Alfred the elephant

My Little Visitor, Alfred arrived today! I know that we are going to have a great winter together. Hopefully we'll get to do plenty of exciting things that he wouldn't have the opportunity to do in Florida!

Day 28 - summertime

It's very difficult to think about summertime when I am currently experiencing a very cold winter! However, I am going to be living vicariously through my little visitor, Gus T. Turkey, while we spends the next three months on vacation in Florida!

Day 26 - love

I LOVE LOVE LOOOOOOOOOVE my new phone!

It is a Samsung Galaxy S. I desperately wanted to get the S2 - the new model which has just been released, but I just couldn't justify the $25 extra per month!

Little Visitor Challenge themes

I am hosting the Little Visitor swap over on Craftster and since it is such a long swap, each round running for three months we almost always have at least one flaker :(

We are doing our best to ensure that doesn't happen this round and I have a team of wonderful ladies helping with many different tasks so that we can stay on top of any potential situations. I have also introduced a photo challenge to try and encourage the swappers to take and post photos! At the moment it is just for fun with no winners or prizes. I'll see how well this goes and if seems to be successful I will let the swappers vote for a winning photo each week. The winner can receive a prize in the mail - maybe a postcard?

So with a weekly challenge that lasts for at least 3 MONTHS I need a LOT of challenge themes!

Here's what I have so far:

Week 1 - something blue

Week 2 - water

Week 3 - magical

Week 4 - childhood

Week 5 - something crafty

Week 6 - architectural detail

Week 7 - something beginning with the letter 'C'

I made the cute banners at puresilvabannermaker. They are just so adorable as well as very simple to put together!

Do you have any ideas for some fun themes that we can use?

Pirates? Baking? Stripes and spots? Science fiction?

Day 24 - orange

I love the colours in this photo. Fresh fruit is just so pretty - I wish it tasted as good as it looks! Sadly my taste buds are not really a fan of anything healthy, with the exception of red delicious apples.

Today's challenge really helped me to recognise the lack of orange in my life, something that needs to be remedied asap. I was very close to giving up since I couldn't find anything orange anywhere!

Note: No oranges were harmed during this photo session. And let's not talk about the mandarins...

Can you build snowmen in Antarctica?

The kids at school are studying Antarctica so today I made them snow-people cupcakes. The kids were thrilled with them (although I really doubt that they'd turn anything away that contained sugar) but I wasn't particularly happy with my work - despite slaving over them for HOURS!

This is what they were supposed to look like:

And here is my version:

As you can see, there is quite a difference! :(

My sister was given some adorable Miniamo icing tubes (pictured below) for her birthday, so I planned on creating the hat trim using those. Unfortunately, they turned out out to be REALLY difficult to use! Hopefully with practice, they will become easier. But that was just the first problem with these cupcakes.

TBC...

Chocolate mug cake

I found a recipe today on Maker*land's blog to make a cake in a mug. Since there was nobody home and my plan for dinner had consisted of toast and honey, I decided that this would be the perfect desert.

I stayed true to the Maker*land's recipe although I did consider switching the oil for butter. The only time that I have ever used oil for baking a cake is when I lived in the US and made packet cakes. I much prefer to use butter, but as this was my first microwaved cake I decided to not mix things up just incase I messed things up!

The ingredients

Mix 4 Tbspn plain flour, 3 Tbspn sugar, 2 Tbspn cocoa and 1 egg. This is what the ingredients look like before mixing.

After mixing you are left with a VERY thick mixture.

Add 3 Tbspn milk, 3 Tbspn veggie oil and a few drops of vanilla essence. Eww. Oil floating on top of milk, floating on top of cake batter.

Stir well until it actually resembles cake mix!

The recipe said to microwave for 2 minutes 15 depending on your microwave. I had no idea what my microwave was like compared to others so I decided to stick to 2 minutes thinking it would need longer. It didn't, the cake was perfectly cooked in that time. If fact, it was overcooked. Or i'm assuming that it was. It was rather chewy and rubbery, although not in an awful way. But also not in the 'I want to try this recipe again immediately' way.

It was yummy, but not as great as I expected. Next time I try this I will microwave it for less. I'm positive that's the reason it didn't turn out as great as Maker*land's.

Still, i'm pretty excited that I just baked a cake in approximately 4 minutes!! I just wish i'd had chocolate chips and marshmallows to add on top! Cookies and cream ice-cream had to do.

Thanks for the recipe Maker*land!!