Few Things

Christmas, as a kid was so exciting for me. Not that it is less exciting now! But, back then, I remember my friends in the neighborhood would give us plum cakes and all kinds of sweets and savories. I can still feel the taste tingling on my tongue as I am typing:) Haan, The good ol' days.

Happy Christmas To you, my friends.

My Boy seems to be everywhere in the house. Especially in the closets, under the tables, bathroom, kitchen, tiny space between the couch and wall.  Wonder why do most kids love such wierd places at home. If adults want to lie on the couch, kids love playing under the couch.


 Im gonna melt, if you keep looking at me that way.

Its probably the best time to do some crocheting.

Made these socks for my li'l boy. He loved them.

See what Momma made for me.

The other day, As I got up, As I came to the window, I saw HIM.

HE blessed  me.

He keeps ensuring that HE's always there for me.

Cute things come in small packages.

And those 2 packages seem to bond so well.

"Look , what a pleasant day it is!"

"I know, We should come out here more often"

"U look super cute in this dress! "

"And so do U [blush blush]"

"Where did you buy that hat?"

"Near my place, My folks bought it"

"Im gonna tell Momma to buy me one."

Do you think they could have had this conversation? Donno what kids speak to each other? I just wondered.

An anniversary cake for our dear friends Shachi and Vinay.

Think I scared them with the blood red topping instead of love-love red. (Whatever love-love means!)

To everyone whom I give a cake:

Bear with me. You may like it or not. I'l try until I get the flawless piece of cake.
Thankyou.

Nevertheless, the fondant puppy looked cute. Puppy Love, ain't it?

Ever seen a more exquisite eyelashes?

Here, he has them.

Lucky He.

Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaawn.

DIY Chocolate Covered Gulab Jamoon Pops

Its winter time guys, and its soo very cold nowadays. Feel like sipping a hot cuppa chai every now and then. Year end is so special for us. In November being Ankush's birthday and december being our wedding anniversary. Yes, We celebrated our 4th year anniversary recently.

Four Years!!

Happy four years !

Happy four years and a cute lil boy who is a year old!!

Phewwwww. So much in four years. No, I won't say it just feels like yesterday that I got married.

                I did think of baking a special cake for our day, but we have had too much of cake recently. So thought of making hubby's favorite Gulab Jamoon. It's been long time since I did this one. Just as I started making these , an idea struck me. "Why not make Gulab Jamoon Pops?" Yes, I have seen people making cake pops, So very unprepared, I started to make these pops. Since it was the first time  I would be trying , just made 4 of them . This is how it's made.

                Ok! For the Pops, all you need is dry gulab jamoons, chocolate (white or milk, whichever you prefer), stuff to decorate(optional), toothpick/lollipop sticks, thermacol.

First you need to make dry gulab jamoon and refrigerate it. Once its refrigerated for about an hour, take a toothpick, dip it into melted chocolate , and insert it into the dry gulab jamoons. Now you need to refrigerate it again enough to harden the chocolate. This is so that the toothpick stands firmly.

Note: While melting chocolate, do not add water or milk . Just melt it as it is. If you want to thin it down just add few drops of oil/shortening to it. I just sprinkled few drops of water, which I shudn't have done.


Next step is to dip the jamoon in melted chocolate as shown .  Lightly tap it against the vessel to remove all the excess chocolate.      

Believe me!  There's nothing heavenly than melted hot chocolate:) Yummmm.

After this, You can roll it over crushed pistachios, almonds or cashews as per your taste. You can follow this step if you aren't interested in decorating it. You can also probably serve it with ice cream.

Take a piece of thermocole and insert the toothpick on it. Refrigerate it to harden the chocolate. It is then ready to eat. See ,wasn't that easy?

Decorating the pops are totally optional. There are millions of ways to decorate them. I did some simple decoration. Here I used white fondant to give it some character.

U can even do this using white chocolate. Mixing food colours with white chocolate and running it threadlike on these pops also look wonderful.

Few other Variations.

There you now know how to make them:) It taste sooo yummy. Trust me on this.

Anybody want a bite??


Update: Better to use semi sweet chocolate to balance the sweetness of the gulab jamoon

DIY Decorations for Ankush's Birthday

Having a runny nose :(  Me and Ankush, both!! Thats the worst part. Our noses seemed to be in perfect symphony throughout the day. We almost created a masterpiece yesterday. Don't ask.

