oh gosh: March 2010

30 Mar 2010

Please please...

....Miss Elizabeth,

Can you and I pop in here next time I visit.

Doesn't it just look wonderful?

26 Mar 2010

{More pictures - here}

My fantastic hairdresser, Becky, is entering her salon, Rebecca Charles, in the Wella Trend Vision '10.

She asked me to come along to the first round of entry and take some head shots of her gorgeous model, Georgina, with her new hair cut, for the entry form.

I love the colours laced through the blond. In fact, I love that shade of blonde. Their colourist, Dawn, is so pregnant, she's about to pop, but she still managed to do a fantastic job.

And, isn't the make up fantastic. One Becky's friend, professional make up artist, and client, Helen, did it for her. I do believe she was eyeing up going blonde next week herself.......

Hair - Rebecca Charles Salon

Make-up - Helen Archer Makeup

Model - Georgina Henderson

23 Mar 2010

I have been totally lusting after this diy desk for ages.

Although, maybe a little wider?

But now, i just need somewhere beautiful to build it.

{And some beautiful notebooks to go in it}

22 Mar 2010

It was my dad's birthday last week, so I decided to make him some cakes.

He loves chocolate, but he loves chocolate orange's even more, so I thought I'd try and create a chocolate orange style cake for him.

It was a bit of a trial and error {i.e the first lot of cakes REALLY didn’t work} but after a little bit of adjustment I think I managed something that did actually work. To start with I used a recipe out of the Hummingbird Bakery book my housemates bought me, but it just didn’t work - the cake stuck to the cases and it tasted on, well, nothing.

So on the second attempt I used Nigella’s devils food recipe, but I substituted the water for orange juice and threw in a good dash of the orange flavouring {because, well, when else am i ever going to use orange flavouring?} and this time it worked;

And, just to continue some sort of double take, there were 2 attempts at the frosting too;

I went all out and made this frosting from the cupcake project, but the marmalade made it so 'ugh' and bitter that it made me screw my face up…….. and even the boy made an odd face when he tried it, and he eats everything……

So I went again and made the same one, but just left out the marmalade. It was yummy. It was sweet. It was orangey. No faces were made. And it was about all I could do to keep the boy from eating it all from the bowl.

And I also found out that you can buy chocolate orange segments in boxes at Tesco. This was, it turns out I wrongly thought, going to be my greatest challenge, separating the chocolate orange neatly, but oh no, Tesco have thought of it, and they don’t even stick them together anymore. Perfect.

So there you have it, chocolate orange cupcakes, with a chocolate orange segment for good measure.

17 Mar 2010

#SMWF

I don't talk about my job very often; its pretty geeky stuff that we deal in {SEO, PPC, Web Dev} and I don't pretend to be expert in any of this to chat about it on the internet. PlusI don't have much dealings with the majority of the geeky stuff, being in the account management team.

But I am involved in the social media side of what we do, and this meant that on Monday, along side Mike from our SEO team, I attended the Social Media World Forum.

We're trying to build our social media offering at work, and rather than tell people they should be doing it, really hold their hands through the process, so we thought it might be useful to see what the 'experts' are saying......

It was all pretty geeky stuff; I think I might have been the only person in the room without a fancy little notebook {anyone want to send me one? I'd quite like one of these} but the majority of the things talked about were things we already kind of knew, but there were a few points that I think are important to tell brands who are looking to jump into the whole world of 'social media';

Engage. Have a conversation with people. Don't just sell, offer something. Offer a reason for people to want to communicate with you. And have a bit of a personality about it.
Create a reason to talk to people; don't just assume because you're out there people will be interested. You need to give them something interesting as a reason to come back to you for.
Put together a business strategy. Don't just jump in guns blazing. Think about it like an offline marketing campaign and have a plan of what you want to do and achieve through out the year.
Start small. And it's not about the number of followers you have, it's about their engagement with you. It's no good having 1000's of followers who you never speak to.
Set measurable goals to establish ROI. Whether that be ? no of followers of twitter, ? posts a day on your blog, ? number of fans on your facebook page.

But it did make me think, there are so many people out there who are doing the whole communicating and building communities on their blogs, conversing on twitter, running great Facebook pages thing.

Does anyone have any great ideas?

16 Mar 2010

This weekend I.....

Clearly drank cocktails. Many cocktails. With many ingredients.

It was 241 at the elbow rooms, we got there at 7, the happy hour ended at 8, so we had 4 cocktails in an hour. As you do. The first one had ameretto and vodka in it, it was delicious. I think the long island ice tea might have pushed me over the edge though.

Saturday was shopping for mothers day gifts and food and catching up on the lost we missed.

And sunday I ventured to London for a work trip. Sunday afternoon was spent with my good friend Liz, which helped towards no 19 on my list. There is more info on the trip over at 29 things. But we went to Anthropologie. Loved it.