Cloudy Lemonade

Following on from yesterday's Limoncello recipe, I wanted to share a really easy cloudy still lemonade recipe I found on the BBC website. This lemonade is bitter and very sweet at the same time and it tastes lovely - plus, it only takes about 10 minutes! 

Ingredients
3 lemons
140g caster sugar
1l cold water

Using 3 of the left over lemons, remove the rest of the pith and roughly chop up the lemon flesh from inside. Pop this into a food mixer and blend the lemons till they are very finely chopped. 

Add 500ml of the water and all of the sugar to the mixer and whizz them together. 

Using a sieve and a bowl, push the lemon mixture through the sieve to leave behind a juice with no bits. Add the remaining 500ml of water and, using a funnel, pour into a sterilised bottle. Pop this in the fridge for at least a few hours as this drink is best served ice cold. 

Ideas to try with this recipe include adding vodka and making lemonade ice-cubes in the summer. Any others I could try?

Limoncello

Moving house has got in the way of blogging this past year but in 2014 I intend to do a lot more! I wanted to start by taking you through a Limoncello recipe that has been great to give as Christmas presents this year. 

A word of warning - whilst this is super easy to make, it doesn't fall into the 'cheap homemade' present category with vodka being quite pricey. To make 4 x 0.5l bottles you'll need 1l bottle of vodka (£15 ish), a bag of 7 lemons (£1), a large Kilner jar (£3.50) and 4 x 0.5l Kilner bottles (£2.50 ish each). All in all I spent about £30 to make four bottles- making each bottle £7.50 each. 

You'll need a week for the lemons to soak in the vodka and the following ingredients:

The zest of 6/7 lemons (unnwaxed)
1 litre of vodka
1250ml water 
700g sugar
1 large Kilner jar - 1.5l or larger
4 x 0.5l Kilner bottles

Peel the zest from the lemons with a vegetable peeler - avoid the white bitter pith under the skin as best you can. Place the zest in the large jar and pour the vodka over the top - shut the jar and leave in a cool place for a week. 

The day before you're ready to drain the lemon zest create the sugar and water mixture. To create this, boil the water and add the sugar. Stir the mixture until the sugar is fully dissolved. I left it quite watery at this point - to make less liquid but to make the mixture sweeter boil the water down further to make the syrup thicker. Leave this liquid overnight to cool (or for a few hours in a cool spot if you're making it on the same day).

After a week, drain the zest from the vodka and discard the zest. Pour the syrup in the jar with the vodka and mix in well. 

Using a funnel pour the limoncello into sterilised bottles. Unopened bottles can be kept up to a year. 

Limoncello is best served ice cold to drink, or drizzled over icecream! I'd love to adapt this recipe to make an orange flavoured vodka- that's my next try! The left over lemons can be used to make a really simple lemonade- I'll put this recipe up soon. 

Instagram Prints from Origrami

I was very excited to receive this parcel through the post filled with Instagram prints from Origrami! Origrami is a great site that allows you to upload your photos from your Instragram account very easily and have them printed in Polaroid style prints. Each print has a map on the back in relation to where it was uploaded (I need to stop uploading them at home, rather than on the move, as a lot of them were my home address!). The photos come in these lovely, camera themed boxes with a really nicely designed tag. The company's based in Australia; with free shipping worldwide and only £12 for 32 photos it's a bargain! Plus the little boxes coming through the post can cheer up anyone's day. 

Vintage postcards

I found some lovely postcards in Boyes in Scarborough. Boyes is a shop that sells an assortment of cheap things from end of line shampoos, fishing equipment, ribbon, curtains, gardening stuff, toys and basically all of those bits of bobs you never knew you needed. It's known by some people as a bit of a dump but it's got all of the odd things you need in one place. 

I went in to get some new buttons but at 39p each these were an absolute steal so I bought 7 of them! In the blog I did back in March on my trip to Scarborough there were lots of beautiful old buildings - this is the nicest Boyes building I've ever seen- most of them are in 1970s style shopping centres!

Saltaire Arts Trail

Ahh.... Saltaire Arts Trail, what a breath of fresh air compared to most days of my week. Once a year in May, the Saltaire Arts Trail brings together a chance to go in Salts Mill, buy nice things in the Makers' Fair and have a nosey around people's houses. This year was especially nice as the sun was beaming down and everyone seemed to be in a good mood! 

