baking and lifestyle

I gave up violin long before piano. I found it tricky and not very rewarding. I guess I was young and it didn’t sound good right away. Don’t get me wrong, I looooved carrying around the case like a teeny 1920s gangster and using that little amber block of rosin (?!) on my bow, just not so much the playing. At school I was always mega impressed with the string section of the orchestra, which included my sister! (she played the violin a lot better and for a lot longer). It always sounded so amazing. Really good violin to me should look like it’s effortless, not all scrunched up faces and squeaky noises like my attempts.

I was asked to make a violin themed birthday cake this past week for a 17^th birthday. The cake itself was four layers of chocolate sponge filled with milk chocolate buttercream. I made these vanilla violin biscuits to line the outside of the cake and royal iced them in three different …

Warning: This post may contain spoilers…

I think I was pretty late to the Game of Thrones party. A friend insisted I watch it a year ago, she couldn’t understand how I wasn’t in to it already. It took me less than a month to catch up on the first five seasons and I’ve been obsessed ever since. I’ve been dying to make a GOT cake for ages. I really really wanted to make a throne and drip some blood. For the cake itself I made a classic Victoria Sponge layered on to a black cake board. It’s nowhere near the amount of blood shed on the show but for the one on the cake I thought I’d do my new favourite thing, colouring white chocolate ganache for drips.

I made the throne a couple days in advance so that it would have time to dry between each stage. It wasn’t toooooo tricky structurally and I went about making it roughly based on …

My friend Alexia is a floral rockstar. She has created the most stunning floral display for the make up company Cosmetics A La Carte for the ‘Chelsea in Bloom’ competition as part of the Chelsea Flower Show. The theme this year was ‘Carnival’ and she dreamt up these amazing frames which house bright flowers, painted palms and the make up packaging itself bursting with carnations. I love all the colours and the shiny compacts and lipstick cases which catch the light and reflect the colours of the flowers.

I was asked to make some little treats to be offered in the shop all week to match the theme. I made mini Victoria sponge cupcakes in bold colours topped with tiny fondant palm leaves, which I …

While this is a less sugar-based post from our travels, Joshua Tree was definitely my favourite stop so I had to share some pics from our stay there.

Steve and Alexia had been to Joshua Tree a year earlier and loved it. We wanted to visit too and stay a night in the desert before heading to Coachella.

We managed to find THE BEST Airbnb up in the hills. The house was perfect – it smelt of log fires and had a quirky mix of furniture and decorations like you would find in any Soho House. You can check all the details and more pretty photos here. After being in hotels it was really nice to all hang on a couch and have some lounge space to chat, listen to the extensive vinyl collection, sit by the fire and eat pizza together (not photographed was the Papa John’s we had delivered to what seemed the middle of nowhere!). We got up really early the next morning to …