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Things I Am Loving: Walnut Birds from Gretel Home

February 15, 2013 By Paola 2 Comments

The sun is shining here in Seattle and the photography studio is calling me, but I quickly wanted to share the gorgeous present that I was lucky enough to receive yesterday for Valentines Day.

Pinterest may have set back cause of feminism by several hundred years, but it sure has made it easier to give husbands a list of acceptable presents.

This little carved walnut bird with the pink lacquer chest has been a cover picture on my Pinterest boards for a long time, so I was thrilled to actually get one in the ‘flesh’ yesterday – along with four little birdie friends.

As with most wooden things, these are so much more lovely than any picture can show – smooth, warm and tactile and most beautifully carved and finished. Exquisite craftsmanship at its very best.

The birds are handmade in the UK and are available at Gretel Home.

Here are my tweeties having a chat.

I haven’t had time this week to trawl the Internet for design WTF**ckery. If you chaps ever come across anything that you think might be suitable to feature, do please let me know.

Last Minute Valentines’ Ideas

February 14, 2013 By Paola 2 Comments

As has become traditional round here, we’re all about the last minute Valentines. And since it’s Valentines’ morning already we are taking the definition of last minute to new extremes.

Still here are some things you can do to surprise the family this evening.

Get the kids to work on this cute colour mixing chart courtesy of Art Projects for Kids.

Or make or buy pink and white loaf cakes (pound cakes) and have fun with cookie cutters (courtesy of Matthew Mead).

Set the kids to work again. This time with buttons (courtesy of Hands On As We Grow).

Or let them get busy with heart-shaped doilies (from Say Yes to Hoboken).

Have breakfast for dinner tonight, and break out the squeezy pancake bottle (via Recipe By Photo)

Or if you’ve been organised enough to get a gift, but not any wrapping paper (er, that would be me), here’s a cute gift wrap idea from Babble.

Or maybe you could just arrange some fruit and make a pretty Valentines’ photo. From DaitoZen.

However, and with whomever, you are celebrating today, make sure you tell someone you love them. To all my lovely readers out there, I LOVE YOU very much!

(If none of these float your boat checkout last year’s last minute ideas round up here.)

The Best Ever Victoria Sponge Cake

February 13, 2013 By Paola 4 Comments

It’s the day before Valentines, and, if you’re anything like me you haven’t exactly managed to buy or make anything in advance. Never fear though. There is still time to make a delectable sponge cake and decorate it with a heart.

A Victoria sponge cake is a simple but delightful British afternoon tea treat, said to be a favourite of Queen Victoria’s. It is most usually filled with a red jam (raspberry, strawberry, plum and cherry are all good) and whipped cream, and sprinkled with icing sugar, making it somehow look very ‘Valentinish’.

However you can just fill it with jam; with jam and a vanilla buttercream (keeps longer); with jam, whipped cream and fruit as I did for this cake, or my mother would often fill our family cakes with a thick layer of chocolate buttercream. If you’re using jam I do recommend using the best quality you can lay your hands on as it is a prominent part of the whole experience. I used a homemade seedless raspberry for this cake.

First make your sponge cakes.

Classic Victoria Sponge

The following quantities make for a nice deep cake in 7 in cake tins or 8 in cakes with a more even proportion of filling to cake. The traditional quantity – 4oz (110g) of all the dry ingredients + 2 eggs makes deep 6 in cakes, or a shallower 7 in ones. (The pictures show the quantities below baked in 7 in cake tins).

For American readers who prefer to use volume measures, I used this recipe as the demo when I was giving a class on British baking and using weighing scales. I suggest you weigh the ingredients for this as you will get a more accurate result.

Ingredients

175g (6oz) butter at room temperature

175g (6oz) caster (baker’s) sugar

3 large eggs

A few drops of vanilla extract (make your own vanilla extract)

175g (6oz) self-raising flour, sifted (or the same quantity of all purpose or cake flour with 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder)

Hot water as required

To finish

Jam, whipped cream and icing sugar

Method

Preheat the oven to 170 degrees C (325F)

Butter two 18cm (7inch) sandwich tins and line with greaseproof paper or baking parchment.

Cream the butter and sugar together until very pale and fluffy.

Whisk the eggs and vanilla extract together in jug and add a little at a time to the creamed mixture, beating thoroughly after every addition. If the mixture starts to curdle then add a tablepoon of the weighed flour and keep beating. If the mixture curdle and you can’t rescue it, don’t worry, it just means your cake won’t rise quite as much.

