Mar
02
Barbie turns 50
I think we’ll have a lot of eager fans jumping up and down…starting now. Yes, you heard me ladies, you’re allowed to play with your Barbies again. This month, our favorite blond bombshell is celebrating her 50th birthday in style. With her face embossing jewelry, shoes and even beauty products, everyone is celebrating and we don’t mind one bit. Just to get all of you reminiscing about styling her hair and marrying her off to Ken doll we’re going to take a look at a few of my favs.
Foxy Originals
Launching this month online and in stores, Foxy Originals has 11 designs and each is more fun than the last. Who can resist their Barbie rainbow-coloured necklace in gold or silver? I feel like it’s a number I’d wear out dancing and relish the many reactions. For every day wear, I love the charm bracelet with a Barbie silhouette and high heel charms.
The jewelry ranges from $24 to $40.
Barbie by Cake
Exclusively at Sephora, Cake Beauty has created a bath and body collection inspired by vintage Barbie.
They have a decadent hand cream, body mousse, hair and body mist, sugar scrub, boudoir candle and solid parfum all ranging from $18 to $40.
The packaging is so unbelievably fun you could forget that everyone loves Cake for their super sweet smelling products and not just because it now has our favourite doll on the front.
Barbie by Town Shoes
Now here is something right up my alley. Shoes!
The black and white pattern from the Original Teenage Fashion Model Barbie doll ($130) is not only an adult way to rock one of Barbie’s great patterns but check out the sole. That little design would have me showing off the bottoms of my shoes to anyone and everyone who would take a look. Sadly though, I don’t think I’d want to wear them and ruin the design.
Town also offers a platform sandal, sweet fuschia party shoe with a bow (seen below for $130), and bags.
And all this excitement over a doll I never really played with as a kid. One would think someone who loves clothes and makeup so much would have been a big Barbie fan, but I was more enthralled with cars and trucks than styling hair. Who would have guessed? Either way, I love anything retro and this is one throwback that is tons of fun.
–Kate Daley
Nov
17
Other peoples birthdays, that is. And yesterday was Steve’s. I had a field day. I spent the last week mentally preparing menus and choosing the right wines. Not to mention the delightful satisfaction of choosing and finding the right gift. I enjoy his birthday way more than he does. But he did pay me a great compliment – he said this was the best birthday ever. Of course it’s all about the food. The day started with freshly squeezed orange juice followed by pink bubbles (Prosecco Marzemino Roasato) and a bang-up breakie of bacon, fried eggs & potato/roasted red onion hash. Next a walk on the beach (yesterday was remarkably warm and clear – you could see every detail of the Olympic mountains across the Juan de Fuca) followed by a matinee of the new James Bond. A stroll downtown lead us to the Bengal Lounge in the Empress where we sipped Manhattan’s (I like bourbon ones) and watched dusk settle over Victoria harbour.
Now for the fun……home to dinner. Bear with me, there are lots of photos…..
I printed the menu and gave it a border of pretty wrapping paper.
In case that’s too difficult to read – here it is:
Stephen’s 42nd Birthday Dinner
November 16, 2008
Chestnut & Chanterelle Soup
**
Clos de Capuncins Riesling Schlossberg 2006
*******
Braised Rabbit with Polenta
**
Clos de L’Oratoire des Papes Chateauneuf-du-Pape 2005
*******
Radicchio & Red Leaf Salad with Toasted Pine Nuts and Lemon Vinaigrette
*******
Blue de Laqueuille
Dutch Beemster
Tomme Haute Richlieu
Black Mission figs
**
Passito de Pantelleria
First course is a chestnut & chanterelle soup with thyme cream…..I love the rustic fall look of roasted chestnuts. To roast them, first score flat sides with a knife, then roast in 375F oven until they pop open…about 15 to 20 minutes. They add a velvety texture to the soup, once it’s pureed.
Poor rabbit…not looking so good right here…. a little too naked. But have hope. I braised it in red wine with celeriac, orange peel, rosemary and lots of garlic.
Oh my, look at these beauties! Cooking for a sommelier can bit a little daunting. But I think I matched my wines well.
This is the finished soup. It was divine….the mushrooms are so incredibly rich. On any given day I would’ve been satisfied with just this – a little bread and a hunk of good cheddar (the raw milk seven year aged cheddar from Quebec), but there was more, much more to come.
The rabbit was surprisingly good. I still think it tastes like chicken but Steve thought it much gamier. The polenta was a good choice to soak up the sauce -and this was a saucy rabbit – the corn added another deep layer of flavour and the texture is so comforting. I forgot how good it is. There will be more polenta in my life from now on!
By the time the salad course rolled around I was more sauced than the rabbit. I needed a cheese fix so I added a crouton with blue cheese to the salad. Wrong, wrong, wrong. All we needed at that point was a tart salad to cleanse the pallatte. Radicchio and read leaf lettuce with a tangy lemon dressing and a few crushed pine nuts was quite enough. Blue cheese – overboard! My bad. So I ate Steve’s crouton. Hee hee.
And finally, what I had been waiting for all day…..the birthday cheese. Starting with the orange hunk and moving clockwise: Beemster, Blue de Laqueuille (from the Auverne in France) and Tomme Haute Richlieu (Quebec). A few dried figs and some dates for good measure.
We finished just before midnight….as all good things must come to an end. If anyone wants any of the recipes let me know. I should probably write them down in the next or day so I don’t forget them.
Cheers,
jennifer
Aug
16
In his recently published, mean-spirited tell-all, Life with My Sister Madonna, 47-year-old Christopher Ciccone disclosed much too much about Madonna’s private affairs and interior weaknesses. He portrayed his sibling as a lonely woman with a soaring, queenly ego and a rocky marriage to film director Guy Ritchie. He wrote that she won’t tolerate being contradicted; that she never got over Sean Penn; that he once caught her then-boyfriend Warren Beatty rummaging through her garbage.
Ciccone was owed money, he contends, from work he did for Madonna as an interior designer (a source of income that has since, obviously, completely dried up). Beyond this, he clearly feels that he served her needs as a yes man for years and that she was never truly appreciative.
These revelations have the stinging air of desperation about them — no detail is too intimate or too meaningless to disclose. But it was while promoting his book on Good Morning America that Ciccone dealt what I imagine is the hardest blow. When asked if he still recognized the girl he grew up with, Ciccone giggled: “Not after the facelift.”
She may be the most influential woman musician in history; she may still earn $40 million a year through touring, recording and endorsements; but Madonna greatly fears getting old, as her brother is too quick to point out.
Today, she turns 50 — with her marriage supposedly going through its convulsions and our most recent memory of her ingrained by those paparazzi snaps that showed her looking haggard, stick-thin and — yes — older as she exited a Kabbalah centre with her daughter. (The glee taken in Madonna’s celebrity-blogosphere destruction is too much for any woman to bear.)
Of course, what Madonna fears most is irrelevance. Jean Anouilh said “When you are forty, half of you belongs to the past, and when you are seventy, nearly all of you.” Madonna is now somewhere in the middle of that uncomfortable calculation.
