Thanks to beauty boxes, blogging and generally scouring the internet looking for tips, I've discovered more and more skincare products to try out on my skin. I flit about trying various things, but recently I have settled on the following products which I have been working well on my skin currently. For reference, my skin isn't particularly good. Its combination, leaning towards oily, I have quite large pores and I am prone to spots. Makes me sound delightful, doesn't it?!

• Exfoliating - I love this scrub cream by Aapri. They were the first ever brand to bring an exfoliation product to the UK market, a fun fact! I used to use St Ives Swiss Formula but it started to go up in price a lot and Aapri is a really good value product. Its quite a rough product so wouldn't be suitable for sensitive skin but its exactly what I need to slough off those dead skin cells once a week or so. It leaves my skin really glowy and fresh afterwards and the fact that the scrub is suspended in a cream helps stop  my skin from drying out. I'm a big fan of this stuff and having just popped on their website, I see they have some other great products that I'd love to try.
• Cleansing - This is my first ever sample of the iconic Liz Earle Cleanse and Polish. I got a sample from Red Magazine last month, picked up a sample in the CEW Awards box from Latest in Beauty and also picked up an extra sample from a create your own box from LiB. So far, so good! Cleanse and Polish leaves my skin feeling clean and refreshed and I love using a muslin cloth, its really good at exfoliating and I feel really nice and fresh when I use them. I am going to rattle through my three samples and I'm 99% certain I will purchase a full size Cleanse and Polish. Perhaps if I can stretch my pennies enough I'll buy one of the Skin Essentials Regime kits so I can try the toner and moisturiser as well (you also receive a freebie with these kits which is excellent! This month it is the soothing eye lotion).
• Toning - as you can see, at the moment I am not using a toner. I don't feel I need it at the moment. After using Cleanse and Polish I splash my face with cold water which is enough for me at the moment. I find a lot of toners very drying.
• Serum - I received this Caudalie serum in last month's beauty box. You may recall me saying I'd probably only use it in an emergency. Its actually become my go to product to put on pre-moisturiser particularly at night but occasionally in the day too. Its got a really thin, milky sort of texture, not at all like you might expect of something that is to help with skin hydration. And I think that's precisely why I love it. It absorbs beautifully, doesn't make my skin greasy but gives it a good hydrating boost and makes it look and feel significantly better. It sinks in so well and then you can top up with your preferred moisturiser. I will definitely be buying this when my sample runs out.
• Moisturiser (day)- I received this day cream by Dr Nick Lowe via Latest in Beauty's luxury samples. Its been an absolute godsend for me, especially in this ridiculously hot weather. Its really helped to keep my skin from getting all greasy but doesn't dry me out either. I will definitely be repurchasing this.
• Moisturiser (night) - This night serum by AD Skin Synergy is also from Latest in Beauty's luxury samples section. I love face oils, which this is, and I find it does nourish my skin beautifully overnight. I also love that it has natural organic ingredients in it. Admittedly I haven't used it during this heatwave, but as soon as its over (and I fear that will be far too soon!), I'll go back to using it at night.

So, that's my current skincare regime in a nutshell! I can be quite fickle when it comes to what I use on my skin but at the moment, this routine is working for me. Admittedly, the best cleanser I've ever found has been one I make myself, following the principles of the Oil Cleansing Method or OCM. I may blog about the OCM one day as it is brilliant and I am a big advocate for it.

Do you use any of these products? What is your skincare regime?

Pop back tomorrow for Day 5 of Beauty Week!

This month was Glossybox's first birthday! They're doing a lot of giveaways over on Facebook at the moment to celebrate and they threw a party in London for their ambassadors and team. I was expecting some pretty big things from the box this month, given the previous Harrods collaboration and the obvious pulling power the GB team have with brands to secure samples, etc.




Here's the box, I liked the change in the tissue paper and the ribbon to reflect the birthday theme. Makes it feel like a birthday present!



Here's my card with the items I received.



