Today I went to the spirit of christmas show at Kensington Olympia, it was amazing. All my favourite type of shops under one roof! And lots of yummy food to sample! The downstairs was all gifty shops and then upstairs were all the food stalls, there were three cupcake ones. Holly cupcakes (where I bought some rootbeer and maple flavouring extracts!), Cupcake-a-licious and Pudding Cook, which was part of the Harvey Nicholls food stand. I had never seen these cupcakes before- they are the creations of Rachael Nimenko who is a pastry chef and has worked at 5 star and michelin star restaurants. (the pics are awful- think my camera is dying!) Apparently they went on sale in Harvey Nicholls in June, she tries to make them in flavours you would have puddings of.
She had these really cute mini ones on sale - you got four in a box, really nice packaging and only £3 which thought was good value. They literally are bite size though! Flavours were chocolate brownie (really rich and chocolaty), toffee apple, pear and ginger and strawberry. They are decorated really nicely - she loves using sparkle! They all tasted great -would definitely recommend them.
The best bit was she was doing a cupcake class in the workshop theatre so I made sure I got into the class and was glad I did! We all got to decorate a cupcake (cranberry and orange flavour) and got to try a nutty chocolate she'd also made. We even got to package it in her cute boxes and seal it with a cupcake sticker. She also gave some good tips for making cupcakes. She said she's been a pastry chef for 18 years but she only looked mid 20's so she must have started young! The buttercream had orange zest in it and inside we put a dollop of cranberry compote. Then got to decorate it with holly leaves and sparkle glitter, there was a little girl in front of me and she literally put nearly the whole pot on hers!
Below is my finished cupcake and the work station where I made it
I got some cool christmas stamps from the English stamp company, if you go to their website they will make stamps to any design you like! There were also workshops on making a christmas centrepiece and gift wrapping, I thought the gift wrapping would be good but it was so basic!! She was demonstrating how to wrap a square box and then put ribbon flat across in both directions. Surely people don't need a class teaching them that!! Then she'd bought a selection of gift bags from Primark and said this was a good option if you didn't feel like making the effort of wrapping yourself! So didn't leave with anything new from this workshop!
Here is another scrapbooking page I made recently - we had a fun time when my sisters and their husbands came to London and we went bowling at all star bowling in Holborn, but first we each had to choose something for each other to wear from Charity shops, hence the colourful page! It was a fun day and the icing on the cake was that they had rootbeer!
