Wednesday 8 August 2012

BBC's 100 Must Read Books


1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling (never ever)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible 
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials trilogy – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott (re-read required)
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare 
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18 The Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger (re-read required)
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck (reading)
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia series – CS Lewis
34 Emma -Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – A.A. Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding (mais il traĆ®ne quand part)
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel (re-reading)
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 The Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt (reading)
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickenens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – E.B. White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Tuesday 12 June 2012

Cino's Low Calorie Chocolate Chip Cookies

I love cooking, and I love baking too. However, my anorexia means that I'm very frightened about indulging in lovely treats from time to time and I tend to count everything I take into my body. I'm very health conscious: I basically don't ingest anything that isn't homemade, which means no microwave meals, juices, fizzy drinks, dipping sauces like tomato ketchup, oils, butter etc. Only fresh fruit and vegetables for me with quorn to try and build up some muscle so I can go to the gym in September. The only thing I do allow myself to have a day which isn't homemade is a snack a day and slices of bread. 
I've recently tried to break habits of avoiding such foods by swapping to low calorie/no fat versions like 'I can't believe it's not butter light' when baking and Truvia no calorie sweetener rather than sugar.

But I love cooking. I love cooking for people. to be honest I'd love to be a chef or own a patisserie (in my dreams) but I don't want to load people with unhealthy fats unnecessarily, but I still want people to enjoy what they get! 
Some recipes are very high calorie for desserts and treats. For example, a batch of 18 cookies, with a calorie content of each cookie equalling 285! It's unnecessary! 

But a few tweaks here and there and I made a batch of 24 cookies with a calorie content each of 107!
I didn't tell my friends they were healthier versions. I gave them out. What was the first reaction? "Wow, these are good! They're so sweet!"
Sweet and low calorie - that's not something you wouldn't have thought you'd hear.
And you know what? This calorie content is with real sugar. Not sweetner. Real.
If I were to replace the sugar with sweetener, the calorie content would be halved further!

I love experimenting with my recipes and trying to find healthy options. Though I'm no professional, and I've had no training, but I feel my booktuber reputation prevents me from diverging.
So this is just a hobby for now. But I'll keep you posted on anything else I create.

Bon appetite!

Tuesday 5 June 2012

Jane Austen Character Quiz


You Scored as Elinor Dashwood
As Marianne's older sister, Elinor lives at the other end of the emotional spectrum. She rarely reveals her intense feelings and is more concerned with being honest and loyal than having what she deserves. Even though her intentions are pure, she sets herself up for loss by constantly placing other people before her own needs. Overall, Elinor is gentle and rational but is just as capable of radical emotions (despite her withholding them) as her sister.

Elinor Dashwood
97%
Elizabeth Bennet
88%
Jane Bennet
63%
Charlotte Lucas
50%
Emma Woodhouse
31%
Marianne Dashwood
28%
Lady Catherine
25%


Couldn't agree more personally (: If you want to take the quiz go here

The voice vlog


Monday 4 June 2012

Book Review: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time


How do you predict a good or bad day? Do you rely on the weather or do you rely on what underwear you’re wearing? Well, for Christopher, it’s the number of yellow or red cars he sees standing in a row.
Christopher John Francis Boone knows all the countries of the world and their capitals and every prime number up to 7,057. Although gifted with a superbly logical brain, Christopher is autistic. He can’t understand emotions, he can’t understand what triggers his father’s anger, nor can he judge the genuine kindness of strangers. He can’t understand why his neighbour is screaming at him whilst he clutches her dead dog in his arms which has been stabbed with a pitchfork.

He doesn’t like seeing the dog dead. He likes dogs. But death isn’t something Christopher understands. He doesn’t understand grief. His mother recently died too. Though the dog’s death isn’t like his mother’s: this is murder. And Christopher wants to solve this mystery like Sherlock Holmes and writes a book documenting his evidence. However, this angers his father who hides his book away in his closet...but that’s not all his father is trying to hide from Christopher in the closet.
The novel is full of odd quirks from chapters being listed as prime numbers to scientific and mathematic diagrams within chapters. Haddon, in my opinion, did a fantastic job capturing an autistic mindset. There’s a level of frustration felt by the reader due to the fact the character is so naive to the facts presented in front of him. You crave for him to understand the facts faster, but that’s a wonderful effect of the novel as it’s so rare for a reader to be the omniscient persona in a novel rather than the narrator, who in this case is the innocently ignorant one. It’s a fast, easy read but wonderfully unusual and quirky, and if you’re interested in reading a novel with an alternative reader relationship with a narrator, I would definitely recommend this novel. ★★★★

Sunday 3 June 2012

My Jubilee Cake

So, it's officially the Queen's Diamond Jubilee weekend!
Well, actually we're already on day three of the four day weekend now, however Monday shall be the main day of fireworks (whilst the official date is, contradictory, Tuesday...)

However, because I love cooking and baking, I make any excuse to partake in my secret love, thus, I made this marzipan cake in her honour. & no, I didn't have a little queen shape cut out for the Queen's head, I just cut it roughly with a knife spontaneously (the only skill I have appears to be cutting out images in icing/marzipan)

Due to my eating disorder I sadly didn't taste any of it, but everyone else said it was delicious so looks like it was first time good luck with this cake! Anyone actually celebrating the Jubilee with a street party? I sadly shan't be as my mother really isn't interested haha, but I hope fellow Brits have a lovely day (:

xoxo