mirrormirror - Part 54

AWESOME GIVEAWAY! – Philips LivingColors LED Lamp

April 7, 2010 By Paola 46 Comments

As you know we like a bit of colour round these parts and we’re also not terribly fond of decorating, so I got extremely excited when I was contacted by the folks at Philips about giving away one of their awesome LivingColors LED lamps.

One of you lucky peeps is going to win a small floor lamp with four different coloured LEDs which casts light onto a wall or within a small room to create instant mood, ambience and 16 million choices of colour. Yes, you heard right, 16 million colours. You’ll never have to go to a paint store again.

It comes with a cute and intuitive little remote control which allows you to precisely control the colour and saturation, so you can have colour for reading, one colour for eating, another for relaxing and another for well, I’ll leave it up to your imagination.

Suffice it so say I want one pretty badly, so I hope no one enters this giveaway.

If you MUST enter, then leave a comment below saying ‘what colour you would choose to colour your world with light and why’.

I will choose one lucky person using a cold hard random number generator when I get back from my Palm Springs weekend (did I mention I’m going to Palm Springs?) on Tuesday.

For more chances to win there is also a weekly sweepstake over at www.coloryourworldsweeps.com every week until April 18th, or you can always buy one here, though it will set you back $190.

A Fun Family Easter

April 5, 2010 By Paola 6 Comments

An egg as big as the Minx’s head

Some Easter eggs we made instead

(Remember when I fondly imagined the Minx and I following Martha’s instructions for tasteful natural egg dyes? Yeah right. Naive is not the word. This year’s egg dying kit from the drugstore was entitled ‘Bright & Shiny.’)

Some chocolate cupcakes made that day

(Chocolate sour cream cupcakes with chocolate buttercream. The Minx was in charge of chicks, Cadbury’s Mini Eggs and sprinkles. Prize Easter cupcake wrappers from Bella Cupcake Couture.)

We opened the ‘Crack Mes’ and shouted ‘hooray’! (Still can’t get over how exquisite these were, and the Minx managed to get one with a HOMEMADE. PAPER. DAFFODIL inside).

We went out for brunch and a movie too. (Both highly recommended).

We had tons of fun, what about you?

Sorry, I’m still in doggerel mode after the ‘Easter Bunny’ put together a hugely successful rhyming clues Easter egg hunt for the Minx. You have never seen two parents more ridiculously proud of their little selves than we were. Sad I know.

Eggs-quisite

April 2, 2010 By Paola 6 Comments

I just wanted to boast really.

Look what I’ve got nestling at the foot of the Easter tree!

I just had a very nice lunchtime knitting session with Megan Not Martha and she gave me three of her exquisite chocolate and goodie-filled eggs which have been all round the blogosphere 85 times already.

I bet you wish you were me.

April Photography Gallery

April 1, 2010 By Paola 2 Comments

Picture from last April’s Skagit Valley Tulip Fest

This one is for all you photographers out there and is half something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time, and half a complete copy from Tara’s weekly photo gallery on her fabulous blog Sticky Fingers.

Some of you may remember that, back in the day, I used to write a blog full of seasonal fun and jollity called The Year of Living Gorgeously , and that we held a monthly photography competition, which celebrated every month of the year through photography.

Well, we stopped writing the blog but I loved doing the photography competition and have been looking for a way to revive it. Tara’s idea seems to work very well. Over the course of the month post up your photograph of the month on your blog (if you don’t have a blog, send me your photo and I’ll post it up here) and at the end of the month I’ll set up one of those McLinky things here, so we can see all your beautiful images.

So, get your thinking caps on. What does April mean to you? Is it Easter? Or Spring? (Or Autumn in your hemisphere?) Does it conjure up a particular food, or flower or view? Or maybe a celebration, a birthday or a local event. Or perhaps a hobby or pastime or craft that you particularly indulge in round this time of the year.

If you were making a really personal April calendar what would your April photo be?

Quick Easter Links

March 31, 2010 By Paola 5 Comments

Rushing around like a mad thing this week, so blogging may be a little light.

Here are some greatest Easter hits to tide you over today though.

Remember when we made hot cross buns? Still better than any I’ve managed to find in the US, though Alki Bakery does the best ones I’ve come across in Seattle.

And here is the Easter tree explained with instructions on how to make the felted pompoms here

And here’s the Easter bunny egg cosy I knitted for the Minx last year, using the free pattern here.

This year I was going to make a traditional English Simnel Cake, but then I was lucky enough to win a pack of Bella Cupcake Couture’s new Easter cupcake wrappers, so plans have changed to make not so traditional Easter cupcakes.

More on these anon. Oh and if you’d like to buy them in the UK (though sadly not the Easter ones this year), we’ve got Bella cupcake wrappers for sale in the shop. (And look whose photo she is using on her promotional postcards!)

One of the great Easter mysteries of our time is why on earth giant chocolate eggs seem to be a purely UK phenomenon. The British do take their chocolate eggs very seriously. After searching in vain for them over the last couple of years, I decided to take matters into my own hands and place an order with the British Food Shop online. After all we can’t have the Minx growing up not knowing about proper British chocolate can we? The British Food Shop ships Cadbury’s chocolate direct from the UK and its Easter eggs are currently on sale (though it’s doubtful you’ll get them in time for Easter).

Finally for someone who does Easter far better than I ever could, rush over to Not Martha to see her amazing take on making homemade Kinder eggs (though so much more beautiful than Kinder eggs could ever be).

As an aside, did you know that, unlike guns, Kinder eggs are technically banned in the US? Any that you see on sale here are actually contraband. Really. I mean REALLY?

