Chocolate Chip Lava Cookies

This morning me and my brother made these delicious cookies using this recipie
http://www.kevinandamanda.com/recipes/dessert/chocolate-chip-lava-cookies.html/

The cookie was chewy and moist, exactly how I love it. I did have a problem with mine which was the gooey centre wasn't so gooey, I would definitely recommend this recipe, because it was one of the best chocolate chip cookies I ever had, just imagining how it would taste like with a gooey centre is making my mouth water. Even though my chocolate centre wasn't oozing out it still had some liquidity to it.
                                                                                  M
   


Here's a few pictures of how mine turned out.

the centre of the cookie before it was baked

right out of the oven

the delicious inside

Salted caramel Brownies

I used this recipie http://www.browneyedbaker.com/2010/08/16/salted-caramel-brownies/ to make these scrumptious salted caramel brownies I made these brownies with my brother, and of course we had some problems but the end result turned out wonderful. Everybody who tried it said that it was really good, even my dad who hates everything I make. The only problematic issue I had was with the caramel I did not give it enough time n the heat to thicken and so when I added the heavy cream, the foam I was expecting did not happen but it turned out okay I just kept whisking and occasionally putting it back in the heat until a smooth sauce appeared. I the. Out the sauce through a strainer since not all my sugar had melted, this also caused my caramel sauce too be runny and less flavoursome.

     M

Here's how they turned out and I would defiantly recommend this recipe.

brownie batter, caramel sauce, end result

crispy caramel edge

end result

Pasta in mushroom sauce not gone my way...

The recipe we followed, but we left out the wine http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/everyday-italian/rigatoni-with-creamy-mushroom-sauce-recipe/index.html

Today me and my friends decided to make pasta with mushroom sauce. So we went to the grocery store got all the ingredients we needed and started cooking it, everything went well until my sister came into the kitchen. When she came in the pasta was nearly cooked and we were working on the sauce, while I was getting the vegetable stock ready she decided to put the beginning stages of the sauce (mushrooms, shallots and garlic) and start mixing it with the drained pasta, we still had to add water,vegetable stock and cheese. I became furious, for once me and my friends were successfully cooking a meal rather than messing it up and having to resort to boxed mac & cheese. My friends backed off as they saw my face turn red as my sister added the vegetable stock and pasta water to the pasta, I was mortified I was about to let the stock reduce a bit in another pan before adding it so that the sauce would be thicker. My sister stared at my red face not even apologising for what she had done. Okay I know i'm over reacting and that it was a mistake but I really wanted to show my friends that I could cook. So my sister came in took control ruined the dish and left. Alright so she added the cheese and the sauce wasn't horrible and she added more cheese to thicken the sauce, but she didn't even apologise she just kept making it seem like I was over reacting, I hated how she could do that but as we tasted the pasta, it actually wasn't bad but the sauce was watery and i felt i could taste the vegetable stock. My friends didn't hate it and neither did my sister so overall it was'nt ruined, and I was  glad because I did not want to have to cook another meal again, I was starving and just wanted to eat. I was also mad that my sister took control of cooking the meal, I wanted to cook I was Waiting since yesterday to cook with my friends, I guess it just hurt my pride,and I was over reacting.
              M                                                                                             
                                               

Summer party

This summer is one of those summer's that i'm expecting to be awful. a few of my closest friend are away and i'm not going to the city I usually go to. Me and my friend spent over 3 hours skyping each other, and during that time we tried to figure out places and things to do. We decided that we'd go to parties, the beach, malls and just hang out. Only problem we can't go to the beach, we weren't invited to any parties and we wouldn't be able to see each other everyday, the malls are awful and so with nowhere to go and nothing to do we decided to have our on party, so next week were throwing a pool party at my house, and while we were making the list of people who we were going to invite we realised we had nobody, most of our friends had gone somewhere during there summer and so our list of people is maximum amount was 13 including ourselves, people leaving and even people who we hardly knew. We called it a party anyway's but not dressy and now i'm just hoping for it to be fun. everyone we knew staying the summer in our home town is sulking about how boring this summer is going to be and we weren't going to let that happen, it was the only summer that I stayed in my home town, and the only one that I would be with my classmates even if it was just 13 of us, and we lived in the least eventful city in the world. What i'm saying is don't wait for someone else to make this summer eventful and fun, do it yourself. 
                                                M 

