The Celebration Girl

Good morning dear friends, and Happy New Year!!!

How are today? How were your celebrations? I hope you all had a really great time and that you started 2012 in the happiest of ways.

Today, as first post of the new year, I wanted to show you the Christmas table I prepared for our children. Since they are still very young, we do not do big celebrations on Christmas’ eve, but rather, we celebrate on the 25th, together with the opening of presents.

This year, I had an “Amy Atlas moment”  and decided to prepare a few special treats to surprise Luka and Zoe for breakfast, together with a decorated table, with backdrop and all. It was really fun to do it! I baked and decorated everything at night for a week, and hid all treats in our study room for the kids not to suspect anything. On the 24th, we set up all decorations and we left the table ready for Luka and Zoe to find it when they woke up. They were so happy!

The inspiration for the table came from a set of window stickers that we brought from Argentina, which featured Santa Claus and its reindeers, and with which the kids had been playing since we had arrived back to Cyprus ( they didn’t survive, so I have no photos of them!). Around the time when I was preparing the treats, I also saw a BEAUTIFUL set of Free party printables from Bird’s Party, offered at Catch My Party, featuring a super cute Rudolph reindeer, so I decided to use them, and to adjust the colours of the reindeers to match them. I also used the printables for the backdrop:  I made several red and green paper fans in different sizes, glued the party circles to them, and attached them to a frame that I already had.

The desserts themselves aimed at reflecting us, as a multicultural family, and at incorporating flavours from our different traditions. There was Pandoro, which is common in Argentina and Italy  (store-bought), gingerbread cookies (in the shape of Santa Claus and Rudolph’s faces), gingerbread houses (the flavour of which reminds my husband of his own childhood in Kosovo), kourambiedes and melomakarona (from Greek Cyprus, where we live), as well as chocolate cookies in the shape of holly and of a Christmas wreath, “Rudolph” cake pops and vanilla bean macarons with chocolate hazelnut cream.  For drinks, we served hot chocolate, and coffee for the adults.

 I made all cookies (including the cookie wreath) using the gingerbread cookies and chocolate rolled cookies recipes from Glory, of Glorious Treats, and 2 sets of Wilton cookie cutters. For the macarons, I used the recipe and the method I shared in this previous post, and I made the mini-gingerbread houses according to the templates and instructions shared on the blog Not Martha. For glueing the gingerbread houses , I used Sweetopia’s recipe for Royal Icing, which I then thinned to decorate the cookies. I LOVE that recipe, it worked really beautifully.

Here are a few more pictures of the details:

And here is how the dessert table looked next to our Christmas Tree, in our living room:

I hope you like it!

Have a wonderful week!

Good morning friends! How are you? Are you ready to say goodbye to 2011? I know I am.

It is funny how the simple act of changing one tiny little number can make us feel like the days ahead are full of possibilities, that new beginnings are possible and that wonderful things await us. I embrace that feeling every year, even if it may be just an illusion for some. I like making time for pausing and reflecting and planning and hoping.

We also have a small tradition for New Year’s eve: we try a new recipe each year. We search old cookbooks, trusted blogs and the internet in look for yumminess and we prepare that. Alas, we still haven’t decided what to prepare this year! Mole Poblano is a strong contender…I’ll let you know next year whether we made it or not! And iIf you would like to give it a try, check Amanda’s blog.

When we started looking for recipes for New Year’s eve, I also started thinking about new recipes to share with you. And I remembered that this recipe, which appeared in Whole Kitchen Magazine back in September, could not be read by those of you who do not speak Spanish and that I had received several requests to share it in English. The problem was that the recipes were exclusively for Whole Kitchen, so I couldn’t publish them here without authorization (and, being a lawyer, everything related to authorizations, copyright, etc, etc is pretty much sacred to me!).

