Jubilee Plans

Since having a blog and making some wonderful overseas friends, I have become extremely proud to be British. I love sharing pictures of my Scotland cottage and taking part in different UK based events. This coming month will be the Queen’s Jubilee and I am excited to participate in the Street Party fun! I have a whole week of Best of British planned here at Messyla. I will be baking from the Great British Bake-Off cookbook, having tea parties and decorating my workshop and garden to suit. Today I started to add my little Jubilee touches here and there: starting with the summer house and, of course, something for the animals.

My mum and dad found this bird house at a dumping ground – someone actually wanted to bin this beauty! We got it painted to match the Summerhouse and placed it in our ancient tree. Decorated with some bunting using my simple paper DIY bunting tutorial..the birds are ready for their tree party.
It’s something for the world to be excited about. And I love any excuse to decorate with bunting, bake and drink from beautiful china cups. I urge you all to celebrate too!

P.S. sorry for the lack of camera photos this past week. I am still trudging through a gigantic order and I only have my iPhone to hand. :-[
Messyla’s Jubilee Week takes place on the 4th-8th June. Yay!

52 Weeks of Baking: Week Nineteen.

Coconut Loaf

Coconut is something that has never tickled my fancy. I am not a fan of bounty bars and I have never really liked coconut snowballs. Although, I know my family love coconut so I decided to make them this little treat.

The recipe derives from a basic Madeira Cake but with some tweaks and alterations here and there:

A little butter to grease the loaf tin
175g Unsalted Butter
175g Sugar
3 Eggs
1 Tsp Vanilla Bean Paste
225g Plain Flour
1 tsp Baking Powder
2 Tbsp Milk
75g Desiccated Coconut (in with the flour)

For the icing:
The icing is just icing sugar and water to make your usual white paste. Spread onto the loaf, when cooled, and then pat in as much desiccated coconut as you see fit!

I use my food processor for pretty much all of these recipes on my 52 Weeks challenge. I love how simple loafs are: they can be whizzed up, popped in the oven and be finished while you do the rest of your work. A definite busy-girls bake!

I cooked the loaf for about 70 mins (+) untill it came out clean on the skewer. The recipe (from Rachel Allen’s Food for Friends) suggests cooking for 55-60 minutes, but I found that mine needed a little longer to be perfect.

The lacey table cover pictured above was gifted to me by the sweetest man in the village. He stopped by my work and dropped off a bag of old sheets and table cloths that were his wifes that he though I would love. And I do! Most are round, which is perfect since we just got our round kitchen table, and even scalloped. I also got some bed sheets with roses on them. Swoon! These lovely people make my day.

Saturday…time for some coffee and then some pizza with beer! Enjoy.xxo

Foxy Loxy

Fox prints have become a sure favourite of mine in fabrics, papers and pretty much anything else. I love their little bushy tails. Again, much like the owls, when I see the fox in our garden I am a little fearful. They don’t so much look like my stamps – but they are cute, need to eat too and have babies in a make-shift house beyond our back garden. But my fox stamp has gone down a treat in the card ‘sector’, so I thought it was time to get it onto some bunting. It’s a beautiful cream cotton as the base with red bias binding and red foxes.

The bunting is handstamped and will be added to the online shoppe this weekend! Hope you all love it. Do you have weekend plans?x

The More Scenic Route Home

I am a lucky little crafter who lives in a village on the outskirts of Glasgow. When I look out my window each day I see greenery of my garden and greenery of the woodland across the road that separates the two streets. So last week I embraced the rays of sunshine and took the more scenic route home from work through the woodland area. Nature is wonderful! This is all I really can say. I am so impressed by it and am in awe by it’s beauty. I sound all nature-hippyness but..I am!

Natural wild flowers, hollowed out hundred-year-old trees and moss that is the most perfect colour of green. I am happy.

x

What’s Going On?

Another busy weekend has been and gone. I can’t believe how fast the weeks are flying in – it will be the summer time before we know it! This weekend I visited a wholesale shop, strolled around the West End with Cameron, drank some lovely Artisan Roast coffee and attended the Cushion & Cake 1st Birthday Party. All of which were extremely fun and left my little feet pinching in my pink brogue heels.

Sunday was more of a constant work day. More luggage tag making for Cycling Scotland..yeesh..it’s hard. The monotony of it is difficult to handle – I go a tad insane and start laughing. Followed by crying. Then I just progress through! This cycle happens around 12 times in the day though, if i’m honest. I love typewriter work, which makes it all very enjoyable in the end.

Today I made little buns with vanilla cream and chocolate drizzled over them in preparation for my sister’s wedding shower in July! They are so yummy, I have the recipe to share with you all this week. I hope this week goes swiftly and the weekend approaches soon enough for us all!

With love, xx.

52 Weeks of Baking: Week Eighteen.

Vanilla Bunt Cake

Something I have been desperate to try since taking this challenge is a bunt tin. Using moulds for baking is the simplest way to make something look extravagant and impressive with little effort in sculpting it to said shape. Well, so I thought. Using the mould was not as easy as I had hoped. My mum has never got this recipe to turn out right either, which is comforting since she is the Queen of baking.

The cake itself is the most delicious vanilla cake. It’s a large, wet mixture that needs about an hour to cook. And can be eaten within seconds of serving..it’s that good! The recipe is from Nigella Lawson’s Christmas book.

225g Soft Butter
300g Caster Sugar
6 Eggs
350g Plain Flour
1/2 Teaspoon Bicarb of Soda
250ml Fat Free Yoghurt
4 Teaspoons Vanilla Essence
Icing sugar to dust.

6 Eggs are used in the mixture, which makes this an excellent recipe to use up eggs. And also if you have hens! I found the batter needed a lot more mixing than I had assumed, which was a note my mum had scribbled on the page too. <3.

I am still setting out to challenge myself to successfully use the bunt tin for another recipe at another time. Nigella herself tells you to hold your breath whilst you turn it upside down and she was right that it was somewhat difficult to extract the cake!  The cake is mouth-wateringly delicious whether it is intact or not and looks beautiful dusted with icing sugar. I am interested in cake moulds now…do they have a secret to working? It seemed that no matter how much I greased the tin and left the cake to cool, it was just as stubborn and didn’t budge.

This is all part of the 52 weeks of baking process. And despite not doing anything too demanding prior, it’s nice to tackle something difficult and know that I still have SO much to learn. Which, to me, is rather exciting. x

Project Workshoppe.

Photo from my instagram: messyla

I’m excited to announce that this Sunday my little workshop will be completely re-painted! I have decided to go for an olive green for the windows and a pink for the door. I am looking forward to giving it a clean up, rearranging my tools and also placing my flower pots around the outsides.

My workshop deserves the love and adoration it is getting from me. When we moved into our cottage it had been so neglected! The outside was shabbily painted with drip marks running down the walls and the inside was damp and in desperate need of some TLC. The previous owners used it as a ‘junk shed’ to store their garden tools, so lets just say a couple of insect families had made their homes there. It wasn’t pretty.

Some cleaning wipes and a tin of blue paint later, it is my magical workshop. The furniture is thrifted: my formica work table is from the Salvation Army, my haberdashery unit is from a vintage store called Louise Loves in Wales and the other bits and pieces are from charity stores. I didn’t want anything new to live there since the house itself has such history.  Although, you can’t avoid the paper racks from IKEA..since they are so cheap and so functional.

It’s been an enjoyable adventure collecting all the trinkets and equipment that has made Messyla. I can’t wait to have a photoshoot next week and share it with you all..it’s an exciting time. The above photo is the undercoat of the house, I am almost there. Have a nice night, x.