Thursday, 16 February 2012

Guinness cupcakes

This is officially my first cooking post. I've been meaning to post one for ages but I tend to get carried away with the cooking and forget to take any photos! I like seeing photos of the final product so this time I actually managed to take some as I went. I baked these cupcakes as part of a Valentine's day present and they went down quite well!

You will need:

350ml Guinness (about three quarters of a can)
120ml milk
120ml vegetable oil
1 tbsp vanilla extract
3 large eggs (beaten)
170ml sour cream
85g good quality cocoa powder (I used Bourneville)
170g granulated sugar
285g plain flour (you can use half and half with self raising if you want big bouncy cupcakes!)
1 and a half tsps baking soda
pinch of salt


This is what I did:

Preheat the oven to about 180C and put your cupcake liners into a tray.

Pour the Guinness, milk, oil and vanilla extract into a large mixing bowl and beat in the eggs one at a time. Then mix in the sour cream. These are your wet ingredients so don't worry if they're splooshing about in the bowl, they're supposed to!

In another large bowl, mix together the flour, cocoa powder, sugar, salt and baking soda. When properly mixed it will be a big bowl of brown chocolatey goodness.

Now mix this gradually into the wet ingredients.

Your mixture is done! It should be thick and gloopy. Now spoon the mixture into the cupcake liners up to about 3/4 full and put into the oven for 25 minutes.

After the 25 minutes is up, remove from the oven and put on a wire rack to cool.

I cheated a little bit with the icing of my cupcakes because I wanted to make sure they looked perfect. I used icing tubes from Asda (chocolate and white), white chocolate stars and pink sugar glitter.




Let me know if you give them a go!



Tuesday, 14 February 2012

Dress to impress: Next

Just a quick post after doing my daily pretend online shop. If I actually bought all of the things that I wanted then I would be in some serious debt! Luckily I'm quite restrained and will only buy something if I keep thinking about it and know that it will definitely get lots of use. I use my blog to kind of bookmark things I've seen and then if I'm looking for something similar I can just look back through things I've already seen.

My favourite five from Next at the moment are all dresses. I really like the tea dresses with the cute prints. I can definitely imagine myself wearing the apple print dress in springtime with some sandals. The blue lace dress would work for day and night so I'd love to own that one.



























I went into Next the other day for a look around and saw some pretty jumpers and cardigans. I'm still in winter mode at the moment so I was tempted to buy a camel coloured top. I held back so that I can spend more on a nice summer wardrobe! Hurry up summertime. I miss having a tan!

Home Sweet Home #4

As I sit in my freezing cold flat shivering, I like to imagine that I am infact in some sort of palatial house filled with fresh flowers and big soft cushions. My latest interior fancies are below:







If I had money to splurge on some pretty things then this is what I might buy...

The products above are from Oliver Bonas who also happen to do jewellery and clothes. I had to stop myself buying a pretty tea dress. And several silver rings. And a purse. Now that is restraint.


Monday, 13 February 2012

I love #8

I love arty things. I don't look at art enough nowadays.
Ahh sparklers.

Florals, bag, tan. Hurry up summer time.



I want to be here. Right now.


I can't decide which is cuter. This or...

This! Cutest lunchbox everrrr.






If I could put me into a bag...


I want to own this dog.

Blossom and books = perfection


 Pictures from weheartit.com

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...