When everything is incorporated sieve about a third of the flour into the bowl and fold in the flour thoroughly with a metal spoon. Repeat until all the flour is incorporated. Be careful when you’re folding to keep as much air in the mixture as possible.

Add hot water or milk as necessary, until the mixture slides easily off a spoon. This is called ‘dropping consistency’ and it key to a bouncy sponge with an even top. I find that I need to add more liquid for American flours. Divide the mixture equally between the two tins and smooth out to the edges. (If you want your cakes to be perfectly even you can weigh the mix in the pans).

Bake for around 25- 30 minutes if making the shallower cakes (4oz of dry ingredients in a 7 in tin or 6 oz of dry ingredients in an 8 in tin) or for 30-35 minutes if you’re making one of the deeper cakes (4 oz of dry ingredients in a 6 in pan or 6oz of dry ingredients in the 7 in pan). When they are fully cooked your cakes will be golden and springy. Press the cake with a fingertip and it should leave no imprint. Loosen round the edges with a palette knife and turn onto a wire rack to cool.

Fill with cream and jam and sift a little icing sugar over the top – in the shape of a heart if you’re feeling romantic.

Things I Am Loving: Doodle Bowls

February 12, 2013 By Paola 4 Comments

I’m sitting here gently blogging to the sound of banging, the odd crash, and builders noisily chatting about skateboarding. Yes, the kitchen remodel is underway. We spent a glamorous weekend taking a huge mountain of STUFF out of our upstairs kitchen and making the downstairs kitchen one where actual food can be cooked (until now we’ve most used it to make breakfast).

I knew I had a lot of kitchen paraphernalia, but seeing it all boxed up is rather mindblowing. Anyway, onwards and upwards. April 26th can’t come quickly enough as far as I’m concerned.

Just time for a quickie today.

Saw these wooden Doodle Bowls and Plates from HappyDoodleLand on Pinterest (where else) and loved them. Unfortunately the artist doesn’t seem to be selling them at the moment (though her prints are also super cute).

But wouldn’t it be nice to be able to doodle as creatively as Flora Cha?

WTF Friday: Our Upstairs Bathroom

February 8, 2013 By Paola 9 Comments

This week we have a real WTF doozy.

I promised you pictures of the upstairs bathroom which we’re finally going to have remodelled. And here they are.

We have the same green laminate countertops as in the kitchen, this time paired with baby poop brown walls.

We have the same orange-y brown wood panelled ceiling as the kitchen.

And thoughtful design touches such as the green glass bricks, which match the green tiles in the bath surround and on the floor.

Together with some charming fixtures and fittings (and built in speakers in the ceiling and toilet ????)

Obviously you’re all jealous of such gorgeousness, but seriously WTF were they thinking?

Kitchen remodel starts on Monday. Bathroom remodel starts a couple of weeks later. I so cannot wait.

Flower Sugar Cookies

February 6, 2013 By Paola 1 Comment

We celebrated a very special birthday a couple of weekends back.

The Minx, would you believe, turned eight in January. No I don’t believe it either. I wonder if there are any of you around who remember her when she looked like this (oh, how innocent those blogging days were).

To celebrate we had to suffer through a party at the American Girl doll store in Seattle, followed by a birthday sleepover with eight of her closest friends and their dolls. I believe I deserve some sort of mothering Oscar.

(For those of you not in the US or in possession of an 8 year old daughter, American Girl dolls are something of a cultural phenomenon. They’re very high quality, INCREDIBLY expensive dolls – some dressed to be fictional historical characters and some from the present day – that come with every possible expensive accessory you can dream of. Even to my adult eyes, the store, with its teeny dolls’ hair salon and bistro with special chairs so the dolls can sit at the table, is faintly mind-blowing.)

Unfortunately a fancy cake came as part of the package at the store, so I was unable to emulate my birthday cake extravaganzas of yore, so I decided instead to apply myself to sugar cookies that the girls could have with milk while watching their American Girl movie. The tiny cookies are of course for the dolls.

As you can tell I’m a rather slapdash cookie icer. One day I’d love to learn how to ‘flood’ the cookies properly with icing and pipe neat intricate details on them, but this time round I made do with dipping the cookies in royal icing – the pink worked best because it was wetter and runnier – and then piped some rather wobbly outlines on them.

