Miss Selfridge Boyfriend Coat

                

Coat: Miss Selfridge

Shirt: Vintage

Collar clip: My grandmas

Leggings: New Look

Shoes: Tesco (£3 bargain!)

Huge apologies these pictures are terrible, David refused to take the OOTD with my DSLR because he couldn't be bothered to faff about with the settings and demanded he used my phone instead.
How amazing is this coat? I fell in love with it in Manchester - post to follow - and I just needed it. I've been after a boyfriend/cocoon coat for ages now, I even made a shopcade list of my favourites, but when I saw this, I knew I had found the one I wanted.
On Friday night (delayed post I know) me and David went for some food before I went back to Leeds. We just popped around the corner from my house to a pub called The Farmhouse, I'd not been in for years but recently they have had a change of chef and we'd both heard good things. We ordered a sharing starter which turned out to be huge, I was so full after eating it all, I literally barely touched my main. Luckily we both went for a light flat bread and a panini so it wasn't too bad, I did manage to eat a lot of delicious sweet potato fries, yummm!
Tigs rocking David's vest...

International Food Week: Italian Meatball Spaghetti Bolognese

For last nights meal we had Meatball Spaghetti Bolognese and it was absolutely delicious. We took a trip to the market on Tuesday and I bought a student £10 pack of meat, which included: mince, steak, burgers, sausages, chicken and bacon. If you have a market near you, or a butchers, I would highly recommend you to buy your meat from them, as you always get good value for your money and the meat always tastes fantastic.


Meatball Spaghetti Bolognese

(I have no idea why this picture is changing colour every time I put it into blogger. Apologies for the graininess! I promise the original doesn't look like this)

What you will need:

• Spaghetti (a handful)
• 2 small onions - or as many as you wish
• Mixed herbs
• Chopped tomatoes (a can or carton)
• Mince meat (400g)
• An egg
• Tomato puree 
• Vegetable oil

1. Mix the egg in with the mince - this will hold the meat together when making the meatballs

2. Chop up the onions and fry in a wok/pan until soft.

Making the bolognese sauce:

3. Pour a carton of chopped tomatoes into a jug 

4. Add a sprinkle of mixed herbs

5. Mix in tomato puree to make it the thickness you like

6. Add the sauce in with the onions to simmer

7. While the sauce is simmer, you can start making the meatballs. Take small amounts of mince and roll into balls (as big/small as you wish)

8. Start to fry the meatballs until brown and cooked all the way through.

9. While the meatballs are frying, add the spaghetti in a pan with boiling water in and boil for 10 minutes.

10. When all the meatballs have fried, add them into the sauce until the spaghetti is ready to be served.

and voilà another quick, cheap and delicious meal. 

Please note: I am not a proper cook however I thought it would be ideal to show you what we're eating this week!

International Food week: Chinese Chicken Balls and Chow Mein

David has graced me with his presence this week (finally! This semester has been hard to see each other with David being in his third year and i'm at uni and working). We decided instead of our usual wining and dining, we would save our money and cook instead. I really don't know why we don't always do this, we are both fairly good at cooking - we just love eating out, especially if you can get unlimited drinks...

On Monday we went to Handmade Burger Co. as on Mondays they have 30% student discount and as a loyal customer I had a free burger to claim! We had a massive mare in there but it just shows that being a loyal customer gives you benefits (I will tell you about this over the weekend when I do my Gig Post). Monday night ended by going to see Crystal Fighters at Leeds Uni union and it was absolutely fabby. If you've never heard of them, check them out because they are such a happy, crazy and sparkly band and seeing them live just made me love them more. 

Yesterday we had our Chinese meal: Chicken Balls and Chow Mein Noodles. 

What you will need (serves two):

• 2 chicken fillets
• Half a packet of batter 
• An egg
• Water
• A pan full of oil
• Onion(s) as many as you wish - we used 2 small onions
• Spring onion(s) as many as you wish - we used 3 sticks of spring onion
• A clove of garlic
• Egg noodles (I used Sharwoods)
• Chow Mein stir fry sauce (I used Blue Dragon)

1. Get the oil boiling in the pan 

2. Chop up the chicken fillets into pieces

3. Make the batter mix. Add water and 1 egg - the batter mix pack has the instructions on the back. If you want to make your batter from scratch you can use this recipe steps 1-5. We cheated a wee bit.

4. Soak the chicken in the batter mix. Start to place a couple pieces of chicken at a time into the oil - once brown take out and place in a bowl with some kitchen roll to soak the fat up.

5. Chop the onions, garlic and spring onions and fry in a wok.

6. Boil the noodles in a pan for 3 minutes.

7. Add the Chow Mein sauce to the onions.

8. Once the noodles have boiled, add them to the wok with the onions and the sauce in and mix. 

9. Once you have fried up all the chicken balls, you are ready to serve. 

and voilà a quick, cheap and delicious meal. 

