How to: Make an awesome dessert in ten easy steps! Rocky Road style!

Nigella Lawson's Rocky Road 

AKA

Neen and Dan's Ultimate Death by Chocolate Dessert!

WARNING: NOT FOR THE FAINT HEARTED! EAT AT YOUR OWN PERIL!

Here's how to make it in ten easy steps!

Step one: Gather your ingredients!

You need:

(According to Nigella...)

125g of unsalted butter

300g of chocolate

3tbsp of golden syrup

200g of rich tea biscuits

100g of mini marshmallows

(Give or take! we used more chocolate and fewer biscuits. It's not too important! We also added chocolate chips and chocolate balls for decoration.)

To see the original, proper recipe click HERE!

Step two:

Get a heavy bottom saucepan and put it on a low heat with your butter, chocolate and syrup in. Break your chocolate up so it melts faster.

Remember to stir!

Step three: Test the chocolate. It's a must.

Step four: Get a freezer bag and bung your biscuits inside.

Enlist the help of a big strong bloke and a heavy duty rolling pin.

Bash the buggers to smithereens!

Step five: Set aside half of your melted chocolate/syrup/butter mixture for later.

Get your marshmallows and biscuits at the ready...

...and whack them into the mix.

Yum yum! Give it a good stir.

Step six: Place a cheeky bid on ebay.

Step seven: Pour your mixture into a large flat dish.

We added chocolate chips on top.

Pour the mixture that you set aside before on top.

Step eight: Enjoy a healthy snack that your other half lovingly prepared for you.

Step nine: Flatten it all out as best you can with a spatula or the back of a spoon...

...and sprinkle some goodies on top!

We chose more chocolate chips, chocolate balls and marshmallows. (obviously)

Coor blimey!

Step ten: Refrigerate for two hours or until the chocolate has set. Eat and enjoy.

Moment on the lips... lifetime on the hips!

How to: Re-invent your scarves!

I really love wearing scarves with my outfits and have accumulated an array of colours and designs. Since the "Snood" or "Infinity/Endless" scarf has become popular on the highstreet I have been enjoying wearing these much more than the ordinary scarf but I didn't want to banish my pretty rectangle scarves to the back of my wardrobe.

Here's a quick and easy way to re-invent your regular scarves. Transform it from this scarf with unruly fly away ends:

To this flattering and easy to wear snood:

All you need is a scarf of your choice. I find this technique works best with regular rectangular fabric scarves.

Step one is to flatten out your scarf and fold in in half so both ends meet.

Step two. Grab one corner from the top layer of the folded scarf and the corner below it. Tie this in a double knot. Repeat the same process on the other two corners of the scarf.

Step three. Put it on! Easy as that. Grab the knots you have just tied and bring them together. Hang it around your neck, twist and bring it over your head again like a regular snood.

Easy as pie.

If you have a scarf which has a different colour or design on each side then you can add a twist into it before you tie the edges. This way you will be able to wear your scarf and show both sides at the same time. Like so:

Even though you have created two knots in your scarf, you can't see them when worn. Just make sure you place the knots at the nape of the neck and when you twist the second layer of scarf around your neck the knots will be covered up easily.

 So there you have it. From this:

To this...:

...in under a minute.

Hope you guys enjoy and try it out for yourself.

x

Scarves are from all over the highstreet and charity shops.

Striped dress is from Oasis, black cardi from Topshop and shoes are from Dorothy Perkins.

How to: Go dotty nail tutorial!

As I mentioned in my last post, I bought some dotting tools from ebay and wanted to experiment. This one didn't turn out as well as I'd hoped but was really fun to do.

I used a variety of pinks and purples by Barry M.

Start with a base coat of your choice.

Set up your blobs. Make sure you work fast! I put blobs of each colour on a piece of scrap paper so I could work easily. These blobs could have done with being twice the size to fill both hand's worth of nails. It started to go tacky after a while so I think bigger blobs would be better.

Start with dotting your first colour on each nail randomly.

Then keep adding different colours...

Until you get something like this...

I ended with putting dots of my original base colour as the last layer of dots. This seemed to tie in any gaps I may have not covered with the other colours.

Voila!

Have fun, guys!