Baking Bonanza and the Pudding Flavoured Lip Balm!

As you may, or may not know from my many Tweets, I have a little daughter who has just turned six months old. I returned to work last week, and my goodness, what a shock to the system it was! I think I fell asleep at half eight in the evening after my first day back! However, I had great fun in making some baked goods for my friends at work, all of which went down well!

Have you seen advertised on television the new serial magazine 'Cake Decorating'? It is AMAZING. As soon as I saw it advertised, I just knew I would end up subscribing. It's a weekly publication, and every week there are new techniques to learn and recipes to try. The best of it is, is that the tools required come with the magazine! Part one came with some pink butterfly cookie cutters, so I made these:

'Butter'fly Cookies!

These were truly delicious, lovely and crispy. They didn't last very long....

I then made this cake for my lovely gals at work, following another recipe in the Cake Decorating magazine:

'Bad Boy' Chocolate Sponge Cake

Again, this was a simple to follow recipe with great results! The best thing happened too: Cadbury UK retweeted this picture of my cake, so all their 14,000+ followers could have seen MY cake! Scary! The girls at work loved it too, which is always good :)

And finally, I cooked a lovely dessert for me and Mr Claw the other week:



A lovely potted Creme Brulee. Although I will come clean, this was bought from M&S and only cooked with my fair hands! Tee hee. It was still gorgeous though- vanilla-ry and sugary sweet heaven.

Unlike this!:

A friend of mine asked me if I'd seen any of these floating around in my local high street. Apparently they were a Limited Edition last year and that there were increasingly difficult to find (the phrase 'Hen's Teeth' cropped up.) I walked into my local Sainsurys on the hunt of these elusive Lip Therapies, and there was about four left. So I picked one up for my friend and one for me. Now, looking at the packaging, you're probably thinking the same as what I did. It's cute. The font and the cracked sugar gives the tin a vintage feel, and the words 'Limited Edition' bring out my collector frenzy.

What's inside is just the normal Vaseline lip therapy with... a digusting chemical smell. It smells absolutely NOTHING like my gorgeous vanilla creme brulee! A serious disappointment. My friend them told me that these tins were being sold on eBay for double their RRP! Right Royal Ripoff, say I!

Have you tried this, or any of the other Vaseline lip therapies?



Dior Garden Party Spring 2012 Collection - Swatches and Review

Okay, I know I'm late to the party in reviweing these. Truth is, I've had them from the first week they were released and have worn them on numerous occasions, just never had the time to sit down and take decent pictures of them!

Dior's Spring make up collection for 2012 is named 'Garden Party' and is inspired by Christian Dior's love for flowers, and the rose garden he planted himself at his house in Normandy. According to him 'After women, flowers are the most heavenly collection.' The collection comprised of the most beautiful make up clutches, and two eyeshadow pallettes with beautiful bright spring greens in one, and mauves and lilacs in another. But of course, I was there for the nail varnish!

There were only two varnishes in the Garden Party collection, so let's take a look at them:

Waterlilly, and Forget-Me-Not

(By the way, that's the tips of my fingers you can see in the reflection of the lids.

I'm waving hello to you! :P)

I wore Forget-Me-Not first, take a look at the swatches:

Sorry about the glare on the first two pictures- it was a mega bright day!

As you can see, Forget-Me-Not is a medium purple creme varnish with a high gloss finish. I liked the colour, but I didn't love it. For some reason, it just doesn't look unique enough to warrant the hefty price tag. I'm sure if I did enough hunting, I would be able to find a fairly decent duplicate for a snip of the cost!

The brush for these varnishes are the short, wide ones with rounded tips, that I personally find make application a whole lot easier, as it just takes one swipe. The formula of the varnish however, is kinda tricky to work with! Look at my middle finger. See that bump? Yeah. You have to be really patient with this varnish, as it will bubble like microwave popcorn if you're not careful. Slow and steady wins the race with this. The formula is quite thick, therefore I found the drying time to be quite long.

As I mentioned above, both these varnishes are rose scented. Now, I don't know if you have tried any of the scented Revlon varnishes, but they smell pretty okay- not too strong, and true to the thing they are meant to smell like. This (and the Waterlilly varnish too) smell GROSS. An overpowering chemical smell. I was dying to get my top coat on just to dilute the fragrance. Headache central.

