November 29th, 2009 by Caroline
Brr.. it’s getting chilly isn’t it?
Well, lets warm things up a bit and have a party!
The Fabiola & Sing Sing Christmas party will take place in Oxford, UK, on Wednesday 2 December 5-10pm.
Celebrate with us and enjoy a fabulous 15% discount on every item in our shop, as well as complimentary drinks and nibbles!
Email us if you would like to come and celebrate with us, and help us get through the champagne and cocktails!
Looking forward to seeing you! Merry Christmas!
Category: Christmas, Entertaining, Events, Food | No Comments yet, your thoughts are welcome
November 1st, 2009 by Caroline
After the great time we had at the St Helen and St Katharine’s Christmas Fair a year ago, I’m delighted to announce that Fabiola & Sing Sing will be attending once again this year!
St Helen & St Katharine is an independent day school for girls in Abingdon, Oxfordshire. As it’s a local school to us we’re very happy to support their charity fund-raising endeavours by taking part in their annual Christmas fair – especially as we get to sell our wares in the wonderful Old School Hall.
And this year the fair promises to be bigger and better than ever before. The fair takes place on Saturday 14th November, with doors opening at 10am.
Look forward to seeing some of you there! It could be the ideal opportunity for you to pick up an object of desire in time for Christmas, and have a fun day out at the same time!
If you do come to the fair this weekend, please don’t be shy – say ‘Hi’ and tell us that you read the blog. We promise not to bite!
Of course, if you can’t wait (or can’t make it to the fair) you can always find an array of gorgeous and beautiful items in our online store.
Category: Christmas, Events | No Comments yet, your thoughts are welcome
November 1st, 2009 by Caroline
We’ve added some gorgeous handcrafted birthday cake decorations to the Fabiola & Sing Sing store.
These creative ideas can turn even the humblest cake into something special, making for an inspired celebration!
Check out some of the designs in the gallery below, or view them in further detail in the Cake Decorations section of our online store.
Category: Entertaining, Food, Kids, Party | No Comments yet, your thoughts are welcome
October 30th, 2009 by Caroline
Happy Halloween everyone! I’ve just discovered the amazing foodie blog of Matt Armendariz.
He’s a food photographer who is completely obsessed with anything food and drink related and anything in between. What’s not to love!
I found his blog whilst looking for great Halloween recipes.
These Candied Apples are so striking have such a depth of colour you would think you’d served up the dark heart of Medusa and the blood of a thousand virgins.
Matt has graciously allowed me to use his gorgeous photography and recipe below. Enjoy!!
Red & Black Candy Apples
8-10 medium sized apples
8-10 wooden twigs, twimmed
3 cups granulated sugar
1/2 cup light corn syrup
1 cup of water
several drops of cinnamon flavored oil
1/4 teaspoon of red food coloring
1/4 teaspoon of black food coloring
Clean and dry the apples. Try to remove as much of the wax as possible. If you purchase them from your local farmer’s market then chances are they have not been treated with the food grade wax that makes then shine. Remove any stems or leaves and insert a twig into the end of each apple. To facilitate easier twig entry you can carefully sharpen the end of the twig or use a candy stick to create a guide hole. Set apples aside.
Heat and stir sugar, corn syrup and water in a saucepan until sugar has dissolved. Boil until the syrup reaches 300 degrees on a candy thermometer. Don’t go over 310 degrees or your candy burns and then you’ll be sad.
Remove from heat and stir in flavored oil and food coloring.
Dip one apple completely in the syrup and swirl it so that it becomes coated with the melted sugar candy. Hold the apple above the saucepan to drain off excess. Place apple, with the stick facing up, onto a baking sheet that’s greased or lined with a silpat. Repeat the process with the remaining apples. If your syrup thickens or cools too much, simply reheat briefly before proceeding. Let the apples cool completely before serving.
A note about the black apples: Lighter colored apples (Granny Smith, Golden Delicious) work well in making the red appear bright and glassy; darker apples like red delicious help the black candy appear as dark as possible. Muy spooky!
Also, Adam made one batch with red food coloring and after he had a few red apples he reheated the candy mixture and added black food coloring. Adding black to red will make it darker. He repeated the dipping process. Black food coloring can be found online or at specialty baking stores.
Category: Entertaining, Events, Food, Kids, Party, Things to do, halloween | No Comments yet, your thoughts are welcome
October 29th, 2009 by Caroline
I’ve received some great feedback from people who were inspired by my how to carve a pumpkin article to try it for themselves. It’s fantastic to hear of some the antics you guys are getting up to in the run-up to Halloween, so be sure to keep letting us know here at Fabiola & Sing Sing.