I contacted Silvia, one of the lovely editors of Whole Kitchen, and asked her whether I could publish it or if they would be interested in publishing the recipe in English in their blog. And she, very kindly, made an exception to the general rule due to the fact that my blog is  not in Spanish, and authorized its publication here.  So, my friends, here is the recipe for Chocolate and pear mousse pie that I submitted to Whole Kitchen Magazine (and remember that if you want it in Spanish, you can read it here)

Ingredients

For the crust:

100 grs de butter

100 grs icing sugar

180 grs self-raising flour

60 grs cocoa

1 egg yolk

1 egg

For the filling:

4 medium-sized pears

100 grs  sugar

50 grs melted butter

1 tablespoon vanilla extract

1 tablespoon natural lemon juice

1 envelope of unflavoured gelatin, diluted in 1/2  cup warm water and 1/4 cup cold water

2 egg whites, beaten until stiff

200 cm3 whipped cream

For the chocolate ganache:

200 grs dark chocolate (if you don’t like the bitterness of dark chocolate, you can use half dark chocolate, half semi-sweet chocolate)

200 cm3 cream

1 tablespoon vanilla extract

Preparación.

1)      Prepare the crust:   In a bowl, mix flour, cocoa and sugar. Make a whole in the middle and add butter, incorporating everything with your fingers  until it reaches an sand-like consistency. Add the egg and the egg yolk and integrate until you have a dough that you can form into a ball. Cover the dough with cling film and let it rest in the fridge for 15 minutes.

Grease and flour a 30 cms pie pan and preheat the oven to 150C/300F.   Remove the dough from the fridge, roll it and cover the pan with it. Bake it in the oven for about 10 minutes or until the dough separates from the borders of the pan. Remove from the oven and let it cool down while you prepare the filling.

2) Prepare the filling: Peal the pears and cut them into medium-sized squares. Place them in a saucepan together with butter, sugar and lemon juice. Cook on low heat for about 15 minutes or until the pears become soft.

Once the pears are soft, remove from the heat an let them cool down for about 10 minutes. Place the preparation in a food processor or blender and pulse until having a purée. Add the vanilla and let it cool completely (you may place the purée in the fridge to accelerate the process if you so desire).

Dissolve the unflavored gelatin and add it to the pear purée. Let it rest for 5 minutes so that the gelatin starts to add consistency to the purée.

Whip the cream until firm, being careful not to over do it (we don’t want to make butter!), and add it to the purée once it is ready.

Whip the egg whites until stiff and add them to the purée. Your pear mousse is now ready!

3) Add the pear mousse to the chocolate  crust and place the pie in the fridge until the filling is solid (about 4 hours)

4)      Prepare the ganache. Chop the chocolate into small pieces and place it in a heat-resistant bowl. Put the cream in a saucepan and put it on the stove, on low heat. Once the cream starts to boil, remove it from the heat and pour it on top of the chocolate. Once the chocolate starts to melt, start beating until it reaches a creamy consistency and until firm enough to cover the pie with it.

5)      Pour the ganache over the pie, making swirls with the back of a spoon. You may also put the ganache on a piping bag and decorate the pie with it.

6) Let the pie rest until the ganache is firm and serve.

If you don’t want your pie to be too chocolatey, you can omit the ganache and serve it uncovered (just crust and filling). It is delicious either way.

Also, if you want to start the New Year with a traditional Cypriot flavour, you can make Vassilopita, a traditional cake  with a coin inside, to be eaten on the 1st of January, the day of Saint Basil.

I hope you like the pie and, most of all,  I hope you have a wonderful New Year’s Eve celebration and a fantastic start of 2012. May all your dreams come true next year, and may you always have illusions to create new dreams!

See you in 2012!

 Good morning dear friends!

I hope you had a very happy holiday celebration! We had a quiet, relaxing long weekend at home, which was great.

I prepared a small dessert table for the occasion but I didn’t finish editing the pictures yet, so I thought that, in the meantime, I could show you a few pictures of how Nicosia (my city) was decorated for the holidays. Earlier this year, in November, I took a Christmas photography course with Montréal-based photographer Jackie Rueda  and it inspired me to register some of the beauty of the holiday season with my camera- or, at least, to try!

Here are some of  the pictures I took.

I will be back before the end of the year with a yummy chocolatey recipe. Have a wonderful week!

Hello my dear friends!

It is almost evening time here in Nicosia and we are getting ready to start cooking our Christmas dinner. Since we are expats, with no nearby family, this is generally a very quiet moment for us, far from the running, shopping and cooking craze that December generally brings.  Family is always missed, but there is comfort and joy in knowing that we are together is our hearts.