Summer/School 2012

Summer/School 2012

Summer its the time we get off school, the time to chill, relax, have fun, enjoy life. The time were we can surround ourselves with who we want to be surrounded by, unlike at school, where we go and see the same faces over and over again, and we can't just leave or go to a different room. It can get frustrating, we start to get bored of the same routine, and after a while it gets under our skin and everything and everyone irritates us. Well I am glad I have a few months to free myself from any rumors, gossip, drama, fights, homework, teachers and most of all arguments. Its not like I won't have arguments with people in the summer, but at least that’s with my family and just them. In school its with classmates who as soon as you put in your thought and idea's that even slightly don't agree with there’s, you get the cold shoulder and not from them but also there friends (have you ever done that to someone? I'll admit I have done something similar, though not as harsh). I love how whenever there’s a simple disagreement we blow it out of proportion the stress of school can make us do things, like stress over everything that isn't related to our education so that we can escape the books. We let disagreements/actions tear friendships and even acquaintances apart when they can be fixed. Instead of trying to fix the problem we ignore it and end up trying to reason the disagreement by talking to someone about what we find the other person did wrong and sometimes even ending up bitching about him or her, even when we didn't intend to. 

                                   

                                                                                       M

                    

Hair chalking

I have long dark brown/black hair and a few strands of dyed blonde hair that hardly show's and i would like to dip dye my hair although i am not sure if i would like it. So i decided to chalk my hair instead of going to the salon and paying for my hair to be dip dyed non permanently, since i can't find non permanent hair dyes or hair colouring sprays in blue or purple, I thought hair chalking would be a great idea. I still have not done it although i wanna know what you guys think about hair chalking
                          M                                                                                                                                                             

Here's a few examples i got from the internet:

Crepe dentelles

Crepe dentelles, 
                         For the past month I have been in love with making crepe dentelles, I usually make a batch of 20 but only 5 work out every time, I made some for my cousins and they loved it, its crispy sugary and the whip cream filling makes it even better. What I also like about these is that they only take 5 mins in the oven so its okay if I mess them up because 5 mins later I would have some more ready. I used this recipe from youtube : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xo3QeZrkG98 I used my large ikea brush as the cylinder  and found that it worked great, you can also use a knife if you want thin crepes but i like the whip cream filling which you can't fill the crepes with if the crepe is thin so I always roll it. 

This is how it looks like if you roll it with a knife, I just got this picture from searching crepe dentelles up on google images, I used to eat boxed crepe dentelles like this all the time as a kid so i'm glad I can now make them at home.

I hope you try this recipe out it does take a few try's to get the rolling of the crepe right but once you get the hang of it you will never stop making them.

                                                                           M

Summer,

               So it's been way too long since i published a post but I'm finally done with school and i started my summer no more IG's <3. Although i'm thinking of taking an extra AS in the summer so maybe this summer won't be as fun, but thats okay since i'm not going anywhere this summer and will have a lot of time to spare. So before my summer i had 2 weeks off before my last exam which was a biology multiple choice, that i already studied for since i studied for the biology practical exam and so for those 2 weeks i went on a little pre-summer holiday with my family. We went to Sharm-EL-Sheikh in Egypt, I went diving,swimming,parasailing and failed at water skiing and heres a few pictures. I also saw a guitar shark while diving at sharks bay, which is known not to have sharks since the boats and tourists scared them away so when we saw the shark it was an amazing experience especially since we didn't think we would see a shark.  Enjoy the pictures <3

Pictures of the view form the boat.

Ship wreck

Fish i saw under water

Parasailing pictures,

Parasailing actually wasn't scary at all but really fun although i kept looking down to see if a shark was going to jump out of the water, even though there aren't sharks in the area.

The moon through a telescope <3 

Thanks for viewing my blog, I really appreciate it <3,

                                                                                          M

Choclate Ice-Cream

 Last night i made a fabulous chocolate ice-cream, and the best thing is you don't need an ice-cream maker. This recipe was so simple to follow and the ice-cream turned out wonderfully, the only thing is that it was more of a fudge texture but i still loved it too. The link to the recipe is here.
http://joannagoddard.blogspot.com/2012/02/best-chocolate-ice-cream-youll-ever.html
Although if your not in the mood for chocolate you can try this dulce de leche ice-cream which i still haven't had the chance to make since i don't have an ice-cream machine.
http://www.treats-sf.com/2010/07/dulce-de-leche-ice-cream.html#more
both if these blogs have been a great inspiration and they are filled with wonderful recipes such as a paris-brest which is a pastry filled with a wonderful praline cream. My Paris-Brest is pastry was more flat although the cream was lovely, definitely going to give it another try.
                                                                                                               M

I'm on Pinterest

Hey,
        I found pinterest and all its wonderful delights just a couple of days ago and am already in love with it so if you have a Pinterest follow me <3 http://pinterest.com/craftsbaking/ and if you don't you should definitely sign up
                                       M

I heart

Hey,
      
   So i got this idea from pintrest.com and decided to give it a try. i pre heated my oven to 175 degrees Celsius and put in my heart moulded pan filled with crushed crayons. Then 5-10 minutes later I realised it was not hot enough and put my oven to its highest setting

you'll need a knife,crayons, heart moulded pan. you can use any type of mould.











