Lifestyle - Birthday Fun

If you hadn't noticed, it was my birthday this week. Friday the 11th, specifically. I had a genuinely lovely day and I got to spend time with some of my favourite people. Always a good day when that happens.

First up, friend H came up to stay for a couple of nights on the Thursday which meant we got to spend a decent amount of time whilst madam was at school actually doing big girl things. Though mainly we did a lot of eating...

Friday started well, I got brought a mug of hot chocolate in bed (madam had insisted this is what H should make for us all!) and then we had cake for breakfast. So much more exciting than toast! We dropped madam off at school and then headed into town for a coffee. 

I then had my nails done. I went for a bit of birthday glitter, so basically a different shade on each nail! It looks amazing! Both hands match, I didn't get that carried away. Poor H sat and read her book whilst this was happening and it took longer than I thought it would, oops!

Most sparkly nails ever!

After nails we had a bit of time before meeting L for lunch. Time for more coffee then. Obviously. Also H managed a sneaky phone charge whilst we were in the cafe. Good skills.

Lunch was amazing. We went to a place in Beverley called Rebels Smoke House which is an American style diner that specialises in slow cooked local pork. And oh, it was good! I have wanted to go since it opened last year and the girls were in total agreement once I sent them the menus over! 

Our main issue was how on earth we were going to narrow down what we were going to have. We each had at least three different things we really wanted to try. And then they gave us a specials menu! We ignored that in the end and made some strict choices with ourselves. L and I ended up with the Pulled Pork Sandwich and H had the Sliders (3 mini burgers). She had a side of skin on fries with hers and I had onion rings with mine. Oh, and H had some of the most amazing crackling too. She rather generously let us share it with her. 

Best sandwich I think I have ever eaten. I wish I could have had more! The people on the table next to us had something called a Waffle Tower burger which was just a ridiculously large plateful of food!

Pulled Pork Sandwich, Onion Rings, Mississpi Mud Pie and shake, L with both our shakes :)

After eating our mains we turned our attention to the desserts. Both L and I were determined to have a milkshake because they just sounded so tasty. I did manage to talk myself out of the booze infused one I had my eye on. I shall go back just to have one on it's own. It would do it more justice.

We both had the Peanut Butter and Salted Caramel shakes. I had Mississippi Mud Pie, L had Pecan Pie and H had a Brownie Heaven Sundae. 

Afterward we were incredibly full! But so happy. L and I got take-away cups for the last bit of our milkshakes and we went on our merry way. We hit The Works, Lakeland and Boyes before having to part ways so L could make it back to her car and we could collect madam. 

Having collected madam from school, seen another friend E for a quick chat and been to collect a few final things we headed in to Hull for our overnight stay at the Travelodge in the centre. Yeah, not awfully scenic, but near enough to most things in Hull that we could walk wherever we were going. 

The original plan had been dinner and then cinema, but H and I still being really quite full coupled with an early film time made it a no-no. We ended up deciding to have a later meal and just enjoy that and then go for a Kids Club cinema showing on the Saturday morning.

Friday nights tea was had at Nando's. Mainly because we knew madam would definitely eat something and I wanted somewhere that would do a good salad! I had a Mediterranean Salad with Halloumi and Avacado extra. It was delicious and so refreshing after all that meat earlier! Madam had veggie fingers and chips and H had half a chicken with rice and salad. 

Mediterranean Salad with Halloumi and Avacado

Mummy and madam do duck face!

We walked back to the hotel and tried to persuade madam that it was bedtime. It didn't go awfully well, but eventually tiredness overtook her and she fell asleep. As did H, which left me watching All About Steve (possibly the worst film ever? What where you thinking Sandra Bullock?!) whilst drinking the last of my cider. Sounds sad and lonely, but I couldn't have been happier! Such a peaceful end to the day, really.

We had booked breakfast in with our room so went downstairs and had a massive cooked feast before packing up to check out before heading to the cinema. Having made a slight (ok, quite big) balls up over booking tickets we ended up going to see Frozen again! 