So, as promised, I had a go at carving another pumpkin tonight – using one of the designs from the Pumpkin Lady herself.
I’m pretty delighted with the results – but see for yourself and you decide!
Category: Party, Things to do | No Comments yet, your thoughts are welcome
October 27th, 2009 by Graham
Sometimes you start Googling something on a whim, and you uncover a whole underworld that you never realised existed.
Take, for instance, the art of designing Halloween costumes for dogs..
Here’s my favourite of the bunch, Darth Vader dog:
Category: Funny, Miscellaneous, Party | No Comments yet, your thoughts are welcome
October 27th, 2009 by Caroline
I really love Halloween, all the dressing up and spookiness is such fun!
This year, I thought I’d attempt my first pumpkin carving ever. I always imagined it would be quite difficult, as pumpkins are quite heavy and thick- skinned. So I downloaded a template which looked easy and not to much detail. I thought the skin would be really difficult to carve through and was so surprised at how easy it was!
I thought it would be fun to share my first attempt with everyone so you could either try this yourself or at least laugh at my efforts.
Step 1:
Choose a smooth, umblemished pumpkin.
Attach a pumpkin carving pattern, using cellotape. Here I have chosen a Halloween-themed pattern (obviously!) with two vampire bats.. Bwah hah hah!
Step 2:
Poke tiny holes through the pattern, using a skewer. I used a cork screw because it was there.
Don’t make large holes, you only need the holes as a guidline for when you start to cut into the pumpkin.
Step 3:
Remove the pattern from the pumpkin. Here you can see my pattern. If you have trouble seeing the pattern, you can rub some talcum powder into the holes and this will show up the pattern better.
Step 4:
Draw a shape for the removable top of the pumpkin. Cut out the shape but make sure you cut at an angle, so the pumpkin top won’t fall into the pumpkin once you’ve cut it.
Step 5:
Time to get squelchy! Get your hands in there and start pulling out all that pumpkin goop!
Scrape out the rest with a short-handled spoon. Better yet, get a pumpkin carving kit – the tools in these make the job a lot easier and safer.
Once that is done, you can start the really fun part, carving!
Step 6:
For my carving, I used a child’s kitchen knife. My nephews and nieces use these knives when we cook together. It’s safer because you can run the knife along your hand without cutting, yet still seems to cut things really well. I’m not really sure how that works but it’s really a great tool.
For larger shapes, cut out in smaller pieces.
Step 7: Whoops! Back to Step 5 for me!:
Ooops! Make sure you have de-gooped properly! I didn’t get out all those stringy bits and when I cut out my pattern, you could see lots of stringy pumpkin bits hanging out.
Step 7 (essential):
Pat the dog. Archie has grown tired of waiting for cuddles and has fallen asleep on the kitchen floor.
Step 8:
Wash out the pumpkin and dry with a paper towel.
Step 9:
Make your room smell great by sticking some cloves in the pumpkin-top and sprinkling some cinnamon onto it.
Step 10:
Add a candle and light! It looks amazing and smells so good!
If you would like to learn a lot more about the art of pumpkin carving, you can visit The Pumpkin Lady, who has lots of really helpful videos to get you started. She also sells creative patterns from really easy to advanced. I am going to try one of her patterns and will post it soon.
The bat-shaped pattern I used here was from e-How.
I hope you found this fun and helpful. If you were inspired to carve a pumpkin, I would love you to send me your photos, so I can post them on my blog.
Happy carving!
Category: Party, Things to do | No Comments yet, your thoughts are welcome
October 25th, 2009 by Graham
We’re working late at Fabiola & Sing Sing, real late. In fact it’s 1:00am in the morning. Yawn!
But what makes this night unusual is that it’s the night that we have to turn all the clocks back an hour. Yep, at 2:00am it will be one o’clock again, and we’ll have to do this hour all over again.
A 25 hour Sunday! When I was a kid that would have been my idea of hell.. but mind you, back then there wasn’t that much to do on a Sunday – no shops were open, and a Sunday almost always meant rain and a repeat of Last of The Summer Wine. Shudder..
It’s said that we turn the clock back to help Scottish farmers do whatever they Scottish farmers do with a bit more light in the morning. It’s also claimed that it’s much safer for kid’s walking to school in the morning (do kids even walk to school anymore these days?) if the clocks go back.
