Peanut Butter Choc Chip Shortbread

 These are another great Pinterest find! This recipe comes from the blog 'The view from the Great Island'. If you are American then click the link to see the recipe. If you use European measures then here it is converted:

113g butter
250g peanut butter
188g flour
31g icing sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla essence
1/2 tsp sea salt
120g chocolate chips

Cream the butter and peanut butter until smooth and then add in the vanilla.
In another bowl mix together all the dry ingredients except the choc chips.
Add the dry to the wet and mix until it becomes a dough. I used my hands for this bit!
Add the choc chips and knead the dough until they are all mixed in.
Put the dought onto a sheet of greasproof paper and make it into a log shape. Wrap the dough in the paper, twist the ends to close them and leave in the fridge for at least 15mins.
Take the wrapped log out of the fridge and cut it into discs about 1cm thick. Place them on a baking sheet and bake at 160C for 12-14mins.
Let them cool on the sheet for 5mins before transferring them to a wire rack.

Beware - they are very addictive! I won't tell you how many I've eaten today. I will have to give the rest away as my husband doesn't like peanuts and I really shouldn't eat any more!

Thanks again to 'The view from the Great Island' for sharing such a great recipe!

Sweet and Sour - a Scrumptious Delight?

 Plush Banana Split by Scrumptious Delight

Plush Pickle by Scrumptious Delight

Do you like the sweet and sour combination? I do! I love sweet and sour chicken, sweet chilli sauce and Hawaiian pizza. And I like the combination of sweet and savoury - french fries with chocolate sauce :) In our town there is an amazing pizza restaurant where they make the best Hawaiian pizza ever, but it's not very popular as people here don't get the sweet and savoury thing. I have been trying hard to convert my friends to it and I'm succeeding slowly! 

Even if you don't like sweet and sour food, you must like this sweet and sour plush combination! Both of these plush are made by Scrumptious Delight. Go and check out her Etsy shop for more sweet and savoury delights - marshmallows, cotton candy and more!

Avant-Garde Jajce 2012

We did it! The art project for young people that I've been talking about on and off for the last month or so has finished. 

It was certainly a day to remember. It started at 03:30am with an armed robbery in the centre of town, about 2 minutes from our house. At 05:00am we left our house as planned to meet  up with the others to put up the exhibition around the town but we were stopped before we even left our street by a policeman telling us to go back into our house as there was a gunman on the loose and the town centre was on lock down. At 06:30am a SWAT team turned up with guns at the ready and searched all around the area around our house as we watched out of the windows. By 07:30am the coast seemed to be clear and one of the policemen gave us permission to start putting the exhibition up. I had to go to a friend's house to pick up some of the stuff as she hadn't been able to get into the town due to the lock down. I should add that we live in an old walled town so there are only a couple of ways in and out. When I got back to the town gate, the policeman there wouldn't let me back in and he got pretty angry when I tried to explain that I live in the town and needed to go home and to set up our exhibition. After and hour of waiting outside the town gate he let me in and we started to put the exhibition up! You can watch us doing it in the video above. 

As if we hadn't had enough to deal with already, there were two big thunder storms in the afternoon right when the young people were supposed to be performing outside! You can see some dancing in the rain on this second video which is of the performances.

Crochet Hero 3KCBWDAY3

I'm a bit behind with these blog posts! Life is pretty hectic these days. But here we go with Day 3 - Crochet Hero. Pictures like this one of amigurumi dolls made by Elisabeth Doherty are what inspired me to start making amigurumi. Her dolls have so much personality and each one is unique. You can see more of her dolls if you click here. She has actually stopped making amigurumi now and has started to make other dolls. You can see them if you click here. She has published a book of her amigurumi patterns and it was that book that helped me get started in making my own patterns for my dolls. You can buy the book from amazon if you click here.

Photo Challenge 3KCBWDAY2

This is Eco Bunny, and he, like me, lives in the beautiful country of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Unfortunately some of the countryside in this beautiful country is messed up by rubbish - plastic bottles, plastic bags and other stuff like that. Eco Bunny is made from and stuffed with plastic bags and is leading the recycling revolution in our neighbourhood. Here he is just across the street from our house in a pile of cardboard boxes.

Here he is again in the bombed out house across from our house.

And once again visiting another pile of rubbish. Unfortunately these pictures only show the bad things about Bosnia and Herzegovina - but for the photo challenge I think they work! But - please take some time to look at some of my other blog posts where you will see how beautiful the country really is, and if you ever get the chance, you really should visit!

This blog post is for day 2 of Eskimimi's Knitting and Blog Week.

To nominate my photos for the photo challenge prize please click here.

To see more photos from today's photo challenge copy and paste the code 3KCBWDAY2 into google.

Colour Lovers

This week I am taking part in Eskimimi's Knitting and Crochet Blog Week . Today's theme is 'colour lovers'.   This is a picture of my wool stash and you can see I have plenty of colours! The top left shelf is the skin tone colours, top right is eyelash yarn for hair, then yellows and greens, blues and greys, reds, oranges and browns and last of all pinks and purples. 

I often start making an amigurumi by choosing 3 or 4 balls of wool in a colour combination I like and then finding a complimentary combination of eye colour and the colour of felt around the eyes. The personality of the doll then develops from those colours as I make it.

Looking back over the dolls I have made I've discovered that this combination of skin, hair and eye colours is the one I've used most often. It's funny because, if I'm asked, I always say that pink and purple are my favourite colours, but when I asked a friend to do a critique of my Etsy shop recently, one of her comments was that there wasn't enough pink in it, and I looked in my wardrobe the other day and realised that most of my t-shirts are green. I'm starting to think that perhaps pink and purple aren't my favourite colours after all! 

What is your favourite colour?

3KCBWDAY

And the waiting is over...

After our workshop on Monday the army of babushkas in my living room now have faces :)