pretty paper. true stories. {and scrapbooking classes with cupcakes.}

So they say a picture is worth a thousand words, right?

Then what about ten pictures?

On Monday, you can sign up for a new online class for summer. You’ll need ten pictures. Not necessarily ten thousand words.

Also on Monday, you can see the first sneak peek of the actual project here.

But better yet: some lucky person who comments on this post any time between now and the sneak peek on Monday, will win five free passes on this class. You + four friends. You + your two sisters + your mum + your grandma. You + your other half + some wonderfully cool couple you both know. You + any four people you know that also have ten photos!

See you here on Monday!

xlovesx

Comment [327]

Some things never change. Like my desire to show you pretty food, despite it having nothing to do with the conversation that follows.

Some things do. Like addresses, hair colour and careers.

So since the under-16 population found out today, I will go ahead and share this with you. When I say the end of term is next Friday, I mean a little bit more than that. I mean I’m not going back for next term in September. Not even in another school. Nope. I’m going to do this full-time.

Okay, I’m not going to make my blog my full-time job, but I’ve been realising that it will be difficult to describe with one label what it is that I will be doing. I’ll be scrapbooking. And teaching online classes (check back Thursday for an important announcement on that subject!). And going to cool places to teach real live classes (see some over there at the right). And sewing. And consulting. And wedding planning. And cupcake baking.

I am totally excited. Excited for a time when I can actually do even half of all the ideas I want to do. Excited that something that has been my second job, my part-time bit of fun can become my full-time job. Excited that I can say yes to things that happen during term time.

Of course, I am also partly terrified. Terrified to work quite alone, rather than surrounded by more than a thousand people every day. Terrified that it will feel weird to go into the next room to be at work. Terrified that there will be no bells to tell me when to move on to something new.

And of course, I am more than a little sad about leaving some of the coolest teenagers in the entire world. I hope that once they forgive me, they will still speak to me, and maybe some of them will keep in touch and share the odd cup of coffee. After all, they are some of the coolest teenagers in. the. entire. world. But they will be fabulous no matter what.

So here’s to paper, fabric, yarn and cupcakes from July 23rd. And if anyone asks, I will work on replying, with a totally straight face, I am a professional scrapbooker.

But I really don’t think I can say it without laughing!

xlovesx

Comment [67]

This is a need you understand, right? The need that, faced with two very challenging weeks, there is no such thing as too much chocolate. Chocolate cupcakes with chocolate filling and chocolate icing and chocolate sprinkles and two kinds of chocolate Malteasers.

But there is good news: my computer is back, in working order. The school stuff that was less than pleasant is not gone, but it is now to a point where we can breathe and look forward. We have two weeks until summer break here, and that will be a welcome event for pretty much everybody.

In the mean time, we eat chocolate.

It’s cheaper than therapy.

Serious Chocolate Cupcakes

Cake ingredients:
110g unsalted butter
3 large eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
150g brown sugar
100g sugar
175g plain flour
2 tablespoons cocoa powder
1 packet instant hot chocolate
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate soda
50ml single cream
125ml milk

Preheat oven to 180C and line cupcake tin with papers.

In a mixing bowl, beat butter until fluffy, then add sugars and beat until light and even. Add eggs and vanilla, mixing on low between each one.

Stir in remaining ingredients, then mix until an even consistency.

Fill cupcake papers just over halfway and bake for about 18 minutes. Remove from oven and cool on a wire rack. Make sure they are room temperature or chilled before adding filling.

Malted chocolate cream filling
ingredients:
200ml whipping cream
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
100g dark chocolate
50g light brown sugar
1 packet instant hot chocolate

Melt the chocolate in a glass bowl over a saucepan of simmering water. Remove from heat and allow to rest until just warm.

In a separate bowl, mix the whipping cream and sugar on a high speed until the cream thickens. Add remaining ingredients and continue to mix on high. Stir in melted chocolate.

Chill until cold. Use a melon baller to remove the centre of each cupcake top and spoon cream into the cupcakes, then replace the tops.

Chocolate cream frosting
ingredients:
200ml whipping cream
50g unsalted butter
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
100g dark chocolate
50g light brown sugar
100g icing sugar (or more to taste)
1 packet instant hot chocolate.

