Pink Pops| How to make Popcakes

You may or may not have seen the posts about my Mum’s wedding in September. In that post you'll have seen pictures of the above Pop Cakes. My mum and I are both huge lovers of cake; any sort will do! So when I found the above book in TKMaxx I had to buy it. When flicking through the pages we came up with the idea of making pink Popcakes for her wedding as a gift for her guests.

At the time it seemed like a great idea; who wouldn’t love cute little pink cakes! However come 10.30pm the night before the wedding when we were still decorating the Popcakes, we were soon regretting it! Despite how stressful this idea became, the end result was amazing. The wedding guests were fascinated, and in awe when they discovered that my Mum had made them herself. So I thought I would show you how we did it.

Step 1- Firstly, a cake needs to be made. We used the recipe given in the book for a simple chocolate sponge cake. For the 100 popcakes that we made we had to bake 6 chocolate cakes and leave them to cool.

Step 2- To make the cake balls, the cakes were blitzed into crumbs then mixed with cream cheese, and icing sugar. This makes the cakes into a moist mouldable texture, that is quite similar to a ganache. We also added bashed up Crunchie to our mixture to add something special to half of the popcakes. We then moulded the mixture into 100 little balls, mounted them on sticks and popped them into the freezer for 15 minutes to allow them to solidify.

Step 3- The fun part; decorating! We ended up with 3 different looks for our popcakes. One was just pink icing with a pink icing rose on the top. The second was pink icing dipped into pink sugar.The third look was meant to resemble a flower, and involved pink and white swirls (as you can see above). The joy with popcakes is that you can be so creative with them, any colour, shape or design. I have seen little teacups and tea pots, dinosaurs, people, and food items such as hotdogs and slices of cake.

So that’s a short and sweet explanation on how we made our popcakes. It took a lot of time to make 100 of them, and it was a lot of hard work, but the final product was delicious and a big success with all the wedding guests. I think they are an excellent idea for wedding favours or even for Christmas presents!

So what do you think? Have you seen or tried popcakes before? Would you make any for Christmas presents or for your wedding or party?

Love the lashes| False Eyelash Review

After reading a few blog posts by other lovely ladies I decided to give DIY lash inserts a try. I have wanted to have professional ones for a long time, but I cannot justify the expense, not so much the initial expense, but having to pay at least £20 every two to three weeks, to have them touched up; after a few months that’s going to take a big dip out of my income. I have also been weary as I am a chronic eye rubber! I’m really bad, especially when I’m tired, I shouldn’t do it anyways as I wear contacts, but it’s habit I haven’t yet managed to kick… hello prematurely wrinkly eyes!

However given that these eyelashes cost me only £4.99 from Amazon, and the glue was only a couple of pounds I thought, for £7, why not! Now I am an expert applying false eyelashes for nights out, I would never go out without them. However these individual lashes were a different story, mainly because you apply them to your lashes not the skin above them, so fiddling around with my tweezers, getting the right amount of glue, and lining them up, proved at first to be difficult. The biggest difficulty was applying them in a line close enough to each other, so there wasn’t any obvious gaps. After doing one eye, the second was a lot easier, so its clear that practice make perfect, but it took me a good half an hour to get them right.

The second, third and fourth pictures show the lashes with no added mascara. I would be happy to leave the house with them just like this if I was off to university or work, as the look long, lush and natural. The only downside is that I had applied too much glue which resulted in residue that dried in white lumps on my lashes, so when closing my eyes this was evidential, as seen in the pictures The last two pictures are with two layers of mascara over the top of them, which is how I wore them for my birthday meal.

The main draw for lash inserts for myself was the time saved applying mascara. If I had inserts I wouldn’t have to put layers of mascara on in the morning, so the big test for me was whether they would last the night!

When taking the mascara off, I used a Simple Gentle Eye-Makeup Remover, resulting in only two inserts coming loose. However after switching off my bedroom light and getting a good eight hours sleep, the morning was a different story. I awoke to what looked like a few dead spiders on my pillow, and the rest of the inserts were crooked and loose. Over the night the inserts nearer the outer corners of my eyes came loose and fell out onto my pillow, and I would say about 60% of the rest become crooked or loose. I was highly disappointed as I ended up taking the rest off as they were irreparable.

I can’t decide whether the lack of staying power over night was a result to my eye rubbing, which I never did consciously, maybe in my sleep… but I would never know, or the cheap glue. So, I am going to try again! If anyone can recommend an excellent glue with great staying power let me know, as I want lash inserts that stay the night, not wither on my pillow in the morning! So keep your eyes peeled for attempt number two, as I am determined to have luscious lashes 24/7!