One of the advantages that I see in this way of living, is that we get to choose the traditions we love and we want to incorporate into our own celebrations as a little family, and to change them and adopt new ones as it pleases us. So, when it came to choosing how to spend our Christmases, we opted for a quiet dinner at home on the eve, and a bigger, yet intimate, celebration on the actual day of the holiday. Our kids are still rather small, and they haven’t started school yet, so they don’t have many expectations about these dates…so they are doubly surprised and overjoyed when they discovered their presents and special treats on the 25th!

One of the treats that I make since we live in Cyprus are some special Greek cookies called Kourambiedes. They were the first sweet I had when I arrived in Nicosia and I loved them immediately.  They are eaten on Christmas day, and at other celebrations, such as weddings. They have cinnamon, almonds and rose water, and they melt in your mouth!

So, if you feel like baking something different these days, do try them! They are very easy, and fun for baking with kids!

Here is the recipe:

Ingredients: 

{for the filling}

30grs almonds

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1 teaspoon sugar

{for the dough}

1 egg

1 teaspoon brandy/cognac

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

100grs butter, at room temperature

1/4 cup sugar

1 cups all purpose flour

{for dusting}

rose water (1/4 cup, approximately)

icing sugar  (approximately 3 tablespoons)

1)Preheat the oven at 150C/300F

2) Process the almonds, sugar and cinnamon until the almonds are coarsely ground (do not over do it, you don’t want them to turn into powder)

3) Beat slightly the egg, vanilla and brandy. Cream butter and sugar with a wooden spoon and add it to the egg mixture. Once they are integrated, start adding flour 1 tablespoon at a time, until you have a workable dough (see picture 2)

4) Shape a piece of dough into an oval. Make a hole in the middle, put 1/4 teaspoon of the almond and cinnamon mixture in it and close it, as shown in  picture 3

4)Place the cookies on a baking sheet and bake for about 45 minutes or until barely golden (Keyword: barely! Do not let them brown!)

5) Put the rose water on a glass and get a brush ready. As soon as you remove the cookies from the oven, paint them with rose water. (The difference in temperature will allow the rose water to be absorbed by the cookies, so do not let them cool down).

6)Let the cookies rest for about 3 to 4 hours. After they are dry, dust  icing sugar over them and they are ready!

They taste delicious with a cup of tea and they last for a couple of weeks if you keep them in an airtight container.

May you have a wonderful Christmas, full of love, peace and joy.

————————

Este post está dedicado a mi amiga invisible, y compañera de andanzas fotográficas, María. Feliz navidad!!!!!!

Good afternoon dear friends!

I apologize for my silence over the past few weeks. I had originally intended to write a few posts before but, as it turns out, coming back home after a 7 week trip with twin toddlers required to readjust them to the old routine, to Nicosia’s  weather and time zone (there is a 5 hours difference between Argentina and Cyprus)  and to our normal life, in general.  So these days we have been juggling regular work and study schedules with middle-of-the-night wake-up episodes, piles and piles of clothes for washing, folding, ironing and putting away, and  a sort of  ”pre-spring”clean (always due after such long trips).

In spite of all these adjustments, it is wonderful to be back home, and coming back in the middle of the Holiday Season makes it extra special. We arrived to a beautifully-decorated Nicosia, with the streets full of lights and Christmas markets, and people singing carols in the streets of downtown. And this, for a Christmas Elf such as myself, is enough reason to be happy.

On Christmas’ eve it will actually be 4 years since I arrived to Cyprus (my husband had been here for 6 months already), so this time of the year is always one of memories of years past, a time to reflect on how much our life has changed since that day.  Back in 2007 there was just the two of us, and an almost-empty apartment with a bed, a sofa, an outdoor table with 4 chairs for the balcony, and a Christmas Tree that my husband had arranged for me, to make me feel at home. In the year that followed we furnished our house, we had twins, we  met new people, we adapted, and Cyprus started becoming our home.

Making a place one’s home involves incorporating new habits and letting go of some others. We change, sometimes imperceptibly, with every new country we live in and those mutations are only perceived when contrasted with people and places that we have met before. As Nelson Mandela said in “A long walk to Freedom”: There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered”.