Please note: I am not a proper cook however I thought it would be ideal to show you what we're eating this week!

We had a tea party and it was fabulous

Well, this is a very overdue post! This actually happened 22nd May, Danielle's birthday, if you follow Charlotte on instagram or either of us on twitter you would have seen a couple of preview snaps, however if not, we'll explain about our fabulous/stressful day here!

After weeks of planning and preparing it all paid off in the end! Charlotte had an exam in the morning until 11.30, so the food preparation didn't start till 12pm and it was meant to be starting at 3pm, so we were about 45 minutes late.
As soon as Charlotte was back at the flat, the baking and sandwich making began! Charlotte was in control of baking, Tori was in control of overall food preparation and sandwich making, when David (Charlotte's boyfriend) finally got to Leeds he was roped into sandwich making and Hayley was in charge of decorating the table! So we had a couple more pairs of hands to help us, otherwise we would have been hours late and Danielle would have been locked in her room, tearing her hair out (she wasn't allowed in the kitchen until it was done, hehe)

David's station

Tori's station

Hayley's station, the flower decoration (real and fake flowers)

The chocolate cake Charlotte made

The table looked amazing, there was everything from crisps, jelly, chocolate strawberries, teacup cupcakes, battenburg, scones, the very English triangle cut sandwiches and one of Danielle's friends even brought some champagne.
We filled a cupcake stand with scones and Charlotte's baking scales filled with minstrels and we had the birthday cake! Cherry and toffee bakewells, bottles of bubbles, sweet and our Twinings Afternoon Tea Bags were dotted all over the table.

Twinings Afternoon Tea*

Twinings Afternoon Tea Collection; the collection includes Orginal English Breakfast, The Earl Grey, and Peppermint, all English favourites. After offering out the range of tea bags, it was clear to say that Orginigal English Breakfast was the most popular, because who doesn't love a good old brew? Earl Grey was also popular, however personally we don't like it as it's quite an acquired taste, you either love it or hate the distinctive bergamot flavour! Peppermint on the other hand was sort of passed along the table, Charlotte liked it and had a couple of cups, it tastes like chewing gum which was really strange but refreshing and aids digestions, definitely worth trying.

Each of these flavours comes in a separate caddy which has 20 individually wrapped teabags. We love the beautifully designed caddys, they totally sell the product to us. We do think that for £5 a pop just for 20 tea bags and a caddy is a bit steep, however the packaging, wrapping and taste make it totally worth it. We've decided that after we've drank all of the tea we are going to buy either a pack of 50 or 100 of English Breakfast and probably Peppermint and then fill up our orginal caddys as that works out cheaper (around £2-£4) and you get more tea bags, and more tea is always better. We really like having the tea bags wrapped up individually as it makes it seem posher, neater, the tea bag string is kept separate to other teabags and it makes them easy to store in the caddy, however on the other hand it just seems like too much packaging and unnecessary waste for the environment, so we're a bit undecided on them being indivually wrapped.

The overall tea party was amazing, everyone felt so sick after so many sandwiches and tea, Danielle loved all of it and the chocolate cake was delicious! At the end we gave everyone party bags with a slice of cake and some sweets in. This was such a great way to end the year at uni, it's a shame not all the girls could make it!

This is something we definitely want to do again and maybe try some other flavours of Twinings tea. We think birthdays are a perfect opportunity instead of the traditional party buffet this is something you can do in the afternoon enabling you to socialise and have some food before maybe going out at night. For this particular tea party we went very traditional with the decor and food which we think worked extremely well. And of course it is always nice to dress up nice without the pain of heels...

With the recent release of F. Scott Fitzgeralds 'The Great Gatsby' set in the roaring 20's and one of my favourite books! (one im going to get Charl to read hopefully!)

We thought this would be the perfect opportunity to incorporate this into our student lives by having a themed tea party. We're talking men in suits and girls in flapper dresses, red lipstick, white dresses, fur and lots of embellishment!. Still sticking to the traditional afternoon tea menu but adding a twist to the decor and dress. This is defiantly on the cards for our birthdays! Any excuse for fancy dress and getting all dressed up and because we love the styles and trends of the 20's!


Don't forget to follow us on Blog Lovin', add us in your circle on Google+ on the right side bar, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.

Have you tried Twinings fabulous tea?

Will you be having your own tea party?

Have you watched The Great Gatsby yet?

Bakingmad.com #2

Hello Lovelies!

Happy Easter, hope you're all eating as much chocolate as you can. I've got my Easter egg waiting for me to demolish.

We have some exciting news, our FIRST GIVEAWAY will soon be published to win a Baking Mad Cook Book for all you food and baking fanatics! We haven't received the Cook Book yet, so as soon as we do we'll post more information about the competition, hopefully will be next week!