I had put quite a lot of effort for Ankush's birthday. I started getting the invitations ready.

Next I prepared these. I cut out the letters in watercolor paper and I used cool blue, ivory black and glitter silver to paint it. The penguins on each letter were all drawn before it was cut. 

Aren't those lovebirds ..oops..Love penguins cute:)

The seal that you can see  over the alphabet 'I' is a character in the cartoon PINGU.

I loved the design in letter 'Y' . The penguin is fishing here:) Ankush keeps pointing out at 'D' all the time.

Penguin on letter 'N' is mountaineering. "Go Penguin Go"

I was getting out of ideas on penguin models. Hence made a snowman on 'S'.


On the whole it looked like this when stuck on wall.

This was the centerpiece or more literally the cornerpiece.

I tried to maintain the colours blue, orange , white, silver and  black in all my decorations. Next I bought white, blue and orange color woollen.   I made a braid out of these 3 colors. Cut triangular shapes of orange, blue, and pasted aluminium foil on the rest.

I stuck Ankush's picture on these triangles. Pasted them on the braid. The penguins were also made out of paper and painted with acrylics. I made around 14 such hangings.






This was on the entrance door. The
letters are made out of woollen and I painted the rest of the area.

This was another piece which says 'You are in 1-derland'.

We had lot of snacks, played quite a few fun games. We all had fun. Hope all the kids enjoyed.

Ankush's First B'day Cake and DIY Fondant Penguin

My Son Ankush turned One on the third of November. I wouldn't say "Wow, Time just flies". Nope. It was a really long year :) First year with my son was awesome I must say. There were a medley of emotions throughout. I experienced anxiety, happiness, frustration, pain, warmth , delight, love and many emotions which cannot be explained through words. First year of motherhood is so much memorable in a person's life.  It is truly a blessing from above to see my angel give his million watt smile.

So having wanted to make his first birthday all so memorable like all other parents, I started planning ahead in time. Ankush loves, loves and loves PINGU ,the penguin. It his first favorite cartoon character. PINGU is enough to soothe him down when he cries or when he's fussy about his meals. So I choose PINGU as the theme for the birthday. So Let me start with the birthday cake, the one I was most anxious about. I baked a marble cake and decorated it with fondant penguins. I used white frosting to represent snow.

All you need to make this penguin fondant is fondant (I used wilton white fondant), food/icing colors(black,orange), powdered sugar , toothpick, orange color titbits(optional).

To begin with, you can either buy black colored fondant or buy white fondant and use black food/icing color to get the black fondant. If you want to color it , do it the day before you intend you use it.

Take a lime sized portion of fondant and shape it into an oval which represents the body.

You can either use orange color fondant or orange titbits to represent the feet. Use 2 titbits and just push it at the bottom as shown.

You can use powdered sugar to help you from keeping the fondant from sticking onto your fingers. 

Now pierce a toothpick into the body as shown. Make sure the length of toothpick is lesser than the length of the penguin, else cut it to the required length. This step is totally optional. This is just to ensure that the head portion is totally supported. I just didn't want to take a chance.

Take  a small amount of fondant for the head. Shape it into a ball and place it above the body through the toothpick.

Meanwhile ,you need to use a pea sized amount of fondant, shape it like a stick and press it lightly , bend it to represent the wings as shown in this picture. Make all the wings before starting the body so that they harden up a bit to retain their shape by the time the body is ready.

Now roll white fondant into a thin sheet and cut out the shape as shown. This will be pasted using a dab of water onto the body.

Take a mustard size of white fondant and lightly press it between your fingers and place a small amount of black fondant over it to represent the eyes.

Now paste the eyes and beak on the face using a dab of water. Use just a dab of water,using more amount of water will make it slippery. So you need to be very careful white pasting it.Beak is done using an orange fondant. Paste the wings at the sides of the body. This edible fondant penguin is now ready.
 Fondant is very sticky and soft. Once the penguin was done, I kept it in open air for an hour and then placed it in a box. I only removed it just before assembling the cake for the party. Too much  exposure to air also hardens it and it might also develop cracks.

I then used green and violet colored fondant to decorate the penguin with scarves, and caps. The dome above the cake represents igloo. I used blue colored frosting to represent water.

