Not Just For Christmas Anymore: Housing Light Show Synced To Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ – Geekologie

I hope you all had amazing xmas and New Year. I have been absent for a little while from the world of Lipstick and Marzipan. I was away in the deep and dismal depths of Luton visiting my Grandparents for the holidays. It was such fun. My Grandma is a pastry chef so you can only imagine the delights. I decided to have a peek in some of her cookbooks and found this yummy recipe to give to Xmas guests to take away with them or have with tea.

As the sherry and Babycham ebbs away from my tired arteries, I am running a little low on festive cheer. This year was the first to herald my dwindling Christmas sparkle, and I fear I may have grown up too much! Plus the previous week to Christmas had bestowed on my doorstop enough snow to make even a woolly mammoth think twice about trekking out. It was, to say the least, uninspiring. Impatient as I am, my major Christmas present had been warming on my back since early November; the coveted, Babrbour inspired All Saints jacket. Of course, I had many a little treat under the tree, but as I watched friends and family open their crown jewels beneath the boughs, I couldn’t help feel the pang of disappointment that comes with knowing your prize present is hanging in the hall way, smelling of damp wax and decorated with an array of dog paw prints and cat hair. Chic? Non. I have taken note, and will be a more patient, better behaved girl next year.

Fairy tale inspired jewellery is set to be big next Spring. With fashion week heralding all that is whimsical and wondrous and Tim Burton’s highly anticipated Alice in Wonderland soon to be released stay ahead of the style set with jewellery from FlashTrash.  With a charming range of exclusive collections, including Eclectic Eccentricity and Elsie Belle its difficult to choose just one so indulge your inner princess with FlashTrash’s Top 5 fairy tale delights..

Alice in Wonderland Pendant Necklace £22 CLICK HERE TO BUY

*LIMITED EDITION*Cinderella Carriage Earrings £150 CLICK HERE TO BUY

Songbird Necklace £18 CLICK HERE TO BUY

Little Red Riding Hood Necklace £15 CLICK HERE TO BUY

Tea Cup Ring £11 CLICK HERE TO BUY

Whether your sun bathing or snow bathing this Christmas,the exclusive new range from Glint Jewellery adds a refined holiday glamour to any look. Using the hottest new design material, sea bamboo, a more environmentally sustainable alternative to coral the covetable bubble bracelet accentuates natural beauty through dynamic design. Whilst the the classically elegant grape earrings (above  £40) featuring Freshwater Pearls and 24ct Gold are the perfect winter adornment to steal the scene at every soirée.

CLICK HERE to shop the collection

Some things in life are worth waiting for. Other things, like decorating gingerbread houses, are not. There’s a photograph of my completed house – despite advice from the recipe, I decided to throw caution to the wind and decorate it anyway last night! Would have posted completed pictures earlier but I was up to my elbows in icing and was quite delirious from all the sugar sniffing.
This blog has taken rather a festive turn of late. We’ve had about 5 inches of snow so far, and the blizzards are still raging outside. The fashion finesse might have dwindled from my posts, but I’m hoping the scent of cinnamon in your nostrils and mulled wine in your gullet excuses a lot of Christmas cheer! Tomorrow, I shall decorate the trees. The weekend brings a Narnia themed party; I have sliver eyeshadow, a tiara, cream dress, Chanel shoes, sparkly lipgloss and an abundance of Swarovski crystals at the ready. The thing I love most about snow is the way it falls so silently. You literally can wake in the morning, with the strange opalescent gleam outside, and peek with surprise at your street or garden lavished with snow!
Now to creep to bed with my near frostbitten feet and snuggle down in my feather duvet for the night, with my little cat for company. Come the morning, maybe I’ll be inspired to write a more formal and interesting post…. or maybe I’ll just go and frolic in the snow…

If you’re anything like me, e.g curious and slightly bemused, you might have seen the most amazing gingerbread houses in the shops and then wondered why they ask so much for them. Hence why I decided to make my own gingerbread house this year, and discovered within five minutes why they demand such a high price; a) if you don’t have lots of bakery goods in your house, it’ll cost you around £20 to make a house with your own fair hands anyway, and b) they are bloody difficult to make. To be honest this post comes a bit early, and the house isn’t finished yet, but I’m impatient and I can always add more delicious looking posts of the house as it nears completion. If you’re a boring old fart and don’t want to read about my trials in making the house, you can look at the recipe online here. And if you have severe difficulties in contemplating how anyone could create, let alone eat, a fantastically fattening house that contains gallons of sweeties and tons of butter and sugar, I suggest you don’t read on.
Now for those who have stuck with me in reading this mundane but salivatingly good post, I’ll tell you now I’m no cook. Everyone who knows me knows I’m an awful cook; the only thing I seemed to have perfected so far is home made chunky chips, and let’s be honest, a life time of chunky chips isn’t going to lend itself well if I want a life time in couture. Couture just doesn’t accommodate thighs. Or any vaguely rounded flesh. Or anything, really, that isn’t pointy and boney and skeletal. Anyway, I digress… so I’m not quite sure why I suddenly took it upon myself to create a gingerbread house. I hate Christmas cake, so it’s nice to have a festive cakey option for me this year as I love gingerbread. My search started with the cook books in the house, to no avail, so I turned to trusty google. The first recipe I looked at warned how difficult a gingerbread house is to make, before even going into the ingredients or the where’s and why’s, so I clicked away immediately and found a recipe that didn’t give me a foreboding commentary.
Any other blog readers have snow today? Uh huh, me too. So I had to set off, in my little car which I haven’t driven for months (watch out pedestrians, I’m mounting a curb near YOU) and headed out to buy ingredients with TWO pairs of shoes, which clearly means this was a serious trip (I can’t for the life of me drive in Hunters, and Uggs aren’t snow proof). Back with my shopping bags, I started to mix!

