Nails

Ok so I just realised that I totally forgot about showing you my Harry Potter manicure.  I did take pictures but they're not very good and I also took them about a week after I did the manicure so there's a few chips...

This is my bad hand (i.e. I'm left handed so I had to paint this with the wrong hand...).  It's not too bad but it's not great either.  As you can see I used a black base, then painted on my designs in silver (lightning bolt on ring finger and the deathly hallows on my thumb).  Once my design had dried I added a flakey top coat.  Any glittery top coat would look good but I always think there's something magical about flakies.

What you can't tell from the picture is that instead of using a normal black I used GOSH Black Passion.  It's basically just black but it's packed with really fine silver glitter.  I've never seen a nail polish like it and I love it!  The flakey I used is also by GOSH and I think it's called Rainbow.  GOSH do some seriously awesome nail varnishes and I think you should check them out if you don't know about them already.

Blurry :(  I suck at taking nail pictures clearly.  But you can see the design and that's all that matters.  I used a thin paintbrush to paint my designs on.  Probably ruined them but they weren't good ones anyway.  You can buy special brushes to paint nail designs on but this probably isn't going to be a normal thing for me to do so it wouldn't be worth me buying them.

This is the lightning nail from my right hand, as you can see I'm much better at painting with my left than my right.

And that concludes my Harry Potter manicure!

I hope you enjoyed it!  I'd love to know about anything Harry Potter related you've done, even if it's just something like you're re-reading one of the books.  Or checking your email every 5 minutes to see if you have your welcome email from Pottermore.  It's always good to meet new Potterheads :)

DFTBA x

Pre-Christmas Baking

So about a month ago myself and a couple of friends were feeling a bit down so we decided to indulge in one of my friend's traditions of having a pre-christmas party. I have to say it was possibly the best idea we've ever had!!! We all decided that we were going to bake something for the party so we spent a morning making a complete mess of my kitchen while listening to Christmas songs and wearing Santa hats!!....In October! :)

I decided to make some gingerbread snowflake biscuits. Have to say they were pretty delicious! I will definitely be using this recipe again and again, in fact I might make some in a minute... Anyway here's the recipe!

Gingerbread Biscuits

(original recipe can be found here)

Ingredients

350g plain flour

1tsp ground ginger

1/2tsp ground cloves

1/2tsp ground cinnamon

1tsp bicarbonate of soda

100g butter

175g soft brown sugar

1 egg

4tbsp golden syrup

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 180°C. Mix together the flour, spices and bicarbonate of soda.

2. Rub in the butter (using your fingertips) until it looks like breadcrumbs.

3. Add the sugar and mix.

4. In a separate bowl mix together the egg and golden syrup.

5. Mix the wet and dry ingredients together until it forms a dough.

6. Tip this out on to a clean, floured work surface and knead it until it's smooth.

7. Roll out the dough until it is about 0.5cm thick and then cut it out using whatever cutter you want/have.

8. Put the biscuits on a greased baking tray (I like to put grease proof paper on my baking trays too) and then bake in the oven for 10-15mins.

9. Ice if you want to!

I iced mine using royal icing. There it a specific way to ice biscuits using 2 different thicknesses of icing however after 3 biscuits I gave up on this method and just slapped it on using a palette knife, which worked quite well!! I then added some edible glitter or lustre dust to them to make them sparkle and shimmer like real snowflakes! I'm so incredibly excited to have edible glitter I wouldn't be surprised if everything incorporates it from now on.... Hehe!

My friends also made brownies, mince pies, white chocolate tarts and rum balls!! Lets commence with the silly pictures!