Christmas Gift Sets | Blogmas Day 2

Hello everyone!

There are a lot of Christmas gift sets that I'm loving this year and think would be the perfect gift for friends and family or to ask for for yourself! I have a list of high end ones and drugstore.

Estee Lauder The Makeup Artist Collection
This is an amazing offer at the moment.  The product is worth £290, but if you buy an Estee Lauder fragrance you can purchase it for £54!! This set contains everything you could need, in my opinion.  I love Estee Lauder as well so this is definitely something I want to try and get!

Soap & Glory Soaper Star 
 I got this as a Christmas present last year and I have used every single thing in this set.  I loved it! I 100% recommend this for a present for someone or even getting it yourself.

Soap & Glory Eyes Box 
Soap and Glory have some really good sets out this year.  I also love this eye box.  All the products are this in full size and for £18 I think that is very good value!

Real Techniques Bold Metals Essentials with a Clutch Bag
Now this is a bit more expensive, but in this set you get an exclusive brush as well as a clutch bag.  I think the clutch bag is a really nice idea as you can use it to store the brushes or even on a night out!

Tanya Burr Candy Glam Beauty Essentials Palette
I really like Tanya Burr's items and I think this is a lovely gift for Christmas.  This features 9 special edition eyeshadows, a mini lipgloss and a bronzer and blush.  It also has a really big mirror which is also a really good idea.  For £12 that is very good value!

Benefit Pump up The Party!
Benefit have got some really good sets out for Christmas this year.  I picked this one because of the Roller Lash and POREfessional which I both love. It also features 4 longwear powder shadows and Rockateur.  There's also a couple of other things and for the price I think its a very good purchase!

So that's my top picks for Christmas gift sets.  There are so many more I could have put in, but then this would have been a very long post!

Hope you enjoyed this post and let me know of any sets your eyeing up! 

Jessica 

xx

A Little Chat | Blogmas Day 1

Hey everyone!

So thanks to Hannah (Twitter, Blog) tweeting about wanting to do Blogmas and being very enthusiastic about it (thanks Hannah, haha) I decided I should try and do it! I'm definitely not promising that there is going to be a post every day, but I am going to try my best and see how it goes. Its good to challenge yourself, right?!

This post is just a bit of a chat really, I hope thats ok.

My blogmas posts aren't going to be constantly around Christmas (I don't know if that means its not really blogmas, but lets go with it anyway.  I'm still posting everyday) as I don't want to push it on to you all, haha.  And if I'm honest, I'm not looking forward to Christmas this year as it will be the first one without my Grandad.  He was a huge part of Christmas in my family and I can't even imagine what its going to be like without him here.  I do love everything that comes with Christmas though, mainly the decorations and songs. There will be a post coming up on my favorite Christmas songs!

Anyway that will be all for this first blogmas post! I really hope you enjoy reading all the posts and can follow it! The posts will be going up at 12pm each day (hopefully)

Happy Blogmas everyone (is that a thing? I don't know, its going to be a thing for me ok)

See you tomorrow where the post will have a bit more of a topic unlike this one! Haha

Jessica 

xx

Funfetti Cupcakes

Hi everyone! Sorry its been a while since the last post. Today I thought I'd post something a bit different than usual.

I love baking, but I just never seem to have the time to do it and if I do I have no one to eat it all so it gets wasted but this weekend I decided to make a smaller recipe! I saw these 'Funfetti Cupcakes' from Zoella's video (you can watch it here) and they looked like they would be good to make.

Ingredients:

• 125g Caster Sugar
• 125g Unsalted Butter
• 2 Large Eggs
• 1/4 Teaspoon of Vanilla Extract 
• 125g Self Raising Flour
• 1/4 Teaspoon of Bicarbonate of Soda
• 1 1/2 Tablespoons of Milk (I only need 1 tablespoon) 
• As many sprinkles as you like! 

Method: 

I didn't follow the exact way that Zoe did, but here is what I did.  

Firstly, I creamed the butter and sugar together.  I made sure the butter was soft before this as it makes things much easier! 

