Hello Everyone!
First of all, and no I'm not that late it's only the second week of January, I want to wish you all a very very happy new year! May 2018 be a year full of joy and love and that you can achieve as many goals as you wishes. 

Then the next thing, I want to say that I know I have been absent for quite a long time and I apologize but school and work and social life and travelling and other things have been keeping my life really busy so I couldn't make time to write down some articles. I also went through my little written-already-articles storage so I couldn't post anything even if I had the time. And u know, sometimes I just don't feel like writing stuff and writersblocks are still a great issue for me without knowing how to solve anytime soon.

But enough about me and my problems, you probably clicked on continue reading because you saw the title and u were craving to this, so let me tell you very quick how you can make your very own rocky road cake!


What better way to start 2018, then with something sweet. Two years ago, I posted an article where I made rocky road. Very simple and delicious, but I think it's time to upgrade ourselves. That's why I'm going to share this recipe with y'all. A chocolate cake with chocolate chunks and topped with biscuits, melted chocolate and marshmallows.
Shall we begin? :)



Ingredients: 

(To bake the cake)
♦ 180 gram salted butter ♦
♦ 200 gram sugar (brown sugar is prefered) ♦
♦ 1 egg ♦
♦ 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract (5 mL) ♦
♦ 165 gram flour (self-raising is prefered) ♦
♦ 50 gram cocoa powder ♦
♦ 1 teaspoon of baking soda (5 gram) ♦
♦ 240 gram dark chocolate chunks or chips ♦

(The Toppings)
♦ 50 gram milk chocolate (chunks/chips/chopped) ♦
♦ Chopped biscuits ♦
♦ Marshmallows ♦


Let's start baking!

Step 1) Preheat oven -> 175 ℃

Step 2) Prepare a cakepan and place parchment paper in it to avoid stickiness. Or use, like in this picture, butter to make sure the cake pan becomes non stick. Make sure to cover the whole pan!




Step 3) Get a big bowl and add butter and the sugar in it. Cream it together with a electric mixer (A non-eletric mixer is also fine but a bit tiring) untill it's light and fluffy, which will take about 3 to 4 minutes before it will become like the picture here above.



Step 4) Mix in the egg and vanilla extract to the mixture, again with the mixer. 






 Step 5) Add in the flour, the cocoa powder and the baking soda and mix it untill it becomes a dough texture, the mixture should be thick. 



Step 6) Now get the dark chocolate chunks en add it to the mixture. Stir untill the chunks are equally spread out in the dough. (It's not necessary to buy chocolate chips or chunks. You can also break a chocolate bar into little pieces, as long as it's small!)


Step 10) To make it ready to serve as a real rocky road cake, simply add cookies and chocolate chunks on the cake and then cover it with marshmallows. 

Now put the cake back in the oven but now we are not going to bake it but grill it so the marshmallows can get crispy and the chocolate can melt. Make sure the grill is on it's highest setting and grill the cake for 2 minutes. 







And voila, your cake is ready to be eaten. It has a nice flavour and it looks creative but it's actually really easy to make. Mine got a bit too sweet tho, so you can reduce the amount of sugar for the people that doesn't like their cakes to be too sweet but other than that I love this cake. As you may see the cake isn't really solid but that is because it's still warm and the chocolate chunks as topping has melted on the cake, so double as much chocolate! The melted chocolate makes the lack of solidness up right? 
TIP : really great cake to be serve after dinner or at a high tea.

Bon appetit!

- Gwendolyne

[written on 2018.10.01]

Hello!

Today I'm going to review a palette. I know right. Me? I know I'm not a beauty guru and I will never be one because I suck at it but I really wanted to review this palette because it's worth it. 

Nice budget, nice colours, nice pigment, nice package. 

So, get ready because I'm going to review the W7 In The Buff Natural Nudes Eye Colour Palette.

W7 In The Buff Natural Nudes Eye Colour Palette

This product of W7 is a palette that is a dupe of the Urban Decay Naked 2 palette that eveybody liked/ still like so much, but is also very expensive. Like about 50 euro's or something. 

W7 is a brand that is known for making dupe products and there are pretty good and most of them there products are pretty similair. 

I don't know the exact price because I got this as a present of my friend Chloe, for my birthday. But it's probably around ten I think.

T H E    P A C K A G E

First of all, the package. 

I like the package, it's simple and it hasn't too many decoration that will make it a little bit too much. The package is made from metal or iron I think but it's a solid package which is nice. 




This is the back of the package and as you can see it has a little ingredients list and how long you can use it before it will be expired. And which is also very handy, is the little image that shows all the name of the pigments.

T H E    C O N T E N T

So of course you get the palette with 12 different shades. They also add a brush with it that has a blendingbrush and an eyeshadow applicator. It's not the best quality but it does the work it should be, so I'm fine with it.


