Christmas #5 | Christmas cookies

So probably this is gonna be my last post about Christmas this year, I'm sooo sad about it but on the other hand I'm happy because I wanted to write 5 post about it and I manged to do it.

Maybe I will add another post with some photo I took these days in Milan, but I'm not sure about it because I don't have a good quality camera.

I can say I've just finished with gifts, it was hard but I'm really proud of myself when I think it's Christmas in 4 days and I don't have any other gift to wrap. 

If you're super late and you don't know what to do, well, this is another recipe I wanted to share becuase I bake cookies every year for some friends or parents, and every year it's a success. 

Shortcrust pastry can be a little bit hard, but if you know how to do it, I can guarantee that you'll get delicious cookies.

Baking cookies can also take a lot, because after preparing shortcrust pastry you need to leave it in the fridge for a couple of hours, so be sure you have enough time.

Ingredients (for about 50+ cookies)

200g sugar

400g flour

250g butter cut into cubes (room temperature)

2 eggs

A pinch of salt

Mix sugar, flour and salt in a large bowl. Then add butter and mix everything with your hands until completely combined. Now add eggs to blend your dough.

In case the dough is too flaccid, add some flour.
Put it in the fridge for at least 2 hours.

When your pastry is ready, roll your dough on a floured surface until is 0.5/1 cm tall: using a Christmas-biscuiti shape, make you biscuits and put them on a baking tray.

Bake at 200° for 10 minutes, until the cookies' surface is golden.

Decor with frosting if you want (recipe here) or just serve them.

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Enjoy your Christmas cookies and Christmas Eve ♥

Christmas #4 | Home made chocolates

This is a very easy, fast and funny way to make chocolate. I think that you can make chocolates in order to eat them or to give them to your friends as a Christmas gift, and you won't fail.
What I love about making chocolates is that you can really let your creativity run wild. You can use so many types of chocolate and a lot of flavors with it... You simply need a chocolate mold with Christmas shape, and then you can really do whatever you want.
I'm gonna show you my kind of chocolates, but you can do them differently of course.

Ingredients
Chocolate
Chocolate mold
Nuts

Decoration
100 g powdered sugar
2 spoon of hot water
Food coloring

Crumble your chocolate bar.

Cook chocolate in bain marie until it's completely melted, then put it in your chocolate mold. Add a nut in every single chocolates shape and be sure it's completely hidden by the chocolate.
Leave your chocolates in the fridge for at least 2 hours.

When your chocolates are ready, prepare cake frosting: put your powdered sugar in a small bowl and add two spoon of hot water and the food coloring if you want. Mix until it's completely combined, then use a pen or a toothpick to decor your chocolates.

How do you prepare your chocolates?
Let me know in the comments.

Christmas #3 | Pine cones string

Since my tree was a little bit too naked, I decided to add something which reminds me of winter and white Christmas.
As I told you in my previous post, I wanted some pine cones on my tree sooo bad, so last Monday I went to Oh Bej Oh Bej fair, which is a popular and classic Christmas fair here in Milan, and I found some pine cones very cheap and good for my idea.
So I bought them and I bought some wire at Tiger's, and that's it.

This string is something you can put not only on your tree but also as a decoration in your home. You can put it on a piece of furniture, or outside your door, or on the balcony... I mean, you can really use it everywhere because it's simply so festive and pretty and easy to do.

Simply you have to wrap every pine cones with one or two rounds of wire, and leave some spaces between a pine cone and the other. Consider that the first lenght of the wire won't be the same in the end because you will use some centimetres to wrap the pine cones. For example I took a 4 metres wire but in the end the string was long about 3,50m.

Eventually I added some fake snow on the bottom of the pine cones and this is the result on my tree.
If you're not going to put the string on the tree but you want to show it entirely, I suggest you to wrap the wire with some colored ribbon, so that it would be way more festive and cute.

Hope you like it and if you're gonna try it or have something similar, don't be shy and post a photo here in the comments.

Christmas #2 | Christmas tree

I'm one of those Christmas hipster-rebel-people who doesn't like red and gold as decoration.
I mean, I like red and gold as Christmas color, and if I see red and gold I suddenly think about december, but I don't like to choose them as colors for my Christmas tree.
When I lived with my parents, we usually decored our Christmas tree with blue and silver things. Last year we used blue ribbons (my mum did them with some tape and wire) and some plastic white snowmen we find in a chinese shop. It was really pretty, I loved those snowmen. You can also find the photo in my instagram profile.