One of the ways in which we have changed is in the food we eat, particularly during holidays and other celebrations. We approach new places also through their food and, in the process of adapting, we incorporate new flavours, we make them our own, and they travel with us wherever we go. This is the case with the cookies I will share with you today, which have come to  mean Christmas to me, as much as  Panettone or Turrones (which are some of Argentina’s traditional holiday sweets ).

Melomakarona are, in fact, the cookies of advent. Greek Cypriots fast during this period (they adopt a vegan diet, eliminating all animal products) and, during that fast, they snack on these cookies, which are highly caloric. Everything in their flavour speaks of this season:  they take cinnamon, clove, orange,  honey and walnuts, and they are dipped in syrup for extra sweetness. If you are looking for a different cookie to bake these days, I highly recommend these ones. They will fill your home with true holiday cheer!

Here is the recipe I use, as was given to me by my neighbour (and adapted by her  from the book “Cyprus cooking for friends“, by Sandra Lysandrou)

Ingredients

1 cup sugar

1 cup orange juice

3 cups vegetable oil (canola)

1/2 cup brandy

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1 teaspoon ground cloves

1 teaspoon salt

8 1/2 cups self raising flour

5 teaspoons baking powder

{For the syrup}

1 1/2 cups sugar

1 cup honey

1 1/2 cup water

{For topping}

1 cup finely ground walnuts mixed with 1 tablespoon of cinnamon (I like to mix walnuts and almonds)

Preparation: 

a-Preheat the oven at 140 C/ 284F

b- In a large bowl, mix sugar, oil, juice, brandy, spices, 7 cups of flour, baking powder and salt. Work the dough, adding the extra flour as needed, until it becomes fluffy. The dough must be oily, not dry, so stop adding flour when it becomes just workable.

b- Form the melomakaronas by taking small pieces of dough and shaping them into ovals with your hands.  Note that this is a dough made with self-raising flour and a fair amount of baking powder as well, so the cookies will expand in the oven. It is consequently better to make them rather small, and to place them in an ungreased baking tray  separated from each other, to give them place for growth. Bake them until  the bottom is golden brown (approximately 30 minutes).

c- Allow the cookies to cool down completely and prepare the syrup by mixing sugar, water and honey and bringing them to the boil. Once the syrup boils, remove it from the heat and dip the cookies in it, soaking them for a few seconds.  Note that it is very important that the cookies are completely cool when you do this, otherwise they will not absorb the syrup! For the same reason, you will need to reheat the syrup if it cools down before you are finished dipping the cookies.

d- Place the cookies on a wire rack to drain the excess syrup and sprinkle the crushed nuts mixture over them.

I hope you will like them !

Good morning dear friends! How are you today? Did you set up all your Christmas decorations already or is it customary to do it  only on  Christmas’ eve  in your country? I haven’t set up our Christmas tree yet, nor any of the decorations…but Santa has already passed by our home and has left me a wonderful, most desired present!!

I know, I know, Santa doesn’t exist… but my present is very, very real and it makes me very, very happy! Would you like to know what it is? Let me tell you a little story first and you will soon find out!

Okay, as you know, I have always liked cooking, especially baking. When I began doing it, I didn’t have any appliances because they were out of my budget, so I used to do everything by hand, while  dreaming of getting a hand mixer and a food processor. Around that time (early 90′s)  Argentina started to be more open to imported goods, foreign magazines became more affordable, and my mother got a subscription to Good Housekeeping Magazine. It was in those pages that I saw the first picture of a KitchenAid stand mixer and fell in love with its design. I did not really know how they differed from a regular food processor, but I loved how they looked. They were not sold in Argentina (or perhaps they were, in specialized stores, but I never saw one) and I am sure I wouldn’t have been able to afford one anyway, but I always remembered those pictures.

Fast forward to 2008. Little after we moved to Cyprus, I went to a shop near our apartment to look at food processors. We were already expecting our twins, and I thought we would put one to good use after the babies were born. And when I entered the shop, I immediately saw a shelf of KitchenAid Artisan Stand Mixers in many different colours. I remembered all those magazines I used to spend hours looking at and asked how much they costed…and that was the end of the dream. They were too expensive for us, especially with two babies coming soon. We bought a Moulinex Food Processor that served us well and -to be honest- once the babies arrived I hardly had the time to even remember the precious KitchenAid!