Anyway in the spirit of Easter, we've been doing a lot of Easter baking! First of all me and Tori made some cute cupcakes, cornflake cakes and shortbreads which all turned out fabulous check out the post here. Then bakingmad.com sent me some decoration ingredients to use so me (Charlotte) and David have baked possibly the most extravagant Victoria sponge I've ever made.

Be sure to check out bakingmad.com if you've not already as they have so many amazing easy recipes for you to follow like these Cake Pops, each recipe have a step by step guide of how to make it and they have loads of inspirational ideas to make your cooking better and more fun!

This is what we got sent. I've never used roll on icing before, so it was a challenge when we finally started decorating the cake.

We decided on a Victoria Sponge with a jam centre, following this recipe but changing the additional ingredients

Here's how to make a brilliant Victoria Sponge

As this was the first time that either me or David had used Roll on Icing I'm afraid I can't give you any advice or tips to perfecting it as we just improvised on our cake, all I can say is that you need a lot of patiences. Check out bakingmad.com here for more information on how to dye the icing.

Here it is! This took us all day long and after lots of stressing trying to get my chick and eggs to look life like, I was very pleased of the final outcome!
Massive thanks to David for helping me, and doing all the banner and the icing letters and for the morale boost!
After trying the cake, it was totally worth it, the Sponge tastes amazing and the icing is just the right amount, I wish I could give you all a piece to try.

We will let you know as soon as we get the competition sort and hopefully you will be a lucky winner of a new Cook Book!

Have you made an Easter Cake? What do you think of our cake?

Don't forget to add us on Blog Lovin' here and add us in your circle on Google+ on the right side bar

The new healthier me...

The diet begins *sigh* ... I decided to spoil myself with some slim fast banana shake powder, BBQ tortilla crisps and cheddar flavoured bites. Thrilling, eh?
Also my first free graze box came today too! Massive yay, been wanting to try one for ages and I've never got round to sorting one out.

You've most probably heard of a Graze box, surely? If not then where have you been?
Graze is a company that sends nutritious nibbles to snack on by post, you can chose to have them sent weekly, fortnightly or just a one of box whenever you want. They send four nibble sized portions of their kitchen to you through the post, all healthy options of course, and you personalise each box from the ratings that you give them. If you don't like the sound of something, you can bin it, or if you are like me, saw the honeycomb flapjack option and clicked 'send soon'. Which was silly because I can't eat it till Sunday because it has chocolate on...
That's right, I've given up chocolate for lent and me and my friend recently found out that lent doesn't include Sundays... I'm not sure if this is like a new rule to lent or something wild like that but I've never heard of it before, so I googled it and was told otherwise. However I've decided that it's pointless because I'd just go mad and eat everything chocolatey on a Sunday, so this Sunday I am limiting myself the tiniest bit of chocolate which is drizzled of these honeycombed delights.

Graze boxes are all 100% biodegradable, 100% recyclable and made with wood from a sustainable forest. So it's all very environmentally friendly which is great! 

In my first box I got a cute Welcome booklet, explaining what they do, what you need to do and explaining their health badges. You can also donate money to their charity (The Graze School of Farming) in Uganda, find more information about their charity and what they do here.

In my first box I was given:
Tomato Dipinetti
Slow cooked cherry tomato relish with rosemary grissinetti
I have eaten these already and they were delicious the relish was amazing, it looked like I'd licked the pallette clean... The rosemary grissinetti were also delightful I just think that they were a little too small and fiddly, but that's me being really picky! Also they are only 96.9 calories!
Super Berry Detox
Blueberried, green raisins, goji berried and cranberries
These are 1 of your 5 a day!
Honeycomb Flapjack
Rustic rolled oat flapjack with honeycomb and milk chocolate
These are slighty higher in calories at 239, however they are full of healthy fibre!
Healthy Popping Corn- Slightly Sweet
Very self explanatory and they can be ready in as little as 40 seconds!
These are also full of healthy fibre which helps digestion and only 118 calories

I'm limiting myself to one punnet a day, so I can make the box last and also I can have a daily healthy snack while I'm on my slim fast diet.
My slim fast diet involves having a shake for breakfast and for lunch and then a healthy balanced meal for tea. I can also have 3 healthy snacks throughout the day (this is where graze comes in), and I need to drink lots of water!

So how much are these cute postbox sized treats? A mere £3.89, that's including post and packaging aswell. They also have a lot of promotion offers on all the time, so it's totally worth the money and it's healthy!

 If you are interested in ordering a box, would you like your first box for free? 

Just enter the code above when you are signing up!

Have you tried a Graze box before? Or the Slim Fast diet?

Let me know what you thought of them :)