Freebie Make-up haul!

It's that time of year when magazines like to give you lots of free stuff and who am I to refuse when there are so many products available at the price of a magazine hey!

Last month (yup, sorry, you're too late for these ones) I got these little gems . . .

3 x Nails inc nail polishes with In-style magazine - The shade names had "in-style" on them so I guess you can't usually get these specific shades.

2 x Body shop lip stain - I think these were from Marie Claire - 01 Rose pink and 02 Bronze glimmer.

These are all full size items, nails inc nail varnishes usually retail for £11 each and those lip stains are £10 each. Feeling a bit smug about the lip stain as I almost bought one the other week but decided against it as there were a few not-so-good reviews on their website about it. In fact I love them both, the rose one is great to add a little colour to your lips which you can build up if you like, the glimmer is more of a colour I will use on holiday or when I have a bit more of a tan.  So that's £53 of make-up as a cost of just under £20 - bargain! Even more so that some magazines are on a 2 for £6 offer at the moment making it even cheaper - unfortunately that ends soon though - June 4th if I recall correctly.

Here are the bits I got today, I am very excited as I paid just over £16 for all these thanks to the above mentioned offer and a small percentage of staff discount. . .I LOVE a bargain! I'm going to give you a brief overview of what is available so you can see what's out there right now (most of these mags only came out yesterday) and then once I get using the products I might go into more detail and review them!

And what do I do with all the duplicate mags? Well, to be honest I give them a quick flick through then give them to my Mum, my Nana, the local Doctors - whoever wants them really! And these ones will be extra useful to my Nana as she's just been taken into hospital today (get well soon Nana!) so she hasn't got much to keep her amused right now!

Anyway - get to the point Ria!!! . . .

Yup - I bought 6 Magazines - the cashier did look at me a bit funny!

Jubilee cake

Every year, in March there is a competition within the Marketing department at work they call the bake-off.

When I moved into the department you could imagine my excitement on hearing such a thing, alas for the first year they had me in Guernsey so I couldn't enter. So, last March came, diary checked, yup, I was going to be there for my first bake-off and the there is 2012, it just had to be a jubilee themed cake.

I spent many hours dreaming this beauty up, it was a little ambitious I must admit as before I made it I had never actually made a 2 tier cake before and it was only the second ever cake I had iced...oh well nothing to loose hey!

4 days (yes 4 actual days - a whole weekend and two evenings) later this is what I came up with....

If it weren't for the fact I had created the top tier first I probably would have left it as it was, as i thought it looked pretty nice as a union jack cake . . 

In case you wanna know how I did it? It was a Victoria sponge with jam and butter cream, covered with white Ready to Roll Icing, I coloured more icing with gel food colour  and rolled into strips and painstakingly  re-created the union jack.For the top tier I printed a picture of a crown on tracing paper, traced over it onto the icing, then painted over the embossed lines that had been created with a mixture of gold lustre dust and rejuvenator spirit - don't mix up too much as once as the alcohol evaporates REALLY quickly! the bunting and little balls were also made of fondant, but in hindsight I think they would have been much nice made of marzipan.  

Oh . . I forgot to mention. . I WON the novelty cake category, very chuffed with myself as I'm not usually a winner!

Do these Nail(s) Rock?

After seeing various famous people with those amazing mirror shine nails I decided to find out how I can achieve the same effect, on ASOS I stumbled across Nail Rock which offer just that, one set costs £6.75 so I thought I would get the twin pack for £10.25, this had the silver i was after and also metallic lizard, I figured I would give it a practice with the lizard, then use the silver for my holiday in a couple of weeks.

To apply the wrap, you take them size that most matches your nail, place it on the nail, then smooth it down whilst applying heat from your hairdryer! OK, so the clever amongst you would have already realised that to do the above you already require 3 hands . . 1. the hand you are applying the wraps to, 2. the hand applying the wraps, and 3. a hand to hold the hair-dryer! I started by heating, smoothing, heating . .you get the idea, this didn't work too well so resulted to leaving the hairdryer running on the side, putting my fingers in the heat when required, this worked best.

Now my nails aren't of the stumpy kind, yet i was still left with a rather lot of excess, the instructions tell you to file this off using a wooden nail file, i couldn't see this working so i took the nail clippers to them and cut bits off first - I would recommend nail scissors here, but i didn't have any so had to make do! i then filed down the last bit, it was a bit scary as i didn't want to accidentally file my nails also, which unfortunately i did on a couple!

Anyway, I did rush these a bit, but was pretty pleased with the results . . until the peeling started, I am one of these people that if I know its peeling I cannot leave it alone or forget about it, so I kept pushing them back on to re-attempt to stick them back, it was alas . . too late. I blame the fate of these nails on my lack of attention to detail when applying, I am pretty sure if I had spend more time heating and smoothing they would have been fine! 

So i am remaining without definitive opinion on these at the moment, and will make my mind up when i get round to applying the silver ones!

Hopefully won't leave it so long next time! 

Gold Fingeeeerrrrr, waaa waaa wa!

Apologies for the cheesy Shirley Bassey/James Bond reference, but it did have to be done . . .

Last week I was making a little visit to the models own website to see what lovely nail varnishes I could treat myself to, and sat on their homepage was this little beauty - Gold Rush!

To start out I need to tell you I'm not a gold sort of girl, its silver all the way for me, but after having a little read of the description I had to see for myself!

"Models Own has pushed the boundaries to the limit and created the most opulent nail polish – Gold Rush.