Essentially, this is the same as the filling but with butter and more sugar. You may want to tweak amounts to match the chocolate you are using and your taste for dark to milk chocolate, but it is the same process as the above. Just beat the butter in the bowl first, then add the cream, then everything else.

Frost the cupcakes with a knife or spatula, then pile on chocolate sprinkles, Malteasers and any other chocolate you have left in your cupboard.

xlovesx

PS: if this weekend behaves as it should, I might actually do something crafty with paper! It it’s positively shocking, I know.

Comment [28]

Even the toughest days have very good things.

xlovesx

Comment [5]

The impromptu departure from the internets? I think I can explain. You might remember this event of late last summer. After that sad moment, there were two full months of agony involving repairs, mistakes, more repairs, insurance companies, more repairs and formal complaints and finally one more repair. But even with all those repairs, the insurance company did not authorise the replacement of a £20 part that was damaged, as it was still functional.

Or at least it was until last week, when it sparked about a foot in the air, right through the speaker, as I was editing photos. Then nothing. No power. And much grumbling about insurance companies and repairs from me.

So right now I am once again waiting for the insurance company to make a decision. I can give my computer to them for an unknown amount of time, hope they fix something right, and not have to pay for any of the repair, since it’s still part of the first claim. Or I can take it to the shop myself, lose it for a few days and pay for it. Or I can scream out of a frustration and buy a shiny new one and promptly move my insurance policy.

In the meantime, I am not online much at all. Or offline. I can manage a bit here and there with some clever trickery. But mostly I am:

♥Marking exams
♥Drinking orange and cinnamon tea
♥Baking and eating orange and cinnamon and carrot cupcakes
♥Sewing dresses from curtain fabric
♥Wearing said dresses to both Singalonga Sound of Music and work
♥Rereading The Order of the Phoenix in anticipation of the event known as A Harry Potter movie with Helena Bonham-Carter
♥Preparing for some upcoming workshops here

If you feel like throwing the technology on the floor, here’s a recipe to give you something to do. And if you’re in this part of the world, you’ll have plenty of hours of daylight to do something this week.

♥Orange and Cinnamon and Carrot Cupcakes♥

Ingredients:
60 mL vegetable oil
2 large eggs
100g sugar
100g brown sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 tablespoon undiluted orange squash (or orange juice concentrate)
35g Bird’s custard powder (half a single serving packet)
200 mL boiling water
160g plain flour
1 teaspoon bicarbonate soda
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
2 medium sized carrots, grated

I felt like I was making this backward, but here’s how it went:
Start with most of the dry ingredients in the mixing bowl, including both sugars, flour, soda, cinnamon and cloves.
Mix the custard as you normally would—put the powder in the bottom of the gravy jug, boil the kettle and fill to the 200mL line. Stir until thickened.
Add the custard, oil, vanilla and orange squash and stir until well mixed. Add the eggs and mix until even.
Stir in the grated carrots at the last minute, just before you are ready to pour into the pan.
Fill cupcake papers 2/3 full. Bake 18-22 minutes, or until a chopstick comes out clean. Remove and let cool on a rack.

♥Orange and Cinnamon and Cream Cheese Icing♥

Ingredients:
200g plain cream cheese
100g unsalted butter
400g icing sugar (more or less to taste)
40g brown sugar
2 tablespoons golden syrup
2 tablespoons cinnamon
1 tablespoon undiluted orange squash or juice concentrate
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
15g Dream Topping mix (half a packet)

Essentially, put it all in a bowl and mix it up. Clearly you’ll want to add the icing sugar a little bit at a time, unless you like the snowy-kitchen look.
The dream topping will make this go quite soft while you’re mixing—make it the night before, put it in the fridge, and it will ice just fine in the morning, and make it through the day on the table in the staffroom.

Garnish with more cinnamon, coconut flakes, walnuts, or whatever else seems to be handy.

xlovesx

Comment [14]

We’ll see if the gremlins and gone away. It seems they have at least slowed down over the weekend. Silly gremlins. How dare they get in the way of cupcakes and paper crafts?

Speaking of cupcakes, it has been forever since I’ve been able to bake for Cupcake Thursdays, and I did promise to post this super easy recipe for someone who asked, so here we go.

