It's summer, so why not add some seasonal fruit into your life and onto your nails!
To do these Tutti Fruity Nails I used a variety of bright colours, MoYou London stamping Plates 08 & 09 from the Tropical range, my large MoYou London marshmallow stamper and a MoYou London scraper.
With some of the designs I wanted to use a couple of colours so I made decals. To do this I picked up the main colour with my stamper, painted clear polish over the top, let it dry for 10 mins, then using a tiny fine brush painted the second colour onto the design where I wanted it, waited another 10 min and covered once again with clear polish. Once fully dried (about 10 mins again) I stamped the decal directly onto my nail.
Watch the full video below!!
I'm going to using some coloured Meringue kisses on top of the very last first birthday cake I ever need to make! It's been a while since I've made French Meringue so I thought I would share my little practise run. I decided to do some rainbow ones for this tester, which in all honesty look like big sweet toothpaste meringues! Note to self, don't use colours that remind you of toothpaste for on top of the first birthday cake!!!!!
What you need...
2 Eggs, using the whites only
Caster Sugar
Vanilla Paste
Food Colouring
How you do it...
Heat your oven to 100 degrees C
Place a mixing bowl onto your kitchen scales, separate your eggs, measuring the weight of
the whites, ditch the yolks, you only need the whites. My egg whites weighed 6o grams
Now in a separate bowl measure out the caster sugar, it needs to be double the weight of the egg whites. I measured out 120 grams.
Start beating the egg whites on low, once they start to bubble up turn the speed up to high.
When the eggs whites have because stiff and firm start adding in the sugar a tablespoon at a time. When the sugar is all in, add a teaspoon of Vanilla Paste.
Beat on High for 5 minutes. When the time is up check that the sugar is dissolved by rubbing a small amount between two fingers, if it still feel gritty continue to beat it.
When it is ready it will be glossy and smooth.
Place a large piping nozzle into a piping bag, fold the edges of the bag down and place the bag into a glass so it is standing up, this makes the next step easier
Use and butterknife to place strappings of food colouring vertically along the piping bag
Carefully fill the bag with the Meringue
Cover a baking tray with baking paper
To pipe the Kisses hold the bag upright about an inch from the tray, gently squeeze the bag while holding it steady then pull the bag upwards to finish off the Kiss
Pop the Kisses in the oven for 35 minutes, you'll know they are ready when they lift easily off the tray
They cool extremely quickly so no real need to worry about moving to a cooling rack, I left them for 5 minutes then popped them straight onto a Cake.
A couple of days ago my last baby, Miss Queen B turned one. Being a FIFO family usually means we rarely get to celebrate occasions on their actual dates, which is exactly the case this time. This means I still have a couple of weeks to party plan!!! Keeping with the original 'Rainbow Unicorn' theme I had decided on (it's morphed more into a pink and gold unicorn theme) I felt that the main decoration for the house should be large tissue paper flowers, to help create a magical garden feel. Tissue Paper flowers are really quick and easy to make, the supplies you need are also really easy to get your hands on, and the end result is gorgeous!
What you need...
Coloured tissue paper, any colour you like at least 5 sheets per flower.
1 sheet of a another colour for the centre.
A twist tie or pipe cleaner or a ribbon
Scissors
How you do it...
Lay out the sheet of tissue paper you are using for the centre pieces
Fold it in half and cut along the line you create, put to the side
Lay out the five or so pieces of tissue paper on top of each other, then the two strips of tissue paper in the centre
Start folding the the paper into a fan, refer to the video below for see how
Use the twist ties or ribbon to tie the fan together around the centre
Cut a semi-
Pull the fan open
Cut strips into the centre pieces of tissue paper, this will create an extra fluffy look when you
pull them up, you can do the step before you lay the centre pieces on top of the other tissue paper.
Now gently pull the centre strips up towards the middle, when you are happy with how that looks, carefully pull each piece of tissue paper apart. It's easiest to work in a circle doing this.
Watch the video below to see exactly how I did it.
Definitely the find of the year for me was MoYou London stamping plates, they have been game changing for me with nail art, which I love but never had time to do with 3 kids nipping at my heels. These plates have made it easy for me to get something funky on my nails and have made me feel a bit more like my old self and not just mummy. It's also provided me with a great new hobby that helps me to relax, unwind and be a little creative. So to bring in the New Year, I needed to ditch the christmas nails and do something new, so here are my new years Zebra print nails.
I hope everyone has a great 2016, I have a feeling it's going to be fabulous for us here!
Happy New Year
I look forward to sharing more with you next year!
Last week while being couch potatoes not really paying to much attention to the T.V something caught the eye of both the hubstar and I. We had Jamie's super foods on, it was right at the end of the show and he was making fancy water, I'm sure it wasn't called that but I wasn't really watching it at the point when he called it anything, so fancy water it is.
It is such a simple concept and one that I'm sure a lot of you already do in summer, I know I do it with lemons and limes already but this flavour combo was just too good to not try out. So two days later we made some and had it out at Miss H's 3rd birthday party, it was a huge hit, so for the past week I've been making up a fresh batch daily and the girls have been drinking much more water because of it, which is great seeing we are having a heat wave at the moment.
What you need...
Peel from half an orange, but into strips
1 or 2 strawberries, sliced
Handfull of mint
Water
How you do it...
Place the orange peel, strawberries and mint into a jug, or whatever you like to keep your water in. I use the one of my el cheapo drink dispensers I got in a two pack with stand from K-mart Australia.
Pour about a cup of boiling water into the jug/dispenser to activate all the beautiful flavour and smells, leave it for about 5 minutes.