Last year I decided to do a little makeover to our apartment and my main target was the Kitchen. When we had moved, the Kitchen looked like this and I had always found it too dark and gloomy:

So I bought a few cans of paint, and in one week I painted the walls in a lighter colour,  all kitchen cabinets white, and an accent wall in a shade of turquoise, my favourite colour. When I was done with it, it looked like this:

 The main result of the change? I loved my kitchen,  I wanted to spend more time in it and, as a consequence, I started cooking more. I started trying things I had never done before, such as decorating sugar cookies  or covering cakes with fondant, and I started trying new recipes. And here I discovered that my dear food processor had its limitations. It just couldn’t beat for 20 minutes like some recipes required (the burnt smell was noticeable after 5 minutes), there was no “medium speed”, only two speeds, and the beater attachment…well, it didn’t really cream butter and sugar as thoroughly as instructed by some recipe directions.

So the KitchenAid came back to my mind. I browsed online, just for fun, and saw this one, the KitchenAid Artisan in Martha Stewart Blue:

That colour! It was PERFECT! (well, perfect for me, at least). Alas, it was not sold outside of  the US because it had been a limited edition, currently out of stock. A friend offered to ship it but, once taken out of the country, the warranty was void and it didn’t come in European voltage  (From what I read, it appears that the higher speeds do not perform as well with an adaptor).

There was, however, a similar shade that was sold here, the KA Artisan in Ice Blue. But the price was still very high. So I did what I always do when I want something that looks impossible: I put a picture of it in the New Years Picture collage, trusting that, if it is meant to be, the Universe will lead me to it (it sound crazy and funny, I know, but it works!).

I didn’t do anything else for about 6 months and then, one day, I remembered a story from an old school book from 2nd grade that was called “My savings”. This story was about a man who had named his house “My savings” because he had bought it with the money he had saved on cigarettes after he stopped smoking, as a way to remind himself about the importance of those expenses that look apparently small but end up having a huge impact on our budget.  So I started thinking how I could rearrange my budget to save for my beloved KitchenAid…and I found a way.

First, I found out exactly how much the KitchenAid’s current cost was, and then I divided that amount by 12, to make it more seizable, and to have a clear idea of how much I needed to save per month if I planned to buy it within a year. If I managed to save more, great, but I didn’t want to put a strain on my budget because of it (it is, after all, a luxury item, not a need!). The monthly amount was surprisingly low but I still had to find places where the budget could be cut: what were we buying on a monthly basis, automatically, but which was something we could live without?

The answer was simple: diapers. I had started potty training my children and my daughter was out of diapers already, so instead of putting the money for diapers and wipes back into the general budget, we kept it aside. We had lived without that money for 3 years and we could continue to live without it without problems because it was sufficiently small not to be missed, yet sufficiently big to represent a change by accumulation. I also started putting all small coins in a jar and changing them to notes by the end of the month, and adding that amount to the KA savings as well.

By the beginning of December, I had 2/3 of the amount required to buy the KitchenAid Artisan Stand Mixer, with no effort.

Last Friday, my husband added the remaining 1/3 as a Christmas present to myself, and we went to buy it. It was pouring rain, parking was an absolute mess, and we had to go to a second shop of the same chain to get it in Ice Blue…but it was worth it because we bought it! And here it is, on my kitchen counter!

I look at it over and over and I still cannot believe that it is MINE!!!

I haven’t used it yet because I want to read the manual first, to be sure that I am operating it properly (yes, I am intimidated by it). But I will use it soon, for all the holiday baking…and lots more after that. We will be great friends, I am sure.

And when I do use it, I will share everything I will learn with you, here.

Now if you will excuse me,  I’ll go take another look at it

I’ll be back later this week with more posts about our trip to Argentina and our Christmas preparations.

Have a beautiful Sunday and a wonderful start of the week, tomorrow!

Good morning dear friends! I hope you are having a wonderful day!

In this post, I will show you in greater detail the decorations we made for Luka and Zoe’s party. The mood for the whole party was set by the beautiful printables designed by my dear friend Laura, from Delicious Tea. I talked to you about her in this previous post and I shared with you some free printables designed by her in this other post, but there really are no words to describe her incredible talent. If you don’t know her work yet, and you enjoy all things pretty, go take a look at her website and her facebook page. Go now, I’ll wait here!

