Blueberry bundt cake with lemon icing

Hello all,
Today I have a recipe of a delicious, citrusy blueberry cake for you! But before that I need to tell you about my inspiration behind this bake.

Two weeks ago was my birthday. I turned 28 years old, which I'm very happy about, because finally I left 27 behind me. The number 27 is really difficult to pronounce in Swedish - tjugosju. I'm so relieved I don't have to say I'm tjugosju years old anymore!

For my birthday, my dear friend Christiane (IG: @aliceinthewoodssomewhere) sent me a package filled with wonderful things, among them a beautiful Ravenclaw-styled apron that she had made herself!! I fell in love with everything in my birthday package, but I'm a real sucker for handmade things. I imagine that I can feel the love it was made with. This apron, in true Ravenclaw colours brightened my life with it's bold blue colour. And with that I figured I need to bake something with blueberry in it. So after a little bit of experimenting, I present to you a blueberry bundt cake.

Blueberry bundt cake with lemon icing

INGREDIENTS

• 200 g butter, room temperature
• 2 dl sugar
• 4 eggs
• 4 dl flour
• 2 tablespoons baking powder
• 2 teaspoons lemon zest (I used all the zest I got from 1 lemon)
• 2 tablespoons lemon juice
• 1 dl milk, room temperature
• 250 g blueberries

• 2 tablespoons lemon juice
• 3 dl powdered sugar

DIRECTIONS
Preheat your oven to 175°C. Prepare the bundt tin by buttering it, and then add flour to it so that the cake won't stick to the tin.

Beat the butter and sugar until slightly fluffy. Add the eggs, one at a time.
Mix the dry ingredients (flour, baking powder, lemon zest) together in a separate bowl.
Mix the milk and lemon juice in another bowl.
Alternate between adding the dry ingredients, then the wet, to the butter-and-sugar-mix. Start and end with the dry ingredients. Mix in the blueberries lastly. If you use frozen blueberries, like I did, they might become a bit wet, and might sink to the bottom of the batter (this happened to me). To avoid that, roll the blueberries in a bit of flour, and then add them to the batter.
Bake for 40 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the cake comes out dry.

For the icing, mix the lemon juice with the powdered sugar until it becomes thick, but pipeable. Drizzle or pipe the icing onto the cake after it's cooled.

I hope you enjoy this recipe. It was a lot of fun to make it and then bake it, and finally eat it!

Much love,
Mona

Magical Portrait

Hello all,
Hope you are well. Today I thought I'd tell you about my amazing experience getting my magical portrait shot by the fantastic photographer Xavier Boldú (@xavierboldu). In September my sister and I flew to London, for the sole purpose of the portrait. We did do other things in London as well, we made it into a whole trip, but the main reason for going was the portrait.

Now if you're a Potterhead and don't know about Xavier then you are definitely missing out. Xavier is a freelance photographer based in London, and is currently working on a series of magical Wizarding Portraits. I contacted Xavier after seeing his amazing portraits on instagram, to see if we could work something out, he was the sweetest and I managed to purchase a commission, and with that the excitement started.

In the process of shooting.
Photo: My sister.

Xavier and I planned the portrait together. What is so brilliant about Xavier's portraits is that he finds something about the person in the portraits to include, a characteristic, or a hobby to display. For example for my portrait we decided to go with a potions theme, and portray me as a potions master, because I'm in the laboratory a lot in my work as a cancer researcher. For other portraits he's had bakers and tailors, collectors and merchants.

"The wand chooses the wizard, Harry".
Photo: My sister.

The day of the portrait my sister and I went over to Xavier's flat to take the photo. We were met by Xavier and his assistant photographer Harry (@focusframe_), a whole lot of props, including a beautiful wand made especially for me by Brown and Lobban (@brownandlobban), and the fantastic velvet costume that I would wear for the portrait. Xavier and Harry had earlier on found the gorgeous costume from National Theatre's Costume Hire (@nationaltheatrecostumehire).

 Admiring my wand from Brown and Lobban.
Photo: My sister.

Xavier continued to style every prop in minuscule detail for ultimate perfection. And then the magic of Xavier's work started. I had the best time ever with the boys and my sister. We had loads of fun while getting the portrait up to the standards where Xavier was happy with it, and the results really speak for itself.

The whole experience was one of the best of my life, it was so much fun and magical, and I feel like I made great friends in Xavier and Harry. We had tons of fun, I'm extremely happy with the portrait and will cherish it forever.

Harry, Xavier and me.
Gif: My sister.

The Wizarding Portraits series is still in the making, so I'm leaving all of Xavier's information down here in case anyone, like me, feel the need to contact him for a portrait. I'll say this much: It was some of the most fun I've ever had,  Xavier and Harry are super sweet and the portrait is magical beyond belief. It is also possible to support Xavier's work by becoming his patron on Patreon.

