Zzzzz....

I'm sure every Friday I say that the week has been really long. This week was no exception. Work was average and for some reason I felt more tired than ever. Literally felt like I was falling asleep at my desk. Zzzzz...

I won't be getting any good sleep ins this weekend either because tomorrow morning I'll be traveling to Taupo and staying there the night for my friends wedding. So excited! Very keen to see what they've done for decorations, favours, cake, outfits. Pretty much all of it haha. I'll be taking lots of photos hopefully.

This is the bride-to-be, my friend Anneka and myself at the hens party last weekend. FUN TIMES!



So so so behind in blogging. I have a giant list of posts to do that I'm getting no where with. I did however just finish up the order of service for a work friend for her wedding so now that that is done it should free up some of my evenings to blog and such.

SO MUCH TO DO. I should also maybe start thinking about how far I'd like to go with this blog, my wedding/event designing and baking. I could probably make some big decisions but I'll put that off for as long as I can. :P

Have a good weekend everyone and I hope you enjoy these awesome finds/links!

1. I really want to make some of these DIY Pantone chip magnets!
2. Melody from Sweet & Saucy has created some amazing dessert tables, made so many delectable treats and sells some awesome cake stands!
3. Just fell in love with this font. Pity it's pretty expensive.
4. Gorgeous papercut wedding invitations from Woodland Papercuts.
5. Such a pretty silver feather necklace.

Enjoy your journey.

Just wanted to show you all the sticker labels, table seating chart and place cards I created for Michelle's travel themed wedding. You can check out the invitation I designed here.

To go with the travel theme, the place cards were made to look like luggage tags that matched the rest of the wedding suite. Each table was named a specific event or place they had been to during their travels together, so guests ended up with a destination like 'Ibiza, Spain' or 'Rugby Sevens, Wellington'.

The names and destinations were printed onto the labels in teal, in the same font used for the 'Enjoy your journey' message.



Michelle's mother made some little cookies for the wedding favours so Michelle got some of those sealable clear plastic bags. Each bag contained two cookies and I designed a sticker label to wrap around it.

The favours were meant to be sort of like the little packet of peanuts you get on a flight, so the message 'Enjoy your journey' was added to the labels.



The table seating chart was made to look like an arrivals board at an airport which was kind of fun!



Can't wait to see the final photos that Bayly & Moore took on the day!

Thank God it's Friday.

This week seemed to drag on like crazy. But here we are, weekend time! It should be a good one, even though the weather looks to be super icky.

I've got a hens party to go to tomorrow night which should be fun! Going to do some baking for it tomorrow - gluten free for the bride-to-be!

Don't have a lot to say for now so I will leave you with some links for your weekend and a wonderful song that I cannot stop listening to. Katy Perry is absolutely amazing and I cannot wait for her Auckland show! Eeee!

Currently listening to: Katy Perry - Brick By Brick (MTV Unplugged)



... a few links for your weekend!

1. Stumbled across We Draw & Cook during the week and now I can't stop browsing through, it's amazing!
2. If you like food and baking, and let's face it, everyone does... then you should check out How Sweet It Is. Fantastic recipes and photography!
3. Issue Four of Rue is out and it's a doozy!
4. In love with this DIY save the date! The colours work so well together.
5. A gorgeous summer camp wedding - stunning! What an awesome location.

A little bit of passion.

Last weekend it was my friend Aishia's 22nd birthday. She had a sky blue themed afternoon tea party and it was awesome! Lots of great food... white chocolate brownies, chocolate cake, breads and cheeses, fruit and of course some fantastic cheerios! I ate too much within the first 10 minutes of being there and then continued to keep eating those delicious brownies. I made a mistaaaake.

I made a batch of cupcakes for the party. Decided to make something fruity since most of the other items that Aishia was making were chocolatey.

(I also made some macarons, which weren't very good so I didn't end up taking them to the party. Booooooo. I will do a post on those soon though!)



Passionfruit Buttercake Cupcakes

90g softened butter
1/2 cup caster sugar
2 eggs
1 cup self-raising flour
1/4 cup passionfruit pulp

Preheat oven to 180 C.
Beat butter, sugar, eggs and flour on low speed until just combined.
Increase speed until mixture has changed to a paler colour.
Stir in passionfruit pulp.
Divide mixture among 12 regular cupcake cases.
Bake for about 20 minutes.



I couldn't find any passionfruit at my local supermarket on the day so instead I got Tasti's Passionfruit in Sweetened Syrup. I'm not a big fan of passionfruit things that contain the black pips so I sifted those out till I was left with 1/4 of a cup of sweet pulpy syrup.



Because it's such a sugary/syrupy recipe, the tops of the cupcakes go really golden brown. Which in my opinion makes it even tastier!



I ran out of time on the day to make some of my own frosting (I wanted to do a fluffy meringue style frosting) so I ended up using Betty Crocker's Vanilla Frosting and added a bit of the passionfruit syrup and some sky blue colouring gel.

