Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas and happy holidays!

Buon Natale!

Joyeux Noel!

Feliz Navidad!

Froehliche Weihnachten!

Krismasi Njema!

圣诞快乐!


!عيد ميلاد مجيد

С Рождеством!

And in the Christmas spirit, please click here to donate to East African Playgrounds :) any donation, big or small, will truly make a difference! Thanks :)

Silvia

P4A 2013 - East African Playgrounds VIDEO

Hi!

I finally made a video about the Uganda project! It's part of the Project for Awesome, which is an awesome (sorry for the repetition, but that's what it is!) thing that brothers Hank and John Green put together to raise thousands for ten charities which get voted for :) So please go vote for East African Playgrounds and DFTBA :)

Silvia

Cute and easy Christmas gift! :)

Hi guys!

I've been working on this little Christmas gift idea and I thought I would share it :) It's a mixture for chocolate truffles! Delicious, I've tasted them. Trust me. It's really easy and you don't even need many ingredients! Also, even if it's edible it won't go soft, hard or off that quickly either :)

Here we go!

Ingredients:
200 g (7oz) milk chocolate
250 g (8oz) dark chocolate (70%+)
375 ml double cream
3 tbsp Champagne or sparkling white wine
1 tsp vanilla extract or flavouring
cocoa powder (optional)

N.B. I bought my ingredients in Italy, that's why they're all in Italian :) AND I only used half of them, so you should have more than this!

 Step 1: Pour the double cream in a pan and heat it until it boils gently.

Step 2: In the mean time, chop the chocolate up, put it into a heatproof dish.

Step 3: make sure you also line a dish with cling film! This was just big enough for me, so you might want to use something bigger if you're making the whole mixture :)

Step 4:  Pour half of the cream onto the chocolate to melt for about a minute, then whisk! I used that, although you can do it with an electric one  as well :) 

Step 5: Pour the rest of the cream and stir until nice and glossy!

Step 6: Add the vanilla and the wine! (Forgot to take a picture of the wine, sorry!)

It should now look something like this :) Well, probably better! 

Step 7: Pour the mixture in the dish that you prepared before.

Step 8: Put it in the fridge and leave to set for 4 hours or more (I recommend overnight)

Step 9: When it's finally set, scoop teaspoonfuls and make them into balls.

Step 10: To make them look a bit better I coated them with cocoa powder, but it's up to you :) I used cling film and made it into a sort of bag and shook it with the truffle in it :) I hope that was clear! Remember to shake the excess powder off!

The purpose of the cling film was to make this less messy, but it clearly failed :( Tip: coat your hands in cocoa powder when you're rolling them in balls

  And here they are! I actually managed to make about 30 from half of the ingredients (including a minuscule one and a malformed one), so bear that in mind :)

You can also make them in squares if you want :) In that case, take a warm knife and just slice the mixture after it's set!

Next up: Making them into little gift boxes!

So, I got these cute boxes and the pink paper from Tiger :) (which, if you don't know, you HAVE to go to) I'm sure you can find similar things in Hobby Craft or similar :)

First, I put the paper in the box and then cut it to fit, and then put the truffles in. However, please learn from my mistakes! I would actually suggest putting the truffles in first, and then cutting the paper to fit :)

And here's the box from the outside. You can just put a little bow on it to make it into a nice present or wrap it :) works either way (or on its own actually)!

I hope this might inspire somebody! It sure inspired me :) Thank you for reading and please go and check out my Virgin Money Giving page by clicking here :)

If I find some more time off from revision, I'll try and make another Xmas related post and update on fundraising!

Silvia 

Credits for the recipe go to Laura Buxton :)

UPDATE: Gingerbread men sale!

Hi everyone,

Sorry it's been a while! But I finally have the pictures from our gingerbread men sale last week :) We made a total of £22.72 (a friend donated some spare change) and sold 11 bags! I'm very happy with the result :) So, roughly we have an extra £11 each! This brings me very close to £100!!