And here are my items. The Noble Isle shower gel smells pretty nice. Not a brand I have heard of. The scent could easily be made by Molton Brown, if that makes any sense? A good sized sample for a wee trip away. I haven't smelled the perfume samples yet. Getting two samples as one of your items is definitely better than getting one measly sample as an item, especially as you can normally pick these up for free in department stores. I have heard of the brand but as I said, I haven't yet sampled these so not sure if they're for me or not! There were two sachets of the Apivita beauty masks, I do love a good mask so I'm excited to try these, they have natural ingredients in them as well which is always a bonus. I'm thrilled to get the Osmo Berber Oil Hair Treatment. Osmo is a brand I've used before and always liked and I'm a big fan of hair oils so it'll be great to try another out. My final item was some Eldora eyelashes. I've taken a close up picture here:




I don't tend to wear false lashes as I'm pretty lucky to have long lashes of my own. I'm really not sure about these, they are a bit full-on for me what with the mad shape and the diamantes on them. They are pretty though and they would make a nice gift for someone who is a fan of lashes and can carry off a pair like these!

Also included in the box was a balloon for birthday celebration purposes, and a Glossy Box mirror.

If I am completely honest, I'm a little bit underwhelmed by the box this month. As a regular box goes, its ok, but as it was their birthday box I did expect something a bit better, although I'm not really sure what I would have put in instead if it was my decision! I know when Boudoir Prive changed over to be Jolie Box they released a 'Best of Boudoir Prive' box featuring some of their best products. Maybe something like that would have been good? Although I suppose the die-hard folk who have subscribed to every box would be a bit cheesed off to receive duplicates.

I will get use out of everything (except maybe the eyelashes. And possibly not the perfume samples but they're only tiny anyway) so in that respect I can't complain, I just expected something a bit more 'wow' than I received. I will stick with Glossy Box for now, but I am starting to wonder if I should cancel my subscription. I suspect if I need to start making some dramatic spending cuts it will be the first thing to go.

Are you a GlossyBox subscriber? What did you think of the box this month? Did you get the same items as me?

Don't forget to come back tomorrow for Day 4 of Beauty Week!

BB creams have taken the world by storm. Originating in Asia, BB cream stands for beauty balm or blemish balm, or many other things beside (my favourite is seeing it referred to as a beblesh balm. I like to say that in a Borat voice over and over and over). BB creams are touted as an all-in-one skin solution; skin whitening ingredients, no need for a primer, moisturising, mattifying, foundation coverage and so on and so forth. The selling point is that once you own a BB cream, thats all you need as a base when doing your make-up (in honesty, this doesn't work for me, I still need a few other bits, but that's ok!). I first started researching BB creams when Illamasqua brought one out last year, one of the first to be sold in the UK. After some reading and some googling and some eyeing up reviews on blogs, I decided to opt for an original BB cream from Asia by a company called Missha. One of my biggest problems is finding foundation to suit my skin tone. I'm pasty and pale with freckles. I have never met a sales person at the make up counters who can ever give me a foundation that suits me. In fact, I've stopped approaching them. 99% of them are orange and take offence when you tell them you LIKE being pale, you WANT to look natural and flawless and you have little interest in using your foundation to darken your skin. I've tried higher end brands and lower end brands. I've spent hours in Boots daubing things on my jawline. They either make me so yellow I look jaundiced, so orange I look like I've been tangoed, or else the foundation just looks terrible on me. My Missha BB cream is the only thing that I've ever liked enough to use all the time and to re-purchase time and time again. I also completely love the pump-action applicator at the bottom of a tube. All foundations should be like this, yes. I get it from Ebay and I use the Perfect Cover BB cream in number 21. I don't find it improves my skin, but it doesn't make it any worse, so that's fine by me. Here is my BB cream:





