.

Wedding scrapbook

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Wedding scrapbook

Following my success with the recipe scrapbook, I decided to get cracking with my wedding scrapbook for a bit more cathartic organisation.  I started filling it with my wedding ideas from before the day, along with some memory bits like ribbon from the bridesmaids’ dresses, our flight stubs and honeymoon itinerary.  We only got married a mere six and a half years ago. I did do a bit when I was pregnant and on maternity leave, but other things soon beckoned (like the SATC boxset, hello Helen!), and it fell by the wayside.  I’ve found a renewed energy for wanting these things sorted now, firstly to keep them away from little sticky hands, and secondly to preserve them for when the owner of those little sticky hands becomes interested in mummy and daddy’s wedding and I can show her everything we (or I) did to prepare for it.

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Recipe scrapbook

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I decided to buy a big notebook when I was at university and write and/or stick my favourite recipes in it, to keep them all in one place.  Fast forward ten or eleven years, and this battered book (pun intended) now contains a good few yummy recipes for starters, mains, and especially desserts and baking.  Along with a huge pile of printouts and pages quickly torn from magazines from newspapers and supermarkets, the shelf in our kitchen was creaking under the weight of paper I needed to sort out.

Meaning business, I got my guillotine out (no, I’m not joking, I have a stationery problem), and started trimming recipes into little stick-able squares.  It took me about six hours (whilst watching my daughter.  And TV.) and my book is now as fat as can be.  But it’s so satisfying to have sorted it all out and have all my recipes in one place, really cathartic.

microwave brownie

I got so inspired I had to stop halfway through to make microwave brownie in a mug – yum!  I did share it with Barry, in my defence.  I’m not sure what the rules are on sharing other people’s recipes on blogs, so, instead, here’s my mum’s foolproof recipe for buns that I don’t even need to look at any more…

My mum’s always told me (this does about 18 buns or a cake): weigh 3 medium eggs with the shells on, then weigh out the same in sugar, SR flour and butter. Cream the butter and sugar together, then add in the flour and eggs bit by bit.  Add a dash of vanilla essence if you’re feeling fancy. Always use a wooden spoon, not a metal one. Pop them in the oven at around 180C for 20/25 mins until golden brown and try not to open the door while they’re in there.  Ice them when they’ve cooled.  Delicious, and so simple!