Pinoy Hubby

My mum and one of my best friends have their birthdays very close together so usually when I travel down to my home town I try to see them both at once - and I usually bake them both a birthday cake. This year it had to be more of a flying visit (one day rather than an overnight stay) and I felt I barely had time to make one cake the day before, let alone two, as we were up to our ears in wedding planning with only a few weeks to go. I didn't want to go empty handed though so decided to bake a batch of cupcakes and give them half each in a pretty box. So they had to be quite special cupcakes! I spent a little while thinking about flavours and looking through recipes and chose this recipe for Mojito cupcakes from Baking Mad . A mojito is a cocktail made from rum, lime juice and mint (a long drink topped up with sparkling water). I had a tiny bottle of Bacardi rum I'd kept from a plane journey, have plenty of mint in my garden and also had some key lime flavoured icing sugar from...

I love fruit-flavoured ice cream, but not flavours like strawberry - I like more unusual, zingy flavours like apple. When I lived in Germany in the late 90s there was an amazing ice cream parlour in my town that did apple ice cream. Quite often flavours like that come in a sorbet but they are much nicer as a creamy ice cream, so I was looking forward to trying Haagen Dazs' mango and raspberry ice cream when they sent me some vouchers. The delicious mango ice cream has a swirl of raspberry running through it which gives a sharp contrast. The flavour is only available in Tesco at the moment (£4 for 500ml) and is a lovely summery treat. I decided to try serving it two ways, firstly Eton Mess style with broken up pieces of meringue; this would be really nice topped with some fresh mango chunks and raspberries. Then I decided to be a bit more decadent and make an ice cream milk shake. Place a few scoops of ice cream in a blender and top up with milk - how much depends on how thick...

It's finally here - I'm getting married this week! We got engaged last August   and I would say 10 months is a good amount of time to plan a wedding - enough time to get everything done and not so long that you are waiting ages for the big day! So everything is ready - well, almost. I could have done with losing some more weight and would have liked to practice our first dance more than once given we can't dance. I'm also crossing my fingers that it doesn't rain this Saturday as the weather hasn't been great lately and our wedding is mainly outside! I thought I'd do a meal plan since I always do but this obviously isn't going to be a normal week: Monday Lunch  - with work colleagues who are over from the US and Asia Dinner - chicken curry which I didn't do last week Tuesday Lunch - provided as I'm at an all day conference Dinner - social night out with the team after the conference Wednesday Lunch - salad! Dinner - chicken pie, with mash for...

On a recent trip to Edinburgh for training at my company’s head office, I stayed an extra day to spend time with a team I work with, so ended up travelling back a day later than everyone else. That meant I was on my own, so at the airport settled in for dinner with my Kindle at the Sir Walter Scott Wetherspoons.   The food is good value and the service is fast, which is generally what you want before a flight – though Edinburgh airport is so small you can practically see the departure gate from the pub. The fact that Wetherspoons has a huge amount of choice on its menu is really good – I often don’t want a heavy meal before a flight, but on the other hand it’s my only chance to eat as I will get home late so I want what I consider a ‘proper’ dinner.   This time I was in the mood for something simple so ordered macaroni cheese, which was baked in the oven and had a creamy sauce, though I thought the extra cheese on top was a bit unnecessary – and so to be honest were the chips ...

Do you know where the highest restaurant in the UK is? You’d be right to guess London, but it’s not actually the Shard, the 95-storey skyscraper near London Bridge that was completed in 2012 – that is the tallest building in the European Union. The highest restaurant in there is on the 35th floor, and there is a bar on the 52nd floor, but it's not a restaurant. In fact, the highest restaurant is just up the road from London Bridge, on Bishopsgate - Duck & Waffle . It's on the 40th floor of the Heron Tower, a commercial office building; you step into a glass lift and get a great view over the City as you are whisked upwards. The restaurant is definitely something special; it's also quite expensive as you might expect from somewhere that can boast such incredible views. The décor inside is worth noting as well - steel and glass meets weathered wood with impressive chandeliers - but of course it's the view everyone comes for. The main dining room (there is also a priva...

The wedding is almost here! I'm not going to be the sort of bride who starves herself to lose the last couple of pounds before the big day, for three reasons: 1) I have a LOT more than a couple of pounds to lose, so one last week of minimal calories won't make much difference, though of course I'm not going to pig out 2) I don't want to be ratty and miserable because I'm hungry 3) My wedding dress is being made to fit me like a glove and my final fitting is Saturday 11th, so I can't lose or put on any weight after that! So I'm kind of stopping the diet - I will continue to fast between dinner and lunch the next day, and have salad for lunch, but I will reintroduce some carbs into my diet. If I'm a little bigger, my wedding dress doesn't need to be laced up quite so tightly, but if I'm a little thinner, it might not stay up properly! So here's the meal plan for this week which with all the wedding planning I forgot about so it's kind of la...

I've been too busy for card making for months now so have had to start sending people shop-bought cards.  But when it came to my fiancé's birthday I wanted to do something special; or at least, a quick and simple make that at least showed I had made an effort. I gave him a selection of birthday presents related to Marvel superheros - as well as films like Avengers and Captain America, we've been watching all the Marvel and DC universe television series together, and I'm currently really hooked on Arrow. A while ago I got a couple of rolls of Marvel wrapping paper from Primark of all places and used this to wrap his gifts. I also decided to use this as the background to his birthday card to create a comic book card, so cut out a piece of wrapping paper and stuck it onto a large A5 card blank. I printed out the words 'have a super birthday' from the computer and mounted the strip of paper onto a yellow and red polka dot backing paper and placed the middle of the c...

I've been baking a fair bit with gluten-free flour over the past year or so as I have a work colleague who can't eat gluten. From reading other blogs I know there are a lot of people out there in the same situation, and it's amazing the number of things you can't eat or have to check the labels on in case they contain gluten (sausages, for instance). And I always assumed she wouldn't be able to eat breakfast cereal as that contains gluten, but it turns out I was wrong. Provena is a specialist in gluten-free cereals, flours and baking products - its range is oat-based and the company says it uses some of the purest and highest grade of oats in the world, which gives a better flavour. The oats they use are grown in Finland, a country with the lowest air pollution in Europe, which is all good for their products! They sent me some products to review and also some to give away to one lucky reader - see below for the entry form. Even if you can eat gluten, these products...