Habitare – let's make it a habit

I visited Habitare – an annual furniture, interior decoration and design fair in Helsinki – for the first time the past weekend. Obviously the place was full of wonderful design, so could only pick a few favourites to present here. Since I live in a 30 square meter apartment, I have pretty much done all the furnishings that can be done. Thus, my interest leaned toward small decoration stuff. And what actually ended up in my shopping cart was cupcake tins, cake pop sticks and gingerbread forms from Iloinen keittiö (=Happy kitchen). 

Design House Stockholm

Jukka Rintala textile

Aava – timeless living

Silmu-Keramiikka

Savesta

I was delighted to see a fair stand by Savesta, a small pottery from Porvoo. A few co-workers and I visited the pottery last winter, because one my colleagues knows the designer. It was interesting to see the place and hear about the making of these beautiful pieces. For example, the sparkles on the vase above are made by throwing grains into it during the production. These kind of stands with handmade Finnish design both get my 100 percent respect and stand out at the fair among imported, impersonal stuff.

Little bunnies with message signs by Savesta. Cute! :).

Slow Factory espresso/tea cups with sugar/tea bag holder. 

Ari Markkola

Finlayson wall of blogs

This wall was one of the must-sees at this fair for me. Finlayson challenged three Finnish bloggers to decorate one of their rooms with Finlayson products. One of those bloggers is my dear friend Kaisa (the one on the left), who has an amazing blog, take a look: No home without you. She did amazing job, way to go, Kaisa! :)

My absolute favourite is the picture on the right, plain and cozy at the same time.

Cake pop time!

What a week! Got fever on Monday and it lasted until Wednesday. And the sluggish feeling lasted even longer. So got nothing done, including blog updates.

Cake pops have been around for a good while, but in case there's someone who hasn't tried to make them yet, I decided to post about them. Hope you get inspired! What is so cool about these cute treats is that only your imagination is on your way when planning the flavour, shape, colors and decoration. I used Valio's mango cake pops recipe, which you can find here. The idea is to 

1. Crumble a ready made cake (150 g), mix it with cream cheese (100 g) and powdered sugar (1 dl) and roll balls.

(I baked the cake myself, but don't think it's worth the trouble. Use basic sugar cake, chocolate cake, tart or whatever you think matches with the cover you're going to use. Mango-flavored cream cheese worked well in this recipe, gets my recommendations!)

2. Dip the balls in topping, whatever you choose it to be.

(I used melted white chocolate (100 g). I coloured the other half with red food colouring, but for some reason it thickened the topping so badly I ended up shaping it on the balls instead of dipping. That made the balls too heavy for the sticks, see the picture below.)

3. Decorate!

I didn't find lollipop sticks to buy, so I used these long grilling sticks. There are many ways to serve cake pops: you can e.g. stick the sticks in sugar or serve them upside down on a plate. Find some nice examples here. Since I used these ridiculously long sticks, I ended up sticking them in a half cut cabbage which I covered with a nice napkin. I added some two-sided tape on the cabbage to keep te napkin in place. Voila!