We're off on holiday!

aLittleBlonde is off on holiday for the next 2 weeks, so please excuse the relative bloggy silence there may be around here!

That said, I am taking my camera and plenty of projects to keep me occupied, so if there's wifi about you may hear the odd thing from me, or failing that the odd tweet. As always, keep an eye out on my facebook page for the latest.

aLittleBlonde x

Hoist up the bunting

You may not have heard, but you know there's this little event coming up very soon in the UK. As in starting in the next few days. Anyone heard of it? I mean there's been so little hype about it, seeming as how everything is running completely as planned, under budget and ahead of schedule.

Anyway, apparently there's going to be a little bit of sailing going on down the road at Weymouth and Portland Sailing Academy, which despite the inevitable swamp of people that will descend on our part of the country soon will hopefully be a nice boost for the area. Already the seafront has been smartened up with a lick of paint, the pavements have been relayed and widened and little cafes and mini attractions have started popping up all over the place.

Weymouth already seemed to have it's fair share of bunting following the Diamond Jubilee, but when we went down to do a bit of shopping in the town centre on Thursday we also spotted this new Olympic bunting that's sprung up adorning some of the boats in the Harbour.

I wonder whether it's just those particular boat owners who decided to deck out their boats (sorry for the painful pun) in olympic bunting or whether it was a requirement to match the sail type flags that have appeared lining the main roads and roundabouts. Either way it's a nice touch and I hope more boats put some up as we get closer to the start of the sailing.

You have to admit, it's a pretty good view for a car park, isn't it? Just a pity the weather is looking a bit moody really, but fingers crossed that should be changing soon.

Happy Friday, aLittleBlonde x

Find me on facebook!

It's official, aLittleBlonde is now on facebook! We've got photographs, status updates, likes and links through to twitter and pinterest.

In fact, all that's missing is you! So if you're on facebook and want to keep up to date with what's happening on the blog then please head on over and click the like button or click the like button on the sidebar to the right of this post.

Happy Monday,
aLittleBlonde x

A Spot of Olympic Baking

Thursday saw the olympic torch making it's journey through Dorchester before heading to Weymouth to stop over night, so Southampton-Girl and I decided to go along and watch the torch as it passed through our little part of the country and then head back to mine, to be joined by Durham-Girl for a good old bake-off.

It was originally intended to be summery affair, with us stood at the side of the road in the sunshine waiting to see the torch before baking cakes and consuming them in the garden. In reality we got somewhat drenched (some more than others!) whilst watching the torchbearer paddle past through Poundbury. But we went, and we have the photos to prove it!

Thinking about it I suppose it's quite impressive when you stop to think that we're only 20 years old and we've lived through 3 decades, 2 milleniums and seen the Olympic torch in our home town. Not to mention the Queen's Diamond Jubilee. I wonder what other major events like that will occur in our lifetimes?

So, on the way back from our swim to see the torch we went to not one, but two convenience stores in search of ingredients, followed by a trip to the specialist cake decorating shop the Angel Cake Company up at Poundbury and then the obligatory stop off at the House of Dorchester factory shop to get some supplies to keep up our strength whilst baking. If you live in the area both the cake and chocolate shops are really worth a visit. This certainly wasn't the last time I'll be visiting either of them this summer!

We used the buttercream mountain recipe from Baking Magic to make the cupcakes. Normally when I'm baking on my own I tend to go for particular flavours like these Coffee Praline ones I made or the Spiced Carrot and Cardamon ones that I love making (both modified from Cupcake Heaven), but this time we decided that it was about the decorating - bright butter cream icing, sprinkles, the works! So much so that we even put sprinkles into the batter in the hope that the sponge would come out multicoloured as it does when you use sugar strands, but sadly they seem to have dissolved in the cooking process.

The sponge worked and tasted great and I'll definitely be using the recipe again as a good basic cupcake base. It's supposed to make 12, but we ended up with 19 cupcakes! Whether we used slightly smaller, cupcake cases, filled them with less batter or what I don't know, but it definitely seemed to work. I love the idea that this book tells you how to make the basic bases of all the cakes and biscuits and then states which base you need to use and in what quantities for each recipe. It's such a great idea and saves a lot of repetition, plus I think it encourages you to experiment with mixing and matching ideas, flavours and decoration ideas a bit more as well.

Sadly the first batch of butter cream we made following the recipe didnt seem to work quite as well. Maybe it was because we used a particular brand of butter rather than bog-standard unsalted butter or maybe it's because we were lazy and decided to use a blender rather than beating it by hand. Either way it didn't look right and it didn't taste right, so we ditched it and ventured out again to get mre supplies to make a second batch, this time working by look and feel rather than following a recipe and I'm very happy to tell you that it worked!

We decided to split the buttercream to make 5 different coloured toppings, but Durham-Girls's attempt at making purple icing using blue and red food colouring went a little awry, so we ended up ditching that one. Our combined efforts at making pink or even red butter cream using red food colouring eventually turned out a rather nice shade of orange instead (don't ask me what happened there!).

So here we are, the finished articles. Aren't they pretty?

Of course the eagle-eyed among you may have noticed that there are only 15 cakes here - we decided to make the ones that should have had the failed purple icing look somewhat special with the leftovers...

And of course one poor cupcake had to be consumed pretty much as soon as it came out of the oven. You know, just to make sure it wasn't poisonous. We take quality control very seriously here ;)

Of course the whole decorating experience would not have been possible had it not been for this impulse purchase up at Angel Cakes yesterday. We only went in for sprinkles, but I just could not resist this piping gun. It's easily the best £8-something I've spend in a long time and it was so eay to use!