A warning note: you can make this with Nestle’s “Smarties”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smarties_%28Nestlé%29, if you prefer, but I will think you are mad. You can make them with the positively heavenly UK creation known as Minstrels, and I will think they are too yummy to give away. Well, certainly not to children. Needless to say, if you count the enumbers in any of these sweets, the chocolates make this a non-organic recipe. Sorry…we all fall down somewhere, perhaps?

The M&Ms will sink to the bottom—I thought this would be a drawback, but the girls at work said it made the bottom of the cake like a candy bar. And that can’t be a bad thing! (Or…it could have just been our Thursday. Trust me.)

M&M Cupcakes

Ingredients:
225g unsalted butter
200g dark chocolate
200g sugar
150g brown sugar
1 tablespoon seedless raspberry or strawberry jam
4 large eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
250g plain flour
1 tablespoon cocoa powder
1 teaspoon bicarbonate soda
240mL (1 cup) buttermilk
As many M&Ms as you would like

Heat oven to 180C and line cupcake tin with papers.

Melt butter and chocolate in a bowl sat over a saucepan of simmering water. Once melted, remove from heat and stir in both sugars and jam.

Once cooled enough not to cook the eggs, add the eggs and vanilla and mix until even.

Add remaining ingredients except the M&Ms, stir in, then mix until even again.

Fill papers halfway. Drop in a few M&Ms and bake immediately, for about 18 minutes (shorter if you are making smaller cakes), or until a chopstick comes out clean.

Remove from tin and let cool. Ice with your favourite vanilla or chocolate frosting recipe, then decorate with more M&Ms and chocolate sprinkles.

xlovesx

PS: This website is helpful if you prefer cups to grams!

Comment [18]

We have gremlins in the system. They are eating people’s comments.

We’re trying to find them and ask them politely to leave.

That is all. For now.

xlovesx

Comment [6]

Actual photographic evidence, less than an hour old, that there is some sort of organisation that I must have in order to function. Boxes at the back of shelves are labelled, and as they are at the back, closed up and have lids, they are things I don’t need to get to all the time, bit by bit (I keep supplies I need for classes in these, so I can just grab the box and have all of that item, but I’m not tempted to use it up with my other stash while I scrap).

Magazine files are my favourites for stickers. I keep all my letter stickers together in one shelf cube, directly behind me as I scrap. I just turn around and they are all there…so handy. Baskets hold newish shopping so I will use it. This doesn’t work one hundred percent of the time, but it’s way better than if I pack it away somewhere. Loose letters and little things go in coffee cups. Because I may drink a lot of coffee, but I have even more cups than I can drink.

And sometimes I organise by manufacturer because I might like all the little bits by a company for filling in my gaps—that’s why I have a pink cube filled with little accents from Heidi Swapp. I keep my Heidi chipboard letters and rub-ons mixed in with other brands, but strips, shapes and frames of chipboard plus tapes and other accents all stay here so I can just grab a few options to play with an empty space. Also easy to throw back the bits I don’t pick in the end.

But this is the reclaim reward project. Once you’ve got your desk clean or your space reclaimed, no matter how big or small, give yourself something that lets you put your own personal stamp on your space. Something you can display that reminds you of your creative ethos, maybe your ‘one little word’ or anything else that motivates you or declares that this space is yours (even if most people would call it the dining room table).

The page frames are fabulous—totally loved them at CHA and only now getting a chance to play with the idea. Basically, you can work both inside and outside the frame, so you can use the frame to protect your photos and paper, but you can adhere things to the outside for texture, like chipboard and buttons. You can omit the paper inside and use transparencies to create a clear background that shows the woodgrain behind, if you hang it on a door. You can stamp on it and apply rub-ons on it. I’m even told that with a Cropadile, you can punch right through the frame and jumprings, eyelets or anything else you might punch through paper. Picture It has a fab gallery to look through if you want to get some ideas.

So here’s the challenge: Reclaim {some} space. Reward yourself with a sign for your door, wall or table. Use a photo you love, papers you love, words you love, whatever will make you know this is yours.

More about this over the weekend. Get your thinking cap or go ahead and get started.

xlovesx

Comment [5]