Sp how’s it going, world? It’s been super easy to shelve blogging lately, but a four day weekend for Easter gives me absolutely no excuse to not sit down and catch up. Most of my days off this year so far have been for hospital visits and check ups, so I am loving that I can spend a little bit of time with my boyfriend and do things that are a lot more fun than sitting in waiting rooms or commuting to the office! To celebrate Good Friday I made my first ever hot cross buns from scratch, and they turned out pretty well despite me realising all too late that I didn’t have a piping bag and having to fashion an emergency piping bag out of greaseproof paper. Didn’t quite work out, so they’re more hot line buns than hot cross buns.
We’ve had some truly beautiful days of sunshine so I’ve done a lot of exploring around my town, getting lost (sometimes quite literally). We discovered an amazing artisan bakery and coffee shop down a country lane called Bakergirl and managed to find a table despite there being cars queuing to get into the car park at 10am! Bakergirl is a bakehouse that offers fresh bread, pastries and coffee in a beautiful brick farmhouse setting. Jon had a very impressive almond pastry, but I had to go for a classic cinnamon bun with my coffee and just look at it – it’s a thing of beauty. Sometimes when you’re in a coffee shop the pastries don’t take that much better from something you’d bought from a supermarket, but this was the cinnamon bun to end all cinnamon buns and I still think about how good the icing was days after. It’s certainly a treat if you’re in the Oxford area, but you’ll definitely have to be strategic about when you go because they’re only going to be even more in demand as time goes by.
April also marks one year since I’ve been at my new job, although I do suppose I can’t really refer to it as ‘new’ anymore. This time last year I’d packed up my desk at my job in Oxford, decided to take on London and see what it had to offer me. This weekend last year I was in Edinburgh, the perfect place to escape and spend the longest time I’d been unemployed since I was fresh out of university. This weekend doesn’t have quite as many adventures in store for me, but instead it is giving me some time to reflect on how grateful I am that I have a job to go to every day and how I am so much happier in myself than I was this time last year. It’s very easy to get stuck doing things and feel like your situation is never going to change, and sometimes it’s not easy to get out of those circumstances, but I am really appreciating lately how much can change can happen when you change just one little thing at a time. There’s been plenty of struggles in the past year, but for now I’m in a really good place and really that’s what this blog is all about for me.
I plan on spending the weekend relaxing and indulging in hot cross buns and Easter chocolate. I hope you have a wonderful Easter weekend!