But hang on – doesn’t more light for kids walking to school in the morning mean that there is less light for them when they come home? And isn’t it plausible that more kids might be run over when they’re tired at the end of their school day than at the beginning?
So, I’m a skeptic when it comes to us messing around with the clocks all the time – maybe we should just adopt the same time zone as France and mainland Europe?
Category: Miscellaneous | No Comments yet, your thoughts are welcome
October 24th, 2009 by Graham
We just had a lady arrive on the doorstep of Fabiola & Sing Sing selling poppies for Remembrance Day.
I’m always impressed by the people who volunteer and collect money for good causes at this time of year, commemorating those who have been lost in conflicts around the world.
I do feel sorry for the humble poppy though – it’s a beautiful flower, but always now associated with wars. Maybe poppies need a PR consultant to give them a new image?
Here are eight facts about poppies:
1. Poppies first caught people’s attention during the Napoleonic Wars, as they bloomed over the graves of fallen soldiers.
2. In World War I, the poppy was noticed in large numbers again, popping up (is that why they’re called poppies?) in the rubble of France and Belgium as the soil became rich in lime. The small red flowers flourished around the graves of the dead, as they had a century before during the Napoleonic Wars.
3. The most famous bloom of poppies during World War I was to be found in the churned up soil of Ypres, a town in Flanders, Belgium. 1915 saw the second battle of Ypres, which was calamitous for the allies as it saw the first use of the new German chlorine gas, bringing forth poppies in large numbers.
4. Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae of the Canadian Forces Artillery was inspired by the poppies he saw at Ypres to write the famous poem “Flanders Fields”, describing how the flowers blew between the wooden crosses. McCrae was actually dissatisfied with the poem and threw it away. Fortunately a fellow officer saved it and sent it to newspapers in England where, after being rejected by London’s Spectator, it was finally published by Punch in December 1915.
5. Two days before the Armistice, an American woman called Moina Michael from Athens, Georgia, read McCrae’s poem, and was so moved that she wore an artificial red silk poppy all year round in memory of those who died in the war. Moina campaigned to have the poppy emblem adopted as a national memorial symbol in the United States.
6. On 29 September, 1920 the National American Legion agreed to make the Flanders Fields Memorial Poppy its national emblem of remembrance. A French woman , Madame E. Guérin, had met Moina Michael at Columbia University’s YMCA, where Moina was working as a volunteer, and was present at the National American Legion. Madame Guérin set about selling millions of poppies, made by French women.
7. In 1921 Madame Guérin introduced the Memorial Poppy to the UK, when she sent French women to London to sell poppies. In the autumn of 1921, at a meeting with Field-Marshall Earl Haig (the former Commander-in-Chief of the British Armies in France and Belgium) she convinced him to adopt the Flanders Poppy for the British Legion. The British Legion’s Poppy Day Appeal was born, raising money for poor and disabled veterans.
8. The wearing of white poppies is, perhaps surprisingly, not a new phenomenon. The idea dates back to 1933, when the UK Women’s Guild designed them to represent peace. In both 1933 and 1988 the British Legion was invited to produce white poppies, but they declined (and refused to accept proceeds) as they felt they were disrespectful to soldiers.
If you’re interested in learning more about her story, read this webpage about Moina Michael and how the poppies of Flanders Field became the flower of remembrance.
Category: Miscellaneous | No Comments yet, your thoughts are welcome
May 8th, 2009 by Caroline
We’re gearing forward to a busy weekend at Fabiola & Sing Sing as we’re taking part in the fair at the Dorchester Festival.
The Dorchester Festival is based in and around Dorchester Abbey in south Oxfordshire, with all kinds of entertaining activities ranging from puppet shows and ghost hunts to Joseph and the Technicolour Dreamcoat and murder mystery trails!
And, of course, all of this is in support of the fabulous historic building and local charity Seesaw.
The Dorchester Festival lasts 10 days, with the festivities culminating in a two day fair at Dorchester Abbey – which means you can meet us and many other exhibitors between 11am and 5pm on Saturday 9th and Sunday 10th May. It will make a great day out for all the family – so why not come along?
You can read more about the Dorchester Festival Fair, and some of the different companies showing off their beautiful goods, on the fair’s website.
If you do come to the fair this weekend, please don’t be shy – say ‘Hi’ and tell us that you read the blog. We don’t bite, we promise!
Category: Events | No Comments yet, your thoughts are welcome
