Shades

I just broke my fourth pair of sunglasses in the space of one year.  How could this happen to me four times?  This time, they just seemed to fall off my face and when I picked them up they were in two pieces.  Curses!

Any inspiration for a replacement pair?  I usually go for some variation on wayfarers but I love these ones too!

Forrest and Jenny

Re-watched the genius that is Forrest Gump last weekend.  There has never, or will ever be a film like it.

Thing #54: Drink Champagne to celebrate nothing

Pop the champagne and make it rain!  There was nothing to celebrate, I just always wanted to say that.

Photos by Lucy Jones

€5 has been donated to UNICEF Ireland for the completion of this ‘thing’.  Click here if you too would like to donate online.

A Question

File under: how to write

Thing #88: Make a birthday cake for someone

Peanut Butter Birthday Cake, pictured with Marie’s famous brownies

Marie makes the cakes.  That’s how this whole thing stays together.  If there is a cake that needs baking… a birthday,  an engagement, a new job?  Marie has a cake for that.  There’s no big fuss about it either.  If you walk into Marie’s apartment when she’s baking, she doesn’t look like a hot mess and she doesn’t tell you to come back in an hour when she has her shit together.  She can hold a proper conversation with you, while she carries on weighing and measuring and beating and folding (that’s a baking word I learned from Marie).  I think she actually likes it.

The other thing is that everyone loves Marie.  Really, everyone.  She’s a crowd-pleaser type of person.  I should be clear that this has exactly nothing to do with her baking skills.  Marie, as a person, is sweeter and lovelier than any of the cakes she’s produced.  Even the carrot cake with cream cheese frosting.

I tell her all the time how glad I am to have her in my life.  But that’s not enough.  She deserves more.  On her birthday, at the very least, she deserves a cake that she didn’t have to make herself.

So, that is what I gave her.  I knew I couldn’t pull it off with the same panache as Marie, but a cake was called for, and a cake I made.  I put on some old school Smashing Pumpkins and followed the goddamn recipe.  I listen to The Smashing Pumpkins while I bake cakes.  That makes me a badass.

It’s a tremendously easy cake to make.  In fact, the most difficult part of this recipe is not eating too much of the frosting before you are entirely sure you have enough to cover the cake.  That requires willpower beyond my limits. 

Anyway, here it is.

Peanut Butter Birthday Cake

This recipe is adapted from the Joy the Baker cookbook and makes one 8 or 9 inch round cake.  The original version is a double layer cake, which I also made, but wasn’t entirely happy with the result – I felt it wasn’t the right cake to frosting ratio, but maybe that’s just me.

What you’ll need:

for the cake

150g plain flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

½ teaspoon baking soda

¼ teaspoon salt

100g peanut butter

50g unsalted butter, softened

60g caster sugar

60g brown sugar

2 medium eggs

150ml buttermilk (I used this substitute)

for the frosting

300g cream cheese

100g unsalted butter, softened

100g peanut butter

250g icing sugar

Seeds of 1 vanilla pod

pinch of salt

Here’s how:

• Preheat oven to 180°C (350°F).  Grease the cake tin.
• Whisk together flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt. Set aside.
• In the bowl of an electric stand mixer fitted with a paddle attachment, cream together peanut butter, butter and sugars for about 3 minutes (I use a hand-held mixer because that’s all I have).
• Add eggs, one at a time, beating at medium speed for 1 minute between each addition.
• With the mixer on a low speed setting, add half of the flour mixture. Slowly pour in all of the buttermilk. When it just starts to come together, add the remaining flour mixture. Remove the bowl from the mixer and finish incorporating the ingredients with a metal spoon.
• Pour the batter into the cake tin and bake for 30-40 minutes, or until a skewer inserted in the cake comes out clean.
• Let it cool in the pan for 10 minutes, before inverting onto a wire rack to cool completely before frosting.
• To make the frosting, just beat all the ingredients together with an electric mixer until smooth.  Use immediately (at room temperature) to frost cake.  If you need help, here’s how to frost a cake.

€5 has been donated to UNICEF Ireland for the completion of this ‘thing’.  Click here if you too would like to donate online.

Fun Pix Fridays #36

This weekend, let’s find some time and share it with each other.  Have a good one. xo

Cycles of Life

Bicycles and Grant Snider’s illustrations:  two of my favourite things!

p.s. Another one.

Blind Date

A blind date with a book?  I can’t think of a better kind.

Awesome idea in a library!  The books were wrapped in paper, with only brief messages giving a clue to the content – words like ‘drama’, ‘espionage’, ‘plot twists’… the only thing visible was the barcode, so you could check it out!