Yum yum!

Current loves.

Currently addicted to avocado on a toasted seasame bagel. I could eat at least one a day. I ate two yesterday and one today. Oops.



Also crushing on pink grapefruit. This is nothing new, however, I NEVER actually eat them.

When taking medications, I am often warned to stay away from grapefruit and it's juices, so in the past 6 or more years I have probably only had two that entire time. THIS MAKES ME VERY SAD. I would eat many a week if it didn't mess around with medications. :(



I decided to ignore the warnings last week and just buy one. BEST DECISION EVERRRR.

Nom nom nom...

I do love to shop.

I expected to buy A LOT while I was away in Melbourne, Australia. Mainly because I love to shop and buy things all the time. However, this year, I just didn't really find much to buy. I didn't buy a single item of clothing, which is shocking for me!

The thing I spent the most amount of money on was probably macarons.

I purchased a total of 26 macarons in 5 days.
I may have a problem...



Cacao: Salty caramel, strawberries and cream, raspberry and violet/blackcurrant.

Not a fan of salty caramel at all. Just not my thing. Violet/blackcurrent was fantastic. The others were great too!



Cacao: Tangy lemon, short mac (coffee), dark chocolate and passionfruit (ate it before I took the photo haha)

The short mac one was the best out of these ones. The other two were great too. Not sure that I'm a fan of chocolate ganache in passionfruit macarons though. I've seen them paired up heaps and I just find the chocolate too overpowering.



Melbourne Markets: Blueberry cheesecake (x2), dark chocolate, vanilla, chartreuse, expresso, tiramisu and strawberry or raspberry

I don't remember what the actual store was called that I got these from but they are in the deli hall if anyone is going there.



This chartreuse macaron was really intense! Quite strong. If you're a chartreuse fan I'm sure you would love it but it was a bit too much for me and I only ended up eating half of it. It looked really pretty though! One of the most interesting looking ones I saw the whole trip.



This was the blueberry cheesecake macaron and I think it might have been my favourite of the trip. The filling was cheesecake and it was absolutely fantastic. The second one was for Carly (who also had the vanilla one).



Lindt Cafe: Strawberry, roselli, champagne, dark chocolate, caramel and passionfruit

These were all pretty good although I had higher expectations from what I had heard about them.

I also bought 4 from Cafe Vue in the Melbourne International Airport before we left for home, which were pretty good. They were the most expensive ones I bought and they were smaller than the others, but the flavours were good. I had the pistachio, passionfruit, orange and vanilla.

I think overall, I would say that the ones from Cacao were the best. They should be since they won the Best Macaron in Melbourne in 2010.

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Apart from the macaron purchases, the only other things I managed to buy where these:



An adorable knitted owl hot water bottle



A heart shaped ice cube tray from Ikea



Oddly shaped cupcake cases from Ikea



BYS nail polishes (the black with glitter in it on the left is for my best friend Brit) - I sort of regret not buying more of these. They were so cheap and this one shop seemed to have the entire range!

........................................................................

So that really sums up the non-Soundwave part of my trip. I didn't really get any good photos of any of the bands/shows but I loved every single band I saw and managed to see some of my favourites twice because I saw them at the festival and at their sideshows. Lucky me!

Some sweet link love for your weekend.

Long week has been long... Even though I haven't even done a full 40 hour working week. I decided not to go back to work on Monday after my operation. The idea of being at work and having a tissue constantly stuck to my nose was not really appealing. However, when I did get back into work, it was just straight back into the Annual Report design job. Bugger!

Luckily that job was sent to print yesterday and I haven't had any urgent calls telling me anything is wrong yet so that's great! *touches wood*

Tomorrow I will be going to a friends birthday afternoon tea party. I'm making some macarons and cupcakes for the occasion... fingers crossed they turn out okay!



Check out these sweet links for your weekend!

1. Some fantastic infographics by Paul Butt of Section Design
2. A stunning confetti dress by Monique Lhuillier in her new pre-fall 2011 collection.
3. Stumbled across this blog of 365 Days of Breakfast and it's completely mouth-watering.
4. "Let's tell better stories" letterpress direct mail - awesome!
5. These brown glass bottles with stamped numbers on them are perfect for table numbers at a wedding!

Have a good weekend everyone!

As cute as a cupcake!

Being cooped up at home, with nothing to look at but the internet and television, has made me extremely hungry and craving some baking. Day time TV has been fantastic lately. There's been a great amount of cooking and baking shows on and I couldn't have been happier.

I'm constantly grabbing tissues at the moment, to tend to my leaky nose so I thought it best not to try baking anything. Might be a bit gross!



Anyway, getting back to where I was heading with this...
Since I can't bake, I'll just post photos of my baking!

