What I didn't expect to be doing tonight...

Tonight is the night before my sisters long awaited wedding, yes it has finally come around!
To say that I am nervous and bursting with excitement is an understatement!
I won't be able to blog tomorrow and I hope that you'll forgive me for that! We are away from home for the night, but I'll be back the next day with some casual snaps before the real ones come through.
In the mean time, I've been repairing sweetie trees that have been made with cement, cocktail sticks and so many packs of chocolates that I am almost sick of the sight of them.

Nonetheless, they are packaged up hopefully for a safe 30 mile trip to the venue!

Sweet, sweet, sweetie dreams lovebugs! Wish us lots of luck and sunshine!

Raw Vegan Red Pepper Soup recipe

Is this just a fad?
Yes.
I'm trying a raw vegan diet for 7 days only. I love bacon, I love bread and I love nutella too much for this to be a lifestyle change. I'm told this could help clear up my skin, or if not it could at least make me feel better, more energy etc etc
A week may not be enough for it to kick in, or I may end up extending it if I really enjoy it, but I doubt it!
Here was my dinner tonight, it was really delicious and soo much easier than actual cooking - certainly a perk of going 'raw' the food gets to your plate within 5 minutes.
This is the red pepper soup recipe that is 100% from www.therawtarian.com
Head over to there for the full recipe, but this is how it went down for me...

I took a 1/3 cup of plain cashew nuts and soaked them in water for an hour so that my little smoothie blender would blend it up easier.

Then I took a red pepper and washed it, then I cut up 3/4 of it roughly, and 1/4 of it finely.

I threw the 3/4 roughly cut into the blender, along with all the drained cashew nuts and 1/2 mug water.

I added a pinch of dried mixed herbs just to give it a little kick (not in the original recipe)

I blended it up for about 2 minutes, until it's almost completely smooth, there shouldn't be any little grittiness of nuts

 I scattered the 1/4 of finely chopped peppers in the bowl of soup, this recipe makes enough for one person.

It tastes really good, I can't believe how creamy it is, all because of the nuts. Also, the red pepper makes it really naturally sweet too. But I do recommend adding the herbs for an extra something.

Then for dessert, it just so happened that the supermarket were selling 300g grams of raspberries for £1 because they went out of date today, so I snapped those up and ate the whole bowl! Raspberries are my favourite!

Extra Sweet and Super Sour chicken recipe

This recipe is a 'win' for taste
but a 'fail' for health

The recipe is as follows:

Chicken Breading:
3-5 chicken breast
salt and pepper
1 cup cornstarch
2 eggs, beaten
1/3 cup canola oil

Rinse chicken, trim off fat or extras and then cut into 1 inch cubes. season with salt and pepper. Dip chicken into cornstarch and coat all the way and then into eggs. Heat oil in large skillet. Cook chicken until browned. Place in baking dish. 3 chicken breasts can be in a 9x9 but 5 chicken breasts fits better in a 9x13.

Sauce:
3/4 cups sugar
4 Tablespoons ketchup

1/2 cup white distilled vinegar

1 Tablespoon soy sauce
1 teaspoon garlic salt

Whisk until smooth. Then pour evenly over chicken. Turn chicken so the sauce gets on both sides and then put in the oven at 350 degrees for 15 minutes. turn chicken and then cook for 15 more minutes.

recipe courtesy of: http://madeitateitlovedit.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/sweet-and-sour-chicken.html

It's super straight foward and doesn't really require anything at all, I was excited to try it because I'd made sweet and sour chicken before that was just super bland, with a thin lifeless sauce- The picture sold it to me:

So I followed the recipe as best as I could, but my errors were this:
Thinking that beating one egg instead of two would be enough to coat the chicken - it's not and all the breadcrumb crusting falls off if you don't have enough egg

Not having a skillet so shoving all the chicken together in a little sauce pan- the chicken merges into a big chicken lump and the cornflour coating ends up mostly on the bottom of the pan

Halving the sugar in this recipe- I began to pour out the sugar measurement and suddenly realised that this would all be going into me- I freaked out a little bit so poured half back in the bag which then made for a rather thin sauce... which you see me try to resolve later... Next time I will use brown sugar and maybe get away with using half since it would make a thicker sauce.

I bought an onion for the recipe too to chop up and add in, and that worked a treat.

You can see how watery the sauce is, and the onions added in

 15 minutes before the end of cooking time i was frustrated that the sauce wasn't especially sticky so I decided to thicken it up with a bit more sugar, then flour... well I had a bit of a flour-tastrophe and accidentally poured in more sugar than i anticipated, so much more that the sauce got sticky... a bit too sticky! Thicker than wallpaper paste, so I boiled a kettle and added hot water slowly in an attempt to thin it out a little, the result looks nothing like the picture, but I've given up trying to make mine look like the picture anyway...

My goodness, it tasted fantastic, despite the thick sauce, despite the fact that the chicken isn't all crumbed. The recipe really does taste like the local chinese restaurant, it was pure indulgence and next to no nutritional value whatsoever.

When I make this again (and I will, it's in my top 3 favourite things to make) I willl...
Skip the coating in cornflour step, it's less healthy and a bit faffy for nothing
Use 1/4 cup less vinegar, the vinegar was amazing at adding the 'sour' but I think I overmeasured
Add more onions and red and green peppers to give it a bit more nutritional value
Add flour again if need be despite using brown sugar but be more careful to add it slowly

A day of sweetness

I was caught off guard with the heat and since I'm staying away from home at the moment I had to make the best of what I had with me which was...jeans

Here I did a little improvisation and rolles the jeans up to mid-calf to give them a fresh summery look. These jeans are my trusty pastel pair that I have blogged about before many times, I got them from the kids section in Next

I matched it with my well-loved 'chocolate box' tshirt, it reminds me of fancy chocolate boxes because of the fancy ribbons!

To sweeten it up a little more and add more colours I'm wearing my triple pastel belt from New Look and it has all the sweetest colours in it!

 The sweetness doesn't stop there, for dessert that night we had chocolate mousse with a deliciously chocolatey base that's all biscuity and crumbly

 ...and a little box of heart chocolates and an umbrella chocolate! I think the umbrella is the funniest, what a random shape to decide to make a chocolate!

Now as you can imagine I'm bouncing off the walls in this sticky heat on a suagr rush!

How to make life a little sweeter

Regular decor can be so dull, how do you jazz up a room?

Maybe a new throw cushion

Maybe a new rug

Maybe a new lamp

But the 'feel' of the room hasn't raelly changed

Here, I gaurantee you genuine smiles and happiness all around by decorating your:

Dressing tables

Counters

Window ledges

Bed side tables

...with these cutie beauties!

They're pretend! Crafted with love by these guys at esty, shop here

All the sweetness, none of the calories and they last forever!

Mwah! Yum-a-dee-doo!

Don't throw away your sweet wrappers!...

Wear them instead!!!

That's right, there are people that take recycling to a whooooole new level!
I give you...
The candy wrapper corset!

I'm not much of a corset wearer myself, but I might just make an exception for this one.
I can't quite decide if it's hobo-chic or sugary sweet though.
What do you think?

This one will set you back a pretty penny at £193.53 or $299 from here
But I'm pretty sure you could make one yourself providing you're willing to eat a few bags of sweets! I'm sure freinds will be willing to help with that.
Then preserve the wrappers and with a cheap corset (ebay) and a hot glue gun (craft store) you could put it together yourself for £10 or less!

You could go to a fancy dress party as a bag of sweets! With a little of everything you're sure to be everyones favourite!