Carrot cake

Mini Carrot cakes

I attempted something new. Carrot cake.
It was successful! And quite easy too. There are heaps of free recipes online, I found one that had the ingredients that I already had at home, so suss out what works best for you. The cream cheese icing was so yummy too. I made little cupcakes instead of one big cake, however I think that unless you are going to feed 24 people with the cupcakes, just make a cake as it's much easier to store.

Lots of mini Carrot cakes!

Christmas!

I love Christmas.

I can't get enough of decorations, carols and baking yummy things!!
This year we bought a new Christmas tree - VERY exciting.

Our fake plastic tree brings me so much happiness

So I really didn't want to go too overboard this year, as I know I have the potential to just buy everything. What helped what planning what style we would use and our budget (sort of..). I chose red and gold (how original!) and stuck with that. We bought our tree early, in October, for $38 and some decorations from various places, in total around ($4 + $3 + $5 + $5) $17. I was happy with just this, but alas I saw some $5 lights and had to give in. So that makes our total around... $60. Which I'm happy with. I found that IKEA and local supermarkets were the best places to buy cheap decorations. I saw some at larger stores for around the $50 mark, noooo way!

All decorated!

Also, I plan on making some bunting...

Of course I'll need to take some sewing lessons, or convince my amazing mum to sew it for me.  I think something like this would be lovely. Oh how I love Christmas.

framed

So the other day, we were in a antique store and right near the counter were bags full of stamps for $2 each! I could not believe my luck! Not just boring every day stamps, but cool international stamps and stamps from cool places likes Egypt, Holland and even some interesting Russian stamps. I bought a few bags, probably only needed to buy one, but ah well. I decided to fill some IKEA photo frames with a cool layout of the stamps. This is how it turned out:

The final product!

I think they turned out well!

Definitely a fun/easy project. I could even consider giving these away as gifts to family/friends as they were a little unusual and quirky. I thought I was a little revolutionary with my stamp framing, however I think the idea of framing has been done before. I wonder what else I could frame....

Other interesting things to frame....

mmmmelbourne cupcakes...

 oreo, chocolate mud, mocha and strawberry. bliss

passionfruit cupcakes!

Here is a really good (and simple) cupcake recipe, that always tastes amazing :)

Passionfruit cupcakes:

150g soft butter/margarine  (i melt mine)
150g caster sugar
175g self raising flour
3 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1. Set oven to 180 degrees (or 350 f)

    Line a 12 hole muffin tin

2. Add all the ingredients into a mixing bowl,
    mix with a hand held mixer, until creamy and soft

3. add to muffin tin. pop in the oven for 12-20 minutes

Icing:

2 x passionfruit

2 cups of icing sugar

1 tablespoon of butter

1. blend the icing sugar and butter - should become crumbly
2. blend in the pulp from the 2 passionfruit
** alter and change depending on how you like your icing, i normally just measure as i go!

my love

we've been married for over 200 days! it's been a bit of a crazy year with uni, work and adjusting to married life, but i'm loving it. i'm so happy to have found someone to share the rest of my life with.

so distracted....

i haven't posted all year. and it's august.
true to the name of this blog i guess thats okay though.
what's been happening? 
well i'm studying - almost finished my one year teaching diploma! very exciting :)
oh, and i'm married! how quickly time flies :)