Celebrating my sisters birthday

Hello!

Firstly I just want to tell you (as if you haven't figured out already) how AMAZING my older sister Malayka is. She's my sister and one of my best friends. We have always had similar interests and tastes (even when she was living overseas), and a similar temperament too (haha). She has great style and taste, has her own online shop, and is in the process of expanding this into a retail store! I happen to think she is the bees knees, and I'm sure you would too!

I know a lot of my followers are also followers of my sisters blog, so you already know what we got up to for her birthday over the weekend, but I have a gazillion photos and wanted to share some with you!

Firstly on Saturday we went to a fashion exhibition called Fashion at War, which was in the Devonport Navy Museum. It was small but very informative, I recommend you check it out if you're in the area (it runs until Sept 11th). Afterwards, we went up North Head, which is a volcanic headland in Devonport, riddled with old military tunnels. I've actually never been there before, so it was fun to explore! (This is a very picture heavy post by the way)

I got a new haircut.. The big hair was achieved simply by running my fingers through it a few times!

 And of course it wouldn't be a birthday without our traditional flourless chocolate birthday cake.

 

I hope you all had a splendid weekend, I highly recommend exploring new places as a weekend activity, it's heaps of fun!

xx
Lucy

P.s. I'm glad you all love leopard print as much as I do!

Leopard print

I don't know if I've told you this before, but I absolutely adore leopard print. especially faux fur leopard print! I also adore deep green colours, so you can imagine my excitement when I found this coat when on a thrifting mission not so long ago.

It's a touch too big for me, but I don't care, it's green, has a leopard faux fur collar and is reminiscent of a 1940's military style jacket. I'm sure this will become a regular item that appears on the blog because I love it so much!

How do you feel about leopard print?

xx
Lucy

P.s. You may have spotted me at the vintage textile fair over on my sisters blog, a post will be coming soon on my purchases from there (which I am super excited about!).

Super easy delicious Thai noodle bowl

I have to admit that I'm not the greatest cook.. Baking I find easy, but cooking is a whole other ball game, and if I deviate too much from recipes, or try to invent something totally new, well, the results are often barely edible (I once even caught my man trying to discretely put his dinner in the trash).  So when I came across this ten minute Thai noodle bowl recipe over at the Gluttonous Vegan I was very excited. I adore Asian style broths (and soups, and other warm mushy comfort foods heh), and I have often made a similar dish to this involving miso, but this one is much simpler. And even more delicious!

It's also a good recipe with there's not so much in the pantry, I just used whatever vegetables were left in the fridge, in this case it was carrot, broccoli and spring onion, and because this has become my lazy day meal, I added tofu but didn't fry it first, just added it to the broth at the same time as the other vegetables. I like it best with rice noodles (which I also just cooked in the broth), a bit of extra soy sauce, and to garnish, sesame seeds and fresh coriander/cilantro, yum!

In case you missed the earlier link, the full recipe can be found here. (scroll down a bit, the recipe is there!)

I hope you enjoy this as much as I do.

xx
Lucy

Breakfast outdoors

Ok well it was more like breakfast on the front doorstep, but outdoors sounds much nicer!  Malayka (my sister) came over for breakfast, and we figured we'd better take advantage of the amazing sunny days we've been having this past week.

Sadly the concrete in front is actually my driveway, and directly opposite is the carport, but lucky for us only one of my neighbours left the house in her car while we were breakfasting (I live in a unit, it was a little bit awkward).

Either way it was nice!  And to all of you who have yards or private balconies, I am rather jealous!

xx
Lucy

The Wintergarden

 Well, I kind of dropped off the face of the blogging world for a month, but now I'm back and feeling a little re-energised, so we will see how things go with this whole posting on a regular basis thing!

Yesterday I visited the Wintergarden in Auckland Domain. Auckland Domain is the oldest park in the city, with the Auckland War Museum situated within the park. The Wintergarden is made up of two huge glasshouses, which were built in 1913, and opened to the public in the early 1920's!

Isn't the lilly pad above strange? I wanted to touch it but it was out of reach!

I took so many photo's it's hard to not post them all! So here a just a few more featuring the band rotunda, and the dress I was wearing under my winter coat.

        Coat: Vintage

Dress: 1970's bought in Melbourne

Bag: Thrifted

In other news, my camera broke at a rather wild (drunken) party several weeks ago, so now I have a new camera which I am still playing around with... It's a better version of my old camera so I'm happy! (although it'd be nice to have a fancy-pants camera one day too)

Hope everyone is well in blog-land, it's good to be back.

xx
Lucy

Ice Cream Cupcakes!!

That's right, cupcakes, baked in ice cream cones.. These are seriously awesome!  I wish I had kids to bake these for, but instead I've been making them for my man (he's a toy collector so he's really more of a man-child), and my friends, and pretty much everyone really.

They're super simple to make, I found the recipe HERE (they're vegan, but don't even have soy milk in them, so this recipe won't require a trip to the supermarket for all you non-vegans out there! Plus I think any cupcake recipe could be used).

I do have to say I didn't use the icing from the recipe, as it required 6 cups of icing sugar... I find 3 cups of icing sugar in my icing too sweet, so 6 cups just screams diabetes to me!  Instead I always use a modified version of the vegan butter-cream icing found in Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World. Actually it's about time I was really honest, my wonderful bf always makes, and pipes the icing.. So I don't really know the exact recipe he uses! But I can tell you an approximate..

Vegan Butter-cream Frosting
3/4 Cup Vegan margarine
1/4 Vegetable shortening (You can sub this for margarine if it's winter, but in summer I recommend using the shortening, as it holds up better in heat).
Approx 2 cups icing sugar added slowly
A few dashes of soy milk (we actually use oat milk these days)
1tsp Vanilla

The icing sugar and milk are pretty much added until the desired consistency is reached.. I hope that is useful to anyone like me who finds a lot of vegan icing recipes a little too sweet!

This is what the cupcakes look like before they are iced.

I hope you have as much fun as I do when you make these! (Yep, I really do find them that exciting and amazing. I love novelty stuff!)

xx
Lucy

It's oh so quiet...

Hello my lovely readers, don't worry, I haven't forgotten about you!

School has been a bit crazy lately, and that combined with a lack of inspiration has lead to me being a very bad blogger. But the semester finishes in a few weeks, and I've been feeling much more inspired by life again (woo!).

I feel like this song embodies my relationship to blogging so far.. Some times I have so much I want to blog about I want to write to you every day, and other times I am totally stuck for ideas and inspiration.. That's when things go oh so quiet.

And of course I have to include a little snapshot of my afternoon tea yesterday since it was so pretty (and tasty too!)

I have to admit I also haven't been keeping up with all of your blogs during the past month either, so hopefully all is well! I have lots of catching up to do, and a bunch of assignments and exams to study for, so it might just be weekly updates for the next little while.

xox
Lucy