A few recent Victories

Today hasn’t been a great day, I’ve not been able to get to an appointment in London and as I result I’m not feeling too pleased with myself. When I first sat down to write something today misery and self doubt were plaguing my words and what I was writing was just reinforcing the negative emotions that I felt. So instead of allowing myself to wallow in that I have decided to write about recent victories in my life. Though some of these may not seem like achievements to other people, they’ve all been accomplishments in my life that I wasn’t certain I could achieve. I’ll go from the most recent back.

I just poached an egg to perfection for a light dinner. I love English asparagus season! Ok, perhaps this wasn't something I doubted of myself, but I still love the satisfaction of cooking something perfectly.

Sorry for the iphone pic!

I got out both days this weekend to see two old friends for lunch, enjoyed good food and got to catch up with people. It wasn't very long ago that I wasn’t getting out of the house more than once or twice a week - either because I wasn’t feeling physically up to it, or because anxiety was stopping me - so this is a big step forward.

I spent the evening at my boyfriend’s house. Maybe this is not something that most people would call an achievement but recently my ‘safe zones’ have been getting smaller and smaller and I haven’t spent an evening at somebody else’s home for three or four months previously.

I think I have finally perfected the French fry. Crispy, fluffy, soft in the middle and not too oily. I’ll be posting a recipe on here very shortly.

My sister’s wedding cake. Like a crazy person I decided to offer to make my sister’s wedding cake. It’s not like I’d ever made any kind of large or tiered cake before, but hey, how hard could it be?! Well luckily it wasn’t too stressful (Mr SF is laughing right now!) and I was so pleased with the way it turned out. The flowers and petals are all handmade from edible flower paste (similar to fondant but stronger and more elastic) and the layers are as follows...The bottom is a chocolate sponge with salted caramel swiss meringue buttercream, the middle is lemon and poppy seed with a lemon SMB and the top is coffee sponge with caramel SMB. The whole cake was eaten and the chef said he'd never known that to happen to a wedding cake!

Wonderful photos courtesy of Lisa Dawn photography (http://www.lisadawn.co.uk)

My sister’s wedding. Having not made it to any of the dress fittings or the hen party because of both pain and anxiety, there was definitely a concern that I wasn’t going to make it to the wedding at all. But I did! And more importantly I had the most wonderful weekend and would have been devastated not to see my sister so wonderfully happy and welcome her man (Mr Sister?) into the family.

So there we go, instead of thinking about what I haven’t done, today I am concentrating on what I have done recently. That and it’s my birthday on Thursday!