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Anglomania: Google’s London HQ

August 29, 2012 By Paola 2 Comments

One thing that really struck me when I went back to London was the sheer number of Union Jacks (or Union Flags for the pedants amongst us) everywhere.

Not surprisingly with the Jubilee being followed by the Olympics, the place was awash with red, white and blue bunting and you couldn’t move for Union Jack merchandise. Mostly fabulously of all most of it wasn’t done in a tacky way. It seems the Union Jack has finally been reclaimed even by top end designers as a bit of a style icon. There really was some good stuff out there.

So it seems that Google have hit the nail right on the head with their new London HQ, designed by award-winning British architects Penson Group. Not only have they taken the Union Jack, but they’ve mixed in a huge number of dated British design clichés – chintz, lampshades, swirly carpets, Chesterfield sofas, wood panelling etc. – and made them fun, witty and contemporary again.

I generally loathe that very trad English maiden auntish style of décor but this is fabulous. (Though I’d never get a stroke of work done here).

But what do you guys think? Do you love these offices, or should chintz, lampshades and swirly carpets be consigned forever to the dustbin of history, never to emerge?

London 2012: The Olympic River Part 2

August 22, 2012 By Paola 2 Comments

Here are some more photos from our trip up the River Thames during the Olympics. I’m assuming that the whole light show will stay in place now, minus the Olympic Rings of course, in which case I can’t recommend a night time visit to the river highly enough if you happen to be in London.

Magical is not a good enough word.

Here’s what we had all come to see.

But in every direction the river looked amazingly beautiful (that’s the home of the French Olympic delegation).

London Bridge has got itself a groovy new lighting scheme.

The Mayor’s Office had a laser light show featuring cyclists and tube trains amongst others.

Remember I blogged about the incredible new light show they’d installed on Tower Bridge? Well for some they flipped up the rings and then put the light show through its motions. HMS Belfast to the right also changed colour too.

And then the rings flipped back on and the Bridge turned gold to celebrate Mo Farah’s win in the 5,000 meters.

Here’s the view from the restaurant we dined at in Hay’s Galleria.

Finally, at midnight, we stopped off at the London Eye.

Slightly awesome n’est-ce pas?

Here are some more shots from my boat trip along the river.

An Afternoon of Chocolate

July 11, 2012 By Paola 4 Comments

Just in case your life was lacking a little chocolate right now (yes, I thought so) here are some pics from the afternoon we spent making chocolate desserts and truffles under the watchful eye of master chocolatier Jean-Pierre Meignaud at Patisserie Camp on Canoe Island.

It’s going to be the same drill as before, no real recipes, just descriptions and food porn a-plenty.

First get yourself a bowl of properly tempered chocolate, some Pralissimo hazelnut paste (this stuff is GOOD) and a box of chocolate breakfast cereal. Yes, truly, something like Cocoa Pops or Cocoa Krispies. I feel so much better now I know that fancy pants patissiers use this stuff too.

Carefully mix the ingredients together and then use a ring mould to form them into a crispy chocolate base. You’ve just made the world’s most sophisticated, and delicious, Rice Krispie cakes.

Then mix together some more melted, tempered chocolate with the hazelnut paste and fold it into some whipped cream. Pipe this chocolate mousse onto the crispy bases.

So far so easy, n’est-ce pas? Unfortunately it gets trickier from here on in.

Next use a knife to ‘wipe’ petals of chocolate onto a sheet of acetate. The shape of your knife will dictate the shape of your petals. Place the sheet of acetate into a plastic ‘gutter’ (half a plastic tube) to bend the petals slightly. That just blew your mind didn’t it?

Or you could just swirl blobs of chocolate with your fingers.

Or comb out streaks of chocolate and again swirl them into grids.

It was amazing watching Jean-Pierre do this stuff. He made it look incredibly quick and easy.

Finally use your chocolate shapes to decorate your mousse cakes. Adding a little gold dusting powder as necessary.

I’m just off to rustle some up for family supper tonight. Hahahahahaha.

We also made chocolate truffles that afternoon, but I have enough swoonworthy pics for a separate blog post.

Pinterest Take 5: Colour Dipped Everything

June 19, 2012 By Paola 5 Comments

It started with these, which you have no doubt seen if you have eyes and a Pinterest account.