You can order smaller samples than that which is good if you're not sure what colour is for you. This one is hands down the shade for me (I did sample No 23 which is slightly darker but it was just a touch too dark for me), it gives me quite a pale base but I can use powder and bronzer to contour my face. excellent. However, it gives me quite heavy coverage and we've gone into a sudden mini-heatwave (by the time this post is published, it'll probably be raining again!), my usual make-up routine just can't handle it. I have greasy skin anyway, factor in heat and you have the unpleasant experience of your carefully applied rouge sliding off your face. Plus all make-up feels much more obvious on your skin when its hot, don't you think? So I set off in search of a BB cream that would be a bit lighter on my skin than Missha and that I wouldn't completely hate. I have already tried Garnier's BB cream and it just wasn't for me at all and didn't work on my skin. Tinted moisturisers don't tend to work too well on my skin either. On Friday in my lunchbreak I popped into a Superdrug with the sole mission of getting a new BB cream (until I realised they had 3 for 2 on cosmetics. It'd be rude not to partake in an offer like that!). I made a beeline for the MUA stand as I really love their products and I remembered they released a BB cream. Whilst the 'Light' shade wasn't too bad and I could probably have learned to live with it for the hot days until I can slap my usual Missha back on, the texture was so thick. I didn't get beyond applying it to my hand, it felt like a face mask, so thick and obvious. I knew that would never work. Then I spied the Maybelline counter and the Dream Fresh BB Cream. It has a runny gel-like consistency, nice and light, felt nice on my hand, and the colour wasn't took bad on my face either. It is an 8-in-1 cream, claiming to create a natural glow, compliment skin tone, protect skin from the sun, hydrate, blur imperfections, be non-greasy and oil free, look visibly smooth and feel fresh. Rather a lot for a little tube of 'stuff', isn't it?! So, I proudly proclaimed it my winner, put it in my basket and brought it home.





Here's a blob of each on my hand, above is the Maybelline, below is the Missha:





The Maybelline is definitely darker, but I do tend to get more freckles in the summer, which does darken my skin tone a bit, and it is a little like those perfect colour match foundations that look all the wrong shade on your hand but blend in and you can't see them. You can see its a lighter fluid than the Missha which is thicker. I've used it for a few days now and I'm not minding the Maybelline at all. I don't feel so 'caked on' with my makeup in the heat and its lasting pretty well. I'm not sure about the blurring of imperfections but I have a great primer for that anyway. It definitely feels fresher than wearing Missha in this heat, and still looks good after a day out and about in the sunshine! Plus, its SPF 30, which is pretty much what I need to wear when the sun is shining, even in the UK. I burn really easily and basically don't ever tan (I get freckles on my face but its still very prone to burning and burning badly, freckles on my lower arms and hands and I tan on the tops of my feet, which is just blooming odd, and makes me look like I have grubby feet all summer). So all in all, a good interim staple for my makeup collection until this blasted heatwave is over!

Are you a BB cream fan? Do you like the version for the UK market or are you a fan of the originals like me?

Don't forget to stop by tomorrow for Day 3 of my Beauty Week posts!

Seeing as I've been so absent recently and also seeing as I've got quite a lot to blog about, I thought I'd mark this week as Beauty Week and attempt to do a beauty post every day. My beauty posts undoubtedly get the most views and whilst I do still love crafting and cooking and baking, everything else has taken a back seat for me recently.

Today I want to show you a couple of items I bought this month through BuyaPowa. BuyaPowa have sales on of various items, the majority are beauty products but watches and even cars have been featured sales! They source a set amount of an item, say 50, and as more people sign up to buy the product, the price drops. The items go on sale for a set time, or until they are sold out, whichever happens first and the price you pay is the price the item is on at the time it closes. You can also refer people to a sale and if you refer the most people in the fastest time, you get the item for free. The website explains it a lot better than I do, so go take a look.

I've bought a total of three items through BuyaPowa but one was so recent I haven't received it yet so I'm going to talk about the other two, the infamous Urban Decay Naked palette and two Macadamia Hair products.




Not much needs to be said about the Urban Decay Naked Palette, its a cult product and I can completely see why. The strokeable velvet box it comes in, the eyeshadow brush which feels lovely, the free sample of their eye primer, the amazing colours in the pans, the excellent names of the pans, oh I could go on. But I won't, because this is probably one of the most blogged about products on the internets and I will only be repeating what everyone else is saying. I will definitely get heaps and heaps of use out of this as its so appealing for every day make up. I will blatantly be tracking down the Naked 2 palette in no time! Here's a shot of the eyeshadow pans and their fabulous names:




Gunmetal is the only shades which doesn't appeal to me because it seems to be quite a blue-grey colour and with bright blue eyes like mine, this won't really go with them. But hey, one shadow I can't use out of 12 isn't bad at all!

The second product I bought almost at the same time as the UD palette was the Macadamia healing oil spray and the nourishing leave-in cream. The world has gone mad for hair oils and products for hair with natural healing oils in them, and having tried a few I can completely see why. I'm a big fan of using oil on my face, I have no idea why it took me so long to realise it would be just as good on my hair!