Take a look at Waterlilly:

 Please feel free to enlarge the images, so you can see the shimmer better.

Now this is a unique varnish, worthy of the price tag. I love, Love, LOVE this lacquer. Look at the colour. A beautiful spring green, with a hint of aqua to it to stop it looking like all the other yellowy spring greens out there. This is gorgeous. Look at the shimmer in the bottle. Lush.

Unfortunately, the same application problems I had with Forget-Me-Not were present in the application of Waterlilly. My pinkie finger had some serious bubbling issues, but because I loved the colour so much, I took it all off and re painted my nail. That's dedication! I would say that Waterlilly's formula is perhaps not as thick as Forget-Me-Not's, but you still have to be careful and apply thin layers.

Again, that horrible chemical-y smell is very much present with Waterlilly. Yuck.

So, what do you guys think? Do you like the colours? Have you already tried them? If you have tried them, what did you think of the scent in them? Personally, I loved Waterlilly and think it would make a great addition to any polish collection. Forget-Me-Not is fine, but it isn't a unique colour in my mind. If Dior had made the Forget-Me-Not a shimmery polish like the Waterlilly, then I'd be drooling and be able to say its a great mini collection.

Let me know what you think!

Food Inspired Nails Part 2- Chocolate Philadelphia?!?! Are they MAD?

Take a look at this:

When I heard about this on Twitter, I thought 'Surely not!' But it's true, the chocolate cheese has landed! Philadelphia have teamed up with Cadbury to create this little pot of cheesy, chocolatey madness! Taste taste to follow after the nails!

Seeing this Philadelphia reminded me of another Cadbury collaboration, this time with Nails Inc from a couple of years ago. Cadbury had just launched their Bliss bar and were running a competition to win one of Nails Inc's two promotional shades: Vanilla Bliss and Cocoa Bliss. I won this one:

Nails Inc Cocoa Bliss

Cocoa Bliss is a rich, shimmery dark brown shade that is absolutely stunning on. It safely escapes looking a shall we say, disgusting shade of brown (get my hint?) and looks very chic. Observe:

Look at that shimmer in the bottle! Yes!

If you enlarge, you will see the shimmer a bit clearer. This is not a flat brown cream. Its special.

And just for a bit of fun, here is a colour comparison against the Cadbury Philly:

Ha! Not quite the same! I prefer the colour of the varnish!

What did the Cadbury Philadelphia taste like? Well, it pretty much tasted like a regular chocolate cheesecake, without the biscuit base. So, after an initial sample, I reached for a pack of digestive biscuits, topped it with the Philly, et voila! Mini chocolate cheesecakes! If you can get your hands on the packs of mini digestives, these would make a great party snack!

Have you tried the Cadbury Philadelphia yet? 







Food Inspired Nails Part 1- Strawberry Cheesecake Cupcakes

Hey guys, sorry for my absence, I have recently been visiting my family up in the North West, in a small town named Congleton. You may have heard of it, but you probably won't have. (It's that small)
Anyhoo, Mr Claw requested some Strawberry Cheesecake Cupcakes last week to cheer him up (Masters dissertation- say no more), and here's how they turned out:

Yum! I took the recipie from the Hummingbird Bakery Cupcakes and Muffins book, and I think it they turned out pretty nice! They tasted lush, despite the fact that Strawberry is probably my least favourite berry. Mr Claw loved them too, and said that next time, I was to bake cupcakes that I wanted! (Oh! How generous!)

It was after I made these cupcakes that I realised I could do a really simple, but effective nail art design based on the strawberry. I had recently bought some new nail art pens and hadn't taken them for a test drive yet, and every nail polish lover has a basic red creme so I created these designs:-

Not bad, eh? As I said, these are really simple designs, but I think they are effective and eye catching. In hindsight, I'm not so sure of the middle finger pink strawberry, as I think I should have stuck to the primary colours. I love the thumb though! Tasty!

Here is a list of all the lacquers I used to create this look: Barry M Nail Paint in Matte White, MUA Cosmetics Nail  Varnish in U & I, Rimmel Lycra Pro in Show Off, Nails Inc Nail Varnish in Milan, Red, Green and Yellow Nail Art Pens (I got mine from Argos!)

What do you guys think? Let me know!