Back in February, we started discussing the concept and colors for the party, and Laura came up with those cute little pencils that appear in all the party printables. She designed the invitation, a beautiful “happy birthday” banner, 5 different cupcake toppers (shown above), circles to add to the popcorn cones…

 …fancy food labels, which were left blank because I wanted some room for changing my mind regarding what I was going to serve…

 …beautiful paper glasses, to which I added yellow and white stripped paper straws…

 …jar labels, which I added to the candy jars ( which were in fact not candy jars at all, but flower vases)…

…a welcome sign, which we framed and placed on one of the tables…

…drink labels (for lemonade, water, and orange juice), which I attached with twine (in Lemondrop by the Twinery)…

…And 3 different souvenir tags, to close the clear bags where I placed a sugar cookie decorated with royal icing in the colors of the party. The souvenir cookie is shaped as a splash of paint, and came in two sizes with an Ikea cookie cutter set!

As I mentioned in my previous post, the souvenirs were placed on three styrofoam boards, which were covered in papers in orange, yellow and green, and which were  used as a backdrop for the main dessert table.

Laura, who is from Buenos Aires,  sent all printables to Cyprus back in April, and those printables came back to Argentina with me when the plans for the party changed.

Once in Cordoba, I crafted with my family the rest of the decorations: a piñata, and paper streamers. We hanged three lines of fishing thread over the backyard and we hanged the piñata and streamers from them, so they looked like they were floating in the sky.

I made the piñata using a regular paper lantern, and I attached to it  2 inch (5 cms) punched cardboard circles in orange, yellow and green, with the help of a glue gun and lots of patience. The streamers were made out of vellum paper using this tutorial from Oh happy day (one of my very favorite blogs). They are really easy to make and lthey look very nice!

Finally, we  bought boxes made from corrugated cardboard in green, orange and yellow so that guests could take home a piece of cake to enjoy with breakfast the following day.

Yes, that is me in the picture above, cutting the cakes.

In the next post I will show you all activities we did with the children!

Have a lovely weekend!

Good evening dear friends! I hope that you are having a lovely week.

It has taken me a while to put together the pictures of Luka and Zoe’s party, but I have finally organized them all, so here is the first of the four posts that I have prepared about it. The first three posts will be mainly visual: I will show you what the party looked like, what we ate, what we crafted, what we did. In the fourth and last post, I will let you know what went right, what went wrong-and what I learnt.

As you know, Luka and Zoe’s birthday was in August. I had, however, started planning this party almost from the minute they turned two years old. I didn’t decide on all details right away, of course, but I did know two things: 1) I wanted an art party, because they greatly enjoy art and because I thought it could entertain children of different ages, and 2) I wanted the color palette to be  fun, vibrant and summery, so I chose the colors yellow, green and orange. The rest of the details started coming to my mind little by little and, by January, I had a clear idea of what I wanted.

By June, however, a major complication appeared: we couldn’t find a suitable, affordable venue in Nicosia. We live in an apartment, so we celebrate Zoe and Luka’s birthdays in kid-friendly venues, where they can run and play in a different way- But the ones we counted on were unavailable, or had gone out of business, or were not suitable anymore. We searched, and searched, and asked around but couldn’t find anything. We had almost decided not to do a big birthday celebration when I had an idea: why not delay the party until November and do it, instead, in Argentina, with all my family and friends? So that’s what we did: I gathered all the supplies I had already bought and travelled with them to my home city, Córdoba, bought here what was missing, crafted the decorations (other than the lovely printables designed by Delicious Tea) and baked everything that was served, all in one week. It was exhausting, yes, but it was absolutely worth it, because we were surrounded by love, by family, by real friends.

We celebrated the party in the backyard of a house rented by my brother for his professional practice (he is a psychologist). The day was beautiful: sunny but not too hot, and with a rather light breeze. We opted for an intimate celebration, and invited around 25 persons only, of which 6 were children of different ages. We set up two tables with the food, and a small table with art supplies for the children, and scattered chairs here and there, so that guests would mingle.

The main dessert table was set up against a wall. As a backdrop, we used three styrofoam boards covered in the colors of the party and attached the souvenirs  (which were sugar cookies coated with royal icing in green, yellow and orange) to them. On top of them, we hanged the birthday banner (also designed by Delicious Tea).

Here are some detailed views of the main table:

 We served popcorn in yellow paper cones (which were a big hit!), cake-pops coated with semi-sweet chocolate…

vegan chocolate and vanilla cupcakes, frosted with vegan buttercream…

…an assortment of sprinkles for the children to decorate their cupcakes with…

 and mini “splash of paint” sugar cookies, decorated with royal icing in the colors of the party.

We also had two two-tier vegan birthday cakes, each of a different flavor: lemon cake with vanilla buttercream and home-made orange jam, chocolate cake with chocolate buttercream and berries jam, marble cake with vanilla and chocolate buttercream, and chocolate cake with vanilla buttercream and orange jam.

On the second table, we set-up the supplies: Napkins, spoons…

plates, straws and extra glasses…

…as well as three jars filled with lemon, orange and apple candies (which were very common during my own childhood and which I wanted to share with my own children). The candies were taken by children as souvenirs too, at the end of the party.

In the next post I will show you all the decorations we crafted, as well as details of the fabulous printables designed by my dear friend, the super talented Laura, from Delicious Tea.

Have a wonderful week!

Good morning dear friends!

I’m sorry for the delay in posting this week: we arrived in Argentina last Tuesday after a grueling travel experience, and we have been enjoying some wonderful family time, greeting friends, walking around, re-discovering (for me) and discovering (for my husband and my children) my home of city, Cordoba. This week, I have been fully immersed in the preparation of my children’s belated birthday party, which will take place next Saturday. So it has been hard to keep the blog updated!

Today, however, I won’t talk to you about Cordoba, but about Belgrade, Serbia, which is the city where my husband’s family is, and where we spent one week before flying to Argentina. I had been to Belgrade many times in the past, but this was my first time in Autumn (my favourite season) and I must say that I found it particularly stunning. The trees of Belgrade’s many parks were gloriously red, orange and yellow, and the streets were covered in dead leaves, which crunched under our steps. The weather was fresh, but not yet completely cold, which allowed us to walk along its streets with ease, with our children comfortably sitting in their double stroller.

Walking is actually one of the things I enjoy doing in Belgrade the most, because it is a very walkable and walked city. I love its parks and its cafes (they say the coffee house tradition was born in Belgrade, before Paris and Rome) and, of course, its poslasticarnica, or traditional pastry shops. Actually, one of the city’s oldest Poslasticarnica, dating from 1936, belongs to one of my husband’s brother in law, Max (whom you can see in the picture below, making the decorations for a traditional Serbian bread, traditionally served during the Family’s Saint’s day).

Traditional pastry shops are generally small, with just a few tables, where you can sit and enjoy a cup of strong Serbian/Turkish Coffee with delicious pastries which denote Serbia’s mixed past: traditional European cakes and oriental delicacies such as baklava. Regarding baklava, for example, you can have it in three different ways: Turkish Baklava (with home-made phyllo pastry), Greek Baklava, and Baklava with Plazma (a Serbian variation, characterized by the inclusion in the filling of a the crumbs of Plazma cookies)

Another favourite spot in the city is Kalemegdan, the old fortress with its beautiful surrounding parks, that overlook the confluence of the rivers Savva and Danube.

Kalemegdan is a great place to walk and, if you have children, you may want to know that the local zoo is located there too. It is also a very common spot for retired people, who play chess in the chess tables located there, a tradition that seems to exist since the times of Tito.

At the entrance to the Park (coming from downtown’s main shopping street, Knez Mihaijlova), one can find small shops selling handicraft goods such as copper pots for making coffee, lace works, knits in traditional patterns, militar memorabilia, etcetera.

The picture below is of a type of street shop that is very common in the city and that I haven’t seen elsewhere: a place where one can find shoe laces of all types and colors. These shops were one of the first things I noticed when I visited Belgrade for the first time-and the variety they offer is deeply missed by my husband when we are abroad!

I hope you enjoyed this small tour of Belgrade! I will be back next week with pictures from Cordoba- and from Luka and Zoe’s birthday party!

Have a great week and weekend!