Easter Baking - Extreme Triple Chocolate Nests

So if you've been thinking of doing some baking this Easter but like me are a bit late to the party then why not try a simple recipe that doesn't technically involve any baking. These are what are called Extreme Triple Chocolate Easter Nests and I got this idea from AmazingPhil and danisnotonfire of YouTube. This took me about half an hour to do with the help of my niece and the result was so worth it. All it involves is the melting of some chocolate and the crushing of some shredded wheat, then a little mixing. Here is what mine look like, and the (very simple) recipe is below!! Enjoy!

This is what I used!:

A full bowl of shredded wheat

3 bars (EACH) of Dark chocolate, Milk chocolate and White chocolate

30g Butter

1.5 tablespoon of Honey

A bag of (golden) mini eggs

Step 1: Melt the 3 bars of dark chocolate on the hob or in the microwave (whatever you prefer) and place in a bowl.

Step 2: Add about 10g butter and half a tablespoon of honey to the bowl and mix.

Step 3: Crumble in a third of the shredded wheat into the chocolate and mix. 

Step 4: Spoon out your mixture into several baking cases but REMEMBER this is only the BOTTOM LAYER of your nests so don't fill the cases!!

Step 5: Repeat the above for the Milk chocolate and then the White chocolate, using the Milk chocolate as your second layer in each case, and the White chocolate as your third layer.

Step 6: When your baking cases have three layers of chocolate and shredded wheat, take your mini eggs and place about three on top of each nest. 

Step 7: Place in the fridge for about 90 mins, brace yourself for a sugar rush, serve and devour!! 

Thank you for reading, let me know if you try this recipe and tweet me some pics if you do!! @misspittypatXx

Books I'm Currently Reading - March 2016

In 2016 I'm aiming to read 50 books. 

I know it's three months in already and I've only read one book but I can still read 50 in the short nine months that are left. My plan is to start writing book reviews after each one as I love to analyse the plot and look at the characters in some depth and reading is such an easy hobby to do. It has been my favourite thing to do to pass time since I was about ten years of age. Yes, when my friends were playing dress up with their Barbie dolls I was immersed in the Babysitters Club series. 

I think I was lucky because there were several people in my class at school who also loved reading and we got a weekly trip to the library from our school from about second class up to sixth class. There were also several book fairs held in our local hall and we always used to compare who got the most books or who got the best among our friends. So I think reading was definitely encouraged a lot and the one thing I had in common with quite a few people in my class was a love of books. 

Here are five of the books I will be reading this year just to give a little taster of what I'll be talking about in my reviews:

1] Tales of Mystery and Imagination by Edgar Allan Poe

This one is a collection of short stories, twenty two in total, which I've already been reading. This book will be finished in no time as I can read one or two short stories every day in between other books I'm reading. Also the book is less than 500 pages long so it's relatively short.

2] Birds Without Wings by Louis de Bernieres

This one is based around the Turks and Greeks and narrated from several different viewpoints so I'm looking forward to getting stuck in on that one. I know absolutely nothing of the history and I'm sure I'll get a good picture of what it was like after I read this book. Those are the books I enjoy the most, the ones which can teach me about something completely new. 

3] The Marble Collector by Cecelia Ahern

This is one of Cecelia's books which I'm looking forward to just to see how she portrayed the character relationships, which I feel is something she is quite skilled at. She's great at writing characters who are very relatable and who you just feel connected with right from the beginning, like you are there in the story with them. I'm sure I'll get through this book in about ten days.

4] The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

Oh my goodness I think I'm going to start this one first as it sounds so good. The story is set in Nazi Germany 1939 and is a very personal story about a nine year old girl and her family during that time. Death and destruction seem to be a common theme from the descriptions I've read and the one little thing that draws me in is that this girl steals books. What a seemingly random characteristic to have, yet it seems to be the very thing that leads her story. It is just over 500 pages which is a comfortable length for me to read. I'll probably take my time on this one and read about fifty pages a day so it could take me a couple of weeks to finish. Books weren't meant to be read in a day after all!!

5] You've Been Warned by James Patterson (and Howard Roughan)

I have a confession to make. I have never ever read a James Patterson novel in my life so this one will be my first. This story is based around a female protagonist trying to make life as a photographer work out and it is apparently Patterson's "most haunting thriller" according to the cover. I'll be excited to see if it lives up to this expectation as I'm not a huge crime or thriller reader, but I did read the Stieg Larsson series which I thoroughly enjoyed. I notice though, that this book has very short easily digestible chapters which I appreciate in a book as it makes it more accessible somehow. For me it means I can read five or six chapters in a short amount of time and feel like I've read loads. 