Next I added the Vanilla Extract and the 2 eggs.  I mixed the mixture after I added the first egg and then again after I added the second.  The mixture didn't look great at this point, but they turned out ok so I'm guessing that is what it was meant to look like haha.

I then added the flour and the bicarbonate of soda.  I know sometimes you need to add the flour bit by bit but I didn't do that this time and it all mixed well. At this point I added a tablespoon of milk and found that the consistency of the mixture looked fine without anymore milk. 

Finally, I added sprinkles.  I added quite a few so the mixture looked like it had a lot in (the picture shows what I mean!) 

I forgot to take a picture of them in the cases before putting them in the oven but I put the mixture in about 3/4 of the way up.  This was actually too much as I only got 9 cakes out of it so I'd recommend putting less mixture in than I did! 

For the icing I used this from Dr. Oetker which I really loved so I'd definitely recommend it unless you want to make your own icing, of course!  To finish off the cupcakes, I added a few more sprinkles :) 

The point of putting the sprinkles in the actual mixture was to give the cupcakes pops of colour, but unfortunately mine didn't do that.  I'm not sure why! They tasted really nice though and people enjoyed them, so, oh well! 

Hope you enjoyed this post and let me know if you want to bake these!

Jessica 

xx

Tanya Burr Cosmetics | Perfect Brows

I've never really been one for filling in my eyebrows.  I'm not sure why, its just something I never really think about and not very good at.  Plus they're always looking pretty 'full' anyway.  

However, as a watcher of Tanya Burr's videos and seeing she had bought out a beauty range I decided to pick up the eyebrow palette as it looked pretty simple to use for a beginner like me.

Firstly, the packaging is so cute.  I am in love with it! There's a mirror in the top as well which I've cropped out because you could see me taking the picture haha. I think the four colours in this are so lovely, I use a mixture of the bottom two - Chestnut and Hot Cocoa.  They work really well for me. 

In the palette you also get a small brush and tweezers which are just the cutest.  I do use the brush as I don't own any brushes like it (oops) and I have occasionally used the tweezers which work fine, but I have  a pair that I just always use and love. 

Overall, I really love this from Tanya and I think I might look into buying some more from her range as it so affordable and looks good.

Let me know if you have anything from the range! 

Jessica 

xx 

P.S Once again, sorry for the rubbish pictures.  I did take them during the day, but you'd never be able to tell haha.  If anyone has any recommendations for a reasonably priced camera then I'd love to know! :)

Beauty Haul | Benefit, L'oreal and more!

Hey everyone, so recently I've picked up quite a few items of makeup (my purse is not very happy with me right now haha)

Benefit The Porefessional

I'm forever hearing people talk about this so I thought it was about time I finally went a got it.

Benefit push up liner

Another item I hear people talk about all the time.  As someone that is awful at doing eyeliner, I'm very excited to try this as it is meant to help (here's hoping haha)

Benefit Roller Lash

I bought this when it first came out and I fell in love with it! I then ran out and instead of rushing out to get a new one, I went and got the Maybelline Lash Sensational, buuuut, Ive gone back to my roller lash and its just the best mascara I've used

Colour Riche La palette Eye Shadow Riche Beige

I went on holiday over the summer and I got this on the plane. This is my new all time favourite eye shadow palette.  I use it every single day, the second colour in is my favourite for base eyeshadow and the 8th one in is perfect in the crease! (There is a a mirror but I've cropped it out as you can see me haha)

L'oreal Glam Bronze tera bronzer

I'm not normally one for bronzers as they always just make me look like I've thrown mud all over my face which is not a good look haha.  However, this just looked really nice and when I swatched it on my hand it looked good.

YSL Touche Eclait 

I see this on TV all the time so on the plane I saw it in the duty free book and thought I may as well get it. I've only used this once, but I really liked it.  

And that's all I bought! Some of these things were from duty free so I did save a tiny bit of money luckily haha.  

Thank you so much for reading and let me know if you want a review of any of these products!

Jessica

xx