Circles

What goes around comes around....blah blah blah, it is amazing the amount of cliches and analogies that are referred to with circles. In some cultures giving a silver coin ensures that circle of life and friendship are never broken, particularly if someone gives you a knife as a gift, which can cut through a friendship.
Circles provide us with a beginning, middle and end, wherever we want to start and end it. In a circle you are a leader and a follower which makes you flexible, and therefore a teacher and a learner, which makes you versatile. Interesting objects circles.....

Saturday Breather

Wow, the weeks come and go and life continues to be busy, so I have made a resolution to start my New Year on 1 April. I figure I could ease the brakes on the year and have another new beginning. I am going to swap 'hectic' to 'rumble'. Steady would be dead boring, and I dont want that on any level!
Today's colour comes from a great discovery I made on holiday losing myself in my favourite magazine, the English House & Garden. I have often said I love that mag so much I could very happily just live inside it... anyhow, I discovered two ladies who operate out of Beirut and meld together fantastic tapestries of old and new worlds and found this beetle they had covered for charity - isn't it fantastic!

A little about these fantastic women.

Bojka Design
Hoda Boroudi and Maria Hibri are the Beirut based duo behind Bojka Design. The pair is natural union of talent and creativity. The both share a love of antiques and vintage furniture, as well as a passion for ancient textiles and tapestries from countries along the Silk Road. Established in 2000, Bojka is an expression of respect and love for an age-old culture and aesthetic with human approach. The concept stands for a poetic sense of colour, an emphasis on craftsmanship, and the sustainable use of available materials to express an artistic idea with an ever present spiritual content.

Very Special Colour

There is no colour so vivid than that of a wedding. Every aspect of a wedding provides us with colour, light, vision and texture. The colour follows the dresses, the flowers, the setting. The light is the heart that a wedding holds. The vision is the future love, relationships and friendships that are born at a wedding. The texture is the pattern that brings all the different aspects of a wedding together, people, places, food, music. What a way to have a celebration. The wedding I attended at the weekend was a wonderful combination of all the above and so much more!

A colourful demolition

....I did have a rather big spash of colour yesterday as featured below, the old much tagged (in a very artistic way)flat in Ponsonby being demolished... this is colour and texture in motion

St Patrick's Day

Well week one is fine, but yesterday the blogger site cut me out so no post, I guess daily was always going to be a bit hard! Today's colour really speaks for itself, being green. That is of course unless you work with food, and all cakes are chocolate but just with a twist for the leprachans out there! Nigella's (goddess of all culinary colour)Guinness Chocolate Cake - now I know a bit about cake but this was defintely in a different league, moist, light and most definitely full of all the best of ingredients, weight watchers read no further... the photos show the evidence and below is the recipe.... SORRY HAD TO ADD A COUPLE OF OMMISSIONS TO THE RECIPE!!

Nigella’s Chocolate Guinness Cake
(a must for St Patrick’s Day)

Quote from the Goddess herself
‘this cake is magnificent in its damp blackness. I can’t say that you can absolutely taste the stout in it, but there is certainly a resonant, ferrous tang which I happen to love. The best way of describing it is to say that it’s like gingerbread without the spices. I wanted to make a cream cheese frosting to echo the pale head that suits on top of a glass of stout. It’s unconventional to add cream but it makes it frothier and lighter which I regard as aesthetically and gastronomically desirable.'

For the Cake:
250ml Guinness 2 eggs
250gm unsalted butter 1 tblsp vanilla extract
75 gm cocoa powder 2 ½ tsp bicarb soda
1 x 140 ml pottle sour cream
400gm caster sugar
275gm flour

For the Topping:
300gm Philadelphia cream cheese
125ml double cream
150g icing sugar

Preheat the oven to 180dgC, and butter and line a 23cm springform tin.
Pour the Guinness into a large wide saucepan, add the butter – in spoons or slices – and heat until the butter has melted, at which time you should whisk in the cocoa and sugar. Beat the sour cream with the eggs and vanilla and then pour into the brown, buttery, beery pan and finally whisk in the flour and bicarb.
Pour the cake batter into the greased and lined tin and bake for 45 minutes, to an hour. Leave to cool completely in the tin on a cooling rack, as it is quite a damp cake. (at least 30 minutes)
When the cake is cold sit on a flat platter. Lightly whip the cream cheese until smooth, sieve over the icing sugar and beat them together.
Add the cream and beat again until it makes a spreadable consistency. Ice the top of the black cake so that it resembles the frothy top of the famous pint.

and now...to finish a glass of Ireland's finest, a song and little reel - another perfect day! Ahhhh go the Irish

the working week begins

Where was my colour today. My early morning walk gave me another beautiful sunrise

And to make you even more envious that is taken from my office - wow how lucky am I?
A day of meetings with very excited people with very exciting plans, and it only lunchtime, where to begin the rather large job ahead. Sometimes I feel the day rushes past so quickly the end has come and the ideas / plans and activity mount like pile of really great books, you want to read them all but just not sure which one to pick first, but if you dont start the pile will fall. Actually that is not a very good analogy as my reading has subsided terribly over the last few years, only on holiday do I love the luxury of a good book and a soft sofa to doze and read, as I find the two go hand in hand these days - it does seem poles apart the 'excited meetings' to the 'soft sofa' - maybe retirement is where the two meld... I am far to young to plan that far ahead, I had better just think about tomorrow and reducing that pile of books...

Replacing Colour

It is nearly the end of summer and the time has come to sweep out the old colour and make way for the new (not that I am off for a big shopping spree) but when the world is rocking on her axis it is a good time to declutter. Have less and give more, which is partly the reason for this blog site. Every day I see so many gorgeous things and want to share them and be able to look at them, but not necessarily own them, so I though photographing and reporting on them I would always have a record.

Another Lovely Sunday

a walk down by the marina and breakfast at a cafe is always a wonderful way to start the day off when YOU have the day off, a slightly belated weekend, but an appreciated one none the less.
My current colour is the deepest of reds as I am gently simmering a pot of boysenberries which is wafting through the house with that wonderful summer berry aroma, later to be made into a Macadamia Crumble!
Sunday night can often be a 'Sunday Night Dinner' at cousin Cate's with an eclectic group of early 20s to happy 50s and the occasional interesting 80 year old to banter and share a wicked dinner - LUGGI (life is great get involved)

Everyone has a first day

My first day of 'the blog'. A little about me, I wish to diarise my thoughts and ideas that come to me everyday in the form of colour.  My world is seen through a coloured lens, if you are looking at the garden, I am looking at the colour of the flowers, if you are looking at the building I am looking at the colour it radiates. I work in a very lively kitchen store where we have the delight of talking about food all day every day and this has given me the ability to taste and imagine most food by just hearing of the ingredients. I see colour in everything from people, things (yes material things) and my surroundings. I dont know where this blog will go but I want to write about the little inspirations that warm my heart each day. So join me or not and I guess this is a slow meander down the yellow brick road!