And then madam insisted she needed a McDonalds for lunch. So we did that and then headed home to let the cats out. H had to head home and I rather hoped madam would want a nap. Wrong. 

I napped for a bit whilst she bounced around watching CBeebies. We voted for fishfingers for tea. And then we watched Britain's Got Talent until it was time to pick the parents up from the airport. The glamour. 

I had such a lovely couple of days and my friend V's dad popped round to drop me off some fab prezzies from her. The only bad thing has been madam managing to break the screen on my laptop! Not good. But as you can tell from the fact I'm still blogging, it is still working, just a bit hard to see everything I'm doing!

I hope you've been having a good weekend.

Love, Pearl.

Lifestyle - My Week on Instagram #3

This week featured my parents Ruby Wedding and my birthday. There were a lot of food photos! :)

My week looked like this:

1. Madam in her cape.

2. Madam gave her uncle a pretty new hairdo.

3. Waiting for my Parents Evening appointment.

4. Pretty rainbow.

5. Glittery nails.

6. Big girls pouting faces.

7. Pudding from birthday lunch with friends. 

What did you get up to this week? Hope it was as fun as mine!

Love, Pearl.

Recipe - A Multi-Coloured Cake (that wasn't)

Last week I made one of my favourite cake recipes. Only, it didn't turn out the way I had expected it to. Sadly. This wasn't down to anything I did, I am an expert in Victoria Sponge, but rather a fail on the part of my food colouring! The cake still tasted lovely and was just as moist and yummy as always. Just not the multi-coloured marvel I had hoped for.

If you caught my twitter ranting last week when it went wrong you will know that I have said enough about this. And I don't like being a negative person. I will just say; when baking make sure you check that the colouring you use is bake stable. Most of them aren't nowadays!

I therefore umm-ed and ahh-ed about sharing and then I thought, no, EVERYONE can have a fail. It's what you do about it that counts. I won't make this a Pearl's Pantry entry because I do want those to all be stuff that have worked!

Right, so I should tell you what I did, first off, because it is Victoria sponge it is the most simple recipe. And really quite forgiving if you are a learner baker!

I made a 3 egg mix, so for that we needed:

6oz Self-raising Flour

6oz Butter

6oz Caster Sugar 

3 Eggs.

Yup, that's it. Told you it was simple. We start off with the butter and sugar in the bowl and then you cream them together until they've gone creamy and fluffy. I do all my mixing by hand, so it took a couple of minutes for me.

Then we add our eggs in. One at a time. And I find adding a spoonful of flour with each egg makes it a bit easier to combine. Mix it all together until all three eggs are fully incorporated.

Your mix will look really sloppy but don't panic. Add in the rest of your flour and mix that in. It's best to add the flour half at a time if you're hand mixing, makes it easier on the old arms!

Once the mix was ready I split it. I left a quarter in the bowl I'd been mixing in so that would remain yellow. I then but the other three quarters into 3 separate bowls so I could add colours into them.

I added red, green and blue. Then I greased and floured my cake tin which makes it easier to get the cake out afterwards. I spooned blobs of the different colours in and then gave them a swirl to make a sort of ripple effect. 

Bunged it in the oven and waited 45mins until it was done. To test your cake insert a skewer into the centre and if it comes out clean then it's ready. The cake will also start to shrink away from the sides of the cake pan.

When I took the cake out the oven it became immediately apparent the colours had gone wrong in some way. I did slightly hope that when I cut the cake in half it would be better on the inside. Nope. I did achieve a two-tone cake. But not the colours I had wanted at all :(

I sandwiched the two halves together with some chocolate buttercream and then made three colours of icing to go on top, figuring I could at least make it look a bit more cheerful that way. 

Madam then went wild with the icing and we ended up with a distinctly messy, rather failed but yummy tasting masterpiece!