I'm really glad I opted for a spray rather than getting a pump action bottle as clearly a little goes a long way with this product and it'd be very easy to overdo it I'm sure. I love the spray, I adore the smell which is really different, quite masculine in fact in my humble opinion! I've used the spray both on damp hair before blow-drying and then a teeny tiny spritz on dry hair to finish my look, keep my flyaways at bay and keep my rather dry ends a bit more nourished. Its really great and helps your hair be soft and shiny and look really healthy. The leave-in cream I probably like ever so slightly less, however it does still do a great job at leaving my hair soft and smooth. I think when it comes to re-purchasing I'll probably just opt for the oil spray, but this BuyaPowa purchase was a duo. Macadamia products are a little bit cheaper than the MoroccanOil products (which I also love but don't own any of) but just as effective in my mind and I would urge you all to try them if you get a chance to!

Do any of you get items from BuyaPowa? Have you got either of these products?

Don't forget to pop back tomorrow to check out Day 2's post!

Its been a wee while, my apologies. My usual routine has been knocked for six lately. On the 'real life' side, things are very unsettled at the moment and I cannot wait to have everything ironed out.

In the absence of a post with any substance, I bring you a few of my Instagram pictures from the last couple of weeks. I am @whatlozziedid over on Instagram and my pictures all get sent through to my Twitter account of the same name if you want to follow me on either of those!



Yayoi Kusama at Tate Modern (go see this!), the recently re-opened Cutty Sark, fun times in Piccadilly Circus, the Christian Louboutin exhibition at the Design Museum (go see this too!)


Cute new owl necklace from Ebay, enormous lunch, Revlon lip butter in Candy Apple is finally mine, jumbo Batiste can (400ml!)


Finally my Poundland had some Revlon varnishes in it, got my samples for the Garnier 7 day challenge, brilliant Ikea gift card from my lovely Mum, ridiculously delicious tartelette au chocolat from Paul (the St Pauls branch!)


Yum yum, Rio, Primark ballet flats in the hot hot sun, picturesque place for a 5 minute break, delightful forecast


I found all 6 of these lip products in one handbag during a clear out, overkill!, recentish MUA haul, painting nails and reading magazines, buyapowa haul (post to follow).

Did you like my wee Instagram post? I know weekly posts are popular in the blogosphere but I'm not sure I'd have enough content to post weekly! But, if you liked this post, let me know and I might make it a regular feature :)

My post comparing the Harrods GlossyBox with the Anti-Ageing Latest in Beauty box is still my most viewed post on my blog. So, I thought I'd bring you another post, comparing the latest boxes from both companies. Perhaps, if this post is as popular as my last one, I'll make this a regular feature.

The April Glossybox's theme was natural products. I absolutely loved the box and I'm planning on keeping it to store all my samples in as it'll go really nicely in the room I store all my beauty bits and makeup in (our second bedroom, which is a home office cum dressing room!). GlossyBox costs £10 a month plus £2.95 P+P, and for that you get 5 samples. My understanding is every month there is around 10-14 samples, of which you receive 5, so there is a bit of pot luck involved! Here is my box:







I just loved the packaging this month! Here are my 5 treats:







Overall, I'm really excited by the products I received which were:

• Burts Bees Milk and Honey Body Lotion. I've sampled this before courtesey of Latest in Beauty, but this is a much heftier sample so I can really give it a whirl. I do find it leaves my skin very soft, but it does feel slightly strange and powdery on my hands after I've applied it. However, hands can easily be washed and I do like the way it leaves my skin elsewhere on my body!
• Caudalie Vinosource SOS Thirst-Quenching Serum. I'm so excited to try Caudalie products. I think this will be a serum I use in an 'emergency' to revive my skin, which is one of their suggestions.
• Monu Rich Collagen Cream. Great for fine lines apparently, of which I have far too many! I suspect this might be too rich for most of my face, so I think I'll use to to treat the lines I have on my forehead and also on my neck and decolletage.
• Inika Certified Organic Eyeliner in Purple Minx. Not a colour I would have picked and I don't tend to use pencil eyeliners, but I have tried it today and it is really nice. Not fiercely pigmented but this means its very suitable for daywear.
• Figs & Rouge lip balm. I received one of these from Latest in Beauty (I think!) once before but as I use hundreds of different handbags (ok, that is a *slight* exaggeration...), I do like to load each one up with a lip balm and a hand cream so no matter which bag I grab I'm prepared! This is a cherry& vanilla scented lip balm and very good it is too!

