Eid-al-Fitr 2018/1439

Happy Eid everyone!

It’s been both a long and a short month (is that possible??) of fasting – on the one hand, the days seemed long, hot and all I thought about was what to cook that day. On the other hand, it really feels like the days just sped by and 30 days of fasting were gone already!

We had a lovely long weekend of celebrating with family, full of dinners (where everyone’s stomach still feel shrunken so we are all getting full very quickly!)

Here’s a peek at our Eid, which we spend at my mum’s, my sister’s, my brother’s and at my aunt’s for meals. I love that even though we don’t have a huge family in the UK, we still have lots of family around us to celebrate with and it always feels like we aren’t short of dinner invitations. I’ve always said to my husband that I can do without a new outfit (even though I buy a new one every Eid) and the bling, but it’s the memories with family which make it Eid.

Hope you all enjoyed the celebrations and had a lovely Eid – I feel a bit sad I didn’t have time to put mehndi on this time around, but I’ll see if there are any mehndi cones lying around!

I’ll leave you with a short story of my little nieces and young cousin, whom I found in my sister’s garden – one niece was lying down while the other two were poking her. When I asked them what they were doing, their response was that they were playing ‘the dead bee game’. My sister wandered out a little while later to find that they had switched places and another niece was playing the dead bee!

Kids!

Dominique Ansel Bakery – Home of the Novelty Baked Treats

I recently visited the famous Dominique Ansel bakery in London with a friend, which is famous for the Cronut, as well as a lot of other baked delicacies.  We got a little over-excited and ordered a bunch of treats, all of which we had fun tasting – the cookie shot (a cup made of cookie filled with milk), the peanut-butter creamy cake, the Frozen S’more (a marshmallow-ice cream combination), mini Madeleines fresh and hot from the oven and a yummy hot chocolate with a marshmallow flower which opened up from the heat of the drink.

As I’m sure you can imagine, we were stuffed after all of this, and had to walk around the streets to burn it off a little, but it was worth it! If you’re around the area, I’d recommend this place to sit and try (although it can get very busy so there may be some waiting time!), and it’s not super-cheap (although not overly-expensive either) – sometime to try at least once!

Eid Mubarak…! Eid-al-Fitr 2017/1438

I’m a bit late in posting this but a belated Eid Mubarak! It’s was a lovely day for us, with colourful cupcakes, delicious food, and an overload of cheeky toddlers, mehndi on hands, presents and sweets.

Here’s wishing you all a blessed celebration, and hope the samosay were spicy enough, the chocolate was sweet enough and the presents were many!

Lazy Sundays

I’ve had a pretty busy week this week, so I’m finally settled in this Sunday and multi-tasking with some yummy home-made chocolate cake, blogging catch-up and getting on with that (digital) stack of books I’ve been waiting to read.

I’m hoping to do a few book reviews for this week, so watch this space! In the meantime, here’s my view today : )

Happy weekendings, all x

Foodie Review: Sweet, Mile End

I was recently invited to a Blogger’s Meet at Sweet, Mile End, a trendy dessert place in Mile End who wanted us try their desserts to review whether we would enjoy the food. I was pretty please to be invited, as I would be going with with some bloggers I know (either in real life or online!) and it was a great opportunity to hang out, gossip, eat great food and relax.

You can see the other blogger’s reviews here: Hijabi in London; Yasmins Intro; The London Haloodie – be sure to check their blogs out!

Sweet is mainly a dessert restaurant, which provides a wide range of milkshakes, mocktails, cakes, waffles, crepes and cookie doughs – as well as their signature ‘Alto-Shakes’, which are crazily-extravagant milkshakes topped with icing, cakes, syrup, more toppings and chocolate!

 

We were lucky enough to try a range of desserts and drinks and we each decided to try a few different things so we can mix-and-match and share our treats. Funnily enough we all had very different tastes – I’m a huge cheesecake and chocolate fan, while the others loved the idea of a waffle, milk shake or the salty desserts. You can see below some of the things we ordered – don’t they look amazing? They actually tasted yummy, the desserts were presented amazingly on each dish and tasted great, balancing salty flavours with sweet, rich flavours with sharp and tangy.

Having tried a lot of options, I loved a lot of these desserts, but my favourite was the Ferrero Rocher chocolate cheesecake (I’m a sucker for cheesecakes!) and the fruity mocktails, although I did like the sound of the ‘gulab jamun’ and ‘gajar ka halwa’ ice cream! I also really liked the mocktails – perfectly fruity and not too icy cold.

I also liked the decor in this restaurant, which was very London-centric with the pencil-drawing art on the walls, mixed with muted colourful lights and a soft atmosphere – a great place to sit and unwind after work.

I had fun at this restaurant and it was great to meet like-minded bloggers (sharing blogger problems like the art of taking ten thousand photos of food pictures to get the right angle!)
Dessert places in London are becoming pretty popular and it’s not surprising, they’re the ideal places for hangouts and who can resist a good dessert? The other thing I loved about this place was that it’s fully halal, so there’s no worries for Muslims in east London looking for a sweet treat after dinner in this area. I’m sure I’ll be dropping by in Sweet again – let me know if you’ve been and what you think of it!

The Cake & Bake Show London 2016

I’m a big fan of crafts and creativity, whether it’s clever decor, home DIY or yummy masterpieces of baking, chocolatiers and beautiful treats (and especially these things because it means I get to eat them).