This year, which is my first year in my new house, I decided to change and decor my Christmas tree with white balls and lights. The reason why I decided to do this is that I dream every year for a white Christmas, but here in Italy it usually doesn't snow in December. If it happens, it happens in January/February.
Since snow is one of those symbols you link with Christmas, but sadly I haven't had the fortune to see a white christmas so far... I decided to reproduce the snow on my tree. And of course I think that a white Christmas tree is really elegant and beautiful: my house has these colored walls (I hate them, I can't wait to paint them in spring), so a colored christmas tree would have been just too much.

My tree is 120 cm tall. I used some balls I found in a supermarket (IKEA didn't have the ones that I wanted, Maisons du Monde was way too expensive, and I didn't find a chinese shop in the neighbourhood): a good part of them is made with blown glass, decoration with white painting and glitters. Then I took some balls made with rope, they're just adorable, and I think I'm gonna buy another couple of them because, even if they're expensive, they look really good in my Christmas tree. In the end, I'm gonna add a rope with pine cones, but first I have to find it or some pine cones to create my own. If you have any suggestion about where I can find something like it, I would be extremely glad to know.

I know it looks a little bit naked, but I didn't know how many balls I needed. Maybe I'm going to buy something else, like my so much desired tape of pine cones.

How do you decor your Christmas tree?
♥

Christmas #1 | Candle holders

Hey!
December is finally here, and that means just one thing... CHRISTMAS!
I love Christmas time, I love lights and cold days and the crowd in the shops, I love Christmas songs and everything about decoring yor own home, I love Christmas jumpers and Christmas food. I honestly wait for this very moment every-single-day.
So, I decided to dedicate all my december posts about it. I will talk about my favourite Christmas recipes, my home decor (since this is one of the thing I am most into in this period), my suggestions for gifts and so on.
I also created a playlist on Spotify with my favourite "old-fashioned" songs about Christmas, you can find it here.

For my first post I decided to share with you some candle holders I found on pinterest that you can easily create on your own.
As you know, I am a big fan of candles, I do have an obsession with them, and of course I love candle holders too. On the other hand, I'm not very good at DIY, I've always wanted to learn and train but I'm seriously too awkward for that.
Now that I live alone and I have an entire home to decor, I wanted to try something easy, and these candle holders seemed easy and fun to do.
I searched "christmas DIY" on pinterest and I found some really interesting ideas.
If you want to create your candle holder, you only will need glue and some jars. Then you can easily find tapes or little pieces of decor (for instance pine cones or pieces of holly and so on) on the internet or in stores like Tiger. After that, it's up to you and your creativity.

I'll leave here my photos.
As you can see, they're extremely easy and cheap to do. You can also create them as a gift for friends or parents.
Hope you'll have fun with your creations!

I suggest you to paint your landscape with a permanent marker. I did this with a black thin cardboard, and when I added glue, some parts became white... So I had to paint it again with a black permanent marker! 

In the end, here is some ideas from pinterest, always cheap and easy to do.

Christmas 2014

Merry Christmas guysss!
Basically I love Christmas and I couldn't avoid a post about it. Just two of the gifts under the Christmas tree were mine, but it's totally ok, I just wanted to share my beautiful tree, made with some pretty ribbons I did with mum and some snowmen instead of the more classic balls. My mum and I like to decorate the tree in a different way every year; the costant is the colors, blue and silver.

Christmas Eve was a bit unusual because my family and I went to the cinema to see Il ricco, il povero e il maggiordomo, an italian movie with three comic actors very famous here in Italy, Aldo, Giovanni and Giacomo. It was very funny, but not banal at all. I love Aldo's expressiveness, he always makes me laugh.

The other two days were of course more classic and we went to grandparents' and uncles' houses, we ate too much and we played games as usual.

This year I wore my Christmas sweater, red with some snowflakes (H&M, 19€, I didn't take a photo of it), and my brand new UGG boots, color sand. I'm definitely in love with those boots, they're so warm and comfortable!
Also, this year, since I had a lot of free time the days before Christmas, I decided to do a cute nail art. I don't really like nail art because I find it too much difficult and my hands really shake, but I did something easy I saw on instagram, Candy Cane nails, and this is the result.

I was given money, which I'm going to save for my trip to Amsterdam in April, and four beautiful Layla nail polish, blue, turquoise, cobalt blue and coral red. My mother tried cobalt blue and it's really really beautiful, I had never tried Layla stuff and I confess I'm pleasantly surprised.

I hope you enjoyed your Christmas!

Bye bye ♥