I'm very happy with the contents of my GlossyBox. Looking at all the samples they had, I would have liked to have tried the Monu Reviving Mist and the Philip B straightening balm, but I'm not sure what products I'd want to swap out to have them, so I think I'm just trying to be a spoiled brat. The May GlossyBox will mark their first birthday, so I imagine they will have something exciting up their sleeves for subscribers!
Over to Latest in Beauty. At the end of April they brought us the CEW Beauty Awards Box. Described on their site as 'the Oscars of the beauty world', these products were all rated very highly by Cosmetic Executive Women (CEW) members. The box contains 8 samples from a possible 9 and was £8.95 plus £2.95 P+P. Here is the box:




I don't mind that the box isn't particularly exciting, if all the beauty boxes were pretty enough to keep my house would be overrun with boxes!

And the contents are here:







I'm made up with my products, which are:

• Elemis Pro-Collagen Body Cream, a firming body cream. Again, I think this will be best on my decolletage, the rest of me either doesn't need help or is totally beyond help!
• Liz Earle Cleanse and Polish, which is surely THE cult product (which is why it won most revolutionary beauty product in the last 20 years!). It came with a free muslin cloth and also some samples of Liz Earle skin tint which was gratefully received!). I also received a sample of this with a magazine last month and I'm super excited to finally try this amazing product. I can see me becoming instantly hooked.
• Percy & Reed Dry Conditioner, I'm a dry shampoo addict, so I'm really keen on trying this out. My ends get quite dry and I'm hoping this will really pep them up!
• Benefit The Porefessional. I have horrible large pores and I've heard amazing things about this product so I'm keen to try it out!
• L'Occitane Immortelle Brightening Hand Cream with SPF15. My hands have really been suffering lately so I am grateful for all hand creams I receive! And I'm fast falling in love with all things L'Occitane.
• Nails Inc Porchester Square nail varnish, which is an absolutely gorgeous colour and absolutely brilliant for day-to-day wear as it'll go with every outfit conceivable!
• Elie Saab Eau de Parfum, which I have sampled before with a Latest in Beauty fragrance box, and really liked.
• Mont Blanc Legend Eau de Toilette, which is one for the boys so this has been passed over to my OH!

This is yet another excellent box from Latest in Beauty and I'm going to really enjoy using each and every sample!

So, which box was my favourite? To be honest, it's too close to call this month, I'll need to declare it a draw. Both boxes appealed to me enormously and I'll definitely get good use out of everything in both.

Did you get either of these boxes? What did you think of them?

Yep. I'm a bit of a stuck record when it comes to Latest in Beauty, but I don't care. I love those great people and all the beauty items they send me in the post in exchange for a few of my hard-earned pounds. In the last few weeks I've bought 3 boxes (excluding the Anti-Ageing box I already blogged about!), and I'm going to blog about two of them today. The first up is the Editor's Choice box which was released at the beginning of last month:





It did contain a few duplicate items, the Eve Lom mask, the Divine Cream and the Emma Hardie serum all featured in the Anti-Ageing box. But I'm absolutely fine with that, it gives me more opportunity to sample these products before deciding whether or not they work well enough for me that I opt to buy full sized versions. The AD skin synergy is a new product to me and I am a fan of serums at the moment, so I'm excited to try this out (it needs to join a bit of a queue behind the other serums I have to sample!). I am really pleased with the nail polish colour from Miners, will be great on fingers or toes in the summer! (If we ever have a summer!). This box cost £5.95 +£2.95 P&P and was worth over £30. I really liked this one!

Whilst unable to possibly wait for another beauty box to arrive (I subscribe to GlossyBox and make it my duty to buy as many Latest in Beauty boxes as I possible can!), I decided to create my own beauty box from the luxury samples pages at Latest in Beauty. Here's what I got:





As you can see, I ended up buying an extra AD skin synergy serum, but again, it'll give me the chance to really try it out before making a decision on whether or not to buy a full sized version. The This Works body lotion came with the Anti-Ageing box as well, but you know where I stand with duplicates by now! I'm really excited to try the Bamford shower gel as I've heard great things. As I have oily/combination skin I'm hoping the Dr Nick Lowe moisturiser can work some magic under my makeup. And the Jo Hansford shampoo and conditioner duo are brilliant sample sizes. My only experience with Jo Hansford products came before I went to university and I decided to dye my hair a sensible dark brown, using a Jo Hansford dye. What I got was 'complete goff black' hair, which took an age to fade out. WHOOPS. But I'm trying the shampoo and conditioner out with a totally open mind. That hair dye experience was 9 (!!!!!!) years ago, and a shampoo can't turn my hair black anyway. The irony was, I'd wanted black hair aged about 16 and tried 3 times, unsuccessfully, to turn my hair black. A few years later I stopped trying and bam! Full on black hair.