Dipped utensils by Little Bit Funky via Making It Lovely

Soon the whole world was dipping things in paint…

Dipped cans by Maya via Anna Johanson

and posting up tutorials…

Dipped chopsticks from Poppytalk via Martha Staples

Then the Etsy shops got in on the act.

Neon dipped bowls from Wind & Willow Home via Anne DeOtte

And now everything is being dipped in colour.

Cutest ever baby shoes from Schier Shoes via Oh Joy

Personally I love this trend. You?

Pinteresting

June 14, 2012 By Paola 11 Comments

Or a small study in the effectiveness of social media.

This past weekend I had the most blissful time at ‘Patisserie Camp’.

I was hoping to blog my pastries this week, but with the Minx now home from school for the NEXT. THIRTEEN. WEEKS (heaven help me), and with us heading off for a mummy and daughter long weekend in Victoria tomorrow, the processing of the over 800 photos I took is taking some time.

She’s off to camp next Monday though, so normal blog service will be resumed then.

In the meantime I leave you with a small but intriguing study in the power of social media and Pinterest in particular. Remember the cake I made a week or two back?

Well ever since I posted it I’ve been getting a small but gratifying bump in traffic to mirrormirror thanks to a few blog readers posting it on Pinterest (thank you whoever you are). Until this weekend, when it absolutely went through the roof.

I checked back on Pinterest (did you know that if you look at something which has been pinned from your site you can see ‘Also From XYZ.com’ to the left?) and this is what I saw. Suddenly the cake had been pinned and repinned literally hundreds of times. It had gone viral.

I’ve been looking back through all the pins and can’t identify the ‘tipping point’ when it all went crazy. Suffice it to say that I yesterday I had 6x the blog traffic I normally get and the craziness shows no signs of abating. To put it into perspective that’s about 3x the traffic I got when Salon.com mentioned my Kelly Wearstler Go Fug Your Room back in 2008and that abated after about a day.

I mention this not to show off – I’ve actually been feeling like a bit of a fraud since I found the original idea on Pinterest, in a picture that had been repinned maybe two or three times – but because now I finally understand why big brands and big bloggers court Pinterest so assiduously.

I’m fascinated to see where my little cake ends up, what happens to blog traffic over time and whether any of the hordes of people stopping by turn into regular readers/commenters.

And you can probably expect a lot more images of photogenic cakes in the weeks and months ahead.

Update: Yay! I don’t feel such a fraud any more. The source of the original idea has been tracked down to I Am Baker. The original pin just said ‘uploaded by user’ so I couldn’t get to the source originally. So happy to be able to credit the right person.

Queen of Diamonds

June 6, 2012 By Paola 6 Comments

It’s been a long and gruelling Jubilee weekend here on the West Coast, with 5.30 am starts on Sunday and Tuesday, and the consumption of rather too much champagne, Pimms and Prince William’s favourite chocolate fridge cake.

Early yesterday morning I was sitting bleary-eyed on the sofa with the Minx and my friend and fellow monarchist Lilian, being lulled gently back to sleep by one of commentator Huw Edwards’ monotonous monologues when the Queen finally appeared looking radiant and very, very sparkly. Immediately the sofa contingent jerked awake. What was that utterly stunning brooch the Queen was wearing?

It turns out that, when deciding what to wear for the last day of her Diamond Jubilee celebrations, the Queen recalled that she is the proud owner of the nine major diamonds cut from the Cullinan diamond, the world’s largest diamond discovered in South Africa at the turn of the 20th century and presented as a birthday gift to Edward VII (at the risk of sounding churlish, why don’t *I* get gifts like that?)

Inexplicably she declined to wear either the Imperial State Crown, which contains the Cullinan II diamond or sit in her carriage waving her sceptre which contains Cullinan I, the Star of Africa, the second largest cut diamond in the world.

Instead, and obviously as some sort of austerity measure, she made do with wearing the brooch made from the Cullinan III and Cullinan IV diamonds, a mere 94.4 carats and 63.3 carats respectively and conservatively valued at some $120 million.

Wouldn’t you be just terrified parading round the streets of London wearing that? Fortunately we were spared the sight of her Majesty crawling around the floor of St Paul’s on her hands and knees looking for the brooch she’d just dropped under her seat, which is undoubtedly what would have happened if I were Queen.

It is an utterly amazing brooch though, with an almost contemporary appeal in its stark simplicity – these diamonds don’t need any fussy curlicues or smaller stones to enhance them, unlike many of the Queen’s other diamond pieces.

