The weekend came and went

How was your weekend?
Mine went by fast!
On Friday night as usual my family went out to eat together, this week it was a rib place. Casual, but not ripped jeans and t-shirt casual, so I wore my beige skirt that I made. Its super comfy!! I didn't take it off until I had to go to bed. haha
Can you tell that I changed my hair style a little? I'm parting the bangs a bit and curling everything for a slightly messy look, not that you can see that in the picture.

I had BBQ that night, and enough left over that I also ate it for dinner on Saturday. Speaking of Saturday... what did I do on Saturday? Hmm.... not much.
Some awesome person scanned and uploaded a TON of Japanese craft magazines on the web, so I nabbed those, and then spent the better part of today looking through them all.
I got sewing magazines that include lots of patterns that can be drafted (yikes! slightly beyond my skills at the moment, but I have them when I'm ready), a magazine on traditional crafts, and two magazines of nothing but how the make your own hair accessories, among others.

Since hair accessories are relatively easy to make, and I have lots of fabric in my rag bag (this is why I have a rag bag in the first place, for small projects like this) I got crafty and made this:

Its just several flower shapes cut out and sewed onto a bobby pin, but I think its a cute little accessory.
The wonderful lady behind Make it and Love it came up with the idea first. I just used a cotton instead, so I had to figure out how to keep my fabric from fraying (with no fray check in the house!) but I think I did ok.
 I now have the instruction on how to make 1000 different scrunchies and similar things, so I'm thinking that by the time my hair is long enough to actually use them again I should have quite the collection. I like my short hair, but its time for a change, so I'm going to let it grow out for a bit. Maybe shoulder length, we'll see... I never keep the same style for very long, and with colder weather around the corner, I don't want it so short now anyways.

macaroons~ from Australia with love

So I got it in my head that even though I totally FAIL at baking that I was going to make some macaroons.
I spent several hours searching the web for various recipes, before finnally finding  Violet LeBeux's version. Since she is the master of all things crafty and sweet, I decided to use hers.
However, I still had a problem, Violet lives in Australia, and I'm in America. Our measurements and ingredient names were all mixed up!
I spent more time googling to figure out what the US equivalent of some of the ingredients where, and then commented on Violet's tutorial to make sure that I had things right. She was super nice, and really helped me out, so I set off in search of all the ingredients. I'v decided to post up both her original recipe (right off her blog, so there is less room for confusion) and what we figured the US equivalent was. The only thing that I didn't change was the measurements, because hers are quite accurate, and I didn't want to fuss with changing and risk losing accuracy. You will need a kitchen scale to measure your ingredients, most retailers with a kitchen section should have them (we got ours at Target).

Ingredients for chocolate macarons with chocolate filling-

For the outside bit:

• 65 grams Almond Meal  Ground almonds or you can grind them yourself (I couldn't find superfine ground almonds, so I used my food processor to get them as fine as possible).
• 80 grams Icing Sugar Powered or confectioners sugar
• 40 grams  Caster Sugar Super fine sugar (I actually used regular granulated sugar with ok results).
• 1 table spoon Cocoa Powder
• 50 grams Egg White at room temperature
• Oil spray
• Pinch of salt

Utensils-

• Scales
• Sieve
• Aluminum foil
• Mixing bowls
• Electric beater
• Baking trays
• Spoon etc
• Piping bag/Small plastic bag
• Violet cooks her shells at 160 degrees C, the Fahrenheit equivalent is 320

Doesn't she just have the cutest colors? I'm also in love with her heart bullets. Her original post is in pink, my comments are in blue.

Please do use Violet's tutorial to make your macaroons, I don't have near enough experience to tell you how to make good macaroons. 

What I can tell you is that you don't have to go out and search the local specialty grocery store for your ingredients. I got most of my stuff at the local Food Lion, but they didn't have any ground almonds, so I had to go to Walmart -which I hate and I spent forever in the checkout line and I just wanted to get out of there.

  For the caster sugar, my mom and I figured that the base of the shell was pretty much like a meringue topping, with other stuff folded in, and since we usually use granulated sugar it should work here too. I'm sure that as a result the "batter" was probably not quite as fluffy or smooth as one made with caster sugar, but it did work fine.

  My ground almonds weren't as fine as Violet's, since I had to grind them at home, but I didn't really see too much adverse effect. I'm sure that they were more lumpy than normal, but I'll have to figure that one out as I go. I'll have to search the web and see what I can do about that. 

Here are my shells waiting to go in the oven. 

