50 Shades food ideas for Valentines Day

February 13, 2017February 9, 20171 Comment

If you’ve decided to go for the 50 shades theme for Valentines day instead of the Vampire or Witch themes for Valentines day then this is for you.

Since you’re more likely to spend your day under the covers you wouldn’t need a big feast to keep you busy, therefore I have chosen a simple blueberry muffin for breakfast. According to E.L James, Christian Grey wanted Anastasia Steele to eat healthy food so for the dinner I have also chosen a homemade chicken salad and no-bake Cheesecake with fresh ingredients for dessert.

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Blue Berry Muffins.

My mother in law recently made these muffins and they were wonderfully soft. She absolutely loves eating them with cream and jam and I thought that that would be a great breakfast option. Who doesn’t like blueberry muffins?

These blueberry muffins are box muffins, so you can just use the instructions on the box, add some fresh blueberries if you like and garnish with whipped cream and strawberry or blueberry jam.

Chicken salad

INGREDIENTS

Fresh Chicken Salad ( serves 2)
1 tablespoon olive oil
2 chicken Breasts
1 large tomato
4 leaves of lettuce
1/2 sweet red or yellow pepper
Cheddar cheese cubes (optional)
Croutons (optional)
Salt and pepper to taste
Honey and mustard dressing

First fry the chicken breast in the olive oil.Then chop all the vegetables and tear the lettuce into pieces by using your hands. You can add cheddar cheese cubes an croutons if you like. Mix in the honey and mustard sauce and salt and pepper and its ready to serve.

No-bake Cheesecake

This no-bake cheesecake is one of my favourite recipe’s it is so easy to make and it doesn’t take long at all. It is a light desert with a lovely cheese flavour.

Have a happy Valentines day tomorrow and I hope you all get spoiled!!

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50 Shades of Grey Inspired Valentines

February 6, 2017February 6, 20172 Comments

Since 50 Shades Darker is releasing for Valentines Day, I thought why not use it as a theme for Valentines Day.

Today’s drink will be a Perfect martini, with equal amounts of sweet and dry vermouth and garnished with pearls instead of olives.

Easy and elegant.

A Witchy theme for Valentines Day

January 30, 2017January 25, 20174 Comments

This year I decided to change it up a little for valentines day so each week I’ll be featuring a different theme. Last week we had a Vampire theme but this week we’ll have a witch theme. This idea has a lot of wonderful features, from love potions, herb infused meals and massage oils to enchant your lover this Valentines day.

Today I have made a ‘Love Potion’ and a ‘Lust’ potion. I was watching Shrek 3 the other day and noticed that the fairy god mother added some lust, passion and desire to her little love potion so I decided to do the same and what better way to throw all caution to the wind than to include some alcohol :p

To start off you need some cute bottles that looks like it can hold potions. Then you’ll need some old paper to label your potion. I got my little bottles from our local Daiso store ( its like a $5 store). To make your paper look old, you can soak it in some tea and bake it in the oven for 5-10 minutes. It works better if you tear the paper before baking it rather than after.

First pour some hot water in a container and leave a teabag in there for a few minutes

Then write your message on a piece of paper and place it in the container. Use the teabag to soak and colour the paper. Make sure you wet the whole piece of paper then remove and place in a baking pan or dish in the oven for 5 minutes. If you feel that you need a more burned look you can leave it in for another 5-8 minutes.

I glued the paper to the bottles with syrup. That way I could easily remove it after use and reuse the bottles for something else later on.

I made two different cocktails mainly because the first one had grapefruit in it and my husband doesn’t care much for grapefruit. The second one I made with berry juice instead that’s also evident in the colours of the two ‘potions’. I also used LOTS of Vodka…maybe too much, so if you don’t mind a very strong vodka flavour in your drinks you can rather use 1 shot vodka per cup of juice. To be honest the drink is very potent so if you’re not used to drinking rather go for the softer version, because I only had a small sip here and there to taste the drinks and at one stage I was swinging around the living room… not really ideal when you’re preparing stuff for the blog.

Love potion

Ingredients

8 Tablespoons grapefruit juice
2 tablespoons apple or white grape juice
4 tablespoons strawberry Vodka

Combine in a blender and mix. Pour into cute little bottles for display

Lust Potion

6tablespooons Grapefruit juice
2 tablespoons Berry juice
4 tablespoons strawberry vodka

Combine in a blender and mix. Pour into cute little bottles for display

As mentioned above you can do a milder version of either one of the drinks by using 1 cup of juice for every shot of Vodka. You could also try my White wine sangria recipe.

