beaulicity

Chocolate banana oat smoothie

Forgive me fellow-readers, I have been slack with posting. It's been a crazy two months since my last post. I cannot believe how fast time goes and how easy it is to slacken off with posts (even if this is only my 4th post!). Anyhow, I thought I would share a new favourite breakfast treat of mine .. chocolate banana oat smoothie! Not only does this smoothie taste incredibly YUMMY, its really HEALTHY for you too.

All you need is to throw everything (but the chai seeds - I used them for garnishing) into a blender or a bar mixer. If you want it thicker, add another banana, oats or almond meal. If you are out of chocolate a tablespoon of drinking chocolate is just as good or even a smaller amount of pure cocoa will do the trick too! I was even thinking you could make this a little 'christmasy' and chucking in a crushed up candy cane for a peppermint taste (even add a dash of peppermint essence), or just keeping it super healthy and adding some shredded mint leaves.

If you are a vegan like myself, its easy to just make a few adjustments to suit your needs; I used oat milk and some good vegan chocolate (you can buy vegan chocolate from Vegan Online). Hope you enjoy this sweet treat!

Christmas Paper Star Decorations

It is nearly that time of the year ... again! I've started to think about how I'm going to be decorating my home. This year I wanted to try out something a little new for myself and decided to give origami a try. Yes, I am guilty! I'm avid for anything creative but I have never attempted origami. So for the last couple of days I have been looking at different origami and I'm in love with some of the stars (especially these little baby ones). But they're a little bit too small for turning them into cute christmas decorations - unless you fill a hurricane vase full of christmas coloured ones. So instead, I cheated and jumped on photoshop, drew out a star, added fold lines to print out on special paper. Luckily, my craft box has arrived for christmas this year (Mr B and I moved a year ago and I missed my craft boxes last year). I picked out 4 different papers for my stars. I chose 3 papers from Kaisercraft's Charlotte's Dream collection - Fantasy, Vision and Daze (the colours look blue online - but they're actually green). I also used a pretty silver & white paper from a Kmart paper stack, but you can use any Christmasy paper (just make sure they have little bit of weight). I attached my paper stars to gifts instead of using traditional gift tags - I also strung up some stars as a little garland. Enjoy!

Jar Label Printouts

So this is my second post and for those of you that know me, I love designing new things. My latest DIY has come about as an attempt of transforming my chaotic kitchen into something resembling organised bliss. I found some old coffee jars in the back of my cupboard and decided to breathe some life into them. And here we have it, I have produced these fancy {yet, homely} jar labels. They're super simple to put together.

Step 1: All you really need are your jars or whatever your labelling, some scissors {or a craft knife}, craft glue, white marker {optional} and the printout from the link below.

Step 2: Carefully out the labels.

Step 3: Trace a small outline of glue on the back of the labels.

Step 4: Carefully place the label on your jar. For this step I rolled the jar across the label paying attention to keeping the jar straight as I rolled it. I found this to help prevent tiny bubbles forming under the label {which makes it look a little tacky!} ...

The labels are all pre-named with some common kitchen ingredients, but I've also included a sheet of blank labels for you to label yourself. If there are any ingredients you would like to see on the labels, don't be shy to ask me to put them up for you :)

Now they're done, prop them on the shelf and enjoy!