Home Sweet Home- Garden Update

It seemed a great time for a Home Sweet Home Garden update… mostly because everything in our garden is pretty much dead haha!

Everything was actually going really well during the initial phase and we were ready to begin harvesting things including the radishes which is what I was really looking forward to!

While a lot of the flowers weren’t growing over their entire boxes they were definitely alive and kicking.
The inside herbs and flowers were doing really well too, there was lots of natural light for them and other than a few little bugs they were surviving nicely.
Even my peppermint which I had assumed was never going to sprout made an appearance!
It almost looks as if there’s a garden there… almost!
Then in the space of a 4 day heat wave… everything died >_< I think most of you will have heard me complaining about the heat on social media. We had 4 consecutive days over 43 degrees Celsius and it got up to 45 on some of those days. It went from 20 degrees on Sunday to 43 on Tuesday *_*
Unfortunately… nothing in our garden survived that intense heat!
On the first day we watered like crazy and tried to shade them.
It didn’t really help! We have no air conditioning and because our apartment was built in the 1800’s it is basically just a big heat box so the inside plants didn’t do any better.
Wilted chives!
The birds took this as a hint to try and eat my radishes too >_<
By the third day this had happened and I had given up…
Poor sad radishes! You will never be part of a delicious salad R.I.P. ;_;
So very sad! It kind of looks like a plant horror movie.
Once it cooled down again we tried to revive them but there was no hope.
All of the neighbours plants died too so our apartment block just looks really depressing at the moment. The only thing that survived was William, our Billy Idol Day tree.
I’m going to try growing some new plants again in a month or so when I have time to take care of them again but this time I’m just going to go to a nursery and buy some ready gown plants which are a bit more hardy against Melbourne’s terrible weather!

Ultimate Floral Rice Crispy Squares

A while ago I wanted to test out all of the decorating supplies that James had gotten for me so I set out to make epic rice crispy squares. EPIC!

I had way too much fun decorating these!

The decorating part was really more important than the eating part of this project but let’s start at the beginning anyway!
Basic rice crispy ingredients:
  • 60g Butter
  • 1 packet of marshmallows (250g)
  • 7 cups of rice bubbles
Melt the butter in a pot and then stir the marshmallows in on a low heat. You can see they will gradually melt. Keep stirring until it’s a big mush of goo and then add the rice bubbles gradually.
Make sure to work quickly or else it will get too hard to stir.
Pour it out into a greased pan and leave it in the fridge to set. I like to smoosh the top down hard with another pan to get a really clean finish.
Once it’s set, take it out of the pan and cut it into little even cubes.
It can be very difficult to cut though so be carful.
From here I basically decided to turn each square into a little cake. To make a smooth surface I iced each one with buttercream and put it back in the fridge.
While they were cooling off I made the marshmallow fondant. Marshmallow fondant is basically marshmallows and a really large amount of icing sugar!
I microwaved the mashmallows until they melted and then put them in my mixer with a cup of icing sugar.
You pretty much continue adding icing sugar until it starts resembling a dough.
Done! Don’t forget to dust the surface you’re going to use with icing sugar so it doesn’t get all sticky!
I separated it into 4 pieces and added a different flavour to each. I used raspberry, lime, lemon and rose.
For each cube, roll out a piece of the fondant.
And lay it over the cube.
Pinch the sides and press them into nice crisp shapes.
While those cool in the fridge it’s time to make the bigger decorations! Most of the decorations I made were out of sugar gum paste and made using these little press stamps.
All you need to do is press them into rolled out fontant/gum paste/whatever and then shape the leaves a bit more if you like.
Easy!
I also made piped icing roses. I did a full tutorial on them here.
Now to put it all together, I used royal icing around the edges of each cube and then added a heap of flowers haha!
I also covered them in edible glitter… because… glitter.
They were incredibly sweet and the 35C heat made them quite melty but it was a really fun project to practice my skills on!
They took quite a while to make… so here are a billion photos  😀

Where I Walk – Snapshots!

This post continues on from my last Where I Walk series of photos. I think Melbourne is just as beautiful as Europe so I was interested to see what I could capture here!

Lottie desperately had to get in on it…
But she wanted me to follow her more often than not >_>
My friends -_-‘

Bonus, here are some more shots from Melbourne’s floor ^_^
I don’t think  could ever get tired of this city.

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