Teekanne 'Sweeteas'

As a lover of both tea and sweet treats, a combination of the two basically just had to appeal to me. Naturally, I got all excited when I saw new tea creations online which are supposed to emulate the taste of the world's most loved pastries. This excitement was followed by big disappointment when my local supermarket didn't stock them and finally ended with even bigger excitement when I finally found them in a big department store in a city near me.

The new tea range I’m talking about is by the brand Teekanne and was appropriately named 'Sweeteas'.

So far, there are 3 different flavours: Caramel Apple Pie, Lemon Cake and Blueberry Muffin all of which are flavoured fruit infusions.

First of all, I have to say that the smell of all three of these is just heavenly when you pour the boiling water on them. If you closed your eyes, you could literally imagine to be standing in your local bakery! Also, they are all naturally quite sweet due to the stevia leaves contained.
But now, let's get to each individual blend!

Blueberry Muffin:

This blend combines the slight tartness of blueberries with the tenderly sweet note of a muffin - I am very pleased!

Ingredients: apples, hibiscus, rose hip, stevia leaves, muffin aroma, blueberry aroma.

Spring Blossom

When I’m sitting at my desk procrastinating and doing my best at putting off work for as long as possible (as per usual), I’m lucky enough to have a beautiful view of our garden through my window. Especially in spring when everything’s blooming and colourful outside, this can be a serious distraction when you actually want to get some work done for once.

By chance, one of my favourite plants, which is the magnolia, actually stands right in front of my window. As its blooming period is usually very short,  I always make sure to take a picture before all of the petals have fallen down.

Somehow, this beautiful sight made me want to have some kind of floral design on my nails as well which is why I created this simple, bright and spring-appropriate nail art!

The Chocolate Factory

As nearly everything’s normally shut down on Sundays, me and my family occasionally like to visit a little seaside resort nearby called Eckernförde on those days. The shops there are allowed to be opened because of a special regulation for such resorts here in Germany.

The city certainly doesn't offer a ton of different stores, but I really enjoy browsing around the little shops without the intention of necessarily buying anything.

Anyway, there is a very special place in Eckernförde that is definitely worth stopping by - especially for everyone that has a sweet tooth like I do! The place I’m talking about is in fact a candy factory (in German 'Bonbonkocherei') where you can see how the candies are made and also purchase a ton of different sweets. Although I should warn you: Especially on Sundays it’s really busy in there!

However, this place also includes a separate chocolate factory in an outbuilding  which I stepped into as it was much less crowded. And let’s be honest: I prefer chocolate over wine gum and hard candies anyway.

For me, it’s always interesting to see which types of chocolate they have to offer when I go in there, as those tend to  vary throughout the different seasons. For instance, you can get ‘apple-cinnamon’ in winter and something like ‘strawberry’ or ‘orange’ in spring and summer.

All of the different chocolates just look so nice and appetizing next to each other! ^_^

Spring Has Sprung!

As you can tell from the title of this post, even in the apparently always cold and rainy Germany spring seems to have finally sprung!

Although I love wearing pastel shades in outfits as well as on my nails basically all year round, I especially tend to combine many different pastels at once when it comes to springtime. Because of that (and maybe my weakness of decision-making) I used six different nail polishes to create this bright and colourful nail design! 

Top 10 favourite Yogi Teas

As I'm slowly revealing all of my more or less secret passions, I'll let you in on another peculiarity of mine: not only am I obsessed with sweets and nail polish but I'm also a huge lover of tea.

I have already tried quite a lot of different tea brands from all over the world and if I were to pick a favourite one out of them all, it would have to be Yogi Tea.

Let's first talk about the amazing idea of putting a yoga pose on the side of every tea box. In my mind, there couldn't be any better recipe to help you relax and destress than the combination of a warming tea and yoga!

After getting the actual tea bag out of its envelope, you also get to read a lovely little philosophical quote/ piece of advice.
["Happiness is taking things as they are."// "To a friend you can lend the whole content of your heart." // "Empty yourself and let the universe fill you."]

Anyway, enough about the packaging and onto the actual tea itself.

Yogi Tea make a variety of different spice and herbal teas which are all based on authentic Ayurvedic recipes. By now, they have already brought out over 40 different kinds of tea! Out of all these blends I'd like to recommend my personal top 10 to you.

[Side note: Yogi Tea also does green and black teas but due to my hypersensitivity to caffeine -I literally will not get a wink of sleep if I have some-, I’ve only included caffeine-free teas]

10. Women’s Tea

I have to say that I was kind of sceptical towards the concept of a tea that is specifically meant to be for women. According to Yogi Tea it’s supposed to 'support the feminine side of creativity and inner balance'. Although I'm not quite sure whether it really does that for me, what I can say is that it's pleasantly light, comforting and just delicious tasting.