T H E    S H A D E S

This is how it looks like as a overview. It looks like it has a lot of pigment and it will apply easily on the skin. Let's see how it looks like on my arms.


These are the first shades. (from left to right)



And these are the last six shades.

M Y   O P I N I O N

I would probably rate this palette a 8 from a schale of 1 to 10. Mostly because I'm not a professional nor a owner of a lot of palettes which give me the lack of informations to give a it real opinion. 
But without all the research and all these things and just giving my opinion on how I find this palette works I would give it a 8 as I said before. 
Yes the pigments aren't too strong but that is reasonable. The package isn't really elegant or something but does that matter? And I quite think that it is okay that the pigments aren't too strong because of the prize. The prize is way less than the original Urban Decay palette.
And also I tried it and apllied it on my eyes and you could still see the pigment so it works.

I would definitely recommend this palette to everyone, to a starter it will be a nice palette to use. 

This was the review. I hope you liked it and it helped out with your choice by buying a new palette.
BYE

X Gwendolyne

Hello Everybody!
I'm a bit late but I wanted to wish a you all a happy new year and hope you had a wonderful time celebrating the holidays. But this article is of course related to the holidays. I'm going to show you how my day was on the 18th of december in 2016. Because I went to a christmas market with my family but the christmas market was quite special. The reason why it's so famous is that the christmas market was in a cave! A cave?! Yes, a cave!


So on the 18th of december we drove to Valkenburg in Limburg, to visit the well-known Christmas market in a cave, named Gemeentegrot.

I don't know if it's the biggest one of one of the biggest christmas markets but it was huge.












Btw, there isn't only this christmas market cave. First of all, there were two christmas markets in caves and second it was a like kind of christmas town. There was so much christmas themed things to see. 

That's why it was such a pity that we haven't had enough time to explore and see all these things. So I'll definitely recommend to stay in a hotel there for one night so you can visit the town for two whole days. It will be worth it.





Some street view, it was so cozy and beautiful.

Okay, I'm now going to tell you what I did in a chronological order.
First of all, my family and I went in the Gemeentegrot, translated it will be Government cave, to view the christmas market inside.

Basically, what a christmas market means that it's a market that sells christmas themed products and the whole place is decorated with christmas decorations.











Look how cute these decorations are but they are very expensive tho. Otherwise I would really get one.






Some magnets to bring home as souvenir.











Doesn't she look like Tinkerbell? 




Little scent chips. My little brother and I has something with it, I don't even know what.


This is how the cave actually looks like, without all the decorations.





MORE Souvenirs... ;)



Silly dad haha.





CANDY!




 This was like one of my favourites like road in this whole market.





And then we of course got some food.



Look, how pretty






There was a like bar thing in the cave.. 




I think we got some traffic..




This is a shallow pit and basically you know that a ceiling of a cave lot of times is not smooth, it has a lot of ribble and most of the times it will be shaped weird. So there was one that started from the ceiling that ends up like two metres under the ceiling and it looked like a icicle but then made of stone. And sometimes this look-a-like icicle will drop water into the pit and that's why it was pretty funny to feel the water dropping on to your hand if you place your hand under it.


This was quite funny because the owner of this shop, a man and a woman, were so different from each other. So we were walking into a queue because there were too many people and we passed this shop and I wanted to take a picture because I think this looks amazing and special. So this woman comes up to me and says: 'Ja en nu bewegen, veels te veel mensen.' Basically she says that I needed to move because I was walking very slow, trying to take a picture and she couldn't stand this and told me to MOVE, because there were so MANY people. EXCUSE ME?! I'm taking pictures of your shop because it was special. Maybe I was willing to buy something and you just told me to go away. 
Sadly for you, I still managed to take a picture. HAH













So we went back, as in turned back around because there was only one passage, the entrance and exit.





So we got out, and as stupid as we are, we didn't check before we came here if there were also other places we could go beside the cave. So we didn't know that it was basically a whole christmas village/town. But due to we took too much time being in the cave, we didn't had any time left to go to other places.

But we did manage to go to Winterwonder land and we took some pictures before a damaged castle. But the only thing we did was taking a ride on a funicular. And it was a little bit dark. That is why I was advising you before to stay a night in a hotel in Valkenburg because there are so many things to see.




LOOK AT THE VIEWW







WINTER WONDER LAND
















And in the end, we got some food to eat because it was dinner time.





And then the day ended by us going back to home.
I had a lot of fun and actually bought some cool stuff to bring to home. Let me show you.






Aren't they cute?!

So this was the A A Day In My Life - Christmas Market In Valkenburg! 18-12-2016, hope you liked it and enjoyed reading it.

Hope you are having a nice day!
I'm going to sleep because I'm a little bit sick so I need to rest.

BYE

X Gwendolyne