Frosting and Sprinkles

Hello all you lovely people!
I am currently feeling poorly, but it's been a while since I shared a recipe on the blog so I thought I'd share my go-to chocolate frosting.

I love chocolate cupcakes more than any other type of cupcakes, even more than vanilla cupcakes, and that is because with chocolate frosting you get such a great and rich texture and flavour. The consistency of this frosting is perfect for piping and it creates the most beautiful swirls of chocolatey heaven.

Chocolate Ganache Frosting

INGREDIENTS

• 200 grams dark chocolate, chopped
• 2 dl heavy cream
• 200 grams cream cheese

DIRECTIONS

Make a chocolate ganache by heating the heavy cream in a pan. Just before it starts to boil pour it over the chopped chocolate. Stir until you get a nice and even chocolate ganache. Then let it cool to room temperature.

In a bowl, whisk the cold cream cheese with a hand mixer, pour the ganache into the cream cheese and whip until just combined. You should have a frosting which is perfect and lovely for piping.

I made these lovely mini brownie cupcakes with the very same chocolate frosting for my Birthday last year. They were a real hit, and my mouth is watering just thinking about them.

You can find my favourite brownie recipe on the lovely Lindsey's blog Have Clothes, Will Travel. I shared the recipe for my brownies with her for a feature, so check it out: here.
And instead of baking the brownies in a pan, pour the batter into mini cupcake tins and bake for about 10 minutes at 165°C.

And lastly, add sprinkles! Because sprinkles are fun!

Much love!

Lace & Elegance

"I might as well be reaching for the moon."

This dress makes me think of Audrey Hepburn for some reason. I have a feeling that she would wear it given the opportunity. Maybe I'm just looking for things to associate this dress with Audrey, but it brings to mind Audrey's lace dress that she wore when she won an Academy Award, although this one is black instead of white. It could also be that it reminds me of her because I feel like it is one of the more elegant dresses I own, and what was Audrey if not the epitome of elegance.

Dress: Chi Chi (here)

Earrings: Lindex (old)

The earrings I'm wearing in these photos are also Audrey-esque. I had been looking for earring like these for years after seeing similar ones on Audrey in a photo shoot (see below), and for my birthday last year my mother surprised me with these perfect ones!! Thanks Mum!

I was a bit hesitant adding the photo of Audrey, because who wants to be compared to her?
Her beauty is not rivalled by anyone, but I do feel like these photos of me carry some of her grace in them. I definitely did try to channel my inner Audrey and embrace her poise.

Audrey Hepburn is one of my all time style icons (not to mention idols). She embodied a grace that was unique. Are any of you Audrey fans? Or is there another classical Hollywood cinema star that you look up to? Audrey has been the one for me since I first saw her in Sabrina. I'd love to hear about your icons in the comments.

Much love!

Magical year

The new year has started well, and as I previously mentioned I am looking forward to this year. It's going to be an exciting year, filled with magic. Literally.

As all you Harry Potter fans out there already know this year will bring the magic back, first to the stages of London, in a play called Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, and secondly to the screens as the movie inspired by the book Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.

What is so incredibly exciting for me is that I have tickets to the play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. It was extremely hard to get by. You had to sign up on a special website to be able to attempt at getting the tickets. Then you waited to get an email on a special day, and once this day arrived you'd get a link that would put you in a queue. At a random place in the queue. You could be the first one in the queue, or the 20.000 one. I was lucky, I was the 8000-something one in the queue.

"And now we wait" - 10 points to your house if you can tell me which film and scene that is from.
But seriously then it was just a matter of waiting for the people before you in the queue to either leave the queue or get their tickets. After nearly two hours of patiently waiting and staring at the screen of my computer as a little wizard walked across the page I finally got in!

I was seconds away from getting tickets to the eight part of the Harry Potter series. It was what I had waited for, for years!

But then... It was impossible to book any dates.
"Have all the dates already been booked?" I wondered. The days were supposed to be colour coded, green meaning there was still seats available, yellow meaning there were few seats available and red meaning it was completely booked. Only for me, it was neither green, yellow nor red, but white!
That's when my clever sister quickly did an investigation (checking the play's Facebook page) and it turned out that there were other people with the same problem. We all had one thing in common... If you were using Safari on a Mac, the webpage would not work.

