Week Thirteen

Monday - over a year later I finally got to redeem one of my presents from my 21st - tickets to see Miranda! It was a hoot, although I'm not sure my Dad enjoyed it quite as much as Mum and I...

Tuesday - Back up to the frozen north for a few days. 

Wednesday - I got so excited about finding this combination of fruit in one pot in Tesco I even tweeted about it! Mango chunks and pomegranate seeds are unbeatable.

Thursday - Another of my sunny lunchtime wanders through the botanical gardens. Glorious.

Friday - Stew served in a hollowed out loaf of bread. Mind = blown. 

Saturday - 400 miles later and I'm home with the orchids again.

 Sunday - I couldn't resist picking up a little treat after Mother's Day brunch at a local deli. Now I'm just thinking up a recipe! 

I've enjoyed spending a bit of time on a Sunday reflecting on my week since I started this project. This week though, it's really interesting. I found this week really quite difficult. I had a couple of tiring journeys to make, I attended a long, enormously important and therefore terrifying meeting, and I made a decision that's thrown all my plans for next year out of the window and left me with a (frighteningly) blank canvas. 

And yet in these pictures it looks like any other week. 

Sometimes it's easy to notice the difficulties in your life, and think everyone else's life is going swimmingly, because of the way they present their lives. But they only show you the good bits! These photos show the good bits, but they don't tell the full story. And I wanted to tell the full story. So all of this rambling is me saying it's okay for everything not to be okay sometimes, and it's okay to tell people everything isn't okay, to be honest with people. I think it's important to be honest. Some weeks aren't great. You just have to look forward to the next one.

Mother's Day Cupcakes

 

Mother's Day is nearly upon us! Sometimes I find it difficult to choose a gift on Mother's Day, it's fairly close to Christmas and my mum's birthday, and usually my ideas have dried up. So when in doubt I bake something pretty, like these cupcakes. Use the prettiest cases you can find, swirl some icing on top and you're good to go. This recipe makes 24 cupcakes.

Ingredients

Cupcakes
250g Self-raising Flour
2tsp Baking Powder
225g Unsalted Butter
250g Caster Sugar
4 Eggs
1tsp Vanilla extract

Lemon Buttercream
500g Icing Sugar
120g Unsalted Butter
30ml Lemon Juice
A splash of milk if necessary

1. Preheat the oven to 180°C

2. Combine the caster sugar and the butter

3. Add the eggs one at a time, then the vanilla extract, then the dry ingredients. 

4. Put even amounts of the mixture into each cupcake case, and bake for around 15 minutes, or until the sponge springs back and a knife comes out clean.

5. Top with Mum's favourite icing, for a nice Mother's Day treat.

Week 12

 Oh I'm late again. Second time in 12 weeks - I don't think that's bad going to be honest.

 Monday - Homemade vegetable fried rice for dinner. It's much healthier than any take away, and just as tasty.

Tuesday - Drinks for a friends birthday at one of the nicest bars in town.

 Wednesday - Frantic note taking in my tiny diary because I forgot to take my notebook to a talk.

Thursday - Burgers and a catch  up with guys from class I haven't seen in forever because we've taken different options. 

Friday - Bake sale!

 Saturday - Twelfth Night at the newly revamped Everyman theatre in Liverpool, which is looking wonderful.

Sunday - It's nice being at home. I'm enjoying the weird touches that make home, home - like these deer antlers with fairy lights wrapped round them in the kitchen.

I hope you all had a lovely, lovely week. Did you get up to anything special?

Super Chocolatey Chocolate Cupcakes

Baking for bake sales is equally fun and exhausting. You get the satisfaction of making lots and lots of cakes that look really pretty, but by the end of the day you've got icing in your hair and and aching feet. This week I'm baking for two sales, both to raise money for the magazine I edit. When baking for a bake sale I find it's best to go for crowd pleaser's. It's not the time to give those avocado brownies you've been eyeing up a while a go, it's the time to whack out your best chocolate cake and make it look as tasty as possible. 

My best chocolate cake is just amazing. It's huge, it has outrageous amounts of icing and every slice looks like a doorstop. It's from a fantastic recipe book called "Cherry Cake and Ginger Beer" that I've had for years. To make the bake sale slightly easier, I divided the mixture into cupcake cases instead - much quicker for people to grab when they pop out of the office for a coffee, and no need for napkins or forks. I mixed the icing up a bit, topping some of the cakes with the recommended chocolate buttercream, and made some of them into butterfly cakes with caramel buttercream.

I know the pictures have you drooling, I know all you want now is the recipe. It would be rude of me to deny you of the treat, so here we go!

Chocolate Cupcakes

175g Dark Soft Brown Sugar

175g Light Soft Brown Sugar

350g Unsalted Butter

6 Eggs

270g Self-raising Flour

80g Cocoa Powder

2tsp Baking Powder

Rich Chocolate Buttercream

175g Icing Sugar

55g Cocoa Powder 

75g Butter

A splash of milk

Caramel Buttercream

175g Icing Sugar

50g Butter

2tsp Caramel Flavouring

A splash of milk

1. Preheat the oven to 180°C

2. Cream the sugars with the butter, then add each egg individually

3. Add the dry ingredients to the mixture then spoon into cupcake cases. This recipe makes around 30 cupcakes when you put around 50g of mix into each case. I don't normally bother to weigh out the mix in each cupcake case, but when your baking for a sale there's something nice about complete consistency.

