Easy lunch idea-avacado and tuna toast

Today for lunch I had a little more time to spend. Whenever I have time for a meal I always try to make it healthy and delicious. Sadly today there wasn't much in the fridge so I whipped up this open toasted sandwich ( I have no idea what this is called?). You can tell I was really scrounging around since one piece of bread is multigrain and one is white. They  were the last pieces of bread left in the pantry. 

I placed two pieces of bread in a sandwich maker and on top of that I slice up some avocado, mushrooms and used some leftover lemon pepper tuna. For the mushrooms I'm not comfortable eating raw mushrooms so I boiled them in some water for one minute just so they were cooked. On top of everything I placed some nice cheese. I leave it in the toasted sandwich maker for 5 minutes just so the bread gets nice and crisper and the cheese is melting. 

And voila! This is such an easy healthy lunch and I just love to make this when I have an empty fridge because it only requires a few ingredients but it is so yummy! You can totally customise what you put on top of your toast. In the past I have used leftover chicken, cucumber, fresh tomatoes, and capsicum and it always tastes good. 

Comment below what you like to make for lunch and if you decide to try this please comment below with a picture. I would love to see different takes on this!

DIY lyric art- Don't you worry child

Got lots of love from my last DIY lyric art so decided to do another one. This is the chorus from Don't you worry child by Sweedish house mafia. This song isn't typically my kind of song but I remember listening to it a couple of times and just falling in love with the lyrics. I really live the lyrics because I am one of those people that just worry themselves to death. I am always so anxious and when I was little I used to have serious panic attacks but luckily I outgrew them as I got older.

Personally these lyrics are a little reminder that there is a bigger picture that sometimes we can't see. It helps me to stop worrying and just live out my life without fear. I hope you any this artwork because I worked really hard on it.

Comment below any other lyric art you would like me to do next.

Easy and Quick Gingerbread Men

In the middle of winter there is nothing better than a good gingerbread cookie. Now I am really picky about my gingerbread cookies. They have to be soft and warming but still gingery and sweet. I know that the 'American' gingerbread men recipe contains molasses but molasses are a rare and hated thing in my house. I think it's a New Zealand thing? I know most of my friends have no clue what they are. Anyway when I first began to make gingerbread recipes I bought a jar of molasses and I tried a couple of 'American' recipes that called for 1/2 cup of molasses and for someone who doesn't like the taste of molasses they all turned out horribly. Even my brother who will eat anything didn't eat them. I think it's because here in New Zealand we don't have the taste for traditional gingerbread. Instead I found this perfect recipe from Zoella last Christmas and since then I have made these cookies 4 times. These gingerbread men are so delicious. The molasses flavour is hidden underneath the ginger and cinnamon but still provides a warm spice. This recipe is really different because it is made on the stove but it works and makes cleanup much easier as everything is in one pot!

As I said this recipe is from Zoella but I've altered it a little bit. I found that this recipe makes about 50 small gingerbread men. it definitely makes heaps so if you want less you can halve recipe. These are so yummy You should definitely try these. If you do comment below and tell me what you think!

Ingredients:

3/4 cup of brown sugar

2 tablespoons of golden syrup (I prefer to use honey)

1 tablespoon of molasses

1 tablespoon of water

1 teaspoon of cinnamon 

1 heaped teaspoon of ginger

100g of butter

1/2 teaspoon of baking soda

1 3/4 cups of flour

Mix everything except baking soda and flour in a bowl.

and melt it over a low heat.

When everything is melted add the baking soda and stir quickly. It should change into a golden colour. Once everything is combined take it off the heat. 

Slowly add the flour until it makes a dough and roll it out. Take a cookie cutter and make some cookies!

Place them into an oven for 8 minutes. Check them constantly because they burn easily. If you want the soft and chewy bake them for 6 minutes.

And Voila! 

For the icing I used one cup of icing sugar, one teaspoon of lemon juice and 2 tablespoon on milk. I prefer a lemon icing because the sourness goes perfectly with the warm ginger spice.

I love the way they turned out. I think they are super cute and fun for a lazy winter day!

Easy pasta salad

For lunch today I decided to be healthy and make a pasta salad. This was super easy and I just used whatever we had in the fridge. I tried to make the dressing a little bit healthy by mixing a couple of tablespoons of mayo with some Greek yoghurt and it actually tasted really delicious. 

