Bit of baking

Christmas time is definitely time for lots of sweets :) All these biscuits and cakes we love since childhood. Or for trying new recipes :)

Few days before Christmas Day we had some fun with Dom making chocolate biscuits.

Recipe I found on Pinterest, but modified it for our taste :) If you are interested in original recipe, go: http://nurturestore.co.uk/easy-christmas-biscuit-recipe.

For our cookie dough I melted: 85g unsalted butter, 2 tbsp of honey and 60g cane sugar. Then added 200g plain flour, 2tsp cinnamon and 2 tsp cocoa plus 1 tsp baking soda mix with 1 tbsp water. Then rolled it

Dom helped with cutting it and then placed on baking sheets and baked in preheated to 190 C oven for max 10 minutes.

After little cooling we checked them and Dom approved them :)

Yesterday I decided to try recipe for Sour Cream Coffeecake I have from instagram - made some research before, cause recipe is American and as a European I'm not familiar with measuring system used in it.

Original recipe from mixandmeasure (65 years in family):

cream 1 stick margarine and 1 cup sugar, add 2 eggs, sift 2 cups flour, 1/4 tsp salt, 1tsp baking powder, 1 tsp baking soda plus 1/2 pint sour cream and  tsp vanilla. Mix well, put in large angel food greased pan. sprinkle top with mix of sugar and cinnamon. Bake 50 minutes in 350 F.

My version: 

cream together 1/2 cup butter and 1 cup sugar (I used only 3/4 cup of sugar), add 2 eggs, 2 cups flour, 1/4 tsp salt, 1 tsp baking powder, 1 tsp baking soda, 1 tsp vanilla and 1 cup sour cream. Mix well. pour half of batter into greased angel pan, then sprinkle with 2/3 of mix of 1/3 cup brown sugar, 1/3 cup or more chopped nuts (pecans, walnuts) and 1 tsp cinnamon, add rest of cake batter and sprinkle with rest of cinnamon mix. Bake 50 minutes in 180 C. Cool down and decorate with glaze of your choice (mine: icing sugar mixed with lemon juice).

Choose your version, bake it and enjoy!!!

Meet Tula :).

When we saw Tula first time about 3 weeks ago she was so small that I could keep her in one hand.

                                          Yesterday she became a part of our little family :).

She's bigger since we saw her last time but still small as any chipin is :).

She loves her food, her toys and definitely she's a playful little creature :).

Tula is checking cardboard :)

Playing with Dom's allosaurus :)

She loves cuddles and Dom loves to cuddle her :). He can do that all the time if we allow him :)

Plus she's kind of nocturnal for now :). I never have to woke up that many times when Dom was an infant :).

Sorry if pics are not clear enough, but my phone not cooperating with me when is bit darker in the room.

December, December...

Winter started... I should say 'raining season' started :)

Luckily for us not everyday is cold and wet, just bit of drizzling from time to time, some chilly mornings... But sometimes we have chance for day like this:

Or sky like this:

We can still enjoy nice walks during weekend :)

From other life fronts... I'm reading book 5 of Dark Tower by Stephen King.

Colouring new digi images

Making new cards

Dom is creating new masterpieces :)

And we all are waiting for new member of our little family - Tula :)

She's a chipin and Dom recognize her every time we see her with no problems :)

That's all for today friends :)

Happy Birthday to me 😊

Do you like birthdays?

I do, but not mine. I'm not type of party girl and I prefer not to see numbers showing how fast time is flying...

Oh yeah I reached 40 this year... to be honest with you I felt kind of old before my birthday. .. kind of depression or something? No idea...

Maybe because cold don't want to leave me alone, maybe because card I used for my digis ( back-up) seems to be corrupted/partially damaged and treating half of my digis as empty files :(

Last weekend my partner said: Come on girl, you are not old, stop to talk about prices, treat yourself!

  He was right! Can you imagine, I didn't saw my hairdresser for over half a year! I was more concerned about my son look then mine! 

So.... Yesterday in my birthday I went for hot chocolate, deal with few small things and then chilled out (half a day without my men). 

Today to treat myself and went to hairdresser and finally dealt with my hair and I feel like human being again:)

Also yesterday or maybe day before I found new issue of my crafty mag in my letterbox with this cutie pie as free gift 

and realized that it doesn't mater how old I am as long as I like myself, my life and all I'm doing.

So...

Yes I'm 40, but that just funny number :) Life is way to short to think about numbers, better to be positive and live the life the way we want! I like my birthdays again, just like when I was little girl :)

Till next post friends!

Stay positive!

Sneaky Santa game

Every year in our Etsy team we are playing Sneaky Santa game...

This year was challenging for me, cause my Sneaky partner did no wish list.

I had to play around - use everything I knew about her to find/made perfect gifts for her.

So...

Leda is bookworm from Sicily, Italy who making beautiful felt accessories and bookmarks. She likes cards, earrings and definitely handmade stuff. I like illustrations she sharing on her FB.

I thought... book! But which one? She has so many and I have no idea which she still not have on her shelf... That was lots of thinking :) Result:

You can see movie made on this book in cinemas now!

One of my first attempts with copper - red semi-precious beads inside cages.

Pendant with stone found by myself on local beach during Summer.

Images from Ching's shop: https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/gjzcck?ref=l2-shopheader-name, I coloured for Leda :) I thought she can like them :)

Little Christmas card with stamp from Tiddly Inks.

Leda received her parcel today and looks like she likes her gifts, so I can show you what I found/made for her :)

What do you think about my gifts? Do you like them?

Winter is coming

Gee title of post like motto from 'Game of Thrones' :)

But fact is that the winter is coming... weather's changing here in the UK. More like 'raining season' plus lots of winds and low temperatures...

My wish to have here some nice amount of snow to have a chance to' build a snowman' (like in Frozen) with my little boy :).

So far when we are lucky to have nice sunny days we can spot this beauty:

I can say this year I saw a lots of them :) Sometimes even double rainbows with so intense colours... just amazing views :)

Yesterday's weather wasn't so nice for us... storm hit east side of UK... strong winds plus rain and hailstones for whole night.

Below you can see street in front of Dom's school today morning - it is like have one more river in the town.

Fingers crossed today we will have less rain... 

Forecast for tomorrow - no rain, dry and sunny spells... We will see..

Chicken stew 😊

I received new toy from my man - slow cooker 😊.  Yesterday I cleaned it and run it first time, then cleaned it again as stayed in instruction 😊.
Today was time to cook something in it!

Hmmm... I thought the best will be beef, but recepies I saw in net didn't catch my eye... maybe just I didn't found 'this one'.

So I decided to make kind of chicken stew. Why kind of? Simply because I put all I had at home into it 😊. So... in my stew you can find: 2 chicken breasts ( possibly bit too much, but my boys love chicken ), 2 small carrots, 1 small red onion, 3/4 of turnip, nice bit of celeriac, few halved baby potatoes, garlic clove, can of chopped tomatoes plus cup and a bit of water, bit of salt, black pepper, powdered garlic and allspice.
Near the end of cooking I added 2 handfuls of Frozen peas 😊.

Result of this experiment was not bad, but ... I need to try different cooking settings next time to be sure we'll not wait for our food too long 😊.

Plus add less water to have our stew bit thicker 😊. 

If you know some nice recipes - give me a shout - want to try something new next week with my new toy 😉.