In the end, I didn't use Violet's filling recipe. Hers calls for baking chocolate, and I had none available (I thought I did, but it was reserved for another recipe) so I ended up making my own, using the the recipe for chocolate frosting on the Hershey's CoCo box. Here it is:

3/4 cup Hershey's Coco

3 cups powdered sugar

1 stick margarine

1/3 cup milk

Just mix the coco and the margarine together, then add in the milk and powdered sugar a bit at the time. It seems like it is too dry in the beginning, but as you keep going it all come together. I ended up with way too much frosting, so you may want to halve this, or do a double batch of the shells.

Speaking of shells, I ended up baking mine about 15 min longer than the recipe called for. They turned out kind of chewy too, but where still slightly gooey on the bottom... I'm going to have to play around with this to get it just right. I fail at baking regularly, so it doesn't surprise me that they didn't come out 100% right the first time. I do however think that it was a really good try, and definitely want to try again. 

The tops look sooo perfect in the shot, all round and crinkly on the bottom.

A couple of the finished one in the container.

Slightly more sideways view. 

Final verdict? Violet makes a mean macaroon, and I'm still figuring mine out. Thats ok though, I'll get it right in the end. Once I do, I'll be sure to post a new recipe for it. What I really want to try is a strawberry one... yum! 

Series: Do "off-brand" beauty products really work? & Weekend in review

Hello! Hope everyone's weekend is going great.

I've had a pretty slow weekend, my sister's friend has come to stay with us for several days, so I have to actually look like a human being for a few days.  Usually if I am just at home with my family I will wear whatever comes to hand and matches first. I DO NOT dress style over comfort at home... so I look kind of ehhh, not great. Since we have a visitor though, I kind of need to look decent.... 

But enough about that. 

I have been baking!~

How awesome do they look? I'm so proud of myself for taking this picture! 

Now if only they had tasted as good as they looked...

My next baking project is either going to be mochi or macaroons. Big dreams for someone who can't bake worth a darn... but I want to try! 

I've got another product review for you too! 

This time its Venus' Wrinkle Preventing Super Moisturizing Cream.  You can get it here (just to cover my backside, I've never shopped for that particular store before. I have however shopped with other stores on the Amazon website.)

It works on the basis that it is a product specifically targeted at young people, to give their skin all the good stuff it needs to stay beautiful before any age/ sun damage can occur. 

I give it a 9/10

I really do love this cream. It DOES super moisturize your skin, and I thought that I could see improvement in the little lines on my forehead and around my eyes and mouth. I do have skin that it just beginning to settle into ageing, and I'm trying my damn hardest to prevent it from happening.  I would use this everyday except for one big problem:

This stuff will clog your skin up!!!!!

Seriously, if I put it on two days in a row I get several bumps and pimples. Its sucks because for me, this product really does work, so I have to use it carefully. 

I think I paid about $4 for the jar, it is a medium sized jar I would say. The scent is really nice to, a light sweet citrus.

Friday night

Its Friday night! That means that my family and I are once again out and about searching for great food!
This week we went to the local hibachi type place...... and it was SUPER AMAZING AWESOME GREAT FOOD!!!!!!!!
First, what I wore:

Look ma, no pants! I really did feel a bit naked with such a short hemline... but I was wearing modesty shorts underneath.

The food... it was really great tonight. My sister and I split a bolgogi order and it came with the meat, a shrimp, large serving of rice, noodles and a salad and soup! It was an insane amount of food. The bolgogi  (is that even how its spelled.. idk) and shrimp was the only thing that we truely split, everyone else got two shrimp- and we got one each and then the beef was split. Oh, and we also split a spider roll. So wayyyyy too much food in total. Normally I'm known as the girl that ALWAYS has room for desert, but not tonight!

When we got home, I got my dad to help me set up the VHS/DVD player. I recently switched TVs with my sister, so I had to get another DVD player. The good thing about updating technology is that we always have an extra of everything laying around, even if it is slightly outdated. When we got a Blue ray player recently, it freed up another one so I can use it now.

Of course, the real upside for me is that I can now watch my favorite childhood movies in my room.

Yep, my favorite childhood movie is The Last Unicorn! 

When I was a child, I would rent the tape from the movie store so often that my mom finally just asked them to order a copy so she could buy it! 

nom nom nom~

My family and I always go out on Friday night to eat, and last night we decided to try a Chinese place thats about 30 min. away that we heard was quite good. I didn't know how fancy or casual this place would be, so I tried for something neutral but cute:

Crappy pic is crappy, sorry! 

In the end, I was wayyyy over dressed! As soon as I saw the outside, I was *_*;;;;;  massive clothing fail. I would have been much more "at home" with a dirty t-shirt and ragged jeans~ yikes... at least I felt pretty?

The food... was good, but we have local Chinese places that are just as good here in our town, so we probably won't go back unless we are close by already for some reason. 

I'm still working on trying to find a good layout, so pardon the prolonged mess. Trying to figure out CSS has been a bit hard for me, given that I kind of suck at computer stuff to begin with.