First I boiled the water and made pasta as normal.

We had some frozen green beans so i thawed them and then fried them with some button mushrooms.

To the pasta I added about half a can of corn, leftover takeaway duck, and some tuna.

For dressing I used 2 tablespoon of mayo mixed with half a cup of yoghurt and some garlic pepper.

And voila! Easy and healthy pasta salad.

Dessert at Frasers

Last night the family and I went out for dessert at Frasers cafe and Espresso bar on Mt Eden road to celebrate getting an A in my first semester at uni. The place was so crowded for a Tuesday night, every table was full and people were turned away. And there was a good reason it was packed. The food was amazing and reasonably priced as well which is a bonus. 

I ordered the warmed chocolate came with vanilla ice cream and warmed chocolate sauce. It was so delicious on a cold winter night. It was $13. 

My mum ordered the lemon tart for only $7 and they gave us a huge slice! It had the perfect sweetness balanced with he sourness of the lemon. Totally worth it.

Top 5 Apps

I love apps. I used to dislike them because I found them annoying and I didn't get the hype but now I love apps! Here are my top 5 apps and since I'm cheap they are all free. I'm also excluding social media cos otherwise my top 5 would be twitter, Facebook and YouTube. 

Comment below if you would like me to do a what's on my phone tag and your favourite apps. I would love to find more great apps.

1. Battery doctor

This app has been a life saver for me since we all know how short the battery life of an iPhone is. I found this app randomly one day in the App Store and i never looked back. This app has helped extend my battery life by hours and got me in much better charging habits. You basically open this app when you are charging and the app makes sure it charges fully. Since using this app I can nearly go a day and a half without charging!  It also clears junk in your phone, boosts memory and tells you which apps uses the most battery and how to optmise your battery life when you are running out.I highly recommend this if you are having battery problems.

2. Charades!

This app is basically the free version of Heads Up app by Ellen. I'm always on the lookout for fun games which are free and this one is great. It is basically charades and you can play it in groups where one person holds it on their forehead while the other describes it to them. 

The cool thing about this app is that you can actually create your own categories and personalise it. It also has so many built in categories like animal kingdom, songs of the 80s,90s,00s and brands and more. I played this app with my friends on a bus trip to Rotorua and it was so much fun. 

3. PicsArt

This is my favourite photo editing app to use. It has everything I would ever need to edit a photo in one app. It has all the tools such as brightness, crop, rotate etc but it can also place overlays on your photos, shape masks which is what I use to create my banner, stickers, borders, frames and more. The effects aren't that good but certainly useable and it even comes with a fade setting so you can adjust how much the effect appears on the photo. 

4. GuitarTuna

This is the perfect app for anyone who plays guitar. It has a built in guitar tuner so all you have to do is place your phone besides the guitar and pluck each string. The app will tell you if it is too high or low and then you tune accordingly. The screen goes green when the string is in tune. This app is perfect for beginners especially because when I first started learning guitar I could not tune at all. I have no musical ear even though I played piano for ten years so this app really helped me out. It also has games that help you learn chords and notes so it is just a great guitar app.

5. Sleep time

I have a love hate relationship with this app. It is basically an app that measures your sleep. You place it beside your pillow at night and it records how well you slept- how many hours of deep sleep you got and how many hours of light sleep and then in the morning it presents a nice graph of your sleeping patterns. 

Another cool aspect of this app is that it is also an alarm. At night you set what time you want to wake up by and the app will wake you up in your lightest sleep so you wake up happy instead of grouchy! 

The only downside to this app is that you have to set our alarm every night in order to get a graph and some mornings i don't have to be up at a certain time so I don't want to set an alarm but other than that it is a really great app!

DIY lyric art- Airplanes

 Airplanes by Bob and Hayley Williams is such an oldie but a goodie. The lyrics of this song is beautiful and meaningful so I decided to recreate my favourite lyrics from the song. "Can we pretend airplanes in the night sky are like shooting star?" These lyrics give me so much hope and brings me back to my childhood. I'm really proud of this piece that I did, it is super bright and colour and I am really happy with it.

Comment below other lyric art you would like me to do and I'll do my best.