Beauty & The Baker

This weeks post is a mix of more baking and some new beauty products that I have wanted to try for a while.

First I will start with the new beauty products that I tried this week; they are Fudge Ends hair serum and a contouring kit from Makeup Revolution. I got the Fudge Ends product from work so it cost me next to nothing but you can buy it here for £13.45 which is quite expensive for a hair serum product except the fact that this one works. As someone who has naturally frizzy, curly hair I have tried a lot (probably hundreds) of frizz-control hair serums, none that have worked that well so it was refreshing to find one that really works. The tube is pretty small, however you only need a tiny amount each time so I know the tube is going to last me along time. I have used the serum after straightening my hair and when my hair was damp to control the frizz as it dried curly, it works amazing in both situations. My only disadvantage with this is getting the serum out of the tube as it’s really difficult to squeeze. This does help though with only getting a small amount out.

Next was the contouring kit by Makeup Revolution that I bought from Superdrug, here is the link to it. So for those of you who know me will know that I’m not big on make-up and I only really wear it when I am going out somewhere nice. Those who don’t know me here’s some reasons why I am a complete make-up novice; I have never worn fake eyelashes, I have never used an eyelash curler before, I don’t really know the difference between blusher, bronzer or powder and more importantly I have never tried contouring before. This leads us to my attempt at contouring this week, with my new contouring kit. As you can see from the photo below, it contains three sections. I had to rely on the trusty Pinterest to know where to apply each colour of course, but it wasn’t as hard as I thought. My only worry was making sure it was all blended enough and didn’t look to obvious and fake. I think I got a little too caught up on this though so I probably ended up blending it too much, meaning it didn’t look that different to my usual basic make-up…oooppps. As I only paid £3.50 for the kit, I wasn’t expecting it to be the best quality in the world and unfortunately the highlighting section (white part) is quite bad. It ends up looking shiny and doesn’t blend very well at all, the other two sections are great though. I think overall I have decided that contouring isn’t really for me but I will probably use the kit every now and again.

So onto my baking attempts this week. I won’t explain too much about these but I was going a little cupcake crazy. I made two batches of gingerbread cupcakes, a batch of coffee cupcakes and my favourites so far were my mint chocolate cupcakes that I decorated for the Halloween contest we had at work. Stupidly, I didn’t take any photos of my cupcakes so I will just have to make some more and take photos then. I have to mention the amazing websites that I have been using to find these recipes while I am still learning the basics of baking so here is the list of the recipes I used:

Gingerbread Cupcakes – http://goodfood.uktv.co.uk/recipe/gingerbread-cupcakes/

Coffee Cupcakes - http://sweetasacookie.com/coffee-cupcakes-coffee-cream-cheese-frosting/

Mint Chocolate Cupcakes - http://goodfood.uktv.co.uk/recipe/mint-chocolate-cupcakes/