Weekend Photos

March 30, 2010 By Paola 4 Comments

This weekend I made a cheesecake for the school’s Gala auction

admired the sun shining through my new (vintage) Pyrex {from ZellesAttic}

over-exposed a tulip

admired foliage in the Japanese Garden

had coffee and cake at the Essential

and put up the Easter tree

I have spared you images from our trip to Ikea.

Some Photography Links

March 27, 2010 By Paola 4 Comments

Loving the ShakeItPhoto Iphone app, which turns all your Iphone pics into Polaroids. It seems to make even the most boring pictures seem interesting. Here are some recent shots, around my house and from a walk round Seattle’s Gasworks Park. I really need to sit down and play with it properly to get some cool effects.

Speaking of which, I think I’ve finally plucked up the courage to spring for a real Polaroid camera. The good news is that the Impossible Project is now making genuine Polaroid film, after it was discontinued last year. At $21 for 8 photos though it does seem scarily spendy.

If you’re a Photoshop user, this is pretty amazing. The below gives a sneak peek of a feature that is apparently on the way. Soon we won’t need cameras at all. {via the Daily Dish}

And finally female Etsy photographers have got together to produce a book on Blurb featuring some of their wares. More details and images on sfgirlbybay. You can buy it here, I wish Blurb books weren’t so expensive as it does seem hugely inspiring.

{Images from She’s a Rainbow by kristybee, traci french and cassia beck}

Foodportunity

March 26, 2010 By Paola 4 Comments

Beautiful ravioli from the Herb Farm

Oh but I’ve been a busy bunny recently.

On Tuesday night I was lucky enough to go to Foodportunity – a networking event for Seattle foodies organised by Keren of FranticFoodie, where chefs, restaurateurs, press, bloggers, bakers and kitchen shops all get together to sample fabulous food from some of the top restaurants in Seattle.

This was the first time I’ve been and I so enjoyed myself. I got to meet fellow Seattle foodies and bloggers such as Seattle Bon Vivant and Carrie of Girl & Coconut (without her coconut on this occasion) whom I’ve been following for years, mirrormirror supplier Bella Cupcake Couture (with whom I’d only exchanged emails before) and loads of new and interesting people such as Lacey from A Greener Kitchen, a new ecofriendly online kitchen store.

The food was really excellent – with my prize for foodie bite of the night going to Alaska Silk Pie’s tiny Creme Brulee Cheesecakes – and best of all, thanks to good offices and generosity of Carrie Coconut, I won dinner for two at the Herb Farm, which is renowned as one of the very best restaurants in the whole of the Pacific Northwest. REALLY excited about that one.

I found out about Foodportunity on Twitter and the Herb Farm competition above was a Twitter competition on the night (which Carrie alerted me to). I’m really finding Twitter a great networking place to be, can’t think why I didn’t get on there earlier. My Twitter handle is @mirrormirrorxx. I’d love to see you there!

The Story of the Cake – Part 3

March 22, 2010 By Paola 16 Comments

And here’s the little hussy with her clothes on!

Here’s a quick overview of what we did. You can get a much better idea of the structure from this pic. I don’t think Cinderella found this to be an entirely dignified experience.

Note the careful styling with the empty pizza boxes

1) Buy a nice clean Barbie-type doll, styled how you’d like. The stripper gloves, choker, hair and earrings on this doll did make a huge difference to the effectiveness of the cake, so it’s good to start with a new accessorized doll, which then makes a great additional present for the birthday girl.

2) You can buy kits to do this but I used took a large stainless steel pudding basin

and a springform cake tin of the same diameter. The bottom layer above is a 9” cake pan, the middle two layers are the pudding basin.

3) Make up 3 x your favourite cake mix. I again used the recipe for ‘Mom’s Chocolate Cake’ from the Macrina Bakery Cookbook. I can’t find it anywhere online, so I’ll try and write it down in a future blogpost. Suffice it to say that I’ve used it for birthday cakes for the last four years, it’s IMMENSELY forgiving to being moulded into all sorts of different shaped pans, is moist and flavourful and much loved by adults and children alike (to the extent that year on year people tell me they hope I’m making the same cake). Divide your mixture up so that one third is in the pan for the bottom layer and two thirds is in the pudding basin. The only tricky bit is gauging the cooking time for the pudding basin cake. I monitored mine closely and stuck a stick of spaghetti into it every 15 minutes after the initial cooking period was up. It took about an hour and half to cook in the end.

4) Slice the domed tops off the two cakes so that they’re flat, cut the pudding basin cake in half and layer the three cakes with buttercream. Wrap Barbie’s nether regions with clingfilm and plunge her into the cake. Our Barbie was tall and so had to go in at a bit of an angle. We also had to take the trimmings from the cakes and build up an embryonic fourth layer on the top so that the cake went up to her waist and not just her crotch.

5) Decorate with vanilla buttercream. This dress designing bit was fun! I’ve seen cakes online which use fondant icing for this part and they look incredible as you can arrange the ‘dress’ into pleats and folds. Unfortunately I don’t like the taste of fondant icing so much, so buttercream it was, there’s only so much compromising a glutton such as myself will do.

I also should have tested out my blue food colourings beforehand. They were entirely the wrong blue for Cinderella but because it’s a primary colour I couldn’t change it by mixing in other colours as I usually do.

6) Go OTT with frills and furbelows. I realised that the colourful flowers I’d made previously would be very un-Cinderella like, so at the last minute I coloured some of the white melty stuff blue and made little forget-me-nots to decorate her underskirts. The coloured flowers I made went round the base. She would also have been wearing a lot of pearls if I hadn’t run out of white dragees.

(Disney’s Cinderella is sadly quite tastefully attired, so I had to keep my wildest flights of fancy in check).