Football fun!

This week has been another fantastic week for me! From playing football to a new hair colour, from celeb spotting to scone making, its been a jammed pack weekend. Most importantly though, this weekend was mainly about raising money for the fantastic charity, Sport Relief.

Sport Relief began in 2002 and is the sister project to Comic Relief, however whereas Comic Relief’s main concept is to do something funny for charity, Sport Relief’s is to do something sporty as the name may suggest. So this year, two ex-professional footballers, Alan Shearer & Robbie Savage, decided to hold a continuous five-a-side tournament that lasted the length of a whole Premier League season which is a whopping 57 hours! So from Thursday morning to Saturday evening over 1000 players took part in the event that hosted a number of teams including celebrities, kids and anyone who fancied a game of football really. One of my football teammates told me about this event and that it was taking place in Manchester so I quickly jumped on the website and booked a slot. As my teammate had booked a slot for our football team to play in, for my slot I decided to form a work team and try and raise some money for Sport Relief. The creation of AFC Bott was made, with a few players who play football regularly, some who play now and again and we even had two players who had never played football before in their lives…this was going to be interesting. We decided that as this was for charity and there was no fee to enter, we would try and raise some money to give as a donation on the night. Therefore on the Friday before the event I held a whole host of football related competitions and activities at work that people could take part in to raise money. We had a ‘guess how many footballs in the jar’ game, a competition where each department had to guess what the score would be, who would score first, etc and ‘guess the name of the footballer’. Also I held a ‘football themed’ bake sale in which we had a selection of cookies and cupcakes.

I made some chocolate cupcakes with mint flavoured icing for the bake sale, and I even attempted to make mini footballs using icing sugar/frosting. To make them you will need both black and white 'ready-to-roll' icing sugar. Make 12 small black balls, 20 white ones of the same size and one bigger white ball.

To make the football stick one black ball to the larger white ball and surround it by 5 white ones. To make them stick, wet your fingers slightly as this will act like a glue with the icing. I'll be honest, this is really quite tricky and takes a long time to make one. I got lucky as my first one turned out perfect, however my next couple gradually got worse, therefore I just made a few.

The whole day went fantastic and we raised just under £200, the company then added a huge £500 to make our total £689.30. We took this along with us and even brought a giant cheque along for photo purposes, which was great as we got Josh from Union J to feature in our photo.

Oh and I should probably tell you that we won 9-8 in a thrilling game where we played a team of 5 guys from Saudi Arabia, who were there to win! Like I mentioned earlier, one of my teammates had also booked a slot so it meant I had just enough time to go home and take a quick nap before I was back on the pitch playing again. My second game was awesome as I played in front of Alan Shearer and got to play against Rachel Riley from Countdown, who was actually pretty good! I even managed to score a goal…sweet!

(excuse the bad quality video)

The team I was on won this game also 5-3, so it was a pretty successful day of football!

Another big thing that happened this week was I went SILVER…my hair colour that is! You may have seen that my hair was quite blonde on my ‘who I am’ page, however this was just the first step in the transition to silver! So after my awesome hairdresser, Vanessa, gave me some great tips on how to lighten my blonde and multiple uses of silver shampoo, it was finally time to apply the silver toner. The silver took fantastically to my hair and I decided to go darker at the roots so the contrast is even stronger.

One final thing before I go is that i made my Lemon Blueberry scones again for my mum as it was Mother's Day yesterday. I made them with exactly the same ingredients however this time my dough turned out a lot stickier than last time. This did worry me but I just went with it and luckily they turned out just as delicious as the last time I made them. I also decided to make a sweet lemon glaze for them which I made using ½ cup of icing sugar, a tbsp of lemon juice and just a pinch of lemon zest. Wait for the scones to cool before glazing and then add as much or as little as you want.

Well I hope you had enjoyed reading my blog this week and tune in next week to find out how to make the perfect Chocolate Mint Overnight Oats!

Peace out for now!