Moral of the story? Failures are not always unsalvageable, cakes can be rescued with some random icing. It's a cake, how bad could it be! ;)

I'd love to know if you've ever had a baking disaster. I can promise you this was not my worst one... I'm still infamous for having burnt a packet mix cheesecake when about 10!

Love, Pearl.

   

Pearl's Pantry ~ Recipe 1: Cheesecake

I have been talking to one of my very best friends about doing a tutorial for my cheesecake recipe for the last few days and have decided to use the opportunity to make a little feature for the blog! So, here we are, this is the first entry in to what will be a periodic feature I am calling "Pearl's Pantry" (see what I did there?)

My cheesecake is something I've mentioned before but I shall now give you my photo tutorial! The recipe came from an advert I saw in Heat magazine ages ago and I did not invent it.

To make 1 cheesecake you will need:

100g melted butter

200g crushed biscuits

397g tin condensed milk

300g soft cream cheese (full fat)

2 lemons.

1. First of all you need to crush up your biscuits into crumbs. I used Ginger Nuts this time (which were jolly hard to crush up, I can tell you!), but use whatever you like best. I have done bourbons in the past for a chocolate version...

2. Melt your butter and mix it in with the biscuit crumbs and then tip it in to your tin - mine is a 7" deep sandwich tin with a loose base - and press it down firmly. Then put this in the fridge to set up whilst you make the filling.

3. Put the cream cheese in the bowl and give it a bit of a mix to loosen it up a bit (a). Now add in the condensed milk and stir it all in, I use a fork to give it a bit of a whisk and make sure there are no lumps. It goes really quite runny at this point (b).

(a)

(b)

4. Juice your two lemons (a) and add in to the cheese and milk mixture (b) (it looks like you've curdled it and made a dreadful mistake, you haven't). Then the magic bit, mix it in and watch as it turns glossy and thick and unctuous (c). Good word that, unctuous...

(a)

(b)

(c)

5. Pour this mix over your chilled base and smooth over the top. Then put back in the fridge for at least 2 hours to give it time to set properly.

You can serve it just as it is, but madam and I like to put something fruity on top. We decided to make blueberry compote this time as we had ended up with loads of blueberries that needed eaten up.

We shoved the blueberries in a pan, added some water and sugar and then boiled it down for a bit (kind of like making jam, really.)

And then: dollop of compote on top of your slice of cheesecake = perfection.

And there you have it, one really simple cheesecake to try :) Do let me know if you give it a go, I'd love to hear what you do with yours!

Love, Pearl.

I officially have the skills

Yesterday was quite good, really. Given that it was a Monday, anyway!

 

I took madam to school in the morning as usual. She did wake up and tell me school is boring which is the first time I've ever heard that from her! Didn't stop her scooting to school like a mad thing though.

 

After dropping her off I headed for my mum and dad's to go grocery shopping (the glamour). We headed to Morrison's and I tried to remember all the things that were on the list I had carefully left at home. I bought madam and I a chocolate apple as this is my new favourite thing to get as a treat for her on a Monday after school.

 

We did start off with toffee apples, but apparently madam doesn't like those :(

 

After shopping we headed for college where I picked up my certificate from the counselling skills course I finished in May. I had been beginning to worry about whether I was ever getting it as it had been so long with no word!

 

When I picked it up I also asked about my portfolio as I hadn't been contacted to collect it and had also been expecting that back. The lady behind the desk said she'd look into it for me and I did get a phonecall letting me know it was in my tutors office and I could collect it whenever.

 

 

 

Obviously, I haven't got it yet as getting up to the college is a bit of a trek and I only went yesterday as I got a lift! So lazy. I shall probably head up tomorrow morning as I get more stuff done when I just get on with them straight after I've dropped madam off!

 

I went home and had lunch, went to the gym and picked madam up. She did her now usual trick of being a monumental pain in the bottom and got sent up to her room to cool off for a few minutes. This cooling off period after school seems to be quite important! She is really tired and cranky at 3.30 having five minutes to herself seems to really help her. But she wouldn't just go up there if I asked her to.