Now I usually can't read more than two or three books at the same time so I'll probably read about 50 to 100 pages of each book per day and then a short story in between. This is a comfortable pace for me and will mean I'll read about four or five books a month. Perfect.

So that's March and April sorted for me, now all I need is a box of teabags and a very large mug!! Thank you for reading, leave a comment if you would read any of the above and give me suggestions of what to read in the future. Happy Reading!! 

Pretty Little Liars Season Seven Theory

Hello everyone,

I hope you all had a lovely St. Patrick's Day. I went to see our local parade, which if I'm honest was pretty rubbish as it always is. It actually genuinely irritates me when Irish parades for an Irish holiday are so useless and not thought about much. There's hardly any planning and the floats just don't capture the theme of St. Patrick's Day and what it should really be about. Surely our country is the one that should do the best parades yet the Americans do a much better job. I've never been to see an american parade but it's something that I will add to my list. 

I want to talk about the latest development in pretty little liars today which is something different for a change. The season six finale was on this week and I think there is a lot of confusion and maybe shock about the twin situation. Firstly I just want to say I thought the outcome was awesome. Mary Drake being Jessica DiLaurentis's twin was something nobody was really expecting, as we thought Mrs. D was dead and maybe her ghost was haunting Ali. But no, there is a twin. The twin on PLL hashtag was trending on twitter for ages and everyone had gone crazy with theories about one of the liars having a twin or one of the boys having a twin and there were some good theories and some not so great. I like that the PLL fans get to be so involved every season by making videos on YouTube explaining their theories and it's actually something I really enjoy watching, as it lets viewers be creative and really get immersed in the plot. 

Now, I have a theory of my own. Well actually this is a combination of mine and my niece's theories so here is what we have come up with between us. 

Mary Drake - What do we know about her? 

She is Jessica DiLaurentis's twin sister, she gave birth to Charles aka Charlotte while she herself was a patient at Radley. She has only appeared on the show now and has never been mentioned before, but, twins have been a recurring theme since season one.

My idea is that Alison's story about the twin sisters where one stabbed the other was about her mother and aunt, and she must have been told the story as a child or heard it but never knew her aunt Mary existed. The twins in the story are Jessica and Mary, Mary stabbed Jessica and she obviously survived, but this is how Mary ended up in Radley. 

If this is true, and Mary gave birth to Charles/Charlotte at Radley then who is the father? I was trying to think of any male patients we know of who were at Radley and I remembered Wren telling Hanna his father was once a mental patient. He said it was in a place much like Radley (not Radley) but what if that was a lie? 

I think it would be a wicked twist if Wrens father turned out to be Charles/Charlotte's father too. That would connect Wren to the whole A game, he could even be Uber A. Wren could know that Charlotte was his sister, he could have known who the DiLaurentis's were before he came to Rosewood and met Melissa. If Wren's reason for being there was to find out more about the DiLaurentis's then that would be the perfect reason why he volunteered at Radley too. 

Also, the only other British guy in the show who is a doctor is Dr. Rollins. My theory is that he and Wren are connected, Wren enlisted Dr. Rollins to help him get Charlotte released from the institution and get Alison put in there. I think their motivation is to get revenge on the DiLaurentis's for putting young Charles in Radley and now for Charlotte's murder.

As for Jason, I have lots of questions as to where he has disappeared to in season 6b, and I also question whether Sara Harvey has anything to do with Charlotte's murder. She was working with Charlotte, but why, and where did she come from in the first place? What if Sara has gone rogue and she set up the murder of Charlotte DiLaurentis. I am also suspicious of Lucas. Is he part of the A-Team again? We won't know until the summer time I guess.

I'd love to know what you think of my theory so far, and please add your own ideas and theories too. Thank you for reading, please keep following the purple brick road!!

Good afternoon bloggers!! 

I guess a short post is better than none! So I mentioned in an earlier post that I attend a Tuesday night class weekly and have been doing so since the end of January. I was there last night and as usual I got in a little flustered and then calmed down after about ten minutes. Class went well and I felt good after it was all done. It's really starting to come together now in week seven and I honestly couldn't be happier.

