Pink Raspberry Cake - Recipe

Ingredients 

200g butter, softened 
200g caster sugar
3 free range eggs
1/2 tsp pink food colouring

250g self-raising flour
1tsp lemon juice
100g raspberries

  

Method to the Madness 

Preheat the oven to 180C /350F / Gas 4. Grease a cake tin. 

Mix together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy.

Add the eggs one at a time and beat before folding in the flour. Next add a little bit of food colouring at a time until you get a lovely pink colour. 

Drop in the raspberries and pour in the lemon juice stirring in before pouring the mixture into the tin. Well trying a bit first and then pouring in....

Pop in the oven for 45 minutes or so until it is lovely and brown. Once the cake is cooked place on a wire rack to cool. 

I cheated a little bit with the topping as I was in a rush to head out to the park and dish up the cake to my friends so I added some food colouring to Betty Croker's cream cheese icing and spread on to the cake adding some more raspberries for decoration.

All of my friends loved it! 

xxx 

 

Ikea Haul

Quite possibly one of my favourite  places in the whole world has to be IKEA. I get a little bit too excited when I see that blue and yellow sign and as a result I try and limit my trips because I don't think my inner child could handle the excitement.

However my friend had a car and has just moved house so a trip to THE BEST PLACE ON EARTH was on the cards. I took Leigh along so he could keep an eye on my spending and off we went.

I didn't pick up any furniture, although I had my eye on a £25 frame (somebody wouldn't let me get it...). I did manage to get a few little bits and pieces though.

First up this gorgeous little plant pot which now has pride of place on my dining room table. I also got the flowers separately, they are real and are actually cheaper than some of the fake ones. I just have to remember to water them!

 Pot - £4 Flowers - £2.50

I also picked up a new throw which I am using as a tablecloth in all these pictures because it's such a lovely colour and I wanted to show it off. I do love grey!

 Throw - £5.50

I also love to keep things in jars so I picked up a couple of large-ish jars so I can keep my pasta and cereal in. They just look so ascetically pleasing sitting around my kitchen and much nicer than bags and boxes.

Jars - £2 each

Going along the same theme I also picked up this Carafe which I am going to use as a vase on the off chance a certain someone buys flowers for me....

I also got this clear glass bottle with a stopper lid for when I make home made lemonade in the summer. This will probably never happen but I just liked the look of it too much to put it back.

Bottle - £2.50 Carafe - £1.50 

Because I do a lot of cooking and recipe blogs I like to display my ingredients. For this I picked up 4 small glass bowls, which actually also serve quite well as dessert bowls. I picked up some white dishes too - a plate and a couple of bowls - as I find the presentation of food when I'm taking pictures for the blog looks better on white.

Glass bowls - 70p each  Plate - 80p  Deep bowls - £2

I also picked up a set of 2 new white mixing bowls as we were using our old ones to catch the rain when our ceiling collapsed in so I thought this was an excuse to buy new ones!

 

Set of 2 mixing bowls - £3.50

I already have this pot in white but when I saw they now did it in pink AND sea-foam green I had to pick them up. No idea what I'm going to use them for but I'm sure I can think of some surface they can clutter up.

 Pot - £2.00 each

We picked up some tealights as standard, vanilla is one of my favourite smells and I do seem to get through these so quickly.

 Tealights - £1.50

Last but not least, the one big item we got which required man power on Leigh's side was a coat stand. We have been meaning to get on for the last 3 years but have never got round to it but I'd had enough of finding coats everywhere so now they are neatly hung instead!

Coat stand - £25

There was so much more that I wanted to pick up but I wasn't allowed to. I will have to box away my inner child until next time it seems!

xxx

Dear Diary,

Whilst I was on holiday I had quite a bit of time to think and so I got to thinking that I have lost a sense of direction and I drifting along. Perfectly happily I might add but at the same time I need to find things to challenge myself. Some might call this a mid twenties crisis.

With this in mind I realised that I have let the last 2 years without really recording it at all. From 2001 to 2011 I kept a diary, I used to write nearly every day. I found it therapeutic and I loved looking back at my 13 year old self and seeing how much I have changed. I stopped writing for a number of reasons really, I was being lazy, I started blogging more, I had other distractions. As a result of this though I now don’t have any record of the last 2 years which I regret so much.

I have decided to start writing my diary again. I am going to make sure I take the time to jot everything down because I think when I’m 60 I will love to look back at my life and remember what it was like to be young and living in London.

With this in mind I went out and I bought a new diary from Paperchase, I don’t think anything inspires me more than a fresh, blank page.

I love the design, it’s very me indeed.

I always do a title page at the beginning and for this I picked a relevant quote that describes life brilliantly for me and added a small doodle of the London skyline as I still feel happy whenever I look at it and realise that I live here. I thought it was appropriate as hopefully most of this diary will be filled with my time here.

I am so looking forward to starting afresh!

xxx