I can't rave about Latest in Beauty enough, as you know by now. Next up to blog about will be the fabulous CEW Awards Box, which I will do next week. Seeing as my GlossyBox vs Latest in Beauty Box post has the most views on my entire blog, I might pit April's GlossyBox against the Latest in Beauty CEW box. What do you think?

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The first thing I should say about this recipe is I cheat at every turn possible. If there's a gadget I can use to get out of doing manual labour, I'll definitely do it. I appreciate that I'm an extremely spoiled lucky girl who has brilliant kitchen gadgetry. All of this can be done without these gadgets, however. I love to cook, but lets face it, who has time to be in the kitchen all day, every day? Not me, sadly. So if I can cheat my way to a tasty tasty meal, I'll do it.

This french onion soup recipe came from a Morrisons magazine years ago. My OH was the first of us to try making it and its a staple soup in my repetoire. Its not a fully traditional version of the soup, but it is less rich and less high fat than the original. If I'm really cheating, I'll buy a cheese-topped baguette from the supermarket and have that with this, but as I've been off and I've had some time, I decided I could make my own bread. Well, I could throw ingredients in my breadmaker and get it to do the hard work, but you know what I mean! This to me is comfort food at its finest. Its also pretty cheap, assuming you have a fairly well-stocked store cupboard.

For the bread you will need:
Strong white flour (I used one with seeds and grains in it, which worked really well)
Dried Yeast
Sugar
Salt
Cheddar Cheese
Cooked Bacon, chopped
Tap water

For the soup you will need:
3-4 red onions (I used a net of 3, along with a half onion I had left from a dinner earlier in the week)
3-4 white onions (I used a net of 4 today)
2 garlic cloves
1L beef stock
Half-fat creme fraiche
Chives

I put the bread in the breadmaker last night and stuck the timer on so it would be ready this morning.



This was the recipe from the booklet that came with my breadmaker. I opted for the 'large' loaf.




Here are all the dry ingredients in the pan, after this I sloshed in the water, pressed the buttons and let it do its thing! My breadmaker has a special chute in the lid where I put the chopped bacon. By selecting a 'raisin' cycle, the chute opened and dropped in the bacon at the appropriate time! Amazing!



And here's the breadmaker last night, on its countdown, doing its thing!

Flash forward to this morning, when I made my soup. Here's how! First you assemble your cooking ingredients (yep, loads of ingredients!):




Then you break out the second cheats gadget, the Kenwood Timer Chef, and attach the food processor attachment, with the cutting blade inside:




You then peel and half your onions. If they won't fit down the chute, as some of mine didn't, cut the bigger halves into quarters. You then fire up the machine and push all the onions down the chute of the food processor until you have lots and lots of finely sliced onions:




Yep, it took me 1 min 25 seconds to chop up 7 1/2 onions! In fact, this was a bit slow on my part as I hadn't cut all the onion pieces down to fit in the chute, so I had to sort of force some of them down! You can of course finely slice all the onions by hand, but lets face it, who wants to do that?! You then pop your largest saucepan on the hob and splash a bit of oil in it (I used bogstandard olive oil but any flavourless oil will be fine), when the oil has heated up (keep the temperature fairly low), tip all your onions in. You will be faced with something that looks like this:




The onions will wilt down eventually. You now want to slow cook the onions for 20 minutes, you don't want them to get any colour rather just soften down.You don't need to stand over the onions for the 20 minutes, but you will want to be around to give them a stir every now and then so they all cook down evenly. After about 10 minutes (so halfway into the cooking), they will look like this:




After another 10 minutes, slice two cloves of garlic up into small pieces and pop them in with the onions. Give the mix another 10 minutes of cooking. Here's the garlic going in:




After the 10 minutes or so is up, the whole thing will be a big sticky soft lump in your saucepan. The onions will have leaked out some water and so will be swimming in a small amount of onion 'stock'. This helps with the flavour! Here's what it'll look like:




Doesn't look particularly inspiring but bear with me! Next, crack out the beef stock. I always use stock cubes or stock granules. For this particular soup, Oxo beef stock cubes are my go to. The Knorr beef stock cubes aren't dark enough to give this soup the colour it really needs. I use 5 stock cubes to make the 1 litre of stock you need:




You make up the stock and add it to the saucepan, give everything a stir then simmer the soup for a minimum of 10 minutes to bring everything together:




Meanwhile, as soon as the breadmaker beeps, the bread is done!




So you squee with excitement (this is an optional stage!) and turn it out onto a cooling rack to cool:




When you're ready to serve up, spoon some soup into a bowl and top with a heaped dessert spoon of creme fraiche and snip over a few chives. Serve with a lovely plate of freshly made bread:




Eat, enjoy and feel smug! The leftover soup will keep for a few days in the fridge, and also freezes well too. In fact, like most leftovers, this soup tastes better the next day. I've taken this to work quite a few times and its always brought me some comfort at my desk on a busy day.

I will leave you with  grauitous picture of my bread. I'm really glad I tried this seed-y flour rather than plain strong white flour. The bread wasn't enormously cheese-y or bacon-y, but had just enough. My OH suggested this would made delicious cheese on toast, so I think tomorrow we'll eat our soup leftovers with cheese on toast with this bread! You can undoubtedly make this bread by hand, and making bread by hand is very satisfying. The best starter recipes are from Delia Smith, here is the white bread recipe and here is the wholemeal recipe. You can then start to add things and adapt things to suit you once you've mastered these. I spent about £3.50 on the ingredients I didn't have lurking in my cupboards, and this will last two of us for two days and probably one final portion for me, so that's pretty good value!





Please let me know if you try this recipe, I'd love to know what you thought of it!

Another mini-hiatus on my part. Apologies, its nothing personal! Work became beyond busy in the last few weeks. But now there's a lot of change ahead and the best part of all this change is being granted a week of gardening leave. I don't need to return to the day job until May 9th. I definitely needed a break. The stress has definitely taken its toll on my skin, my hair, everything. So whilst I do need to spend my week catching up on some essentials (changing my ISA, closing an old credit card account down, getting a better deal on my broadband, going to the dentist! And pardon the irony, but part of my gardening leave will need to be spent doing some gardening. My garden looks like Day of the Triffids) I will also be spending some time pampering. Nothing too crazy, just a fringe trim, eyebrow threading, a few face masks from my collection. But aside from that, I do want to line up loads of blog posts to keep my blog looking good for as long as possible! I've certainly got loads and loads to blog about.

And today we begin with one of those rather hyped products, the Revlon Lip Butters. I managed to pick these up in Scotland when I was home last month, and got them with a No7 nail varnish as part of a Boots 3 for 2. I picked up Peach Parfait and Berry Smoothie. Here they are:



And here's the lip butters up close, with Berry Smoothie on the left and Peach Parfait on the right:







They're both really wearable everyday products. The Peach Parfait colour is a little more shimmery as you can see, and is also a more natural colour on the lips. I'm definitely more of an eye make-up girl so I like a more muted, natural lip product to go with. Plus, I'm a disaster area, so wearing a strong red lip tends to end up with me smearing it all over my face anyway! These are very moisturing as well, as one would expect when its a lip butter, and don't dry out the lips the way I find some lipsticks do. Its halfway between a gloss and a lipstick and I'm definitely a fan. Here's a couple of swatches, please excuse my terribly scaly looking hands, I slapped on so much handcream after seeing these pictures!

On the left is the Peach Parfait and on the right is the Berry Smoothie. I'm a big fan of these, I definitely recommend them. They are the only lip butter-type product I've tried and to that extent I would be interested in trying other brands, but I can definitely see me re-purchasing these in the future.

Do I have a favourite? Probably the Berry Smoothie, but I use them both equally. I'd like to pick up Candy Apple and Pink Truffle as well as I think they'd be great additions to my ever-expanding make up collection.


Have you tried the Revlon lip butters? What did you think?