You’d be smiling too if you had that brooch

And I loved how the Queen’s beautiful outfit of palest mint green was designed to show it and her off to the max – the heavy embroidery, crystal beading and contrasting soft chiffon drapery were exquisite and it was so refreshing to see an eighty six year old looking every one of her eighty six years and yet still be stunningly beautiful. The shoes were of course dreadful, but we can’t have everything.

For future reference, just in case you find something similar in your back garden, this is what the uncut Cullinan diamond looked like before it was divided into the 9 smaller cut stones. Apparently it was initially tossed out of the window at the mining company where it was found, because no one believed it was possible to have a gem quality stone of this size.

Buckingham Palace is putting on a display of the Queen’s personal diamond jewellery this summer, including all seven smaller cuts from the Cullinan diamond, and some spectacular tiaras. Full details here.

Great British Fashion Stamps

June 5, 2012 By Paola 3 Comments

I miss British stamps. The Royal Mail puts out some of the most beautiful and best designed commemorative stamps I’ve seen, and the set they produced for the Diamond Jubilee is no exception.

The set of ten stamps celebrates British fashion designers of the last sixty years, including Hardy Amies and Norman Hartnell, who both designed some of the Queen’s most iconic looks when she was younger.

It’s a pretty much spot on collection of great names and clothes, though am I alone in never having heard of Granny Takes A Trip?

Mary Quant has apparently featured on a stamp before, and was thus ruled out of this collection. John Galliano managed to rule himself out for obvious reasons. And I’m wondering why there wasn’t a place for Barbara Hulanicki of Biba.

The gorgeous photos are by Sølve Sundsbø. Stamps are available for purchase here.

Red White Blue

June 2, 2012 By Paola 3 Comments

A world-class energy-efficient illumination system has been installed on Tower Bridge to celebrate the Jubilee and the Olympics and designed to highlight the crazy architecture. All sorts of different colour schemes are planned for the future.

Can’t wait to see this when we get to London this summer!

Tell us what the Jubilee means to you (if anything) below. I’m so excited for this summer in London.

Easy Cake Decorating Idea

May 29, 2012 By Paola 52 Comments

I’m starting to think that Pinterest has pushed back the cause of feminism by several hundred years.

This weekend we were hosting a Eurovision party and since it also happened to be the birthday of one of the Minx’s friends who was attending, I offered to make a quick birthday cake.

And then I went on Pinterest, disappeared down the rabbit hole, and emerged to find several hours had gone by and the kitchen was totally covered with food colouring and buttercream. This is indeed a very easy frosting idea, but quick it is most certainly not. It was enormous fun to do though.

The Minx and I got a little carried away with the food colouring and made coloured layers inside the cake, which I think in hindsight was a garishness too far, particularly as they were not quite as subtly pretty as I was hoping It would have looked better just as plain cake with white buttercream inside.

But then garishness isn’t really a problem when making cake for an eight year old. Please excuse drunken pic below, but you get the idea.

Update: Several people have asked me to provide a bit more information on how I did it. I mixed up a big batch of vanilla buttercream (beat together 2 sticks/220g of room-temperature butter, 6 cups/640g icing/confectioner’s sugar, plus a little vanilla extract, plus a tablespoon or two of milk until the buttercream is soft and smooth).

Then I divided the buttercream into six and the Minx and I conferred long and hard over which colours to choose. I spread a very thin crumb coat over the sides to even them up and then used a #21 tip to pipe little rosettes onto the cake, making sure that I didn’t pipe the same colour in adjacent spots. And then kept going and going and GOING until every bit of the cake was covered.

Further Update: Thanks to the comments below, I’ve been able to track down the original source of the idea at I Am Baker. Thanks for pointing it out. The original pin I found was ‘uploaded by user’ and no source was indicated, so I’m glad to finally be able to credit the right person.

Fan Bingbing at Cannes

May 21, 2012 By Paola 6 Comments

Last week Chinese actress Fan Bingbing won the Internet.

Firstly she gets to be called Fan Bingbing; secondly she gets to put tassels in her hair and look stunningly beautiful, not utterly ridiculous: and thirdly she got to wear one of the most exquisite dresses I have ever, ever seen.

Her glorious embroidered dress by Christopher Bu was inspired by a Chinese porcelain vase from the Qing dynasty and tells stories of the Four Beauties of Ancient China. Her hair is worn in the style of a young noblewoman from the Tang dynasty.