This week is going to be busy as St. Patricks day is tomorrow and the towns are going to get really busy and crowded. I'm looking forward to seeing family and having an eventful few days, particularly to seeing the parade, although this means I've got to deal with crowds, not so good!! 
I'd like to know if any of you have any tips or tricks you find useful for dealing with crowds and for keeping anxiety at bay. 

What are you all up to this week? What parades are you going to see? 
I will normally have longer posts but I'm blogging from my fone today so it's a little shorter. 

Thank you for reading!! Happy Writing!! 

2016 so far in the life of Misspittypat!

Spring at Misspittypat's

So the year got off to a pretty laid back start, I stayed at home with my Mom and my brother for the first week in January and I just chilled out watching Supernatural obsessively, eating chocolates and drinking all the tea I could physically consume, and it was pretty good until I decided to come back to real life and deal with real issues.

After I had tied up a few loose ends I decided to make January the month when I would plan my year and get the ball rolling on some important things I needed to do, like studying for my entrance exam to go back to college. 

It has been a long process for me to get the whole college thing going again and I'm glad to say all the studying paid off and I now have the exam over and done with but honestly it was a difficult task. I practised as much as I could all through January, February and March and in the end I think it paid off as the exam went pretty well on the day. Though it was tough, I still came away from it feeling like I did the best I could have done and that's what matters the most. 

Also in January I decided to set up an office in the spare room in our house, which is now looking quite good. I'll give you a tour later in the week maybe with some photos and show you my amazing book collection, which in all honesty could be bigger but I'm working on that. My office is the place where I will write my blog, create short stories and write book reviews, because yes that's something I have started already though none of my reviews are ready to publish online yet but, soon! I will of course be sure to let you know when those are published and let you all have a browse through my ramblings so you can tell me what you think. 

February was pretty much a continuation of everything I was doing in January with the added excitement of joining a Creative Writing class, which has been a great experience. In total there are ten weeks to this class and I attend on Tuesday evenings with up to fifteen other men and women. So far, we have been given reading assignments and writing assignments, where we do short descriptive pieces or write short stories. I'm not great at this yet but I am learning slowly, and it was tough to realise just how much of a challenge it is to put a short story together. We read out our stories to the group and everyone participates in giving feedback to each person after they read. 
This was super scary at first but after week one it just became second nature and now we are all tripping over each other to read our story next. Some people in the class have huge imaginations and most of them have a great vocabulary but I'm not intimidated, I know I have as much potential in me as they do and that I need to work on myself to bring it out. 

Ah, March... The month of the blog! This brings me on to the main reason I wanted to start a daily blog. Yes I want to express myself in words and get better at doing so, but I also want to challenge myself in more ways than one. It's challenging to write short stories but I have wanted to blog for about two years and every attempt I made kind of just fell flat, so if it makes any sense I kind of just feel like now is the right time as I'm in the creative mindset again which I haven't been able to tap into for a long time!! 

Finally, my last piece of oh so interesting news is that I've decided to go on a wee bit of a health kick. I have noticed recently that my iron levels have dropped which is something I actually have experienced several times in the past and as a result I feel tired, weak, dizzy and I get headaches so overall that's not looking like such a good picture. So my goal is to add at least one new healthy food into my diet each week until I get to a point where I'm happy with my health again and to kick-start this process I added about five or six new things this week alone which I will be trying to have daily. 
These include: 
Avocados, Chia Grain Bread, Kale, Spinach, and various types of fish that I don't normally eat. I would love to know if any of you have recipes for breakfasts or lunches including any of these items so I can try them out! Also, I am cutting back on caffeine and adding twice as much water into my diet as my skin needs some serious improvement and is water not the easiest way to begin improving your skin? I think so.

So, I hope this post brings you some inspiration to try something new, get healthy, challenge yourself, or get back into doing something you loved to do before and see where it takes you. Go for it, you can do it!

Thank you for listening, congratulations you made it to the end... you're excused! :)

Ten Things About Me (And Welcome!)

Welcome to my Blog!

This is a personal experiment and you are invited to observe, make notes, come to your own conclusions... you get the drift. I just want to write, be it blogging, writing fiction, writing poems or even writing letters, all I want to do is write. 

This is the place I will be visiting daily (hopefully) to express what's on my mind, what I'm enjoying at the moment, what I'm reading, where I'm going... basically the never-ending stream of consciousness that pours from my brain and usually has nowhere else to go. How exciting!

