It’s National Cupcake Week.
That’s right, it’s officially time to indulge in cupcakes galore.
But if you are worried about your waistline here’s 15 cupcake gifts you can sink your teeth into without the regret.
From bean bag chairs and candles to lip balms and toothpaste, there’s something out there for even the fussiest cupcake lover.
1. Cupcake ring
Channel your inner Katy Perry with this cupcake inspired ring.
£13.30 Etsy
2. Pink cupcake bean bag chair
The start of September and the first day back at school. You’re refreshed after your break, your (brand new) briefcase is packed with still unused WHSmith resources, your shirt or blouse is crease free and your lesson plans for the day are ordered, colour coded and complete.
‘This year is going to be different!’ says sir or miss to themselves as they stride purposefully through those school gates, ready to meet their new class and start things as they mean to go on.
Teachers, how many of you still remember this as you a mere few weeks ago? Probably not; the memory could well be lost under the pile of marking that is now threatening… Read the full story
Boil the kettle, select your brew, add the milk. Are you ready? Now we can begin.
Tea is an art form. It is a ritual, a social crutch and a way of life. It is also delicious.
As a culture we base our days around our tea breaks. A builder’s marks the start of your day, and the end of it when you get home. It is the opening to all meetings at work and the cornerstone of new friendships.
But even in our tea soaked society, there are some of us who are marked out for our love of Lapsang Souchong. For our desire for Darjeeling and our prediliction for PG Tips.
If reading this makes you crave a cuppa, here are 21 things you will understand:
So, Bake Off is gathering pace on the telly AND it’s National Cupcake Week.
Basically it’s cake time.
Yes, a week dedicated entirely to cupcakes, with a Cupcake Championships cake bake-off and everything.
So whether you’re a pro with the frosting bag or an enthusiastic amateur, now is the time to get your pinny on and get baking.
But if you’re going to all that trouble of getting your whisk dirty, you may as well make it count.
To help your cupcakes standout from the crowd, we’ve put together 15 unusual cupcake recipes you can try at home.
Tweet us your cupcake pics @MetroUK_Life and let us know how you got on…
A women’s six year photography project to pay tribute to her late mother is one of the most beautiful things you will ever see.
Kirsty Mitchell, an award-winning fine art photographer from Surrey, lost her Mum to a brain tumor in 2009.
As an escape from reality and a way to come to terms with the grief, Kirsty started the deeply personal photographic series dedicated to her mother Maureen, with hair and make-up artist Elbie Van Eeden, on a shoestring budget, spending years creating all the costumes and props by hand.
So, it seems that despite our prayers and hopes and dreams, summer is definitely over.
And while the cold, grey, drizzly weather is doing little for our hair (or spirits), from a fashion POV, we’re actually pretty pleased.
Yes, we all feel hotter with a bit of a tan, and yes, you looked super-cute in those short shorts, but here are all the reasons why cold-weather dressing is SO much better.
Brand new (for now at least) thick black razor-BLAHing opaque tights. Literally anything could be under there… and it usually is.
From chunky knitted numbers to huge thin picnic blanket-sized ones you can wrap around you thirty times, scarves are… Read the full story
We’re so over the skinny bitch.
Aka vodka soda lime, it’s the epitome of dull drinks.
It’s the drink you order if you’ve just said: ‘Oh I’m only staying for one! Got a spin class in the morning!’
On a Saturday.
And it often doesn’t even taste that good.
At least it doesn’t when it’s made with flat soda and a rock-hard lime quarter, or worse, cordial.
All skinny bitch drinkers dread the words: ‘We don’t have fresh lime, is cordial okay?’
Read the full story
Just last year 18-year-old Madeline Stuart set out to become a model. And this week, she made her New York Fashion Week debut.
The teenager from Brisbane, Australia, set her sights on a modelling career after losing one-and-a-half stone thanks to a new healthy diet… Read the full story
*ICE CREAM NEWS*
If you’re one of those ridiculous people who only eats ice cream in the summer, Ben & Jerry’s new offering could change everything.
Because everyone’s favourite ice cream double act have basically turned autumn in to ice cream form with their latest offering – Pumpkin Cheesecake.
The flavour might sound unusual to us, but over in the US they’re potty for all things pumpkin, and stuff themselves silly with the stuff from Halloween to Christmas.
But what can you expect? Well for one, we can promise it doesn’t taste even slightly vegetabley. Instead it’s a sweet creamy ice cream with a hint of cinnamon with biscuity base pieces running through.
Soldiers. Mothers. Women.
Time was, when women had to choose between having a career and being mothers, but thankfully that time is now behind us.
And if you were ever in need of proof of that fact, this picture is surely it.
The historic image shows 10 serving US soldiers, in full camouflage, breastfeeding their babies, and it’s glorious.