I headed down with my Mum and a family friend, Jenny, to have a look around - first stop was the Makers' Fair where I bought a lovely selection of cards (about 11 cards - but you ever have too many cards, right?!). Six of them were from Sunlight on Closed Lids, who create really nice printed cards with clean, bright designs. I've been coming to the Arts Trail for the last 3 years and always stock up on these cards; they sell them in the Mill also but you can snap them up for only £2 each on the stall (or 3 for £5). The rest of the cards were from artists dotted around the fair - I bought so many cards as I wanted the large scale prints but couldn't justify buying 11 of them! 

The Makers' Fair was in the beautiful Victoria Hall (you can see the ceiling below) and was filled with lots of handmade goodies - from necklaces and prints to hand carved wooden chopping boards and ceramics. The stalls that caught my eye most were the stalls with screenprints - such lovely designs! 

Next we moved to look in Salts Mill which is always a pleasure. Salts Mill, set up in its current guise in 1987 by Jonathan Silver, was once a textile mill opened by Sir Titus Salt in 1853. The mill today houses galleries, restaurants, shops and the most beautiful book shop I've ever seen.  The mill is a shrine to one of my favourite artists, David Hockney, and the gallery-cum-shop (the photo to the right below) lets you look at the art work AND buy art equipment at the same time. I love it in here but I always end up leaving with a new piece of equipment I'll never use (I have some charcoal tucked away that I bought 5 years ago but in that moment I just HAD to have it). 

Finally we moved on to have a look around the houses...

The houses surrounding the mill were built to house the workers of the mill and are ordered so that the foreman's houses at the end of each street were the tallest and largest houses on the street (apparently so the foremen could keep a watchful eye!). All of the streets are named after Salt's children (Mary, Helen, Amelia, Albert, Fanny and more - he had a lot of children!) and the houses are small and perfectly formed. As part of the Arts Trail about 20 of the houses open their doors to present artwork for sale - giving you a chance to look at the art work and have a good nosey around people's houses! Of course, I always want to live there before the day is through as the houses are just so nice. 

All of the houses that have artwork for sale have red bunting outside and range from the weird to the wonderful. My favourites were Clare Caulfield who creates really nice illustrations and Salts Press who I bought a lovely print from for a tenner.  

Saltaire is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and is kept in beautiful condition - it's my favourite place in Yorkshire and I would recommend a visit all year round but it is especially good when the Arts Trail is on. 

Food glorious food

I spotted this beautiful food blog from a guy in Sydney and had to share it. Named Heneedsfood, the blog is really well designed, has some lovely photos and also some really nice recipes. 

This recipe for Kruske (pears) caught my eye - they look delicious and include my favourite flavour (almonds!). 

I found the recipe on TasteSpotting. It's a great site that brings together lots of different blogs - I'd recommend it as it's great for finding inspiration! 

Envelope Club

I signed up to the Envelope Club last month after spotting it on The Culture Vultures Blog. What a great idea - sending nice things through the post to other people and getting nice things in return! 

I was delighted to receive an envelope through the post filled with stickers, a card and a folding bird from Kate - I took a few pictures to show you the kind of thing that comes through. It cheered me up mid week and I would recommend it to anyone who likes sending letters. The bird that Kate sent through fits perfectly by my desk with my other birds. 

Here's a selection of pictures of what I sent through to Kate. I found these lovely old fashioned postcards in Scarborough for 39p of the old railway advertisements and added some clippings from my sticker collection. Also, I discovered Death By Tea at the Saltaire Arts Trail whose card you can see in the photo below - she makes some really nice things so I thought I'd pass her card on. I particularly like her digitally printed cards which are very reasonable. More on Saltaire Arts Trail later. 

A little love and a lot of gloss paint

With a little love, care and a lot of gloss paint I turned my old, scruffy wooden candle holder into something fit for a living room. There are a few handy hints I picked up from my mum that I wanted to share. 

I started off with my old wooden bowl, which, over the years has become covered in wax from one to many candles blown out. As you can see from the picture below, it's in a pretty bad state and as I hovered with it over the bin I thought, wait!, I can probably do something with this...

My mum introduced me to 'Stain Stop'. An absolute godsend when decorating, stain stop can be sprayed on to anything you want to paint to cover up any greasy marks (very good for kitchen walls!). In this case I scraped off as much candle wax as I could and sprayed some over the top to stop the wax showing through. 

Using quite a thick brush I painted white gloss paint over the top, using a smaller brush to get in the nooks and crannies and giving it a second coat here and there. I left to dry and popped some candles in and it's like having a new candle holder!