Degustation Dinner

Taking a break from the seemingly unending painting, sewing and general mess that seems to have invaded our lives; the wonderful J and I got all dressed up and went out for a degustation dinner on Friday night.

The meal was a early birthday gift from the wonderful J's brother who has the uncanny knack of winning things - a lot!

The dinner was at Hobarts.

I wish that I had taken more photos of the food as presentation was half of the pleasure, but alas it was dessert before we thought to bring out the camera..... 

The food was lovely and as they change their menu once each season, we are planning go back and try the new menu.  Next time we think we will try the Crepes Suzette Flambe`, which was very impressive to watch as they make it at the table.

Unfortunately come Saturday we were back into it, so I will hurry up and take some photos .... we are hoping to have some 'after' photos by the weekend - fingers crossed!

Baby Shower

Today my beautiful and very pregnant cousin Jess had her baby shower. 

She wanted a very simple High Tea with some close family and friends on a Sunday afternoon.  

On Friday we baked and iced about 40 cupcakes, and on Saturday I made some simple flowers to go on top. I also offered to decorate a cake for the shower and as we don't know the sex of the baby yet, of course it had to be yellow! 

 

The weather was rather temperamental but the baby shower was just beautiful. 

Things are happening

There have been lots of thing going on this week as the wonderful J and I have been working to a deadline. 

The deadline was today, as today we are getting carpet laid!!

This is a decision that has taken us about 18 months to make, and once we finally made the decision to do it it took as four long tedious weeks (with about 50 carpet samples) to choose a carpet.  

All carpet is not created equal!! 

But the decision was finally made and I am sitting in my office at the moment packed in with bedroom and lounge room furniture to the picture rails! 

I want to show you some before and afters, particularly of our living room, which has received the most attention this week.  However right now my "before photos" are on my potable hard drive, and quite frankly your guess is as good as mine as to where that would be right now!!! 

So I will leave you for this fine Friday with some photos of my current living environment..... 

This is where we slept last night on a blow up mattress - worst, worst night sleep!!! 

Becoming a Follower

So many people tell me that they are Followers of my blog - and I can't tell you how happy I am to hear that!

However people are most disappointed to find out that I don't know that they are Followers, and ask me how it is that I don't know!

Well the issue is that when you Follow Me By Email you are not actually a Follower.  

To become a Follower is very easy and only takes about a minute to do so let me explain (please note there are limits - I am really sorry, they are not my limits!):

First thing that you need to do is locate the FOLLOWERS button on the right hand side of this blog page (you may need to scroll down a bit).

Once you click on the Join this site button this screen will appear:

You simply choose one of the icons to join with (if you don't have a Google, Twitter, Yahoo, AIM, Netlog, OpenID account - I am sorry, Blogger has not advanced to your level yet!!). 

However if you had, for example, a gmail email account, you could click on Google and this window would open up: 

Then you simply log into your account, using your normal email details, and this window will open up: 

From here you simply put in your name (or the name you want to follow under - you can make one up!) and a photo, if you want/have one, and click on the Follow this blog button. 

And you are done! You will get an message congratulating you for becoming a Follower and you will be an official follower of my blog!

And best of all I will know it!

Wedding Brunch

I am making another wedding cake in December. 

I actually know the groom better than the bride (as we work together); they are planning on having wedding with an emphasis on fun and relaxation. 

They are coming down to final decision now so when they were talking about wedding flower inspiration, I was inspired to go back through photos to look at my own wedding flowers.  

I (and my lovely mother), did all the flowers for our wedding.  We did the church, the reception and the bouquets, so looking back I was able to find lots of photos.  

In my reminiscence I came across these photos which were of the brunch that we had the day after the wedding.  As we had so may overseas guests we wanted to make sure that we got a chance to see and talk to everybody properly. 

The Brunch was wonderful it was so relaxing and it was an absolutely beautiful day.  My father’s garden looked just beautiful (as always!) and as it was Lent when we got married so we had to remove all the flowers from the church after the ceremony and were able to use them in the backyard for the Brunch.

It was such a beautiful day.....

                 

Fans

This is another "segment" of A few of my favourite things.... except that these are not exactly my favourite things! I love fans when it is hot and I can absolutely see the value in them! But I have to say, from a design point of view they generally leave a bit to be desired .... especially when you don’t want to spend upward of $1500 on one! 

However a friend of mine asked for some suggestions for some fans with lights that she need to put into her house.  She needs three bedroom fans and a fan for the living room. 

There are lots of places to buy lights and fans out there and they have price tags from $100 to $10,000 so I have contained my findings to fans that are under $200 (for the bedrooms) and under $350 (for the living room) and are widely available to the majority of people living on the East Coast of Australia. 

So these are my  top picks for fans:  

Beacon Lighting

For the bedrooms: 

For the living room:

Eurolight:

For the bedroom: 

For the living room: 

Unfortunately my search was a little limited as Cetnaj's website was under construction and Davis and Spence  don't have product photos on their website.

I think we might have to let our feet do the walking for this one!

October bride

Earlier this year I was asked to do a cake for the lovely Jess's wedding in October.

She is having a beautiful small wedding the Hunter Valley with lace on her dress and babies breath for her bouquet......

            

Bella's cake

So this week has been huge - hence the silence in blog land!

This week I had two cakes to make.  My October bride's cake for today, Jess is getting married this afternoon: Happy Wedding day Jess!

And a birthday cake for Bella.

My lovely friend Kate asked me if I would do a cake topper for her daughter Bella's birthday.  I previously made some flowers for her younger daughters birthday a few months ago, and she wanted something special for her Bella's birthday too.

As Kate's daughters are chalk and cheese this cake topper had nothing to do with flowers and girly things like last time, this cake was all about the Penny.

I thought I had not heard of a Penny however once Kate showed me some photos, of course I new what she was talking about! I remember having one of these when I was a kid, apparently they are having a big come back!

 So using this photo for inspiration:

I printed out a photo of the board and got started making myself a template. Kate asked that instead of having the word Penny in the middle of the board we replace that with Bella, so I found a font that was as close to the Penny font as possible so I could use that as a letter guide. 

After getting the shape right I cut out the letters for Bella. 

Although I coloured the fondant icing for the board blue, it is not really possible to get a strong blue colour without 'paining' or 'dipping' on the colour with a colour and alcohol mix.

Once the desired colour was achieved it was then just a matter of attaching the letters:

And the lovely Kate sent me a photo of the finished cake:

Happy Birthday Bella!