4. Bake for around 20 minutes, or until a skewer comes out of the cake clean.

 
5. For the cupcakes with chocolate buttercream simply make up the chocolate buttercream and pipe it on top of the cupcake however you fancy. For the caramel topped cupcakes, chop the top of the cupcake off.

6. Pipe a splodge of icing on the flat part of the cupcake, then cut the top of the cupcake in half and stick them in either side of the icing splodge, like butterfly wings!

If you're making these for a bake sale, try and resist eating them before the day! If you're just treating yourself, tuck into the cupcakes with a cup of tea.

Week Eleven

I am a bad blogger, a bad reader of blogs, just bad! Why is life so busy sometimes? I've got my photos of the week ready for you, although they have to come with a warning that they are generally terrible quality! At least having such a busy week means I have a myriad of posts lined up for the coming week, because of all the exciting things I was doing, and I can't wait to sit and catch up on everyone else's blogs. I'm having withdrawal symptoms!

Monday - After an incredibly traumatic Sunday evening that saw Ben and I in A&E until midnight because of nasty allergic reaction, I treated us to lunch at The Sand Dollar to cheer us up a bit. The soup is Cullen Skink, which sounds disgusting but is a delicious Scottish soup, thick and creamy with smoked haddock, potatoes and onions. 

Tuesday - I left the house at 8:30am and got home at 10:30pm. It was a painfully long day, but there was a lovely moon on the way home.

Wednesday - Remember these guys, that Mum sent me for my birthday weeks ago? I finally put them in the bin on Wednesday. The buds were still perfect, but sadly the flowers were long gone. They lasted an age though, so great value for money!

Thursday - I had a class in a building I never really spend any time in, so I got a different view of he city for a change.

Friday - The start of National Science and Engineering Week saw the launch of the new issue of the magazine I'm Editor-in-Chief of, and an evening with Lucy Hawking, children's author and daughter of Stephen Hawking

Saturday - Another NSEW event - sustainable fishing anyone?

Sunday - Bake sale prep! I have lots of recipe posts coming up for you as a result of this...

I hope you all had lovely week. Remember to link me in the comments if you're doing your own photo project!

Week Ten

 Monday - A mad (and enjoyable) scrabble to eat all of the chocolate in the house before the start of lent.

Tuesday - A glorious view that just about made stomping about in the rain for a few hours worth it.

Wednesday - We snapped up tickets to see Jack Whitehall back in Autumn, and it was well worth it! If you can find tickets for a show near you I wholeheartedly recommend it.

 Thursday - Spring has sprung in the Botanical Gardens I'm lucky enough to walk through everyday. Fingers crossed we won't get any snow towards the end of the month, which is exactly what happened last year. March was two weeks of glorious sunshine, two weeks of blizzards.

 Friday - A fun outfit choice to brighten up the day.

 Saturday - Pure indulgence dinner of baked camembert, bread and apples.

 Sunday - The lilies in my Valentines flowers have finally bloomed. Beautiful.

World Book Day

Today on my way to university I got really irritated, because I realised I'd missed the opportunity to wear one of my many book themed t-shirts on a day dedicated to books. I live around the corner from a primary school, and upon seeing children dressed as Harry Potter walking down the street I genuinely wondered if I had time to turn around to change. Sadly, a computer lab beckoned, and I'm sat eating lunch in my staple Breton. But I'm still thinking about books. I'm reminiscing over the world book days I spent at school dressed in ridiculous outfits, the embarrassment of sitting on the bus home in elf ears, but secretly loving every second of it.

When I was younger I devoured books. I had nearly two and a half hours on a bus to school every single day, so I had a lot of time to read. I'd been encouraged from when I was tiny, with Dad reading books that I was really far to young for chapter by chapter before I went to sleep at night. I was five years old in the summer of 1997 when Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stones was first published. Dad had picked it up on whim before we went on holiday and I became so obsessed with it that he'd read the whole thing to me within the first few days of the holiday, because I insisted he didn't wait until bedtime. He ended up with a small crowd of children around him reading it on a sunbed by the pool. After that we read The Hobbit together, and on and on it went. I read his Famous Five books, very carefully, as they were second hand when he had them as a child and a little delicate, and all the rest of the Enid Blyton classics. The Roman Mystery books were both and enjoyable and educational, and I hold them almost solely responsible for me passing Latin. As a teenager I used books by Meg Cabot to guide me in my life choices - other than the whole 'princess' thing her characters were so easy to relate to. I didn't have the easiest time at school, for which I hold myself and my inability to react to situations into the right way equally as responsible for as the people who put me in those situations. But books made it so much better for me, I could go into a little world of my own.

These days, I enjoy a wide variety of books, the specifics of which are a post for another day, this one is so wordy already! But I don't have as much time to read. Or I don't think I do. When I think about how much time I spend flopped in front of the TV or browsing the internet, I have plenty of time to read.

As yesterday marked the start of lent, I was thinking about how I could mark lent this year. There's my usual health kick. But I wanted to do something else, and it's often said that you should do something extra during lent as well as giving something up. Although reading more is a bit self centred, I think it'll be good for me to spend a little less time on mindless junk, and a bit more time with my nose in a book.

Maybe you'll try and do the same?