This lovely weather is the perfect excuse spending the day outdoors, and also to break in my birthday picnic hamper. Look how cute it is with it's pink trim! It's designed for two, so as you can see it was jam packed for today's picnic for four! We went to Haigh Hall Country Park in Wigan laden with pate and crusty baguettes, … Continue reading A Lovely Day For a Picnic
Manchester city centre is full of hidden places to explore, which is why I just love working there. I’m always going for little wanders on my lunch breaks and discovering new shops and places to eat. So I thought I’d post on a few of the places I visited/passed in the Northern Quarter one lunchtime … Continue reading Lunchtime in the City
After part one of my birthday celebrations on Saturday, yesterday was the actual big day – the day I turned 29 and the last birthday of my twenties. Aside from the fact that I hadn’t booked the day off work AND the weather took a turn for the worse, I actually had a pretty nice … Continue reading Birthday Cake Adventures
This week will be my birthday, and I celebrated with friends on a very sunny Saturday evening in Manchester, eating cake, drinking wine and cocktails and having chats and giggles. Warning – there are some explicit cake shots in this post! My outfit was chosen with the weather in mind, and I went for a … Continue reading Birthday Celebrations (Part 1) – Featuring Lots of Cake
This week’s bake was a new one I slightly adapted from a Hummingbird Bakery Cake Days recipe, and the result was very successful. Chewy cookies are my favourites, and these were very flavoursome thanks to the cinnamon and almonds, and the apricot and white chocolate chips added a nice bit of something extra. It’s an … Continue reading Chewy Almond, Apricot and White Chocolate Cookies
This week I agreed to contribute a batch of home-baked goodies to a charity cake sale at work. This resulted in me still pulling trays of cookies out of the oven at 10pm on a Thursday night, and declaring I’ll never agree to this again! Cake sales should be on Mondays to give people a … Continue reading Chewy Peanut Butter and Chocolate Cookies
There’s no way that Manchester dwellers can complain of having nothing to do this Bank Holiday weekend (provided the nice weather holds out) as the city is going all out in the festival stakes– from SpinFest at The Oast House to the Northern Quarter Festival Take Over. And as I live in the Salford Quays … Continue reading Lowry Outlet Food Festival
If there's one thing worse than an overripe banana, it's two overripe bananas. It's a sure sign that they'll end up being thrown away - I really hate eating them after a certain "ripeness". And after being inspired all last week to save money thanks to the "30 ways to save £1" blogger competition from … Continue reading Weekend Baking: Banana Loaf
At the weekend I was mostly channelling my inner old lady. Firstly a trip to Dunelm Mill got me overly excited about two new snugglicious blankets for our living room (we love curling up under blankets in front of the TV or with a book, even during summer months!) as well as a set of cheerfully-coloured … Continue reading A Weekend of Simple Pleasures
After a recent Sunday night #lbloggers chat it came to light that many of us enjoy reading baking posts, and although it's great to see a perfectly executed and presented bake sometimes it's nice to read about the things that can (and do) go wrong. With this in mind I thought I'd post about the … Continue reading Loaf Cake Learnings
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