The picture was taken by Texas-based photographer Tara Ruby, who was on active duty in the US Air Force from 1997 – 2001, before turning her hand to photography.
In a fast paced world where travel and flitting around the country is almost essential for career progression, a huge amount of us are now living a long way away from our families.
Families will always be the most important thing in our lives so not being close to them geographically can be an absolute killer.
Thank heavens for the visits home then. While they can be a pain to organise, they keep everyone going but just moments after you take that familiar step into your old home, you end up dreading the time you have to say goodbye for months on end all over again.
If you live away from your… Read the full story
Cocktails can be rum old things.
The right flavour can take your taste buds out of gloomy old Blighty and away to warmer climes.
We hardly had a summer, it’s cold and grey and the nights are closing in.
But we can still pretend it’s hotter than July with the right drink in our hands.
Here’s 12 irresistible rum cocktail recipes to take you back to the beach.
Yes, that’s right, some of them even involve tiny umbrellas on sticks.
Watermelon Fizz by Shivi Ramoutar
Prince Harry is 31, and it looks like he’s living up to his mischievous streak by getting himself into trouble at the Battle of Britain celebrations.
As one of the more high-profile royals, his life is seldom out of the press. From the death of his mother, Princess Diana, aged 12, to his hi-jinks as young prince and his hectic love life, we could assume we know most things about him.
But how well do you really know the fifth-in-line to throne?
Test your knowledge to see if you are the ultimate fan of The Happy Prince.
Imagine looking into the mirror every day and seeing a monster staring back at you; an image so vile you feel physically sick.
Imagine a voice in your head constantly telling you you’re grotesque, worthless.
For Lauren Keith that horrifying notion is a daily reality.
Lauren, 26, from Brighton, suffers from body dysmorphic disorder (BDD), which causes her to have a highly distorted view of how she looks.
The destructive mental illness has plagued her for more than a decade.
Sickened by her reflection at the age of 16 she would endlessly research surgery to ‘fix’ herself.
Her condition caused spells of depression and a great anxiety… Read the full story
An ad campaign commissioned by Brazil’s Pediatric Society of Rio Grande (SPRS) has gone viral, after the ad company quite frankly smashed it.
SPRS commissioned Brazilian advertising agency Paim to create a campaign to highlight the impact on a mother’s diet on her unborn child, and Paim came up trumps.
The campaign features three images of breastfeeding mothers, where each mother has a different junk food or drink painted on her breast so it looks like the baby is consuming that food directly.
Have you ever noticed how some people are just ‘naturally relationship people’? They end one, and manage to find their next long-term relationship immediately.
I’m starting to think there may be such a thing as ‘naturally single people’, and I might be one of them.
Over the last two years, I have been on dates with over 30 men.
The longest any of these lasted was around two months, and all the rest were ended by them, by myself, or mutually before we even got as far as a third date.
When it comes to what I’m looking for in a person, the list really isn’t that long. At least, that’s what I believe anyway.
All I ask for is a spark, one of those moments where your… Read the full story
Paintbrushes are often the tools of great art. But not often do they become the art.
The Woolff Gallery, which previously brought you sweet wrappers transformed into goblets and busts is now showing unusual pieces by artist Finn Stone made up entirely of paintbrushes.
They include recreations of famous works by painters including Leonardo Da Vinci, Vincent Van Gough and Andy Warhol.
Germaphobes, we have some bad news for you.
Korean scientists have found that antibacterial soap is no more effective at killing bacteria than normal soap.
According to the team at Korea University, the antibacterial soap market in the US is worth nearly $1 billion (£6.5 million) a year.
However, after a detailed study – which involved researchers testing twenty bacterial strains against plain and antibacterial soaps for 20 seconds at 22°C and 20 seconds 40°C – researchers found that the plain soap performed just as well.
Interestingly, the problem wasn’t exactly that the bacterial soaps didn’t perform better… it was that it took them 9 hours to do their work, which is obviously little use when most people wash their hands for mere seconds.
In the results section of the report, the researchers explained: ‘These results suggest that although triclosan-containing soap does have antibacterial activity, the effects are not apparent during the… Read the full story
A new sexual partner calculator has got us freaking out over the amount of genitals we’ve come in contact with.
According to the tool, if you have racked up four notches on the bed post, you have effectively been exposed to nearly 2,000,000 sexual partners.
The tool, created by Lloyds Pharmacy, has taken the six degrees of separation theory – the sociological idea that we’re all connected to each other by just six connections – and applied it to sex.
We wish they hadn’t, because we now can’t stop seeing images of the millions of genitals we’ve unwittingly been exposed to.
Read the full story
Read the full story
Read the full story
Read the full story