Merlins. Beard.

Dress: Book of Deer (sold out in this colour, but with print here)

Tights: Lindex (old)

Heels: ModCloth (here)

After panicking for a while, and desperately asking my sister to fix it in some way, we got lucky and my sister had a friend that was close to the beginning of the queue, that managed to get us tickets as well.

So there you have it! I'm going to see the play - but it sure wasn't easy getting the tickets!

But so, my 2016 will be filled with magic.
This dress that I'm wearing today is quite magical too. It's from Book of Deer, and I don't know if it is the rich midnight blue colour, the luxurious velvet fabric or the dramatic fluted sleeves, but something about this dress makes me think that it would be the perfect dress for a witch.

I wear it with pride as it is the lovely dark blue colour of my house (Ravenclaw), and I also think about Brave and Merida because of the wee embroidered bears at the lovely bow. There are still some items left from Book of Deer's Hibernation collection of AW14 that you'll find here.

I hope you will all have as much magic in your life in this year as I will.
Much love,

From the Bottom to the Top

Hello lovely people!
I hope you are all having a nice weekend. On Monday I go back to work, and I'm excited while at the same time mourning my late mornings.

Today I'm going to touch upon how I feel about a certain part of my body, and what society tells us about this. It won't be The body post that I've intended to write, inspired by Klara of The Robot That Had a Heart. You can read Klara's magnificent body positivity post here. For me, that post will come another time, but it's more about a single part of my body... That was highlighted in these jeans.

Yes, my arse.

Since I've developed my "womanly" body I have always been pear shaped. That is, my hips and arse are wider than my top. Other than making jeans and trouser shopping extremely difficult, it has also affected how I see myself and my size. I often feel as if I am "wide" just because of my curvy hips. In reality though I'm a size small-medium. But my perception of my size is strongly affected by my curvyness.

These tight jeans, that I almost couldn't get over my arse, made me almost cringe at first. My hips looked so huge and my arse looked positively JLo-esque. Some of you may be thinking that it's not too bad, and that JLo's arse is one to strive for. Many think she's got a beautiful body (as do I), but the point I want to make is that it doesn't quite matter what others think. If you don't feel beautiful or like you are "the right size" nothing anyone's going to say will make a difference.

I really like Meghan Tainor's song All About That Bass, and I think body positive messages like that are brilliant, "Every inch of you is perfect from the bottom to the top" - Yes! Great!
However there is a line in that song that bothers me beyond belief.
"Boys they like a little more booty to hold at night" - Big Fat NO!

Why should it matter to me if I have the "booty" that boys like. First of all, I'm no object that's here to please boys. What boys like couldn't mean less to me. We don't want a world where I'm supposed to think: "My arse is big, but it's okay because someone else (a man) will like it". Secondly, I think the whole reasoning is wrong. We want to live in a world where people like me think: "My arse is big, but it's okay because I can be the way I am".

I just think we're focusing far too much on what others think, and what society says is right and good. And I hear you, it's hard not to listen to all the countless of voices that have opinions about women's bodies. But accepting your body, big arse and all, should come from within. It should not be a result of a man giving you the "right" to accept it, as it feels like it is today in the world.

In Sweden there is a commercial for a matchmaking website where they say you shouldn't worry about your imperfections because someone out there loves them. Again, it's giving the power of body acceptance to someone else, when it is such a valuable thing that we should keep for ourselves.

I'm ranting now, but the point I wanted to make is that: Don't rely on someone else to accept your body. I finally decided that "Yes, my arse does look big in the jeans, but that's my body!", and it didn't come from someone else telling me "No really, you look great".

About this lovely knitted cardigan, that I feel has a 40's vibe to it. It's from Emmy Design, that makes vintage inspired clothing, and I just fell for this cardigan. Good thing too, because it's been so cold lately that woollen cardis are a necessity.

Cardigan: Emmy Design (here)

Jeans: River Island (old)

Heels: ModCloth (here)

To anyone who got this far, thanks for staying with me in my rant about this. I just want people to look to themselves for acceptance and happiness.

Much love,