Cupcakes & early Christmas presents!

It was my office Christmas party on Friday which was fun but messy on my part, let's not go into details! Needless to say, all day Saturday was spent nursing a massive hangover. My friend Pia came around and made the hangover slightly less awful, we went shopping and went to Winter Wonderland in Hyde Park (overrated if you ask me, although it could be that I am biased due to an unfortunate combination of a sore head and screaming kids).

We exchanged presents as well, she had made me an AWESOME box full of embroidery stuff so we can get started on our new hobby. Isn't it pretty?

She even made me cute little needle cushions!

And since this post is dedicated to lovely things, I thought I'd add a few baking pics from tonight. We have another charity cake sale at work tomorrow and I have made a huge batch of banana cupcakes with sinfully delicious white chocolate frosting. Definitely not for the faint of heart, in fact I feel semi-sick after a few too many tastes.

Pretty polkadot cases imported from Brussels

White chocolate. Mmmm!

The finished cupcakes in all their glory, may they make someone's belly very happy!

And finally, a much better picture of our Christmas tree than in my previous post

Now I need to finish some work. Oh sweet, sweet Thursday come soon!

The hardest of hearts

I absolutely love Christmas. Completely and unconditionally. Every year I find myself getting extremely excited about big coats, long scarves & mittens, ice skates, Starbucks' red cups, pretty gift wrap, Phil Spector's Christmas hits, mulled wine and lame TV Christmas movies. This in itself isn't the problem. The problem is that I start getting excited about all of this around mid-October. And every year I find that around mid-December, the novelty has worn off and Christmas becomes this big, stressful anticlimax.

This year I am really trying not to give in to my cravings. It's pretty hard to avoid the whole hoo-ha when living in central London, as Oxford Street has been blinged up with tacky lights for several weeks now. And at work, Christmas has been on my daily agenda for ages.

I do love you Christmas, I really do, but I just can't bear to spoil it for myself this year. So I won't allow myself to give in to the cheer until 1st December, where I'll be decorating my Christmas tree with these, amongst others:

Yeah, I couldn't help myself.