Prevailing flavours: ginger, cinnamon, orange, fennel, chamomile.

9. Classic

You can never go wrong with a simple, classic and yet still somewhat exciting Chai tea. Just add a little bit of sweetness and milk to it and you've got your perfect, homemade Chai Tea Latte!

Prevailing flavours: cinnamon, cardamom, ginger, cloves, black pepper.

The Versatile Blogger Award

I've recently been nominated by the lovely Jo from Say Cheesy Cake to do the Versatile Blogger Award. I’m very grateful for her nomination as she’s one of the first bloggers I've started to follow and she always puts so much love and effort into her posts!

I think this is quite an enjoyable tag as you’re supposed to tell the reader 7 facts about yourself which is great for getting to know everyone a little more personally.

So, without further or do - here are the 7 facts about myself:

I. My absolute favourite movie series is (and will certainly always be) Harry Potter. Normally, I’d rarely watch any film more than twice but I've seen all of these so many times that I know practically every single scene by heart now.

Glico Pocky Milk & Strawberry Flavour

There are honestly so many reasons why I’m urgently wanting to go to Japan one day:

1. I have been loving to read manga, watch anime and play Japanese video games since I was a little girl and there are so many good memories attached to these things (like my brother and I having intense Pokémon sessions together).
2. The country's stunningly beautiful landscape and architecture is so fascinating to me.
3. Their exceptional fashion sense as well as the entire lifestyle in general just excite me.
4. They've got so darn many flavours of Pocky! (with this being the most important aspect, of course)

Although Pocky is also sold under the brand name “Mikado” in Germany, there are by far not as many flavours available as there are in Japan.

Just look at the amazing variety (even without including the huge amount of seasonal editions that come out every year)!

Nail Art Trio

As a self-proclaimed nail polish enthusiast you will only very rarely see me with bare nails, especially not for longer periods of time. Depending on how messy and chipped my nails have gotten in the meantime, I tend to change my nail polish at least once a week. Luckily and surprisingly, my natural nails are actually still quite healthy and intact (thank goodness!).

The reason why I don’t regularly publish a ‘Nails of the week’ post or something of that sort is that I don’t really feel like every design/ colour I try out deserves its own entire blog post. As I’m quite an annoying perfectionist, it’s admittedly rather hard to please me completely.

Anyway, I thought I’d show you a compilation of three designs that I wore lately, compacted into this single post!

Polishes used:

Main colour: wet’n’wild – Wet Cement

Copper crosses: Manhattan – Café Beauté

Silver cross: ciaté – fit for a queen

Top coat: essie – good to go

Skittles Desserts

In today's post I'm going to present another goodie from one of my foreign candy orders to you. This time it's about a sweet produced by the Wrigley Company or more precisely by their famous brand Skittles.

We can also get hold of Skittles in Germany but there are only a few sorts available. The original Skittles Fruits as well as the Crazy Sours have been out for a longer time already and I just recently passed a supermarket shelf that held the Skittles Wild Berry which I hadn't seen before.

However, my internet research has shown me that there are many more creations available, especially in America, like the Skittles Confused/Riddles, Tropical, Darkside and Desserts.

Especially the last one tickled my fancy (which might also be due to the pink packaging) so I went on and purchased a 56,7 g / 2.0 oz pouch to give them a try!

This creation includes 5 different flavours which are all named after a certain dessert creation.

Here are the 5 sorts reviewed in detail:

1. Blueberry Tart

The shell of this one initially tastes nothing but sweet and maybe a little fruity. However, once you start chewing it, you can sort of taste the slight tartness that a blueberry would have. What I definitely miss to actually make this resemble a dessert, is the typical soft sweetness of a pastry, though. The flavour reminds me more of a fresh berry jam which is very delicious, nonetheless!

My Nail Polish Storage

One thing that you may have already noticed about me by now is that I'm quite a nail polish enthusiast. What follows is that my collection doesn't really seem to stop growing anytime soon.

It has taken me quite a long time and lots of failed attempts to figure out a way to properly store all of my polishes.

There were certain requirements that the final storage solution had to fit:

1. The polishes should be easily accessible!
2. The different colours should be displayed (or at least visible without having to take them out of a box or something)!
3. It should store over 100 polishes!
4. At best, there should be an option to enlarge the storage capacity!
5. I don't want to spend a fortune on specially made polish racks that you can buy online!

Despite the rather large number of requirements, I finally seem to have found the perfect solution for me, namely the RIBBA picture ledge from IKEA! Although it's certainly not intended to be used as a nail polish holder, it's perfectly suitable for this task.