I used this trusty sugar cookie recipe from the Joy of Baking, which I highly recommend, together with their royal icing recipe.

For the record here is my baby blowing out the eight candles on her cake.

And here she is with her freaky ‘Look Like Me’ doll.

I do want to improve my cookie icing skills and so to that end I’ve purchased Decorating Cookies by Bridget Edwards which looks amazing. Not that I’ve actually used it yet mind you. I find it’s always easier to buy the craft book rather than actually DO the craft. The blog which inspired the book is here.

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Reboot

February 5, 2013 By Paola 13 Comments

There’s been quite a lot going on behind the scenes here at mirrormirror global headquarters over the last month or two. The mysterious backpain has been coupled with days of utter and total exhaustion and nights of bizarre dreams, insomnia and very unrestful sleep.

I read everything the Internet had to offer on piriformis syndrome – the clenched muscle in my left buttock that was squeezing on the sciatic nerve and radiating pain all down my left leg making it impossible to sit and often to sleep – and discovered that some people think it’s stress related, that the muscle spasms due to stress or anxiety in the same way that we might get a tension headache when we’ve got too much on our plate.

And just believing that I needed to relax and that the pain wasn’t due to a major structural issue, and that I could walk and sit as normal, immediately started to bring relief and now the pain is pretty much gone. I’m convinced that for me the pain was stress-related. I can even feel the muscle start to tighten again if I get agitated. (If you think you might be going through something similar, you could do worse than check out John Sarno’s book Healing Back Pain. It’s a terribly written book and could be condensed into one chapter if you got rid of all the padding and filler. But I’m certain he’s onto something.)

As all this was going on, it slowly started to dawn on me that, what with being the mother of a young kid, moving countries, trying to run my business from afar and finding time to blog, I’ve actually been living with a mountain of stress for years. I’ve always been a very type A personality – rushing about everywhere, and with a ton of stuff on my plate – and although many of those stressors have now abated, I realised that I had absolutely hit a wall, that the chronic insomnia I’d been suffering from since the Minx was born was not going to go away on its own, and that the exhaustion I was increasingly feeling during the day was not exactly normal.

And then I started reading about adrenal fatigue – where you are literally running on empty and caffeine, – where your adrenal glands, worn out through years of pumping adrenaline and cortisol into our body in response to stress, stop producing the cortisol and adrenaline you need to make you feel wakeful and energetic and just respond to stress and anxiety. I was waking up exhausted, struggling through the day, getting more stressed, producing more adrenaline and cortisol in response to the stress and then ending up so stressed out that I had trouble sleeping. And the following day the whole vicious cycle would start up again worse than before.

So I’ve been resting and relaxing as possible, clearing a lot of stuff on my plate and working with a naturopath to rebalance my sleep cycles. Hence the lack of blogging in recent weeks. The good news is that I think I’ve turned the corner. I’m sleeping better, though not always soundly, and the dragging exhausted feeling during the day has lessened. So I’m hoping to start up regular blogging again. To my one remaining reader, I have missed you!

Reboot – Part 2

The other big change has been in what I do with the rest of my life.

I closed mirrormirror over Christmas. It’s been pretty much on hiatus for the last couple of years and you might have noticed that I’ve been completely uninspired by it for the longest time. In fact you probably thought it was already closed. It just became too complicated running it across the different time zones and since it seems that we are here in Seattle for the foreseeable future, I had to bow to the inevitable. It was HARD to say goodbye to my baby – at one point it seemed like we were running a successful little shop – but I wasn’t doing right by her. Sometimes you just have to let go.

Thank you so much to everyone who has supported the shop in the past, by buying from it or promoting it. I really appreciated all your help and encouragement. I was hoping to hold a big sale before Christmas but all my health issues got in the way, so we do still have a bit of stock. If there’s any stuff you remember liking let me know and I can give you a fabulous price. I’ll also be hosting some ‘Bargains of the Week’ via the blog over the next couple of weeks and months.

As to what I do next, that’s a good question. All I know at the moment is that food and photography are drawing me somewhere.This blog is probably somewhere in the mix too. Where it’s all leading I’m not exactly sure but I’m intrigued and excited to find out.

