Good Old Fashioned Fun (With the Girls)

Somehow, despite pay day having only just been and gone, pretty much everyone I know seems to be totally broke and I am definitely at the helm of this pauper-style living! With that it mind, it was time to get creative on the weekend just gone as there’s nothing worse than spending a whole month of weekends doing nothing because of a lack of funds. So, the girls and I decided to spend Saturday baking and watching movies; proper girly fun, the good old fashioned way.

Since gluten and I don’t seem to get on very well at the moment, I found a recipe for gluten-free cupcakes (and then amended it slightly) and off we went.  The recipe I stumbled upon can be found here; we doubled up for the first batch of 12 so they came out huge and then made another batch of 12 on the recipe sizes. We also added some xanthan gum and baking powder to the mix to make sure the cakes weren’t crumbly and that they rose enough.

Well, the first batch were pretty huge and consequently quite hard to ice so we were glad we made the second batch smaller! With the actual icing mix, we ended up adding a fair bit of icing sugar as well as we couldn’t get the mixture firm enough to be able to sit on top of the cakes. We then piped the icing on amateur style, (no nozzle, just a bag) and got round to the fun part of decorating those bad boys! Check out my amazingly edited video of us in full on piping action!

Bare naked cakes

Piped and ready to go

Some of our best work

All of our beautiful babies!

As you can see, we got a bit carried away with the decorating. We started off quite refined, creating sophisticated little numbers and then we went wild sticking on a whole array of sweets and decorative bits! It was brilliant fun!

The cakes themselves are not as moist as my friend over at Cuppies and Cream makes but they weren’t dry which is great considering they are GF. We also made one batch with lemon icing which I really love, a pretty good effort considering we were first-timers. Now however, my thighs are approx. 6 times the size they were last week because I’ve eaten so much cake!

I thought I’d share because it was such great fun and I’d really recommend getting back to basics with your friends when the pennies are tight. Do as they did in the old days and fill your time without using computer games, Facebook or the TV and you might just surprise yourself in just how much fun you can have! x

Low Calorie Cakes

At the moment I am on a bit of a health kick, partly to lose some weight but mainly to feel a bit better. I’ve been really suffering with a bad gut, bad skin and feeling exhausted for a good 4-6 months now so I’m trying to do something about it. What I’ve found is that I am absolutely fine with eating loads more fresh fruit and veg. but I still crave naughty foods and need to snack several times a day (I eat loads!). So far, I’ve been struggling with this and have resorted to crisps and chocolate on quite a few occasions which obviously is not really helping any of the causes.

As diet success seems to be mainly about being organised, I got myself organised this weekend and made some more of my delicious lemon and poppyseed muffins. They’re gluten free, sugar free and dairy free as well as being low GI and tasting nice…amazing! The recipe is sat over on my other, somewhat neglected blog so here it is: http://candidafree.wordpress.com/muffins/ . Just thought I’d share in case anyone else is also having trouble sticking to their diets 🙂 x

The Lost Room

Having recently moved house, I now have a whole new kitchen to get to grips with and as such have been spending rather a lot of time in there. So far things I have made have ranged across: sugar free chocolate cake, gluten free cake, bacon cupcakes, dairy free ice cream, Asian sweetcorn soup, curry and a whole load of other random creations in between, complete with a lasagne made by the bf.

It’s been pretty fun and a great way of using up ingredients that are just sitting in the cupboard, i.e. money I have already spent when I am broke and can’t afford to spend any more! However, I can’t help but notice what a lost room the kitchen is nowadays, so few people use theirs to do anything other than shove a pizza in the oven. This really hit me today when a friend of the bf popped over and couldn’t believe how much “stuff” we have in our kitchen…I’d been thinking how little “stuff” we have as every time I make something new I seem to have to buy a new implement to complete my recipe! What has happened to the crazy world!?!

It seems such a shame that nobody can cook any more, did these people not have parents and grandparents showing them how to cook? Do they not like eating tasty food? Or is it just that I am a pauper and can’t afford to dine out or buy takeaways everyday? Either way, here I am making a stand and joining the campaign to revert us back to our old ways…at least a little bit.

Let’s hear it for all the unashamed kitchen users who have used their ovens for something other than storage! Let’s challenge ourselves to getting just 1 extra person in their kitchen by the end of the year!

Not Bloody Likely!

Hello again old friends and welcome to those of you of a newer persuasion! This is a short post but I just had to rave about the night I had on Monday…it was super!

The background to this splendid Monday was celebration of the fact that the bf and I have been together for a year…yes, a whole year! This in itself is pretty awesome and then we made it even better with 0ur night out.

We started off in Wahaca in Covent Garden which is one of a fairly small chain of Mexican restaurants. The mojito which began our meal was super tasty, though I must say my dad is still winning in terms of making the best mojitos ever (perhaps because just 1 will get you super drunk!) and that progressed into a passion fruit margarita which was deliciously summery 🙂 Then we moved onto the food, it was quick, cheap and very tasty – plus it came with an assortment of spicy sauces to make it more authentic for those who can take it. Apparently I can’t take it. 1 baby finger full of the mild sauce had me breathing fire and downing the bf’s hibiscus margarita! An added bonus at Wahaca is that a lot of their food is gluten free, they even have gluten free wraps which is pretty rare.

For desert there were churros with melted chocolate and salted caramel ice cream. Yes, for those of you who are observant, I know this all goes against the rules of my candida diet but it was our first anniversary, I had to enjoy it! This was my first foray into salted ice cream and it was beautiful, sweet caramel, then chocolate chunks followed by a mild salty after taste…yum!

Although the mains had been with us very quickly, the desserts took forever so we then had a quick hop, skip and jump round the corner to the Garrick Theatre to see Pygmalion. I loved it! Kara Tointon’s performance was spot on; her posture and range of dialects combined perfectly with her superb comic timing to produce a truly enticing Eliza Doolittle. I had not expected it but Rupert Everett’s performance, though good, was overshadowed by that of Kara which is credit to her in my opinion. Everybody should try and get tickets to this show, it’s so much fun and just whizzes by in the blink of an eye 🙂

And that was that, our evening of fun and I loved it. Thank you to the bf who has made this a super year, I can’t wait to see what we get up to in the next one.