Xavier Boldú Website
Xavier Boldú Patreon

Xavier Boldú Instagram

Xavier Boldú Facebook 

Until next time.
Much love,

Mona

Autumn Allure

Hi all,
I've been longing to write a bit so here comes a blog post.
In the latest post I wrote about what had happened in 2017 and the beginning of 2018, and since then really nothing has changed. I'm still waiting for therapy, I'm still on sick leave, I'm still not doing any research, and I still feel a bit hopeless. It's difficult to keep up the hope when you still have 6 months to go until you get any proper professional help.

The physicians, that only contact me by telephone, keep changing my medicine because I'm still not doing well, but in reality they know, just like me, that the best treatment for depression and OCD is CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy). The problem is that there aren't enough resources for mental illness. There is so much more funding for research of physical illnesses than there is for mental illnesses. I, myself, work with cancer research, but even I think that more money needs to be put into mental health/illness research rather than physical illnesses. I'm not saying that physical illnesses are unimportant, but if we keep saying that mental health is as important as physical health, but then do nothing to validate this saying the stigma attached to mental health issues will never ever come to an end.

Luckily I have the support of family and friends, and I'm dancing a lot to try and help me get out. I've also noticed that going into woods is very soothing. Anyone that knows me at all, knows that I am not an outdoorsy type of person not in the slightest. I much prefer to sit in my armchair at home with a nice book or a cuppa. However, autumn has a unique allure that draws me out into the woods.

Just a week ago my sister and I went out and photographed a bit. I was wearing my Son de Flor dress that in itself has an allure that can't quite be described. This dress makes me want to twirl to the end of the world and back. It a magical dress from an equally magical brand.

Dress: Son de Flor (here)
Cardigan: Lindex (old)

Belt: Can't remember

Scarf: Through LootCrate's Wizarding World Subscription Box (here)

Boots: A sporty shop in London that I can't remember the name of

Which season has an allure to you? For me, it is always autumn. The colours of the trees, the crunching of the leaves under your lace up boots. The cold sharp air and the pale sun, all have a special place in my heart.

I hope you are all enjoying the season. Much love,
Mona

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,

Ravenclaw pride!

I'm really only posting this because I wanted to show you all my new scarf. If you follow me on Instagram (@curlsncakes) you will have already seen it.

The Harry Potter fan in me could not resist getting this Ravenclaw scarf from The Mad Girl Shop on Etsy. I've talked about this scarf previously, and I told you then how much I wanted this scarf and finally I got it. I suppose you could say it was another Christmas present from me, to me.

Anyway, the lovely and sweet Madison Steward (@madisonsteward) of The Mad Girl Shop makes these incredible Hogwarts scarves. It is knitted with a warm and soft yarn so it is super comfortable and perfect for cold winters (something that we used to have here in Sweden, but global warming happened). They are so accurate to how they look in the films. They look more like the scarves in the movies than the official Hogwarts scarves that you can buy at places that sell official Harry Potter merch. I know this because I also have one of those scarves. Of course...

If you're ever planning on getting a Hogwarts scarf I would probably say that the best one you can get is from The Mad Girl Shop. And besides, you'd be supporting a small business of handmade items! What's better than that!

Much love!

Smart Wizard

Here she is, the Ravenclaw in her natural habitat.

Lately I've been having Harry Potter on my mind. A lot.
I think it's to do with Harry Potter and J.K. Rowling being in the news a lot recently. If you haven't heard (which I'm sure you have) the next instalment of the Harry Potter series is coming, as a play instead of a book. It's called Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, and you can read all about it here. Yesterday they announced that the tickets will soon be going on sale, and I am so excited about this that I had trouble falling asleep last night. I have been waiting for another piece of the world I love so very much for years, and to finally get it in the form of theatre is incredible!

Since I've gone so far into the world of Harry Potter lately I thought I'd tell you about these amazing scented candles I've found on etsy. They're from a shop called Frostbeard Studio which make all their own unique candles by hand. They've got what they call the Book Lovers' Soy Candles, with scents like Old Books, Oxford Library, and Gatsby's Mansion. They've also got a range of Harry Potter inspired candles, including my favourites: Smart Wizards, in Ravenclaw's distinct blue colour, and Wizardy Buttery Drink, that smells just as Butterbeer tastes.

I hope you all have a splendid Saturday!
Much love

September Day

Happy September to you all!
I can't believe it's already September!

September is one of my favourite months because it is the start of my favourite time of the year - Autumn. I enjoy the calmness and stillness of an autumn day. I love the bright colours on the trees and the crisp, fresh air. Nothing beats a nice cuppa on a chilly day, sitting wrapped up in your favourite blanket with a good book (i.e. Harry Potter). Speaking of Harry Potter, today is the first day of term at Hogwarts. So I hope all you Hogwarts aficionados out there have a splendid day!

Another thing about autumn that I also love is that I can finally wear my beloved berets once again. I styled one of my favourite dresses with a charming beret and felt so good keeping my head warm! Yay for berets!

What is your favourite time of the year? Do you love autumn as much as I do? And if so, what is it you love about it?

Beret: Larmoni (here)

Dress: Apricity (here)

Belt: From a ModCloth dress (here)

Flats: Daisy Street via Asos

Much love!