Homemde Sausage and Egg Mcmuffin

 

Lovely BM and I are partial to a McDonalds breakfast so i wondered if i could make my own, turns out theyre simple!

I squeezed the filling out of a good quality pork sausage and formed it into a burger shape. Which i then fried it along with an egg. I used an egg ring to help me get a nice round shaped egg. Pop both the sausage burger and the egg onto a toasted english muffin, top with a slice of (poor quality) cheese and its done!

They were delicious, and so much more filling that the bought ones too!

Speckled birds egg chocolate cake with whipped buttercream and nutella butter cream

It was my birthday recently and i like to make a cake for the folks at work each year. This year i decided to combine a few techniques i'd been wanting to try out. The folks at work never mind being my guinesa pigs!

So i started with my go to chocolate cake recipe by Nigella Lawson -its brilliant you must try it.
And added nutella butter cream as the filling. When i saw nutella buttercream on pinterest i couldnt believe id never though of it before - such a brilliant idea!


I also used the nutella butter cream as the crumb coat. Id never crumb coated before but as my icing was going to be pale and my cake was dark i thought it would be a good idea.



I let that chill for a couple of hours and then i made my whipped butter cream topping. I find butter cream too heavy and quite sickly so i was very pleased to find this whipped butter cream recipe from Can you Stay for Dinner. It really is a winner, almost mousse like in texture, so much lighter than regular buttercream and nowhere near as sickly.
So i covered my cake with the delicious topping, coloured a pale blue in anticipation of the next step.


I fell in love with this speckled egg cake from The Cake Blog the minute i saw it and have been dying to make one for ages. So i gently speckled the cake with cocoa and water and this was the result. The picture genuinely doesnt do it justice. It was so pretty, even with my slightly dodgy cake decorating skills! I would definitely make the icing darker next time, i was worried about it looking too fake but i should have gone the whole hog and made it blue instead of pale blue!

Everyone at work loved it and it all got eaten - the biggest compliment of all!

Babies snakes (well hopefully in a few months!)

Now i know the title alone will have out a few people off but lovely BM and i keep snakes, we have 6 of our own and 4 currently loaned to us for a bit of breeding (yes you counted right, i have 10 snakes in my house!)

Well one of the females laid 21 eggs last week - which is brilliant! We've not had the best of luck breeding, with a dodgy batch last year, that produced 2 very small snakes that we've had to hand feed and then nothing since, even though 2 females showed promising signs they had eggs but none subsequently appeared. So were really pleased to have finally got some eggs, and such a good number. Fingers crossed theyre all fertile and give us some super cute teeny tiny baby snakes in 2 months time. So watch this space (or not if your not a snake fan, baby snakes still seem to freak people out even though they couldnt hurt a fly!)

 

muma snake defending her eggs

21 healthy looking eggs, snake eggs are not like bird eggs, theyre soft not hard so thats why they look a bit squidged, and the crosses are so we know which way up they go, the embryo attaches itself to the top of the egg in the air pocket so its important not to turn them.

Makes i love this week 10-Feb-12

Cute pencil skirt made out of old tshirts over cottonandcurls

Great egg confetti game at juliasroomfordessert

Brilliant embellished tshirts at creaturecomfortsblog

Handmade washbag tutorial at sewlikemymom

Bady beardied dragons

In addition to both having full time jobs and my quite time consuming love of crafting lovely BM and I also keep snakes. We currently have 11 in the house, i think its officially a zoo! Now,  snakes arent everyone's thing so i wont post any pictures on here but recently we looked after some bearded dragon eggs for a friend and they hatched last week, and they are sooo cute that i have to post some pictures. Everyone loves clumsy baby animals so, even if you dont like reptiles, i think you'll find these pretty adorable!