 

For dinner we voted for fish and I decided to do a crumble. I have to say, I think I outdid myself this time! It was so good. I made chocolate, cherry and almond for a bit of a change. I had a tin of cherry pie filling that had been sitting in the cupboard for a while.

 

So, as I was asked for a recipe last night, here is how I made it.

 

First, pour tin of filling into pie dish.

Weigh out 3oz of self raising flour and 1oz of cocoa powder. Add in 2oz of cubed softened butter and rub the ingredients together until it looks like breadcrumbs. Then add 2oz of sugar (this is more than I would normally put in, but I didn't want the cocoa to be bitter). And I chucked in a handful of flaked almonds as I found some in the cupboard! Mixed it up a bit and put it over the top of the fruit.

 

I put it in my oven at about 200 degrees C for 20 minutes, the smell in my kitchen was amazing! And it tasted pretty darn good, too ;) 

 

 

 

  

a viking adventure

I had a slight misunderstanding about what yesterdays school thing was about. There is now a scale model Viking boat in the upper school playing field at madam's school (I only ever really go in the foundation stage area atm, so hadn't *really* noticed it).

 

So, yeah, we got to school and there were a few stalls around making balloon swords and other Viking accoutrements. As I have *no* cash until Tuesday I had to march madam past everything. She has a wooden Viking sword at home and if I'd thought we could have brought that with us.

 

Madam instead went straight for climbing over the boat which is big enough for a whole heap of kids to play out any number of fantasies. She commandeered the prow and made the most of her position to order the surrounding populous around. They mostly just ignored her.

 

 

 

She then met up with a chum of hers from her class and they went careening off into the wooded area at the back of the field and spent the majority of the hour or so we were there collecting conkers and jumping all over the tree stump seats and things that are along the nature trail. She did manage to come back in time to have her photo taken for the local paper (not just her, it was a group shot). I mainly sat on one of the benches and supervised her coat!

 

After I managed to persuade her to leave, which she only agreed to when she realised that we were pretty much the only people there, we headed home for a bit of a chill before dinner. We had decided to make a fruit crumble (plum and strawberry) for dessert. But I had this rush of blood to the head and decided that even though crumble is becoming a bit of a signature dish for me we should have something different.

 

I had already pretty much made the crumble topping when I decided this so had to improvise what I was going to turn it into. I went with shoving a splash of milk in and turning it into a sort of scone dough. I (of course) put too much milk in and ended up desperately adding flour to try and dry my dough out a bit! I made it into little flattened balls and put them all around the top of my fruit. You know, bit like a cobbler.

 

I have no idea if I even vaguely made the right thing, but what we ended up with tasted really great and was a change from the same old, same old. I shall make it again, but perhaps in a small deeper pan. That way the topping might join together better and the fruit won't all stick to the underneath!

 

We did go to the Harvest Festival this morning after all. And it was nice to see the display of food that had been brought in. Madam was particularly taken with the wheat sheaf they had right in the centre of the altar display. All the food collected today is going to the churches newly formed food bank. This is the same for madam's school service on Wednesday.

 

the main table with all the food was off to the side!

 

 

After the service we wandered along to the food festival, but it was so busy and loud that madam wasn't keen. There was a barbecue/grill going that was smoking wildly as well. We didn't stay long and we didn't find any free samples... Boo ;) 

 

We ended up going to mum and dad's a bit earlier than normal and madam has mainly been riding her bike and getting under peoples feet since then! We have taken her for a ride out to the supermarket in the hope of finding her some more school t-shirts as she's ruined some of them already. They had none in, annoyingly, then we took her to the park on the way home. She is now (finally) sitting quietly. I'm hoping she might be tired enough to go to bed to time this evening.     

summer holidays are long... more fun with madam

And yes, it is more about "what I did on my summer holidays". Again.

Today, I have mainly been supervising madam at the play area whilst mum and dad were shopping for yet more coral for the marine tank (orange and lime green versions this time). We were at the garden centre at Skirlaugh and they had a bouncy castle and a slide for madams amusement.