All joking aside, I would hope my ranting brings a little smile or a laugh and maybe a tiny little sprinkle of enlightenment every now and then to those who want a temporary escape from their own lives which if we're honest, is what everyone needs now and again.

P.S. Don't take me seriously, this is just for practise!! Enjoy...

Ten Totally Interesting Things You Need To Know... About Me.

1] I drink too much tea. It's just a true fact that I do. I'm Irish and I'm typically Irish along with that, so yes copious amounts of tea is consumed when I'm around. If you invite me over and you have no caffeine in the house I will conclude that you are trying to kill me... 

2] I believe in Angels. Do you ever get that feeling that someone is watching over you or that some mystical being has intervened on your behalf at the last minute and turned a particular situation on its head, resulting in a much better outcome than if you had carried on the way you were going? Well I get those all the time and the more I look into it the more I believe that it's Angels, and they watch over every one of us all the time. I'm trying to learn to let them in and ask for their help more often and honestly I'm starting to see results. More about that in another blog post!

3] YouTube! I'm addicted. I started watching danisnotonfire and AmazingPhil about three years ago and I became hooked immediately! Before we go any further, if you're not a Phan that's ok you should still carry on reading, (but Phans get extra lovage from me because, well, y'know, we are Phamily...?) Anyway. I will watch all kinds of YouTubers and I give everyone a fair chance as there are a lot of unique people out there with something interesting to say, so yes YouTube is one of my favourite online places to browse around in.

4] On a more serious note, I experience anxiety on pretty much a daily basis. Hopefully some of you can relate, and if you can't that's even better because it means you are blessed with mental stability (probably). This is an area of my life I'm working on and I just want to say to any individual reading this who might be going through the same thing that you aren't alone, you're not weird, and you can still live a fulfilling life if you learn how to cope with your anxiety just a little bit better. Again, this is another topic for another blog post which I will definitely talk about at some point.

5] I'm an Owl. I haven't yet mastered the art of rotating my head 270 degrees though that would be an awesome Halloween party trick, but nonetheless I am definitely an Owl. I stay up all night and I love the dark and I like going out at night more than going out during the day and... I want to slide down the Owl slide at the Howlter residence. Yep, I'm definitely an Owl.

6] I have never broken a bone. Have you broken any bones in your lifetime? Luckily I've never done anything dangerous enough to risk breaking anything as I was so sheltered as a child I wasn't even allowed to join gymnastics for fear of hurting myself, so these days I live out my acrobatic dreams by... doing Yoga (which by the way is very good for the bones). Really though, I'm grateful I've never broken anything because those things take far too long to heal!

7] My favourite TV shows and films to watch are those with a strong female character, someone with real gumption who is not afraid of the world. I'm giving Legally Blonde as an example that we all know, because it just goes to show that one person can really break through barriers that others put up in front of them, and to me that is an important thing to be able to do. I find it inspiring and I take comfort in the fact that there are real people in the world who might feel they are going through this exact type of transformation in their life and honestly, so am I.

8] When I was young I wanted to be a photographer! I got my first camera when I was about eight or nine years of age and it came with a book on how to do all these little tricks with the background and I really had such fun with it. I remember the camera was yellow with a black wrist strap which used to remind me of the sun and every time I carried it around I felt I had literal sunshine in my hands. What a positive little thing I was! Over the years photographs became less of an interest to me as I became rather camera shy, but gladly I now think I'm ready to dive back in.

9] London is my favourite place that I have visited. I've been there once, and admittedly I haven't travelled to many places in the world but there was just something about London that I really connected with. The people were so diverse as was the food, the music, the shops and I just felt like there was something for everyone. I enjoy reading about London too as I plan to go back there one day and want to know everything there is to know about the place. Fingers crossed!

10] Pasta is my favourite food. I would live solely on pasta if I needed to and would gladly have it for breakfast, brunch, lunch, dinner and dessert!! Ok maybe I'm exaggerating but really... I need to go make some right now! 

So I hope this was a sufficient welcome/introduction to me and my blog and well, the ramblings in my head and if you weren't painfully bored then please leave a comment and tell me what you thought. I will be talking about anything and everything that I find interesting and as I mentioned previously, don't take me too seriously as this basically just a hobby!! 

Thank you for reading, congratulations you made it to the end! See you soon!