Here are the gingerbread men all in their santa bags :) Most bags had two in and they were £1.50, and some had three in and those went for £2.00

This is me intent in decorating the gingerbread men with smarties. We held everything together and made the eyes with some icing (icing sugar and water!)

 And here they are all finished! That last one even had sunglasses :) He was obviously hoping for a holiday!

If you're feeling the Christmas spirit, please visit my fundraising page by clicking just here! Any donation is greatly appreciated and I will make a special announcement as soon as I reach £ 100!! So be on the look out for that :)

Silvia

Gingerbread men baking session!

Today, me and my buddy Sarah made gingerbread men! We (well I) are going to sell them at the end of my lecture on Monday :)

Ingredients
5 oz golden syrup
4 oz caster sugar
3&1/2 oz margarine
2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1 lb plain flour
1 egg
pinch salt
1 tsp ground ginger

Here's some pictures of what we did :)

 This is Sarah while warming the mixture of golden syrup, sugar, ground ginger and margarine (well, we used butter).

 This is the mixture after we had added the bicarbonate of soda. It was so exciting! It kept growing :)

 We then made a little well in the flour (and pinch of salt) 

And added the golden syrupy mixture and the egg! :)

 This is Sarah mixing it all together :)

And here's what it looked like :)

Cutting up the dough to make the little men :)

Sorry about the bad quality of this one! Here they go in the oven :) Only about 10 minutes!

And here they're done! And ready to go in the Santa bags for selling on Monday :)

Hope you enjoyed this post and I'll update it as soon as we know how much we make on Monday :)

Silvia

Christmassy song

Hi all,

Here's a song I uploaded to Youtube a couple of days ago that I thought I should share! I hope you enjoy it :)

Click here for the link to the video on YouTube :)

As always, click here to go to my Virgin Money Giving page and donate to East African Playgrounds!

Thank you!

Silvia

Fundraising to do list!

Here's a few things that I am aiming to do in the next couple of months that I thought I would share :) Hopefully this will help me keep on track and let you know what's going on in the fundraising process

1. Get a permit for bucketing in York in January

2. Organize a bake sale for next term (already have loads of boxes and things like that)

3. Think about busking

4. Try and sell some CDs and songs online (if interested stay tuned!)

5. Sell some gingerbread men bags before Christmas (next week)

6. Get in touch with my Grandmother about asking for donations at her church

7. Send private emails/messages to people I know might want to donate

8. Make plans to fundraise while I'm in Italy (busking)

9. Make JAM with my buddy Sarah! (IT'S JAM FOR AFRICA)

10. Make a video for my Youtube channel promoting my fundraising page

11. Update my page and come up with an original idea (easier said than done!)

Once again here's the link to my fundraising page: http://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/fundraiser-web/fundraiser/showFundraiserProfilePage.action?userUrl=SilviaHarvey

Thank you for reading! Any questions about the project, just leave a comment :) I'll be posting more info soon!

Silvia

Blog Introduction :)

Hey everyone!

Next August I will be travelling to Uganda to take part in an amazing project: building a playground in a local community :) Can you imagine a childhood without a playground? Without a place where you can just be a child and play? Hopefully we are going to change that for some very lucky (or maybe not so lucky) children! 

I'm going with a charity called East African Playgrounds, which is a really small charity founded just a couple of years ago, but that has built loads of playgrounds around Uganda already! I'm really excited about going with them :) If you'd like to know more go and visit their website: http://www.eastafricanplaygrounds.org/

This page is mainly going to be updates on how my fundraising is going and anything else to do with this project! Please follow me through this journey :)

If you'd like to donate to this cause, I need to fundraise £700 for the building materials! So please help with anything you can, or share this blog or my fundraising page with friends and family (which also helps out a lot!) Thank you! :D

Here's the link to my fundraising page http://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/fundraiser-web/fundraiser/showFundraiserProfilePage.action?userUrl=SilviaHarvey