First went the dry ingredients into the Kitchen Aid, whilst I started to stir the butter, sugar and syrup on the Aga so it made a really scrummy treacley sticky gooey sweet sugary yummy gloop. Mmm.

Oh and by the way, yes I did document all my processes using my BlackBerry camera. I’m terrified my little house will fall apart and I’ll have nothing to show for my herculean efforts, so feast your eyes on the pictures!

Out came the goo and it was mega greasy, I’ve made gingerbread men before and never known a dough to be soooo sticky and greasy, so I was a bit concerned, but the dough set nice and hard. I had to make little templates for the bits of the house, which was a complete pain because you’re really proud of your dough shapes, you pop them in the oven and then POOF ten minutes later, they’re baked and distorted!

ANYWAYS. So then I had to wait for them to cool, and then I could finally put the walls together.

Note the crazed cat in the background. Don’t worry, she’s gone no where near the house, despite her unnerving interest. I think she’d quite like a bit of icing.

I am using icing for glue, so to speak, to keep all the gingerbread walls together. Now I have to wait three hours for them to set, and then I can put the roof on, and it won’t be until tomorrow that I am able to decorate it! I’m so impatient. I baked a little gingerbread man to inhabit the house, and made him an Xmas tree too, so I was able to decorate them to keep myself busy, but I’m so desperate to decorate it now!! Fingers crossed it doesn’t fall apart….

Isn’t that an awww and a half picture! Not my own little kittykat, but a regular visitor of my boyfriend’s old house. I’m aware that this post may fall of deaf ears (or blind eyes since you’re reading?) but I thought I’d plug it out there on the off chance someone might be looking to rehome a cat. Cat and Kitten rescue do the most amazing job in rescuing and rehoming poor little pusscats. Sure, they might be a bit scraggly and need a bit of TLC, but they can become the most beloved little critters. My dearest Niamh was a bag of bones when I first brought her home, but she has turned out to be the most glamourous sophisticat (pun intended). This is the time of year I’m labelled even more of a mad cat lady as I start to gather together a bundle of cat friendly fishy pates, kitty kibble and an assortment of pingpong balls (FYI, cats LOVE pingpong balls) for the poor cats at the home near me that don’t have any family to call their own this Christmas. If that pulls at your heartstrings and you’re interested in rehoming a cat or kitten, there are always plenty of fuzzy headed felines just waiting to be snuggled. CLICK HERE TO BE FORWARDED TO THEIR WEBSITE.

Inés Susaeta’s jewellery designs are a compelling mixture of futurism and nature with an architectural edge. Her stunning handmade earrings, necklaces and bracelets are crafted from sterling silver, semi-precious stones and cutting edge titanium fabric to create lust worthy pieces that give any look a dynamic edge. With S/S’10 set to be about challenging fabric’s stereotypes, stay ahead of the style set with the Titanium Flower Necklace(featured above £67.50) a versatile piece to give a simple tee or LBD a hit of eclectic luxe.

Click here to shop the rest of the collection   *  JUST IN TIME FOR CHRISTMAS

To any devoted blog readers, you’ll have noticed an abundance of advent posts and a drought of anything you can really sink your teeth into in this blog. These last few weeks have been hectic; right now I should be running round in marigolds with bleach and polish as my choice weapons, for I am leaving the capital tonight to hibernate in all that is countryfied and green. My little flat, therefore, needs to be blitzed, but not before I issue an apology. I promise the holidays will bring a myriad of joyful posts, and if you thought many of my recent posts could be easily shoehorned into festive fueled Christmas rants, you’d be right. I’m desperately clinging onto the last month of the year, for the January sales make my skin crawl (expect a post about THAT in the very near future) and I’m making the most of the last few enjoyable shopping weeks of the year. Now, I must return to the unenviable task of packing for a month at the family home before the tube whisks me into university to hand in the last few scraps of work. DRink, be merry and don’t give up on me; the blog will be busting at the seams with posts before you know it!