恭禧发财 (Happy New Year!)

The beautiful table

This weekend I celebrated the coming of the Year of the Horse with my girl the talented events planner and designer, Alexia Lenoir and friends with a Chinese themed lunch at my place. It was another excuse to work with Alexia, to celebrate the new year in style but most of all to treat our friends to a tasty feast and some quality time.

Handwritten invites

We decided to send handwritten invites via post; in today’s world of Facebook invites and text messages, it’s nice to actually get something in your hands.

Homemade fortune cookies

Menu

Starters

Steamed prawn dumplings

Vegetable Spring Rolls

Homemade Fortune Cookies

Prawn Toast

Prawn Crackers

Mains

Chilli prawns on skewers

Sticky Jasmine Rice

Steamed Pak Choi

Vegetable Stir-Fry

Steamed Sea Bass

Desserts

Mango, passion fruit and banana dessert

Coconut & lime ice-cream

Prosecco, mango, apple and pomegranate jelly shots

To top it all off, we had delicious Jasmine Tea and Green Tea cocktails.

The theme of the day was ‘doing you’. Someone asked me what I meant by that the other day so here is my attempt to explain it.

For me, it means expressing myself freely and living my life authentically without fear of judgement from other people. More often than not, other people aren’t the problem. We are our own worst enemies and we enslave ourselves with fears and worries and judgements. I have found that when I allow myself to be authentic, people are much more inclined not only to accept me (even if they don’t necessarily agree or support what I am doing), but also it gives them the freedom to do the same in a way that feels right to them. As the African proverb says ‘When there are no enemies within, the enemies outside cannot hurt you’.

‘In the sweetness of friendship let there be laughter and sharing of pleasures. For in the dew of little things the heart finds it’s morning and is refreshed’ Khalil Gibran

Wishing you prosperity and happiness!

Peace & Love

xxx

Pin It

Mango & Lemon Fusion Cupcakes (Inspired by Ellen Gallagher)

Back in June I went to see the Ellen Gallagher: AxME exhibition at the Tate Modern and was inspired to create a cupcake flavour.

The exhibition was very interesting: Ellen uses a mixture of different mediums including paint, photographs & even plasticine to bring her art to life. After taking it all in, I came away thinking of all things yellow and decided try out variations of either lemon or mango cupcakes.

I started out with a vanilla recipe as the base. The lemon cupcake had a lemon curd centre with a whipped cream topping, lightly flavoured with lemon curd. For the mango cupcake, I pureed some sweet mangoes (the Pakistani variety I believe) for the centre and flavoured the whipped (double) cream with some of the mango puree and a little icing sugar.

However, when I put everything together, I mixed up the toppings & fillings and ended up with a lemon, mango fusion. The best variety being the mango centre with the lemon cream topping.

At first I was kicking myself for messing up but when I tasted it, it was actually really good! It got me thinking about making mistakes, how often I seem to make them and how annoyed I get with myself for it.

The truth is, no-one is perfect, least of all me and that as long as I'm growing and evolving I will continue to make mistakes. The good news is that sometimes, they can turn out to be important discoveries and if you're really lucky, very tasty!

Here's to making tasty mistakes!

Peace & Love
xx

Pin It