This meant I got to hang around for half an hour and watch her bouncing about. It's incredibly dull being a parent sometimes... Especially as there was no way I could join in! I should have remembered a book!

I was also wary of taking photos as there were other children about and you have to worry about that kind of thing nowadays, sadly. I think you get great unguarded pictures of them when they're having fun. There's a lovely one of her coming down the slide...

I did myself another manicure, in my attempts to learn to be less wobbly in doing so. I went for a domino design as it's mainly just dots! It was sort of successful, my left handed dotting is really wibbly still. And the topcoat made it blur again. People who do nailart, what topcoat do you use?

I let madam help make crumble with me on Monday. Sort of. I did the chopping and the actual cooking bits, but she put all the stuff in the pan for stewing the fruit and then mixed the crumble. I added some muesli to the crumble mix to give it some crunch and add a bit of extra sweetness as the fruit was rhubarb.

And it tasted gooood! I am a rampant foodaholic, so I do like a good pudding every now and again. I have been trying to keep to mainly just having some fresh fruit after tea, but you can't eat rhubarb without crumble (in my opinion!)

I have been sticking to my gym routine and have started to get some results. I've lost about 3kilos so far, which is good given I haven't been dieting with it!

So, more of the same summer fun from me, I'll have to find something more exciting to write about soon!

Is there anything you think I should be writing about? Go on, pick a topic! 



peanut butter and fairies

*This post now has all the photos I had planned it to have*

Firstly, some apologies... I haven't written anything all week as madam is now on holidays and I can't go to my usual haunts for free wifi. Well, I can, but it wouldn't be as easy to achieve as usual. I have got lots of things to write about today but have forgotten my phone so I can't post the photos :(

 

I shall have to post them another day... though I might be able to lift a couple from where I've posted them on other sites...

 

So, I made the salted caramel peanut butter bars from essbeevee's blog and it was great fun. I found some of the initial mixing a bit hard going with a spoon so in the end went for the tried and tested "just shove your hands in" technique. And then squished it all in to a big disposable tin thing. The big tin could have done with being bigger. This recipe makes a huge amount...

 

Then I made the caramel and poured that over. At which point I *really* wished my tin was bigger, it didn't overflow or anything but I was a little wary of what would happen when we poured the chocolate on... I had promised madam faithfully that she could do the chocolate and sprinkles so I put what I'd made into the fridge and licked out the bowls before doing the washing up.

 

In the morning I was going to meet my dad at 9.45 as I was heading for a gym induction and he was having madam for me so chocolate melting/pouring/sprinkling was being done whilst also making breakfast for us both. And it was a lot of chocolate! My, this really is a great treat recipe.

 

 

After it was topped and sprinkled it went back in the fridge to set and to await the arrival of my sewing buddies in the evening.

 

Although madam and I did have a sneaky taste test in the afternoon, you know, just to make sure...

 

I ended up having a rather frustrating afternoon as I had planned time to do some more tidying, get dinner sorted, and do some pattern cutting. But I ended up stuck waiting for the gasman to come round and service my parents appliances. :( We were late getting home and therefore all my plan went out the window. I ended up throwing out my ideas for the pattern I was going to sew and decided to just make the a fairy skirt for madam.

 

She is really excited about her competition and I really enjoyed making her skirt. It was a good job we had three pairs of hands to hold and pin the fabric as that was the only complicated bit. But more importantly it was really nice to have the girls round and we had a great chat. I also learned how to do a French seam.

 

 

Madam was awake the entire time as she is too nosy for her own good! She also insisted on modelling her outfit after everyone had left before she would go to bed!

 

  

 

The fabulous Tabatha also brought me a lovely goody bag of sewing stuffs including some pinking shears! I am so grateful to her, she really is like a little sewing fairy being so kind and helpful to me.

 

I will be attempting to make some wings to go with madams costume once I have acquired more net... I'm planning on cutting out wing shapes from the net and just sewing them on to the vest top madam is going to be wearing...