Dead Famous - Kyle's 30th and Megan's 4th

Amy's boyfriend and sister had a joint 30th and 40th birthday party where the theme was "Dead Famous". In true Amy and Kyle tradition, they decorated their place amazingly, I think it's their best effort to date! I think it even beat their amazing Under the Sea party in 2012.

My job was to bake 80 heaven and hell themed cupcakes. I found some angel and devil (well, bat) wing cookie cutters at the Cookie Cutter Shop and bought a variety to give me some options. I will definitely be going back to this website to buy cookie cutters in the future - they have such an amazing range of obscure shapes.



I bought black and white fondant and made all of the wings in advance, hoping for them to dry hard so that I could arrange the wings to stand upright.





Unfortunately I didn't realise that the moisture from the butter cream would soften the fondant, so the angel wings wilted! Although everyone said that they looked way more angel-wing-like in their wilted state, and I think I now agree (although at first I was so disappointed!).



I dressed up as Moaning Mirtle from Harry Potter with my mum's blue blazer, my dad's blue tie, a fake fringe and white/blue makeup:




Andrew dressed up as Kurt Cobain with a blonde wig (he's actually naturally blonder than the wig) and my mum's (electronic) cigarette:




The decorations were amazing! You entered the party through a tunnel (built through their garage) and could choose to either enter through heaven or hell. There was a heaven area (Heavenly Haven) and a hell area (Lucifer's Lounge).









They really need to figure out a way to make money from their talent for themed parties!

Fleur de Sel

I really like salt, my whole family does. We eat way too much of it, but I'm counting on my genes to sort it out. I love salt so much that I'm going to write a blog post about it.

Since Andrew impulse bought a Le Creuset salt pig we've been trying different salts and have discovered how different salts can be. So far we've tried Maldon Salt and Murray River Gourmet Salt, and just in time to finish off our supply, Simona brought us some Fleur de Sel Guerande salt from Paris.

The salt came in a sealed plastic bag contained in a pretty calico bag. It looked kind of wet in the plastic, which makes sense (after looking it up) because Fleur de Sel is a moist salt.



The salt is not pure white, but a little bit grey in colour, and kind of fluffy in appearance like snow. It looks a little bit wet, but doesn't feel wet. The crystals are small, irregularly shaped and sized and very hard - they don't crush when pinched.



The salt is crunchy and tastes very salty, so that if you sprinkle it over something you get little crunchy salty parts rather than an even saltyness. The taste isn't simple, and is very different to table salt.

It's quite different to the Maldon and Murray River salts which were both flaky salts.

Maldon Salt
Maldon salt crystals looks like little hollow pyramids that are white, very pretty, and crush to small flakes when pinched. The pyramids aren't too soft and can actually hurt a little bit if you try and pinch them on one of their points. The taste is mild and the texture is a little bit crunchy, and you can easily get an even spread of this salt when sprinkled on your food.

Murray River Salt
Murray River salt is pale pink, shaped like flat flakes that are very soft and can be easily crushed to a fine salt dust when pinched. The taste is mild, and there isn't much texture since the salt melts almost straight away (because it's so delicate) so it's easy to use a lot of this salt. It's very pretty!

The little pamphlet that came with the Fleur de Sel recommended cooking with it, but I haven't given that a try yet. We usually cook with normal table salt (Saxa salt) because for cooking you need a lot of it and the flaky salts seem too delicate.

Maybe this is weird, but writing this post has made my hungry for salt!