   



Step1: select the colour of the crayon's you would like.

Step 2: chop the crayons.

Step 3: place them into your pan.

step 4: place into the oven. 


step 5: place into the freezer until set, about half an hour.


Step 6: take out of mould.

You could put a name on the heart as a valentine gift or your best friend's name and she/he can have the one with your name on it.                                                                                                            M

Cake,Cake,Cake

Hey, 

        So if you read my previous post you mat have seen me attempt to do a hunger games cake and today or tomorrow i will give it another shot but this time with vanilla cake with pink food colouring so when you cut through the dark black fondant theres a hot pink cake hidden underneath.

If you would like to see my second attempt please comment.

                                                                                          M

Hunger games cake

Hey, 

so I attempted to make a chocolate covered in black fondant with a fiery coloured icing. The icing was used to spell out Girl on fire.

My cake didn't turn out the way i wanted it too but it also wasn't s a total failure:

First i used this chocolate cake recipe

http://www.food.com/recipe/super-moist-chocolate-cake-280351

this fondant recipe

http://www.cooks.com/rec/view/0,236,159186-235201,00.html

and this butter cream icing recipe with red and yellow food colouring

http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/basicbuttericing_73263

and this is how my cake did turn out:

As you can see the cake is not covered in black fondant because my fondant dried out since i made it before i made the fondant before the cake and it dried out and this is how it turned out and you can see on top right corner i was practicing with the butter cream.

and this is how my apron tuned out x_x

Hope you guys try to do a hunger games inspired cake/food and if you don't forget to share.

                                                                                                                                    M

Hey,
So i made the popcorn yesterday it didn't turn out bad but it wasn't amazing but thats only because my friends came over and decided to take out half the butter and everything else fattening x_x and we only had powdered vanilla which i absolutely hate. Even though the was quite hypocritical since they came over with unsuspectedly with  burger king.I would say give it a go it wasn't that hard to make so don't worry and if it turned out pom with less butter than it should be good.
                                                                                                                       M

Cupcakes,

(from bakerrella.com)

This week i am hoping to tackle the amazing Hi Hat cupcake, i will be using the martha stewart recipe a link to the recipe will be written at the end of this post. I hope you try to do these cupcakes as well. I will have an updated post about how they turned out and maybe even a step by step tutorial of how i did them
the link: http://www.marthastewart.com/258067/hi-hat-cupcakes.     
                                                                                               M
                                                                                                                  

The Hunger Games,

I  finished reading the Hunger Games last summer and i have to say i am in love with the series. If you have not read the books at least read the first book before March 23rd that is when the movie will be out because a book will always be better then the movie.  

This Weekend 8/3/12

Hey 

So this weekend there's an over 21 concert on Thursday sneak-in or not? There's this concert on Thursday I am hoping to go but I heard its an over 21 only concert and so as a teen will not be able allowed in :( So instead of sneaking in which I was told wouldn't be a problem I am hoping to have a DIY (do it yourself project) a fun string chandelier I will be using this website as a guideline http://www.wednesdaycustomdesign.com/blog/2010/11/7/messiest-merriest-and-whirliest-diy-balls.html 

I hope you guys wish to do this it looks like so much fun, I am trying to get my best friend to do it with me but I still didn't ask her

The messier the more fun right :D

                                                         M

 (image from Etsy)

First post and one written by a teen who is stressed at the moment

Hey,

        Welcome to Lilac&Love a blog which will have posts about, well I still don't know. It might be about food, fashion, do it yourself projects or maybe rants about my daily life (there might be a lot of that). I am a teenager who currently is stressed about school, I am far behind on EVERYTHING and i do mean EVERYTHING. My friends want to kill me for being so lazy and so do I and now I am stressed about it and my lazy ass won't do anything about it. I see this rant has probably made you dislike me and think of me as a whining loser who will use this blog as a diary but don't worry i have a Twitter for that and is failing miserably at school but i assure you that you will love this blog (I HOPE). Its one in the morning where i am right now and i have school tomorrow... If you are under a lot of stress like I am at the moment maybe you can't hand things in by the deadline or you seem to have to be pulling all nighters every night or you find yourself the day before every test or deadline stressed or even just before any normal day what I'm trying to say that it will be worth it and its okay to have some fun and relax but if like me you have done a lot of that this school year and find yourself scared for your exams than first breathe second get everything organised and third start studying. which i will do tomorrow since its 1am i'm tired but not sleepy and if tomorrow night I end up without any work done you can scream at me at the comments below and i'll add you to the list of people who love me and want me to succeed in life and who also want to kill me for being so lazy, I have My IGCSE's in less than 8 weekend 4 coursework's due in about 3/4 weeks , wish me luck and good luck to you too.

                                                M