Fill the the rest of the jug/dispenser with cool watering chill in the fridge.
So easy and and really refreshing! Thanks Jamie Oliver!!!!
It's not christmas here until we have over decorated some gingerbread houses!
My girls love putting the lollies on, and eating them, so its a great activity to do with the kids. Not only are they cute to look at, they make your house smell great and are really delicious.
We usually make one big house each year that stands at about 20cm tall, but this year I decided to try and make a smaller template so we could have a few houses to decorate, that quickly turned into me trying put a template together for the mini gingerbread houses that sit on your hot chocolate mug.
But before we get to the templates and cutting out the pieces, we need to make some gingerbread dough.
What you need...
350 grams plain flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
3 teaspoons of ground ginger
100 grams diced butter
140 grams brown sugar
1 egg, beaten
1/3 cup of treacle
How you do it...
Place flour, baking powder and ginger in a large mixing bowl and mix together with a wooden spoon
Rub the butter into the dry mixture with your fingertips to make a breadcrumb looking mix
Stir in the brown sugar
Make a well in the centre and add in the egg and the treacle
Mix well with a wooden spoon until quite firm, then start kneeding the dough with your hands.
Once smooth, wrap in glad wrap and refrigerate for 20 mins.
Divid the dough in to two, roll out on a floured clean bench to about half a centimetre in thickness
Using the templates below cut out the house pieces. Make sure on the front piece you cut out the door section, I also like to use an extra small flower cookie cutter to create a window detail at the top of the house front.
Bake on 180 degrees C for 8 mins
* This amount dough usually makes 1 large house or
* This is a larger house that stands at approximately 20cm tall
To cut the dough, I simply cut out the pieces of the template and lay them on the rolled out dough and
use a butter knife to cut them out.
To glue the pieces together I make Royal Icing
You will need...
1 and 1/2 cups of icing sugar
1 egg white
1/2 teaspoon lemon juice
How you do it...
Lightly whisk the egg white in an electric mixer
Add sifted icing sugar and the lemon juice in
Beat until thick
Quickly put the icing into a disposable piping bag, Royal icing set quite quickly, which is what makes it prefect for gluing the house together, so make sure you work as quickly as you can.
Below are a couple of video we made for putting the houses together.
This week our precious little Miss H turned 3, to celebrate we had a mermaid themed party.
Luckily we had a perfect day and all our little mermaid guests got to enjoy a splash in Miss H's brand new mermaid pool and a BBQ to boot.
Never one to do things by half I spent the past month planning and crafting little details for the party.
I think the thing I was most proud of was the mermaid cut out I made, it was a huge hit with all kids too, and made for some super cute photos of all of our little guests.
I had kept a large box we got from one of our many online shopping deliveries, armed myself with some paints and headed into the laundry. I will admit that I didn't really have a plan and just kind of started to paint. I started with the shape the of their bodies and tails and then moved on to hair and the finer details like scales, seaweed and clam bras. I then outlined it all with black paint and painted the background blue. The Hubstar then got involved to make a structure for the back so it could stand up, I can't really go into details about how it was done as I had NOTHING to do with it, but I've added a photo so you can have a little look see. It didn't take me as long as I thought it would to put together, and I will defiantly be doing more of these bad boys at future themed parties!
Next crafting the girls and I got stuck into was making paper mache starfish.
To make the paper mache you will need
old catalogues or a old magazine
Egg carton
Water
PVA glue
We started by ripping up an old magazine and and two egg cartons, putting them in a bucket and soaking them in water for about 20 mins. Then once they were all nice a soft I got the girls to get their little hands in there and mash up all the paper, after kneeding it for about 5 mins, I squeezed out the excess water and place it into my mix master, turned it on high and watched it turn into a pulp. Once it's nice and squishy and pulpy, and almost clay like I once again squeezed out the excess water and added some PVA glue. I didn't measure how much I added, I did it more by feel, you can feel the glue is the whole way through the pulp and it kind of feel tacky.
The next thing I did was create a little template of starfish that we could use to help us get the shape right. You can find the pdf for the template here.
Now here's the fun part, using the pulp to make the starfish, we basically placed the pulp directly over the pictures of the starfish and then let them dry over night. Once they were completely dry the paper peeled off the back and we were all set to paint them.
Ever party needs a party bag, or in this case a mermaid kit! Our mermaid kits included a a little tub of play dough, some bubbles and what every mermaid needs a mermaid tail.
I made up some cute mermaid kit labels and glued then onto some brown paper bags that I had in my pantry, you can find the printable labels on the link below.
The mermaid tails were really easy to make, I ordered a pack of crocheted 'tutu tops' from a etsy store and then tied 30cm lengths folded in half to the bottom row of the crocheted tutu top.
I am far far from a professional cake maker, but I do enjoy a challenge when it comes to the kids cakes. This year Miss H picked out a mermaid tail cake. About a week before the party I made the tail topper out of fondant, doing this in advance gives the fondant plenty of time to set nice and hard.
I used three cakes to make up the shape of the cake, one 6" deep round cake tin and two 8" round cake tins. As for the actual cake, Miss H requested a strawberry cake, not exactly the type of cake I'm use to making, so I cheated and used two Betty Crocker Strawberry packet cake mixes.
Once the cakes were baked, cooled and ready to decorate, I myself organised and set the camera up and filmed the process....much easier than trying to explain what I did.
My only regret with the cake was rushing with it (we were heading off to a family christmas party), so I didn't roll out the fondant thin enough, so I think the end result looks a little clumsy, but the birthday girl loved it, and really thats all that matters when you're making a cake for a three year old!