My friend Aishia and I decided that we would so some baking for our boss's wedding morning tea at work, instead of just buying it all from a supermarket or caterer. We had just had some cupcakes brought in to work previously by a caterer and they were really yuck. And I knew I could do better than that!



I decided to do two batches of cupcakes so that everyone in our work team would get one each.

The first batch I made were chocolate cupcakes with some sprinkled white chocolate chips. I may have gone a little overboard with those. :P



I whipped up a chocolate buttercream frosting and piped it on using the handy 1M piping tip.

I'm never happy with how my buttercream comes out when piped - I always end up with too much air in the bag or in the mix, so then it doesn't come out all nice and smooth. Must find a way to fix this! If anyone has any tips for this please email or Tumblr ask me!



So since the frosting didn't nicely attach back to itself, I decided to pipe some little hearts out of candy melts to decorate them and cover up the bad join of the frosting. I chose yellow candy melts to match the other batch of cupcakes I was making. They turned out super cute!



Just because I hadn't had them in ages (and was really craving them!) I made lemon cream cheese cupcakes for my second batch.

This recipe might just be my favourite cupcake ever.
I love lemon.
I love cream cheese.
I love cupcakes!



Lemon cream cheese frosting was the obvious choice to pair up with these cupcakes (just add 2 teaspoons of grated lemon rind to the recipe in the link).

You'd think it would be 'too much' lemon and 'too much' cream cheese. But no way. All of it. Together. So good.



This frosting looked really cute when I used the 1M tip. Super happy with how it worked out since this was the first time I had used that tip and I had heard many great things about it!

I popped some white pearl sprinkles on top and they looked really nice!



I originally intended to do these cupcakes in a real 'bride and groom' theme but I let time get away with me and never made any groom decorations, and then decided that I didn't want to make the lemon frosting teal (the colour theme of my boss's wedding) cause I thought it was weird. So this is how they turned out in the end. Ha!

They got eaten up crazy quick! It's not often that all of the food we have at our morning teas get eaten so it was great when these all got gobbled up.

Aishia made some AMAZING white chocolate brownie (which I will be making myself some time soon cause it was delish!) and chocolate chip cookies and they all got eat up too! SUCCESS!

Hope your weekend has been better than mine!

What an odd past few days I have had.

I'm not sure if I have mentioned it earlier on here, although if you follow me on Tumblr or Twitter you might know already, but I had sinus surgery on Thursday.

I've had sinus issues for many years now. I saw an ENT (ears, nose, throat) specialist last year and we decided that surgery would be the next step for me. My CT scans showed some extensive sinus disease, as well as a polyp and a deviated septum.

So I had surgery to clean my sinuses out, remove the polyp and realign the deviated septum. Unfortunately my surgeon/ENT found some gross stuff in there and now believes that I suffer from Allergic Fungal Sinusitis. He didn't go into much detail about it with me while I was in hospital and I'm trying my best to not look it up online or it might freak me out. So after my check up with him I will know more.

I'm not a pretty sight at the moment and I don't know how comfortable I will actually feel around others at work. It's all well and good letting your boyfriend and best friend see you with gross stuff dripping from your nose and making awful noises whilst doing sinus rinses, but I'm not sure my co-workers would really appreciate it... GROSS.

In the mean time, I'm going to try catch up on some much needed blogging, watch a lot more of House and eventually get back into the swing of things at work.



So, late again, here's some links for you all to check out:

1. Simple Silhouettes have brought out a new range of dresses that are perfect for bridesmaids or wedding attendees. LOVE THEM!
2. Check out these awesome rain cloud wall decals by Mae. I want them!
3. Awesome recipe cards from Gait Design. Might need to get these myself!
4. Unique balsa wood airplane save the date.
5. I think I need both of these recipe books by the boys from Baked.

Macarons: Attempt Two!

After my epic fail of a first attempt at macarons, I was determined to get it right. I knew what I had done wrong previously, so I just had to be patient and follow the recipe properly.



I decided to use a different recipe this time, since the last one I used said to only let them sit for 15 minutes, which I think is just not enough time. I found this recipe for 'the perfect macaron' on The Pink Whisk site and decided to roll with it.



I followed the recipe down to a tee. And they turned out perfect!

You should have seen Carly and I sit right next to the oven watching them bake. :'D We were so excited!



Due to my love of lemon, I decided to fill them with some sweet lemon curd. Since the curd has quite a strong flavour, I thought it best to leave the macaron shells as just the basic plain flavour and colour them with some Wilton Golden Yellow.



It was fairly late at night when I made these and I was too lazy to make my own lemon curd up so I used the Barkers Lemon Curd that I had in the fridge to fill them. SO YUM!

These were my first successful attempt at making my own macarons; Lemon Curd Macarons. I cannot wait to try out some new flavours, especially now that I have my new Macaron recipe book that Aishia got me for my birthday! :D

Hope you all like them!