Vampire inspired food ideas

January 26, 2017January 24, 20174 Comments

This week has been so much fun preparing so far. Today we can put together all the foods for our Vampire Valentines dinner. It will include some lovely tomato soup,some medium to raw steak with a cherry wine sauce and red velvet brownies. Also don’t forget your Vampire Blood cocktail

I’ve tried to use foods with shades of red because vampires when I think of vampires I always think of red and blacks.

Tomato soup

I’ve used my homemade soup recipe for this meal.

Steak and sauce

Red wine and cherry sauce

1tbs honey
2 tbs sugar
1 cup pitted cherries
1 cup red wine

Heat the honey in a pan on a low heat, add the cherries then add the sugar. Let it simmer until the sugar has disolved. Add the wine and bring to a simmer. This sauce is great to add to steak. You can even cook the steak or pieces of beef in this sauce for a lovely bold wine infused taste.

I’ve chosen steak because vampires would probably be more into meaty dishes than vegetables…. you can cook the steak the way you prefer, but I made mine extra raw for visuals.

Red Velvet and Oreo truffle brownies.

Red velvet brownies. To keep things simple for the brownies I used a red velvet mug recipe as it reduces the baking time especially since Valentines day is on a week day this year and you might not have a lot of time to prepare your meal.

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INGREDIENTS

3 tbsp buttermilk
1½ tbsp vegetable oil
red gel food colouring
2 tbsp granulated sugar
1 tbsp cocoa powder
pinch salt
4 tbsp self-raising flour, see notes

Truffle topping

4 Oreo cookies
1 tablespoon cream cheese
100g melting chocolate

Mix all the wet ingredients together. Then and the sugar cocoa and salt. Whisk mixture together. Fold in the self-raising flour. Grease a square (5×3 1/2 inc) microwave proof container. Microwave at high for 1-1/12 minutes.

Crush the Orea cookies and melt the cream cheese in the microwave (1/2 minute). Mix the cookies and cream cheese together and scoop onto the red velvet cake. You will have to help the mixture along with your finger. Top with melted chocolate and cool in the fridge for about 30 minutes. It could also be served warm.

….and there it is, your vampire inspired Valentines dinner.

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Valentines day ideas – Vampires

January 23, 2017January 10, 2017Leave a comment

I learned long ago that it is important for your relationship to celebrate the small things. Even if you don’t go all out its important to find little moments in life to celebrate and appreciate your partner. Valentines day may be over rated but it is definitely one of those days where you can show your partner how much you love them. It doesn’t mean you have to spend thousands of dollars to prove your love but rather spending time and putting effort into your relationship. Personally I’ve never loved Valentines day. In fact during my school years I dreaded it because I never got anything from any of the boys.

When I started dating it was a mission to buy presents because they always had simple gifts in store that my boyfriend never really liked. A few years ago however I made him a nice home cooked dinner that we ate on our porch and it was more romantic than anything else I could buy him. This year I’ve decided to theme-up my valentines dinner so for the following 3 weeks I’ll share some of my valentines ideas with you, with a different theme each week.

This weeks theme will be Vampires, not any specific genre of vampire but just vampires in general. Now bare in mind, vampires don’t eat anything other than drinking blood, but we’re still human and this is only a theme :p

For today we’ll be making a Vampire inspired drink. I have an alcoholic and non-alcoholic version.

INGREDIENTS ( 1 serving)

80 ml coconut water
2 tablespoons chocolate syrup
1/2 cup (125 gram) cherry pie filling (check below for substitute)
red food dye
1 drop yellow food dye
Pinch of salt (optional but its pretty sweet so the salt helps to reduce the sweetness)
1 cup red semi sweet red wine ( for the alcoholic version)

METHOD

Mix everything together in a food processor and serve. You could even heat it up

Instead of cherry pie filling you can make your own but its very sweet. Take a cup of fresh cherries pitted. In a pan boil 2 tablespoons honey with 4 tablespoons sugar over a low heat. Add the cherries and stir. Cook on a low heat for about 10 minutes until the cherries are nice and soft. Use same measurements as described above.

Notes: for the alcoholic version of this recipe you can mix 2 tablespoons of the mixture to 1 cup of red wine, mix well and serve.

I really hope you like this idea 🙂