Holiday Blues

Although I seem to have frequent hiatus's from blogging I actually have a value excuse this time. I've been in America for 2 weeks.

My boyfriends parents have a place out in Marco Island, FL so me and him go there every year, but this year we stopped off in New York before for a couple of nights. I've never been to New York before so it was pretty exciting, but massively exhausting! We practically walked around the whole of New York shopping and doing little touristy bits. But my favourite part was going to PDT, or Please Don't Tell, it's like a secret cocktail bar that's hidden behind a phone booth, it's really hard to get a table in because they only let you ring up to book at certain time on the day you want to go and then of course the phone-line is jammed! But we sort of rocked up and managed to wangle a table!

I am however utterly ashamed of my photography skills. I actually took like 10 photos of the whole trip on my iPhone (not even my camera!) and they are all rubbish! Plus I'm super upset that I didn't manage to get any photos of PDT, but I hate, hate, hate looking like a tourist so I stupidly didn't take my phone or camera!

Anyway here are a couple of pictures from the trip.

New York

Crazy ass picture of cabs

Super yum French toast at Cookshop

Of course we had to try one of Magnolia's cupcakes!

The Kardashian's shop, super happy to stumble upon this, but nothing in there particularly caught my eye

Amazing desert at Buddakan

View from the Empire State building

Florida

Even the roads in FL are pretty!

Naples beach

Naples pier, always a gorgeous sunset

The boyf

OMG I love rare tuna

Anyway it's back down to earth with a bump, as I'm back on night shifts this week. I'm super jet-lagged still because of it and I'm worried that I'm never going to get back to the right time zone!

Weekend in pictures

How I wish I could do amazing arty pictures of things. But I can't...I have not photog skills and I was using an Iphone. 

I spent the weekend up in London at my boyfriends

The weekends nails - POW! BANG! - although I wish I'd used all white dots!

My new, very pink, Smart car. SO EXCITED

Tea, mountains of chips and a dose of craziness in Sketch

Amazing cakes are the Hummingbird Bakery in Soho (finally!)

So much hummus at the Hummus Bros

 

Homemade pizza - including the dough. Impressive, non?

All in all a very fab weekend. Even if I have put on 3 stone!!

You guys? Weekend good?

Cupcaking

I adore baking.

I find it very therapeutic and I love making people happy through food! I am by no means an amazing cook but I can follow a recipe quite well.

My favourites are cupcakes, but I like my cupcakes to be more than just sponge and icing. So these badboys are chocolate with caramel centres and a chocolate cream icing.


I don't like to blow my own trumpet but these were GOOD!

I followed the recipe for the cupcake sponge and icing from this book.


The Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook - If you like baking I would advise that you get this book. It is amazing. Seriously all the recipes are good!

The chocolate cupcakes are good on there own, really moist, but to make mine a little more exciting I made some caramel sauce and injected it into the centre of the warm cake. Before letting them cool down and smothering the thick chocolate icing on top.

Caramel sauce is pretty simple, I just googled a recipe for it but all you need is sugar, butter and cream. Tastes great over ice cream too.

Anyone been to the Hummingbird Bakery?