I dream about....

Lately, weird things have been happening.
I've been dreaming of having a baby. No, I'm not pregnant. But man, it's on my mind.
I even...wait for it... starting looking at blogs about babies/young families.

Oh dear.

to teach or not to teach...

I studied to be a teacher. There are hardly any jobs out there though. It's so annoying. Maybe one day...soon, maybe it will all change!

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!