My sister, niece and I recently went to the Cake and Bake Show last weekend, which was huge fun for us as we all love seeing different ideas and creative pieces, and of course we all love stuffing our faces with cake. We knew it would be a good show when we were greeted with this huge BFG sculpture at the entrance – who doesn’t love Roald Dahl, fantasy and cake mixed together?

We saw a huge range of cakes, cupcakes, biscuits cakepops, meringues and many more, plus lots of professional baking and cooking tools, which was serious inspiration heaven, whether you’re a baker or not.

Below are some of the professional cakes we saw, as well as many of the ones on display we loved – it’s amazing how many ideas there were.

(Be warned, my sister and I took hundreds of pictures, I’ve tried to cut down how many I’ve posted below but there were just too many we loved and which I didn’t to keep out!)

Professional cakes
This was a display of professional companies advertising their services and showcasing their cake and biscuit skills. I loved that some of these were set up like wedding dessert tables, where the treats all match each other and have a theme. Serious luxury here!

Exhibitor cakes
These were cakes and cupcakes on display by vendors selling tools for baking, so a lot of these were on display to show how the tools could be used to make something beautiful. Again, I had a lot of favourites with these as I never realised how many ways of decorating and creating baked goods there were, but I did love the beautiful pieces and colours. I guess my most favourite is the first picture below – the Alice in Wonderland theme cake, which really appealed to my love of all things Wonderland!

Competition cakes
There was a long line to see this, but we just had to line up to see these. The theme for the cakes in the competition was ‘Myths, Legends and Fantasy’, which I just loved because it’s always been one of my favourite themes in just about everything (film, books, games…!)
It was amazing to see how this was interpreted, with a range of myths and stories from across culture (not to mention media, like the Neverending Story!).

I was going to only post a few of these, but then opted to show all of the entries because I thought each baker had something beautiful in each piece – I wouldn’t know which one to choose as the winner!

Harlequin Pics http://www.harlequinteaset.wordpress.com

Happy National Chocolate Week!

This could quite possibly be my favourite national celebration of the year (except for my birthday, which should be a national holiday) – it’s National Chocolate Week!

I’ll be helping the country celebrate and doing my part by buying a few luxury chocolate (or a thousand) and pondering the benefits of chocolate (i.e. nuff’ serotonin = happiness) while I curl up with my latest book.

In other news, here’s a peek of the Cake and Bake show my sister and I went to last week, a little chocolate Morphe-type man! Isn’t it cute?

Afternoon Tea at the Sky Bar

It’s been a while since I’ve had a proper afternoon tea, so when my friends suggested a tea at lunchtime in the middle of work today, I didn’t resist for a moment. We’re lucky enough to work locally to Westfield Stratford in east London, which has a variety of restaurants and shops for us to indulge in every now and then (not everyday otherwise we’d all be bankrupt!)

So off we skiddled along to Sky Bar, which I never knew existed until I walked in, a beautiful balcony restaurant overlooking the random skyscrapers, train stations and restaurants of east London while having a lovely tea. The best part about this is that there was a 50% off deal going on as well, so it was cheap and guilt-less indulgence too!

I always love beautiful decor when visiting a new restaurant, and this place fit tickled my imagination nicely – a huge ceiling with cool wooden floors and metal decoration, beautiful lanterns and quirky paintings at the entrance.

Onto the good stuff, the food – I think the picture below sums up how pretty this tea was. I wasn’t expecting a lot for what we paid, and was pleasantly surprised by how nicely put together everything was. Teapots with fresh roses, jugs of tea and milk, plates of scones, jams, sandwiches and tea, lemonade water (for people like me who aren’t tea drinkers!) and beautifully made desserts.

We loved how well presented each plate of food was – between three of us we couldn’t finish this three-tier of sandwiches and cakes, and we had great fun swapping different flavoured macarons and cupcakes (by swapping, ‘sampling’ each other’s cakes!). My husband always says having afternoon tea is a bit of a girly thing, and that there are never enough sandwiches for his liking – personally I think afternoon tea is for everyone but I did love how girly and vintage-themed the flowers and crockery were. I also loved that there was a good mix of food for everyone, lemon cake, brownies, rich cupcakes, macarons, scones and three different fillings of sandwiches.

I also love how full the table looked by the time all of the food arrive – I never like paying a lot of money for an afternoon tea experience which makes you feel as if you didn’t really get much. Half of the tea can sometimes be the visual experience and the beautiful decor to match beautiful food, which in this case certainly worked well together. My favourite thing was a little cute case with a single macaron with an ‘eat me’ label on it! Sadly enough I wasn’t allowed to take the little case home (I did eat the macaron inside though, it was an almond-flavoured one), but it did give me ideas for future tea parties…!

All in all this was a lovely afternoon (even if we did have to go back to work after a long lunch!) and a perfect way to end the working week, and begin the bank holiday weekend!

Cupcake Fridays and Colouring Pens

With a chocolate cupcake, some drawing pens and some chick-flicky reading material. Yup, all ready for a wild Friday night (with a movie!)

Weekend Pretty…A Little Heart

A little cute treat today, my husband and I don’t really celebrate Valentine’s Day (I’ll blog about this soon!) but it doesn’t mean I don’t notice all the pretty little cakes and sweets I see everywhere!