No more plain shiny or spread on icing for me! Next time I think we're planning our first foray into edible glitter, or maybe something chocolately? I hope it's not too long before we repeat the experience.

Happy Sunday, aLittleBlonde xx

Returning to Cross Stitch

Today I'm starting off a new cross stitch project, but I'm afraid that's about all that I can tell you! You see it's a present for someone who could potentially end up reading this post, so I need to keep it under wraps a bit until it's all finished and has been given to the person in question.

It's been a little while since I did any cross stitch as I've mostly been crocheting recently and my current crochet project isn't exactly the most portable. In the grand scheme of things I've been cross stitching for much longer than I've been crocheting (years as opposed to months) and I did a lot of the little Mouseloft cross stitch kits last summer and a couple of the Christmas ones, not that I've ever done anything with the completed kits. I've started myself a camp blanket which I will tell you about at a later date which has various cloth badges stitched onto it, so until I can find a good home for the mini stitches or untill I get any more cloth badges maybe they'll find a home on there.

Anyway, I'm excited to be starting this new project today after a quick trip up to Pauline's Patchwork up at Poundbury to get these to get me started.

Love these colours!

I hadn't realised quite how much I've missed cross stitching until I started again a few days ago by attempting to stitch this little Strawberry kit that came free with a magazine. Sadly it didn't come with enough red thread to finish it, which I didn't realise until I got halfway through. A bit annoying I have to say! So for now this is as far as I can get with it until I work out what on earth to do. I wonder how close a match the suggested thread colours are with those provided in the kit? Not close enough I'm guessing, but we'll see.

I also started this after lunch as something small I can work on when the person in question who is receiving the big project is around. Not that it will keep me working for long given it's size!

Can you tell what it is yet? I'm afraid you'll have to guess. There may even be a small prize for the first to work it out...

Happy Friday, aLittleBlonde x

"It's important to begin everything with www dot..."

So I'm back in Sussex for about a week to get in a few extra hours at work and I've decided that the next few days are going to be all about the interweb - updating, reorganising and connecting.

I've been meaning to have a bit of an update and general overhaul of my internet usage recently and I've decided that now is the time to do it, with planned updates to my own personal facebook page, the creation of a separate facebook page specifically for this blog and updates to twitter and the other social networking sites that I am a member of.

Hopefully in a few days time I will have a much more organised and consistent internet presence with everything linked up and a new look for a lot of my pages. So keep an eye out as everything has a bit of an update! Of course I shall be following the help and advice of the wonderful UK Craft Blog and iMake blog as I'm still very new to the blogosphere and have a lot to learn.

So, for future reference, here is what my blog and twitter profile currently look like:

Here I go, wish me luck!

Train Journeys, Podcasts and a Welcome Home

Those of you that know me in the real world so to speak will know that this summer I am being a little mad and sort of commuting between Dorset and East Sussex once a week to carry on my weekend job close to where I live at uni. I know, I'm mad aren't I? It's a four hour journey on the train, with 2 changes on a route that, whilst very pretty, is often a bit overcrowded and has a tendency not to run exactly to time. I know a 2 minute delay may not seem much to some people, but when you've only got a 4 minute change in the first place, you're loaded up like a packhorse and you've got to change platforms or wait an hour for the next train it can be a bit of pain.

Anyway, enough complaining, as long as you're organised it's not too bad and I'm starting to become a pro at navigating my way around the stations and learning to pack more efficiently. That said, I did arrive back home in Dorset last night a whole hour earlier than I thought I was going to, so maybe I should start paying a little more attention. In fact I dare say if the iMake podcast I was listening to hadn't ended at the strategic moment I may well have ended up a few stops down the line at Weymouth. It always is the one time when you're not paying attention that the guard forgets to announce what the next station is, isn't it? It was a fairly good journey as they go though and I managed to finish reading my book Pictures of Lily before changing at Southampton and listening to a couple of podcasts for the rest of the journey.

I've not really listened to podcasts before, just spent time browsing through iTunes downloading ones I might like, but never actually getting round to listening to them. After a couple of false starts going by the 10 minute rule - if you're getting bored of it, give up and move on, I discovered the iMake podcast which I'm definitely going to subscribe to and another which I'm going to try out for a couple more episodes cause I couldn't quite make my mind up about it. It's funny that I haven't listened to iMake before really, given than I follow the blog through bloglovin. I've been thinking a lot about copyright recently and it just so happened to be one of the topics in the podcast I was listening to, so if you're interested it's well worth a listen as Martine has some good points and advice about how to protect your own content and respect that of others.

So back to the original purpose of this post, I'm only back in Dorset for about 48 hours this time to do a bit of stewarding for some music exams, and am very mcuh looking forward to meeting up with one of my friends tonight for a good old catch up, before heading back to Sussex tomorrow for a couple of extra shifts at work. I know, I'm mad aren't I? But it pays, unlike sitting around at home hiding from the rain, which would probably cost me money if my amazon wishlist is anything to go by.

Aside from a cat with a wind problem asleep on my pillow (nice.) and my Dad's washing strung up all over my bedroom (again, thanks Dad.) look what was waiting for me when I got home last night!

I've been wanting one of these tins for ages, complete with it's contents to assert my status as a born and bred Dorset Dumpling. Although what exactly I'm going to use it for I have no idea! If you've not had a Dorset Knob before, I suggest you try one, it's a real experience! I may even do a post about them at a later date.

So that's it from me for now, I hope you're all out enjoying the beautifiul July weather! Mum's washing machine appears to have broken. I reckon she should string up her dirty washing outside for the wind and rain to clean au naturale - the elements would probably do a better job than the machine in its current state.