Home is where the heart is.

I thought I should introduce my little work space to you all. I live in a teeny apartment so there's not enough room to have my own desk so the dining table is all I have to work with.

It has everything I need. I guess if I want to start doing crafty things I will just use the rest of the table or the floor for my work area. Flatmates are gonna love that although right now lots of floor space is taken up with the boy's photography, video and sound gear.



Things I must have at my work space:

iMac Could always do with upgrading, so who will buy me one?
External hard-drive
USB hub How I got on without one of these prior to buying this one is beyond me
Wacom pen tablet Home one is an Intuos 3 (A5 size), work one is an Intuos 4 (large)
iPhone Always with me
Inspiration board Fashioned mine out of cooking twine and cute pastel coloured bulldog clips
Stack of magazines My favourite is IdN and Prodesign is pretty good too
Canon G11 Recently purchased, these photos are taken with it (will probably do a post about the camera in the near future)



And as an added bonus to my work space, my awesome Fishy sits right beside me.

Orange crush.

I'm a huge citrus fan and after making so many lemon cupcake batches, I needed to try something new. So Orange Cupakes it was.



Orange Buttercake

90g butter, softened
90g cream cheese, softened
2 teaspoons finely grated orange rind
2/3 cups (150g) caster sugar
2 eggs
1/3 cups (50g) self-raising flour
1/2 cups (75g) plain flour



Preheat oven to 180 C.
Beat butter, cream cheese, rind, sugar and eggs with electric beater till light and fluffy.
(I added in a bit of orange food colouring here to make the cakes match the orange cupcake cases I was using)
Beat in flours on low speed till just combined.
Divide mixture between 12 standard cupcake cases.
Bake for 20 minutes.



Orange Cream Cheese Frosting

This is my favourite recipe for cream cheese frosting. For lemon flavour, replace orange rind with lemon rind. Or for plain cream cheese flavour, leave the rind out. Brilliant.

60g butter, softened
160g cream cheese, softened
3 cups icing sugar
2 teaspoons grated orange rind



Sift the icing sugar.
Beat all ingredients together until smooth and combined.



I added red colouring gel to get that rich orange/watermelon colour in the frosting and topped them off with a few edible silver dragees.

TASTY. Probably one of my favourite cupcake flavours I've worked with so far.

Mother's Day.

My mum has never been into the whole Mother's Day thing. I received an email from her a few weeks ago telling me "don't fall for any of this mother's day crap" and then went onto say "if you have any spare money at the time, buy a lotto ticket for yourself instead." She's the best.



I wanted to order her something awesome off Etsy, but then time got away from me and there was not enough to time have something sent. So instead I decided to make her a card. I found a cute design on an Etsy print (sorry, I can't find the link for it. If I do I will update this) and re-created it myself. I printed it onto Evergreen Birch 260gsm card, and made a matching paper label for the front of the envelope.



I ended up making four card and envelope sets. One for mum, one for my step-mum, and one for each of my grandmothers. I don't get to see them often so Mother's Day was a good excuse to get in touch.

It's a pity that I got them in the post too late so they will arrive a day late. My bad.