Cake Days

Recently some friends and family had cake days (ie birthdays) so I made them some cake.

The first one was a Blueberry Velvet Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting - the photo doesn't do it justice, but the inside was a great blue colour with the berries making balls of dark blue thru out. Its a very large cake - I made it in one 28cm tin and cut it in half rather than the 2 smaller tins as suggested.

The next cake was designed to use Rhubarb and Lemons as I have lots of these in the garden. I'd seen a recipe for a Rhubarb Meringue Cake but didn't really want to use 8 eggs (I don't have lots of these in my garden :P ) So I made this Lemon Yoghurt Cake and then filled and iced it using the Rhubarb Cream from the Rhubarb Meringue Cake recipe. It was a great combo!

Following the Chevron

I've had plans for aaaaaaaaaaaages to add some colour to the decor of our lounge. We have a very neutral lounge from furniture and wall colour so I wanted to brighten things up a bit. As a wedding gift we received a stunning photograph on canvas, which has pride of place over our couch so I decided to take a colour from the photo to add to the room.

I have a habit of getting bored with things, so decided I'd just add some coloured cushion covers at this stage and see how they go - its much easier to get new cushion covers if I want a new colour than other  things!

So today I finally set aside some time to sew for me (Sweet Designs sewing takes priority most of the time!) and I whipped up a couple of cushion covers. I love the lift they've given the room.

Happy Birthday to a Dear Friend

Last weekend my dear friend, came to visit. After years of not getting to celebrate our birthdays together (mine is the day after hers) we now seem to be starting a bit of a tradition of spending the weekend closest to our birthdays together. This year we moved it forward a week so we could go to the NZ Chocolate Festival.

We had a great weekend drinking coffee, chatting, eating chocolate, chatting, watching Julie & Julia (foodie chic flick, perfect!), chatting, more coffee & cake.

Because it was a birthday celebration we needed cake (well to be honest we'd have had cake anyway, its a given when we spend time together). I remembered in my recipe collection that I had a Chocolate Guinness Cake recipe..... there might possible have been some Irish pubs involved in our younger days, and you know how much we like chocolate, so this seemed like the perfect cake to make. It's a Nigella recipe originally, took me a while to realise that part of the reason it has a cream cheese icing is that once iced it looks like a pint of guinness!

Nigella Chocolate Guinness Cake

Ingredients
250ml guinness
250gm butter
75gm cocoa
400gm castor sugar
1x small pottle sour cream
2 eggs
1Tbsp vanilla essence
275gm plain flour
2 1/2tsp baking soda

Icing
300gm cream cheese
150gm icing sugar
125ml cream

Pre-heat oven to 180'C + grease 23cm cake tin.
In a large saucepan, put guinness & butter to melt. Stir (whisk) in cocoa & sugar.
In a separate bowl, beat sour cream, eggs, & vanilla. Then pour into guinness mix.
Whisk in flour & baking soda.
Bake 45-60mings. Cool in tin.

To ice: Whip cream cheese & sifted icing sugar together. Add cream & beat again. Ice cake so it looks like a frothy top of the famous pint!

I'd love to know if you make this recipe and what you think about it :)

Recipes for Life

As you probably know I got married a while ago (6 months on Monday to be precise ;) ), for my Hen's Party, my lovely bridesmaids organised a recipe collection. All my female friends gave me their favorite recipes written on some pretty cards they'd been given earlier. 

I'm going to start working my way thru these recipes, so when I do I thought I'd share them with you here.

To start with I was given the recipe for a Happy Marriage.



Happy Marriage

*Recommended to make often*

- Unlimited Fun
- Equal quantity of love
- Good measure of communication
- Sprinkle of Independence
- "Spice" of your choice...for "spicing it up a bit...

Mix all ingredients together and Voila...... Enjoy!

Bloomin' Lovely

I really like flowers - pretty much every kind, and especially sweet scented ones. I really like bringing flowers into our home, but they're not a cheap luxury so I'm always looking for ways to use what's in my garden in fun ways. As we have been in our house less than a year its a bit of a surprise what flowers each season - especially as Spring arrives and lots of bulbs pop up.

A couple of days ago I picked these little yellow daisies - I recently added to my assorted jar collection with these wee ones. I think they look really cute with the sweet yellow flowers in them.

I then found these lovely pink pretties - they smell divine too. I have them sitting just inside the front door so every time I come home I'm greeted with their lovely scent.

Not inside my house! But I did also see this beautiful Kowhai tree went out for a walk the other day - you can't really see it but it had about 10 Tui's having a feast on its flowers!

Are you a flower fan? What's your favorite?

Cooking up some Fun!

Following on with the baking theme, the next give away revolves around recipes! I want to try some new baking ideas, and I want to get these from you!

Email you favourite baking recipe to sweetdesignsnz{at}gmail.com before 6pm Tuesday 20th August and you'll go in the draw to win a $20 store credit.

