Sunday, September 08, 2013

Impulse Buy!!!

I am not the worlds best house keeper, I aspire to have a nice house but with working full time there is always something that gets in the way. I have lots of ideas but usually run out of time before I get to translate them into the real thing!! This year I plan on swapping some of my furniture. Carl will be moving into a new flat so its a great time to look at buying some furniture that I have had my eye on for a while!
I have started by buying a new kitchen table, the one I have had for an age was perfectly fine but for years I have been battling with getting the chairs around it. The table I had was a round one that converted into an oval, but even as an oval you could only get 4 chairs around it (you could seat more but the chairs stuck out). So I decided to look for a rectangular table. When we visited Fran and Pete a few weeks ago they had a lovely rectangular table and chairs exactly the same as mine except they had painted theirs and they looked lovely. So this week I bought a table off of The Bay I am thrilled with it I can get all six chairs tucked in under the table which seems both bigger than the last one but takes up less space!! I now plan to buy some ESP (easy surface prep)  as suggested by Fran and change the chairs into something far more beautiful.  Strange thing about the new table, when I rung the lady to arrange to collect it I thought I recognised her voice, it turns out it was a lady I used to work with a few years ago, its a small world!!

Anyway onto my impulse buy. I popped into Aldi to pick up some cereal bars when they had an electric mini cake maker on offer. So I came out with the machine and grand ideas of what I could do with it. It has turned out to be a really useful machine and I have used it lots already. I am not usually a cake maker as it takes a lot of effort and seems to make a load of mess. But I decided to try this maker with a packet mix just to give it a go. I have been most impressed. The cakes are bite sized and cook in less than ten minutes. 


They only had pink ones left and at £7.99 I thought it was worth a go.


I have found that Petit Four cases from Asda are the perfect size. You can only cook 7 at a time and whatever mixture you use you can only get one teaspoon in the case.


Yesterday I made a couple of batches some fruit cakes, which was dried fruit and mixed spice added to a basic Victoria sandwich cake mix!! I also made another batch using left over bananas mashed down and mixed in with the basic packet mix. I know that this doesn't make me into a Nigella, but for a quick and easy cake which because of its size must be better than eating a full sized cake calorie wise, I am pleased with how they have turned out.


I have even pushed the boat out and added proper swirly icing to the top of some of them !! I have started to look on line for other recipes and it seems that you can make mini tarts in the machine as well, so I can feel some experimentation coming on!!

So as I said quite an impulse buy when  I was only planning on buying some cereal bars!!!

Finally I have had a bit of a week and I am glad that it is over so I can move onto a fresh week, Beth has been very helpful and she knew I was feeling a bit fed up with everything, so she surprised me a beautiful bunch of flowers to star on my new table!!


I hope you all have a lovely week make the most of the last of the lovely weather, you can definitely feel a change to the air first thing in the mornings, we are heading into autumn, my favourite time of year!!





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