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

Not a cupcake, but still cake!

Brooklyn Blackout cake to be precise.

I used a recipe from the The Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook and i'm not going to say it went fab but it was 8.30pm that i decided to start baking it, so i guess thas no-ones fault but my own!

Basically it is a chocolate cake, but instead of frosting or ganache, the filling is a very thick chocolate custard, now this is the part i don't recommend attempting to make when your a bit tired last thing in the evening, as not only did i make things ten times more difficult for myself but there were two casualtys from this baking session - a whisk and a sieve!

Oh yes, the joys of cornflour, i wont be using that ingredient again for a while, i mean 200g of cornflour with 120ml of water, im sure whoever wrote that recipe was somewhere laughing a very evil laugh when i was attempting to "mix" the two! And where did the sieve come into it? When the custard had thickened and i still had a whole load of lumps!! Ok, im not the worlds greatest cook, i admit that!

So anyway, witht the sponge i only had 2 cake tins instead of 3, so its not as tall and pretty but i think it still looks pretty darn nice, especially with the milk, white and dark chocolate i grated on top!

Conclusion? well i'm not a huge fan of chocolate cake anyway, there are only two i have found that i like so far - one from costa coffee, and another from thorntons, both of which are sweet and fairly gooey.  Now this cake would be labeled "tame" for the people who like chocolate cake but always complain it's too sweet, i found it not to be sweet enough for my taste, but i can understand that others would potentially enjoy this more than your other mainstream chocolate cake recipes.

What next? Back to cupcakes for me!

Cinnamon swirl cupcakes!

Well this is my first post to this blog, welcome! Today I experimented with making cinnamon swirl cupcakes.

This was my first attempt at these and the idea was pretty much "suck it and see" as I didn't have a specific recipe for them. I used my current favourite basic vanilla sponge recipe (I say current, it's the only one so far that I have managed to do without going wrong) which is as follows . .

(makes 6 large cupcakes, 12 small)

4oz butter
4oz sugar
2 large eggs
1/2 teaspoon vanilla essence
4oz flour

1. Mix butter, sugar, eggs and vanilla together until smooth

2. Mix in flour until incorporated

3. Spoon into paper cases

Now here is where the cinnamon part happened! I mixed some demorera sugar with cinnamon (don't ask about quantities because I havnt a clue, I just made sure it was edible, not too cinnamony!).

Backtracking slightly to spooning into the paper cases . .

I spooned a dollop of cake mix, enough to cover the base of the paper case, then a spoonful of the cinnamon sugar, then more cake mixture, then used a cocktail stick to swirl it around a little.

Then baked, at about 170 degrees, until golden and a cocktail stick inserted came out clean, about 20-25 Mins.

For the frosting I used the following recipe, although it is very sweet, I have yet to find a better alternative . .

250g sifted icing sugar
80g butter
Milk (a dash or two)
A few drops of vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

1. Combine the butter and icing sugar (I like to use a handheld electric whisk)

(tip: make sure the buttetis fairly soft, room temperature is great)

2. Add the vanilla essence and milk, add enough milk to get the desired consistancy.

3. Beat in the ground cinnamon, 1/2 a teaspoon is an estimate, I just added it to taste!


Once the cakes were cooled I put the icing on using a plastic spatular and sprinkled a little cinnamon to decorate!

Here is the final result . .

And the swirl . .

Unfortunately I don't think I put enough of the cinnamon sugar in, next time I would certainly use more, and be sure to distribute it a little bit better.

Until next time . .