Make sure you mention in your email if you're happy for your recipe to be shared with everyone or not, as I may just blog about the recipes I try :)

Share the love, and let your friends and family know about this competition by sharing this blog or my facebook page :)

Winners will be chosen by random.org and notified by email.

Baking Binge

Earlier this week I had a bit of a baking binge - well probably not compared to some people's baking, but as much as I like baking, I don't normally make 2 different things in a few hours, so it felt like a binge to me!

I had some Feijoa & Pear yoghurt from The Collective Dairy that needed using up. So I went on a hunt for a Yoghurt Cake recipe and found this one. I did wonder what the flavor of the yoghurt would do to the cake, but you can't actually taste the yoghurt as such - just the lemon. I chose not to ice the cake as I figured it was sweet enough as it was.

Then because I'd decided to make soup for dinner, I decided I'd make fresh bread to go with it. Fresh baked bread straight from the oven is always a winner! I thought it would be a good time to try a new recipe, so went hunting thru my books to find a goody....thought I'd found it, til I read the ingredients and it said "1 packet of white bread mix". Now this recipe book was written decades ago, so I don't know what packet mixes they had then, let alone what was in them. Frustrating! I'll have to go back to it when I've got a bit more bread making experience and see if I can make something up!
Instead I ended up on trusty ol' Google, and found this Herb & Cheese Pull Apart Bread

It was pretty tasty!

And the Winners are....

Thanks so much to you all for entering and sharing the give aways :) Hope you stay around for the rest of the relaunch festivities!

The 3 winners of the Blog give away, who all win a set of Peg Magnets are.....

Tammie Banks
Nikki
Fiona Herbert

The 2 Spot Prize Winners from the Facebook Giveaway, who both win a Lucky Dip prize are....

Jodi Allen
Maricris Williamson


If the winners could all email your name and address to sweetdesignsnz@gmail.com I'll get your prizes in the post!


Thanks again for participating, I'd love it if you could keep spreading the word and joining in the fun :)

Getting in the Groove

So its been a while since I ran a Give Away, and since I'm going to run a few more as part of the re-launch, I thought it was a good time to give you some practice entering!

Up for Grabs are three sets of hand stamped peg magnets - great for keeping your fridge organised and looking pretty, or use on a magnet board in your study, bedroom, hallway or where ever you choose. Three people will be winners - see below for all the ways you can enter :)

Mandatory Entry:

1. Leave me a comment below with a topic you think would look great on a set of pegs (e.g. Oceans, Flowers, Drinks)

Optional - for additional entries - please leave a separate comment for each one you do!

2. Follow Sweet Designs on Facebook. 1 entry.
3. Tweet about this giveaway. Please link to your tweet. 1 entry.
4. Pin this blog post to Pinterest. Please link to your pin. 1 entry.


Giveaway closes August 6th 2013 at Midnight. Winner will be chosen at random and announced via Facebook

Just Because Baking.

Hey! Its been a while, and if you haven't already heard - Sweet Designs is returning, September 1st. New Season, New Products, New Designs! Keep an eye on my Facebook page for giveaways, sneak peeks and other fun things!

I ended up with an unexpected day off work today due to other people needing my office. Amongst a bunch of other things I decided to do some baking. Most of my  baking over the past while has always been for a reason - birthdays, visitors, parties, bake club etc, but today I decided to bake just because. Which of course could be bad, as if I don't manage to give the baking to other people very quickly I'll probably end up eating it all myself!

I'd had found this recipe for Potato Chip Cookies a while ago and was very intrigued by it. Then a friend mentioned the Momofuku Compost Cookies which reminded me of the Everything Chocolate Bar that the lovely Agnes from Wellington's Milk Crate - so I tweaked the Potato Chip Cookie Recipe and made my own Everything Cookie. If I say so myself, they're pretty good - but its hard to beat a cookie straight out of the oven, what even the flavor!

Everything Cookies

1/2C Brown Sugar
1/2C White Sugar
125gms Butter
1 Egg
1tsp Vanilla
1C Flour
1/4tsp Salt
1/2tsp Baking Soda
1C Rolled Oats
1C Crushed Potato Chips
1/2C Chopped Pecans
1/2C Chocolate Chips (I used Whittaker's Dark Ghana & chopped it up)

Preheat oven to 180'C

Cream butter and both sugars. Add eggs and vanilla, mix well.
Add flour, salt and baking soda. Mix until just combined. Stir in oats, potato chips, pecans and chocolate chips.
Roll dough into balls (about 3cm in diameter) and place spaced apart on a lightly greased baking tray. Makes about 24.
Bake for 12-14mins, rotating the baking tray half way through.
Let cool on the tray for a few minutes before transferring to a cooling rack.

Note: I used Ready Salted Potato Chips - not sure what other flavors would be like!

Would love to hear what you think of these cookies if you give them ago :)