When painted on it looks like gold leaf. It glistens, glimmers and actually sparkles like tiny diamonds, yet is absolutely smooth to the touch."

lush!

I should probably mention that this is the second version of this nail varnish that has been released, the first being in a gold and diamond encrusted bottle, a pinch at only £83,000! Read more here, I personally prefer this one though as it only costs a fiver!!

I'll give my apologies now for the state of my cuticles, I used to do a manual job and they have never really recovered!

Anyway, back to gold rush, I love the word they use "opulent" i must admit I wasn't quite sure what it meant, but I'm sure this photo demonstrates this...

I applied 4 coats to get this result, and yes that is a bit heavy, but I found the formula dried very quickly so it didn't take long between coats. I usually find that I cannot wear a nail polish for more than a day, two at a push before it chips, and as soon as there is a chip, ill start picking the rest off (very attractive!) however I have now had this on for 3 full days, and it still looks great! I'm getting a little bit of fading on the ends of my nails from typing today but not enough to make it look tatty, because of the super-shiny sparklyness it barely notices, so I will carrying this application forward to tomorrow, day 4!

I got loads of compliments on this at work today, I know, its not exactly a "day at the office" colour, but it cheered me up! It is probably more appropriate for an evening, or sunnier time of year!

So to conclude, I love this, I ordered 5 polishes in total from the models own website (buy 5 save £7 - result!), i am very much looking forward to trying the rest, but at the moment I just cant bring myself to remove gold rush!

Chocolate mud cake with a whipped milk chocolate ganache.

Mmmmm, i just love chocolate cake, but i always find that a chocolate buttercream can be a bit too sweet, so the milk chocolate ganache i used to top these little delights was perfect.

For this recipe you need the following . . .

60g dark chocolate (i used cadburys bournville)

140ml water

90g butter at room temperature

220g brown sugar

2 medium eggs

100g self raising flour

2 tbs cocoa powder

40g ground almonds

1) Melt the chocolate with the water until combined and smooth.

2) Beat butter and sugar in a bowl, once fluffy add the eggs.

3) Sift the flour and cocoa, add with almonds and chocolate mixture to egg mixture.

4) Pop into 6 muffin cases.  you will find the mixture is very runny, fear not, it will set.

5) Bake on a low temperature (about 170, or lower if you have a fan oven) for about 40mins, please check on them regularly, and remove from the oven once a cocktail stick inserted comes out clean.

and for the ganache . . .

80ml double cream

200g milk chocolate

1) Heat the cream in a small pan until simmering.

2) Add the chocolate, remove from the heat and stir until smooth.

3) Put in the fridge for about half an hour then get out your electric mixer and whip!

(if its not a stiff enough concistancy pop it back in the fridge for temn minutes ant try again)

Pipe the ganache in swirls on top of your cakes!!

Yum!

Getting all gifty . . .

So, my (maybe one day to be) sister in laws' birthday was coming up and i didnt know what to give them, and then is struck me, something personal, that i had made an effort with, that i enjoy creating, cupcakes of course.

(at this point i apologise for the not-so-great image quality)

So I set about finding some presentation boxes (which i bought from http://www.icing-works.co.uk/) and once they arrived i got baking.  I didnt take the decision of what flavours to include in the box lightly, in fact it kept my brain occupied for a fair few days.  I decided to include 3 different flavours, 4 of each, that way if any in the batches of 6 went wrong there would be 2 spares of each flavour!

What flavours did I choose? Well up until half way through baking they kept changing, but the final cakes came out as the following . . .

Chocolate: Chocolate mud cake with a whipped milk chocolate ganache.

Lemon meringue: Lemon cake with a meringue topping

Berry white chocolate: Mixed summer berry cake with a vanilla and white chocolate whipped ganache topping.

YUM!

I will create a blog post for each flavour over the next few days, with a few more pictures and recipes (as much as i can remember as i pretty much made these up as i went along)

The quest for a good basic recipe!

Slowly but surely i'm getting there! i think i have found my favourite buttercream recipe, which i will share with you shortly, as for the sponge? Well this one was nicer than previous but still not quite there!

one thing different from the usual sponge recipes i use was that there was no vanilla essence in it, i think this made a lot of difference, positively! npow if you are interested, this is the basic sponge recipe . .

115g butter

115g sugar

115g flour

2 eggs

1tbs milk

1) beat butter and sugar together until combined and fluffy

2) mix in eggs

3) sift in flour

4) fold flour in with milk

bake in 12 cases for about 20mins, until a cocktail stick inserted comes out clean.

I baked my cupcakes in some new, dare i say it, christmas! Silicone star shaped cases, absolutely adorable, £7.50 from Marks and Spencer, i love them, even more so because they are dishwasher safe!!

Now for the frosting, what gets me about this frosing is that it has a lovely stiff texture, but when you bit into it it is so light, it just melts in your mouth, mmm.

175g butter (at room temperature)

2 tsp vanilla extract

a couple of drops of food colouring

2 tbs milk

300g sifted icing sugar

1) cream the butter, vanilla, food colouring and milk togther (i use an electric whisk as it makes it fluffier)

2) bit by bit add the icing sugar until fully incorporated

3) beat, beat, beat!! the more you beat it the lighter and fluffier it will be!

the frosting recipe is meant to be for 12 cupcakes but i found i had half left over so you may want to reduce quantities! I used my new Tala Icing Bag to ice them, this is the first time I have used an icing bag before so i dont think they look too bad!

thanks for reading