ice cream // chin chin labs Posted by Helena

Burnt Butter Caramel ice cream with chocolate sauce and grilled white chocolate

My housemates have told me about amazing ice cream shop Chin Chin Labs on several occasions and last Saturday I finally made my first visit! And then my second visit on Sunday...

Chin Chin Labs is Europe's first liquid nitrogen ice cream parlour. Yes, it really is as cool as it sounds! They make it right in front of you and you can feel the cold hitting your legs from the nitrogen as it overflows from the commercial Kitchen Aids. Laura K has been there so often the guy knows her.

They do different flavours every week (I think it's every week) and a special "secret flavour" which was Burnt Butter Caramel last weekend and was simply amazing. Burnt caramel is one of my favourite flavours in the wooorld. This weekend's secret special is Peanut Butter Malt... I wonder if I can squeeze in a visit to Camden before my bbq lunch tomorrow...










Step One: pour in the flavouring mixture...


Step Two: add in your liquid nitrogen








Step Three: mix mix mix!




Step Four: Add your sauce and topping...








I destroyed it.

camden market // cake pops part 2 Posted by Helena

These were just taken out of silliness because Laura was wearing a lot of yellow, teehee! Anyway, on Saturday we walked to Camden Market from home since it was such a lovely sunny day. By the time we got to Camden after a 40 minute walk we were almost sweating and had shed our cardigans. This is very exciting for London weather and bodes well for the upcoming summer!

Cake pop about to be eaten...

We didn't put enough candy melts on the lollipop stick before we stuck it in this pop. Whoops.

Booty wine!

Laura popped into a touristy store to buy a present.

We couldn't resist... more yellow!!

baking // top of the cake pops Posted by Helena

I hope you're ready for a post that's a little on the heavy side. Image wise that is! Laura is going to make some special disco cake pops for her boyfriend Pete's new London club night Dance London Dance, and we decided on a trial run since we'd never made them before. With the help of April Carter's trusty book, Top of the Cake Pops, we managed to successfully make our very first batch of cake pops! We made the classic red velvet pops and they are delicious. It took a little while, but we did stretch it out over three days. We made the cake on Thursday night, the icing and rolling the dough into balls on Friday night, and turned them into cake pops and decorated them on Saturday morning!

And now comes my (sometimes unnecessary) captions for every photo...



Here's our red velvet cake crumbled.



Mixing the icing.



Here's the icing dolloped into the cake crumbs.





Our "dough"!





Then you cover and refrigerate.





Here's our melted candy melts and our cake pops after the lollipop sticks were inserted.



Random photo of my new nails...





Decorating station.







Our other housemate Laura K (it can get confusing) is in Tigercats and their album launch is this Friday and it's sold out. Go LK! Just before we started decorating, Laura had the genius idea of making some pops for the album launch! So here's what we came up with...