Thus, I made the cake. Donno if Ankush really understood about the cake. But hubby and me were all excited about the cake. When Ankush grows up, Im gonna show this picture to him. Hope he Likes it:)


Coming Next Post: Ankush's Birthday Decorations.

DIY photo decal/frames

Just looked back at all my posts and realized that this is my 26th post. Bad? Good? Don't know? Think ,I don't know, coz its over a year now that I started blogging. Think I need to blog more frequently, something nice. Creative. Fun. Interesting.

The other day, I wanted to cover up the boring white walls with some photos. But I dint have any photo frames to fame them onto. So I made some of my own.

Things you will need: Construction paper/colored paper which is stiff and thick, stickers, glue scissor, cello tape, photo/any printout.
 First, cut the colored paper like a frame and stick it onto the photo/printout. Then decorate it as per your taste. I stuck some scrapbooking stickers on them. I also cut out ribbons into small pieces and pasted over it. Voila! Done. Now stick it onto the walls with cello tape.

Have a look at my wall. See how the boring white wall looks colorful. As a variation, if you want a uniform look, use a single color for the frames instead of multicolours. I prefer using wider number of colours coz its nice for the babies if you have one at home.




Do you remember all the fun stuff you ate when you were a kid? I remember! I use to love eating Good day biscuits(which was so much tastier then), 5 star, dairy milk, cream over the boiled milk (which I really hate now), thick yogurt (which my mom wouldn't allow me to eat much coz I would catch a cold) , Sweet buns, honey cake (which I still love, think I need to bake it someday), ice cream, bubble gum (I remember trying to make those big bubbles. remember Boomer????),  dosa with jam and many more things. These tiny colored chiclets being one. Don't know why but I used to love these. The other day when I went shopping , my eyes happen to spot these and I just picked it immediately. Haven't seen these lately. I used to love it as a kid. They just look so cute:) Ah! Those ring-a-ringa roses days, I'll tell ya!! But taste buds have changed so much now. Then, A ketchup would be enough for everything including dosas and idlis and upmas. Now!! Eeeeeeeeeks. How can anyone eat ketchup with idli! I remember my cousin bro eating curd rice with ketchup. Imagine:)

 Having bought a new muffin pan, I felt like crazy to bake cupcakes again. Crazy me, didn't I eat enough on my hubby's bday! I had to hurry up and make them again. This time I baked Mocha cupcakes with raspberry and chocolate chip. Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm........... Want some???

It is Dasara now. Happy Navarathri to all my friends:)

Mr. Charming's Birthday

It was my husband's birthday yesterday. This is his 5th birthday we are celebrating together. How time flies! I usually plan for a surprise on his birthday. This time I had planned for a surprise party which didn't really materialize. Know why? Coz dear hubby comes home and tells me to plan for a dosa night on his bday:)) He himself asked for it.So there went down the drain, my surprise. Anyways,we had an amazing party .And the one who enjoyed the most was my son Ankush. Thanks to his cute friend Oishi. Both the kids were having fun playing around.

This time I baked carrot cupcakes for the cake, topped with cream cheese frosting. I arranged the cupcakes as in the word DAD. It was his first birthday as a father. The decorations you can see on top of the cake is made of black fondant. Hubby was just happy to see the arrangement and taste the cake. He loved it.



This pic is not good. It's a snapshot from a video. Forgot to click a picture of the whole arrangement:(

 In this pic You can see that I made shoes, laptop, sunglasses and his office bag. I mainly made stuff that he uses everyday.

In this one, you can see his T-shirt, shorts, car, wine bottle with glass(Not that he drinks everyday;)).

In this pic are his watch, mobile and his wallet.

Happy Birthday Dear Raghav

Look at him posing. He just loves to pose for the camera. As soon as he hears the switch on sound of the camera he starts paying attention, and gives his priceless poses.

 This one is for you, my friends. Come have a bite:)

We watched Endhiran last week, the hindi version. We were happy to find a link, online. It was a total, entertainer. The last few scenes, felt like I was watching transformer,Super man, Batman, infact all super heroes on One.It would have been great watching it on big screen. But honestly, Ash and Rajni!! Just imagine the number of times she had to kiss him while shooting!! Hehehe. But  Hats off To Rajni for his performance as Robot. 1 zettabyte memory, 1 teraHz speed. Wonder what would be his next film.What fun it would be if I had a robot at home:)