perfection

Baby Shower Candy-Bar GOALS!!!

As you know, on Sunday we had a small baby shower party to celebrate the fact that a little princess is coming our way shortly. We partied (not so hard) with only a few close friends and I have to tell you that we felt amazing. Don’t really know about our guests, but we really enjoyed ourselves… (hope you guys had a lovely time as well!)

That said, I really wanted to talk a bit about the amazing candy-bar we had as, in my opinion that was the main focus of the party – seriously, nobody is really interested on how a steak looks! The candy-bar was fully home-made and decorated by HomeMade Candy Bar. If you need a candy-bar or just sweets anytime, anyplace give them a try as the desserts were perfection and the way it looked was simply stunning. It seriously was way over my expectations (we did have a candy-bar that was twice as expensive at our wedding and it did not look anything like this one). This was a 20 persons candy-bar and it had everything a dessert freak could wish for: cupcakes, gingerbread, cake pops, marsh mellows, macarons etc. Keep in mind that you can customise it any way you like as they are very flexible on that department and that was one of the things that made me choose them. Also, they have loads of decorating pieces that really make the brandy-bar stand out and you can opt for any colour-theme you’d like. Notice that I really did not want to use the classic pink and blue theme and opted instead for a purple and turquoise theme which posed no problems for the talented duo (did I mention this is a family business: mother and daughter?).

Overall, everyone seems really impressed with the candy-bar and so were we therefore I really felt the need to talk a bit about them here. All worth mentioning is the very reasonable price (about 150 E for the entire thing) which is amazing considering the high quality of the sweets and the fact that the location of the event was at home (no extra transport fee!) on the outskirts of Bucharest.

November 30, 2016

evenlymatchedLeave a comment

#UNTOLD online recap…

We’re back from our favourite festival of the summer, Untold, and we are so glad that we got to be a part of it this year as well. First of all, I was a bit scared of the possibility of going to a festival while four months pregnant (almost five), but in the end I decided that whenever I felt like I needed to rest we would just go. Fortunately, our little bundle of joy seemed to be in sync with our musical preferences and behaved wonderfully. Obviously, my schedule was something like : EAT, SLEEP, EAT (again), SLEEP (again), DANCE, REPEAT. All in all we didn’t miss one main event and all I can say right now is that this festival managed to surprise us in a very pleasant way yet again (I mean the way it is organised) – but more on that in the longer post that will soon be up! These are photos and videos that we posted while there on our Facebook page and our Instagram accounts (L and D).

BEFORE – The road to UNTOLD

Yes, we left a day earlier just incase I wasn’t feeling way because even though there are only 320 km from Bucharest to Cluj-Napoca, it does take almost an entire day to get there (yup, no highways!).

DAY 1

This was actually the first day of the festival with more details and photos soon to come! Dimitri Vegas and Like Mike smashed the house just like last year!

DAY 2

This was the day I was most excited about as this was the first evening a main event was someone I haven’t seen yet. Needless to say that HARDWELL killed it!

DAY 3

This was the day of the King – ARMIN VAN BUUREN! No more words needed!

DAY 4

Done a bit of shopping during the day from the amazing Fashion corner and then we got ready (read: ate and slept) for the closing night of this amazing festival! This was also the night when I decided that AFROJACK was my favourite of the four days! Martin Garrix did not disappoint either.

This was all our online activity during the festival – yes, I know, not much, but I did sleep most of the time there as the little one seemed to be needing a lot of sleep. More photos and details soon!

August 9, 2016

evenlymatchedLeave a comment

Get him to the Greek!

Today is all about my favourite Greek dish! We have to confess, we didn’t make this one, but it did emerge in our kitchen, so it is blog worthy! Last Wednesday some friends came over to watch the football match with us and they decided to make Bouyiourdi, which is the simplest, most delicious recipe ever! Naturally being cheese-based I’d say that, but trust me, this is heaven! True and simple foodporn, that can be made in less than half an hour with only a handful of ingredients.

So, let’s get down to the nitty-gritty as looking at yesterday’s post, I realised that lately I do tend to write a bit too much off-topic. What you need to get this amazing, easy dish:

500 gr of tomatoes
1 bell pepper
300 gr of white cheese (we used 150 gr of simple white cheese and 150 gr of herb white cheese)
350 gr of Mozzarella
250 gr of Gouda cheese
1 tsp gried oregano
1 tbsp extra virgin olive oil

That’s about all we used but you can add chilly peppers, onions and whatever other type of cheese you like, making this a versatile and perfect-for-anyone dish. Besides the fact that you need only a few ingredients, making it is actually easy as 1-2-3!

Preheat the oven at 175 degrees and take all sorts of angled photos of the lovely cheesy ingredients.
Slice the tomatoes and the cheese, and dice the bell pepper.
Arrange all the sliced/diced ingredients into identical bowls and take 100 photos.
Toss all the ingredients finishing with the oregano and olive oil into a clay vessel and put it into the oven for about 20 minutes.
After those what seemed like forever, 20 minutes, take it out of the oven and, if you had any Mozzarella that didn’t fit into the vessel the first time (like we did), now’s the time to add it and stir the whole content with a wooden spoon.
Put it back into the oven for another five minutes and that’s it! You’ve got yourself the most delicious dish on the planet!

Considering just how amazing this was, I would’ve expected it to be the most unhealthy dish ever, but my UP app surprised me, giving it a score of 7.9 and only drew attention to the elevated amount of saturated fat. One serving from this heavenly dish gets you about 350 kcal which is actually way better than expected on my part and I decided that if I ever want to get fat, this is the one thing I’d like to get fat on!

June 19, 2016

evenlymatchedLeave a comment

Ruby…

Back to a very special red, the 2011 Anima Syrah. This one has no memory attached to it as we first drank it a few days ago. And boy, were we impressed! I mean, we were expecting this one to be a very good wine since it’s made by Aurelia Visinescu and just like all her wines, this one is also a limited edition, with only 14.204 bottles for sale. D bought it based on a hunch and my conclusion to this after taking a sip was that he should always trust his instinct. And we are talking a bout red wine and this is me writing it!

The very first thing you notice, before tasting it, is its rich ruby colour and then you feel the complex fragrance it dispenses. Just based on those two things you quickly realise this one is a special etiquette. Obviously, being a dry red wine, it’s crisp and rough, but a very good kind of rough! The first thing I felt at first sip was the rich spicy aroma, complemented by a subtle blackberry taste. The aftertaste is even more complex as it had a dark rich chocolate accent that lingered for a while. Once you get used to the spiciness of it you start detecting hints of vanilla. All that made me think that I’m dealing with a very complex and rich red that clearly moved to the top of my red wines list.

Surprisingly (for me!) this wine is not from the Transylvania area, but way closer to home (Bucharest), in the Dealu Mare area. It comes from a very small and exclusive winery, that only produces limited edition wines sold all over the world. The winemaker is the best known Romanian woman in this area of expertise, that decided to put all her knowledge and expertise into this little winery giving us some very complex wine bouquets. This one is made out of three types of Syrah grapes from France and one from California.

Syrah is D‘s favourite wine type and I know that every time he buys wine, we end up with at least two different etiquettes of Syrah.

This wine should be enjoyed at 18 degrees C alongside either red meat or cheese (YaY!). This one is quite a strong wine in a sense that it hits you right at the knees after one glass, but the great thing about it is that it doesn’t affect you upper body (no headaches whatsoever). Therefore you should consume it with caution.

All in all, I have a new favourite red! Yes, I know we should at some point review a rose wine and we will, especially since we do have a few favourite roses. Maybe we’ll do that next week.