I’ve signed up to do ace commercial photographer Don Giannatti’s Project 52 PRO course, which is a year of critiqued professional level photographic assignments, which should help me build my portfolio. I’m renting some beautiful studio space so I’ve finally got a proper place to work. And I’ve committed to working really hard at building my blog, my photography and my foodie credentials over the next year and I’m excited to see where I end up. Watch this space. And I hope you can join me on the ride.

And yeah, just while I’m supposed to be relieving stress we start our kitchen and bathroom remodel next week. Oh my lord!

Oh and as a further aside, our first Project 52 assignment is to ‘photograph a stranger’. Is there a Seattle-based blog reader whom I’ve never met who would like to meet up for coffee and a quick portrait session? I don’t normally take many people shots, except of the Minx, so I don’t promise they’ll be any good, mind you. If you’re interested drop me a line.

WTF Friday: Versace Fall 2013

January 18, 2013 By Paola 6 Comments

I’ve finally got my head back into the blogging game and have much to share with you next week. However, I couldn’t let this Friday go past without a quick WTF?

Today, we are going to be discussing lacy underwear for men. As shown in Versace’s Fall 2013 Menswear collection.

By which I mean you will have to discuss it because I am rendered utterly speechless.

I do appreciate, though, that Donatella, in keeping with couture tradition, added a more bridal look at the end of the show.

A New Year, A New Kitchen

January 11, 2013 By Paola 18 Comments

I haven’t been blogging regularly for a while and nobody’s currently reading this blog, so hopefully I can get away with slipping this in without anyone noticing.

WARNING: I guarantee you will see nothing uglier on the Internet today than the following pictures. Get the eye bleach ready just in case.

Finally, this year we will be remodelling our upstairs kitchen. Our house has many fine features – a great location, a fabulous roof deck and spectacular views among them, but it is not blessed in its kitchens.

I say kitchens, because we have two of them, one upstairs and and one downstairs. The downstairs one is very tiny and in need of extensive remodelling, so we tend to mostly use the upstairs kitchen. Yes, the pictures you are about to see are of our nicest kitchen.

Ready?

Aren’t those burnt orange walls and green laminate countertops just GORGEOUS?

I bet you’re jealous of those fabulously inconvenient shelves.

You too, can revel in the lack of storage space. Now do you understand why you never see any ‘in progress’ shots on my recipes?

It gets worse in the other direction.

What about that LOVELY panelled ceiling?

The. fridge. will. go.

I am so embarrassed that we’ve been in this house for six years and done nothing about this hideosity.

We are on a tightish budget, so we can spend more on the downstairs kitchen, so it’s going to be Ikea or similar all the way up here, keeping most of the existing appliances and the existing layout intact. We already have half a ton of Ikea kitchen stacked up in our basement, bought in the recent sale, and the contractor is due to start at the beginning of February.

Wish us luck! I’ll be asking for lots of our opinions along the way. At the very least we know whatever we end up with can’t possibly be worse than this.

Hanging Gingerbread Cookies

January 5, 2013 By Paola 3 Comments

It’s still sort of Christmas round these parts. The Minx doesn’t go back to school until Monday and we keep the tree up until January 6th as is traditional in the UK.

So I wanted to share one of the most fun things we did this Christmas, which was make gingerbread cookies for the tree.

I wanted to do something to pull together the hodgepodge of ornaments and decorations we’ve gathered together over the years, so I decorated them as simply as possible with white frosting and assorted pinkish ribbons from my ribbon box.

The very cool thing about them is that you’re always prepared for unexpected kid guests, of which there seem to be very many over the holiday period. Kids seem to love being able to choose their own cookie from the tree.

If you want to make some next year I can highly recommend this recipe which made easy and extremely tasty cookies.

I used this recipe for basic royal icing using egg whites but halved the amount (ie. 1 egg white to 1.5 cups of sugar). You really don’t need much icing for these babies.

I then pushed a little sugar ball into the cookie dough before baking, which could be pushed out at the end and left a little hole for hanging without the need to do dangerous things with skewers. This worked fantastically for the heart and star-shaped cookies, but I think next time I need to find a way of creating slightly smaller holes for my gingerbread girls and boys, so they don’t all look like that have frontal lobotomies.

As you can see, my icing skills leave an awful lot to be desired, but they were hugely fun to do and I think they have a certain, er, rustic charm.

I think this is the start of a new Christmas tradition anyway, though I bet I’ll be cursing these come December-time. Did you guys start any new traditions this holiday?

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