I love the people who come with this stuff!

The Tutor Crowd

Possibly my favourite single-topic tumblr discovery in a while;  The Tutor Crowd have taken grammar correction out of the classroom and onto the streets of London.  Check it, don’t wreck it.

A Beautiful Man

…because, you know, Mondays are tough.

(more here!)

Your Weekend

I hope you have a real weekend.

I hope your bed is warm, and your pillow cool.  I hope you wake up late.  I hope you eat doughnuts for breakfast without giving it another thought.  I hope the breeze through your kitchen window makes you want to take your coffee outside.  I hope you forget all about the dirty dishes and to-be-folded laundry.  I hope you smell sunscreen this weekend.  I hope you breathe salty sea-air and sink your toes in the sand.  I hope your weekend includes fresh flowers from an outdoor market, a bubble bath, a mostly-downhill bike-ride, ice-cream, a long afternoon nap.  I hope you watch a feel-good movie while shovelling popcorn into your mouth. I hope there is a happy hour in there somewhere.  I hope you find some time to yourself.

I hope you have a real weekend.  Really I do.

Money and Happiness

Everyone says money can’t buy you happiness.  Not entirely true.  There are (at least) three things that I could buy, with money, that would make me happier:

1. A puppy

2. A Vespa

3. A karaoke machine

If you had the money, how would you buy happiness?

Photo via Le Blog de Betty

Starbucks Doodles

Ivette is hilarious.

Thing #74: Buy nothing unnecessary for a month

Unnecessary:  Essie in Haute as Hello (coral) and Fiji (pale pink-white)

The Rules

Things that I deemed ‘necessary’ and thus, exempt from the shopping embargo for the purpose of this project: 

1. Food, even biscuits.  I didn’t think it wise to try to curb unhealthy shopping habits and eating habits at the same time.  Good Lord, I am only human.

2. Money spent on nights out.  On alcohol, yes.  You try working in my job for a week and then tell me Teacher’s Medicine is not a necessity.

3. Birthday presents and other gifts, because your friends shouldn’t have to suffer through this ‘thing’ with you.

4. Internet and telephone.  I doubt that my provider would have entertained the idea of cutting me off for one (unpaid) month anyway.  That’s my story.  Sticking to it.

You’re probably thinking my rules make this very easy indeed.  I also implemented the ban in January, making it even easier on myself since everyone seems to be tightening their purse strings at that time of year.  But easy, this was not.  No clothes (even January sales bargains!), no beauty products, none of my little sporadic pick-me-up purchases.  No really, this was dang hard! But, I can be pretty determined when I want to be.  I was going to nail this one on my first attempt if it killed me, which thankfully it did not.

The first thing(s) I bought after the month was up were Essie nail polishes in ice-creamy colours (pictured).  A completely unnecessary, but completely guilt-free purchase.

I don’t know if this ‘thing’ really had a positive impact on my spending habits in the longer-term (I don’t know if that was even my intention?), but either way it is good to step back sometimes and remind ourselves of the difference between what we need and what we’d like. 

€5 has been donated to UNICEF Ireland for the completion of this ‘thing’.  Click here if you too would like to donate online.

That Video

It’s that video that’s gone viral over the last few days.  I’m as enamoured as everyone else.  Have you seen it?

Before you watch the video (and you must watch it), there’s this thing I want to tell you about.  It’s about this time when I was driving back home from Dublin Airport.  My Mam and Fiona were in the car with me and we had just returned from a lovely long weekend in Krakow, but were beginning to feel the blues set in at the thought of resuming the banalities of everyday life.  While stuck in the usual traffic at Harold’s Cross, I glanced across at the car in the next lane and there was the driver, singing along to whatever song happened to be on the radio.  I mean really going for it – eyes closed, fist-pumping, top-of-his-voice singing.  There was nobody else in the car with him.  I wish you could have seen him, to understand.  We couldn’t catch the song.  I imagined it to be Journey’s Don’t Stop Believing, but that doesn’t matter.  It really doesn’t matter at all. 

The point is this:  I love that man.  I think about him often.  I think about him after I’ve read in my local paper about someone beating up an old person or hear about someone being broken up with in an email.  I remember him when I’m beginning to think this is a horrible messed-up world we live in.  I can be having a really shitty time and be feeling like the world is against me and all I need do is remind myself that there are people like that man in the world.

In this video, the singing is not even the best part – the best part is that you get a little glimpse of one of those truly happy relationships that are more special and rare than we think.  I’m sure this pair have their bad days too but it must be a lovely comfort to know that another person so clearly and openly thinks you’re awesome.

This is beauty, indeed.