What I Have Been Doing While in Lockdown

What I Have Been Doing While in Lockdown

I had a lot of travel content that I was planning on writing up for this blog but sharing it in the current climate feels a bit odd so I am saving it for future posts. Instead I thought I would share with you all what I have been doing to keep myself busy while lockdown has been enforced. Currently I am working from home so that is filling up most of my working days. That aside what I have been doing to keep myself entertained is:

1. Catching up on TV Shows
I watch a lot of TV generally it is one of my favourite hobbies, I love getting invested in a good programme. This extra time has helped me catch up on shows that I started watching but never finished as well as binge watching new shows. You can check out what I have been watching here.

Basic Banana Bread

Basic Banana Bread

Lockdown has given me far more time to bake than I normally would have and it seems like ABSOLUTELY everybody has baked banana bread at least once during this time! Having never made banana bread before I figured I would give it a go due to all the hype and the fact that I already had the ingredients ready at home. The recipe I followed was super simple and I figured I would share it with you:

How I'm Managing My Mental Health in Lockdown

How I'm Managing My Mental Health in Lockdown.

I'm sure the current situation surrounding lockdown over the last month has affected everyone's mental health in differing ways. During this time I have set myself many routines aimed to help and improve my mental health during all of this uncertainty and I thought I would share with you the routine tasks that have been helping me:

1. Exercising Everyday

Before Lockdown I was lucky if I found time to exercise twice a week, during this period with all the additional time I have forced myself to exercise in some way everyday be it going for a walk or following exercise videos on YouTube. I find even if I haven't been feeling the best that doing some form of exercise has always boosted my mood and made me feel better about my self image.

2. Reading 

I finally can read for joy again now my degree is complete, so this spare time and the kindle daily deals have given me chance to get stuck into some fiction. You can see what I have been reading in this post.

3. Baking

I have been practicing and perfecting a lot of baking recipes that I have never tried before such as banana bread (as who isn't baking that currently?) and brownies. The only problem with this one is I then have to eat all that I have baked!

4. Watching Movies/TV Shows

Catching up on the shows and films that I have not seen, either on Netflix, Amazon Prime or Disney+. You can see what I have been watching recently here.

5. Practising Self-care

My self-care before lockdown was awful, I never left time for any extra pampering. So during this time I have made full use of face masks, practising with makeup, having baths to relax and finally sticking to a skincare routine.

These are all the tasks I have been doing to aid my mental wellbeing during this time. What have you all been doing to help your mental health during these strange times?

Thanks for Reading!

Halloween Cake Baking

Great British Bake off eat your heart out!

Last Tuesday me and a friend decided to go a bit baking crazy and in the spirit of the season these cakes had to be Halloween themed.

We started off with the basic cake recipe

6 oz Sugar

6 oz Butter

3 Eggs

6 oz Flour

Then we decided to have some fun with the cake mix and make them that bit unusual. We had previously been to Hobbycraft aka baking heaven and bought loads of colourful icing and most intriguingly some of the Sugarflair colour pastes. 

Blogmas #19 Chocolate Covered Peppermint Creams

As you saw from my last Blogmas post I baked some festive peppermint cakes, if you have not seen this post you can check that out here.

After icing and decorating these cakes I had ALOT of leftover icing which seemed such a waste to throw away.

I remembered once making peppermint creams out of some icing and thought why not give it a go with the leftovers. So to the runny icing I added in more and more icing sugar and mixed until the icing formed almost a dough. I then made this into circles and placed them on a plate in the fridge to harden for at least 3 hours.

Blogmas #18 Festive Cupcakes

Today's Blogmas is some more festive baking! I love a bit of cake baking and decorating.

I found some mini candy canes and knew I wanted to put them on some cakes. These are my interpretation of peppermint cupcakes.

The ingredients you need for this are:

- 4 ounces butter

- 4 ounces caster sugar

- 2 eggs

- 4 ounces self raising flour

- Icing sugar

- mini candy canes for decoration

- Peppermint flavouring
- Red food colouring

Blogmas #13: Christmas Baking

Christmas Baking

Tis the season to bake festive themed treats. I saw the recipe for these on one of Zoella's YouTube videos and thought I would give it a go.

The base is brownies I used a box mixture from Betty Crocker (I'm lazy and I don't have the brownie knack just yet.)

Mug Cake

I'm a big fan of cakes and baking so when I saw that they were selling Mug Cakes I could not wait to try one. I got the chocolate chip one.

What you do is you mix the mixture with 4 tablespoons of milk till smooth and then bake in the microwave for 1 minute 20 seconds.

Then voilà the cake is baked easy and simple. As you can see I used a Mug that was far too big for the cake but overall it was very tasty obviously not the same as oven baked cakes but tasty non the less.

Also a moment of appreciation for my Disney Mug. I love anything Disney! 

Have any of you tried these Mug Cakes ? What did you think?

My Week in Photos 3

Thought I'd do a my week in photo's blog- I know I don't do these every week and just whenever I feel like it I'm still counting these as week 3. It's definitely been a busy one since last wednesday!

Above is my drawing of a skeleton from this weeks 'Drawing For Beginners' class. I will blog about this shortly but in the meantime you can see last weeks blog here.

Halloween Themed Cakes

I know it's too early to be talking about Halloween yet I mean it is a few weeks away but I saw the recipe for these witches cauldron cakes and I couldn't wait that long to bake them.

I thought I would share with you the technique to bake these Halloween themed cakes.

First off these are the ingredients you will need: