As a vegan it can be quite expensive to stock up on treats for Christmas, it often feels that the more ingredients companies remove from food, the more they cost, so this year I decided to make a lot of my own baked goods. I spent a few days in the kitchen and made lots of yummy vegan beige food, including: Welsh cakes (recipe here), sausage rolls, cinnamon rolls, gingerbread people, pain au chocolat (not in the photo) and mince pies with citrus and apple. It was all delicious and, unsurprisingly, was gone in no time even though I made loads of everything. It's definitely given me the baking bug again and I can't wait to go shopping so I can buy more ingredients.
You Tube: Nikkie Tutorials
Nikkie Tutorials is a make-up artist and You Tuber from The Netherlands, but speaks perfect English. She's funny and very easy to watch. Whether I'm watching one of her many tutorials or her monthly 'Hits and Oh God No's', I enjoy her videos. This past week she uploaded a new video every day so I watched her a lot. Her make-up is always flawless, but she has a way of making it look so effortless and easy.
Watched: Christmas films
As I posted about a couple of weeks ago, I have a few Christmas films that I watch every single year in the run up to Christmas, and this week I got through quite a few of them. My favourite, as always, was Santa Claus: The Movie. I've watched that film every Christmas since I was 6 and I love it just as much now as I did then.
Read: Tea Party Beauty
I only discovered Tea Party Beauty a couple of months ago, but it's quickly become one of my favourite blogs. As the name would suggest, it's predominantly a beauty blog, but you'll also find some lifestyle posts as well as blogging tips and tricks. Every Wednesday she posts a 'Wittering Wednesday' where she either has a little rant about a subject that's bothering her or talks about something that means a lot to her. These are my favourite posts of hers and I never miss one.
Before I started blogging my main hobby was crafting, in particular jewellery making and decoupage. I've shown you before the Superman shoes I crafted for a friend, and this week was the turn of Spiderman. My brother has a godson who is mad on superheroes and Marvel, so he asked me to decoupage a pair of trainers for him. Unfortunately I didn't have a huge amount of time to do them in, so they're not exactly how I wanted them, but for a rush job I'm pretty happy with how they turned out.
Annoyed by: The Lush Boxing Day Sale
The Lush Boxing Day Sale is something I've looked forward to since their limited edition products were released in October. I knew there were certain things that I wanted to stock up on while the price was low, so I saved some money and counted down the days until midnight on the 25th December. I stalked the site from Midnight until around 5am and no sale went live, then I fell asleep. Thankfully when I woke up at around 9am the sale still wasn't up so I didn't miss anything. I keep hitting the 'refresh' button and as soon as I saw the 'sale' section I tried constantly to add things to my basket, but the site kept crashing. This continued until gone 5pm! I was on the verge of taking my money and spending it elsewhere when finally I managed to check out. I didn't get everything on my list, but everything on my list that was in the sale I managed to get. From what I hear I was very lucky, so many people couldn't check out at all, and by the time the site was working properly everything had sold out. Last year's sale wasn't quite as bad, but also had similar issues, so my annoyance is that Lush hadn't learned their lesson from the previous year. They must have anticipated a huge amount of traffic, yet weren't fully prepared for it. I really hope they are better prepared next year, because, quite frankly, it was a bit ridiculous.
Discovered are vegan: Jus Roll
A few weeks ago I discovered that the majority of products sold by Jus Roll are vegan, meaning that once again I can enjoy a warm croissant, apple Danish, cinnamon roll and more. It's been so nice this week to be able to have a pastry for breakfast (not something I'd do on a regular basis, but it was Christmas). They're all super easy to make too; simply unroll the dough, cut into 6 and bake for 11 minutes.
Beauty product of the week: B. Rich Lipstick in Carmen
I've had my Christmas Day make-up planned for a couple of weeks now, but unfortunately when the big day rolled around I found myself with really tight, dry lips. I had to ditch the idea of a bold matte red lipstick and instead reach for something creamier and moisturising, the B. Rich lipsticks are just that. The shade I chose is Carmen, a very wearable red with brown undertones and subtle shimmer. I had my make-up on for around 14 hours and my lips definitely felt more moisturised and soft after I took my make-up off. It needs touching up throughout the day, but if your lips are in bad shape, I'd recommend this range of lipsticks.
I'm sure you're wondering why I haven't talked about Christmas in this post; maybe you're wondering what I did, where I went or what I got, but to be honest, Christmas is family time so I don't feel comfortable taking loads of photos and telling you everything that went on. I hope you understand that and respect my privacy. I do hope you all had a great time, no matter what you celebrate or who you spent it with.
