Great Advice on Monday Morning

(found @Reddit)

Healthy Breakfast Cake

I like healthy cakes that are not too sweet. In this way I can combine my (not too) sweet tooth with my interest to eat healthy. Hence, it's no wonder that I was immediately drawn to Zuzana's breakfast cake when I first discovered it about 2 years ago. I made this cake several times in the last 2 years and also experimented a bit with different ingredients.

Here is my current version:

• 120 grams of Couscous cooked (or doused with hot boiled water)
• 50 grams of Oat Flakes
• A little bit of milk
• 2 apples, 1 carrot and 1/2 of a chocolate bar crushed & mixed
• a hand full of crushed walnuts
• a tea spoon of cinnamon
• honey
• 2 whirled eggs

Sometimes, I mix the eggs with the rest of the cake. Sometimes, I add ground almonds instead of walnuts and mix them with the rest of the cake. There are plenty of possibilities ...

But now to the current version: at first take the couscous, heat water in a kettle and pour it over the couscous. Let it steep for around 10 minutes until the water has been absorbed by the couscous.

 

Clean 2 apples and 1 carrot and crush and mix them with 1/2 of a chocolate bar. Mix everything together and add also the Oat Flakes and the Milk:

 Add crushed walnuts on top and disperse cinnamon over them. Finally pour some honey on top:

Pour 2 whipped eggs on top:

Bake the cake for around 25 to 30 minutes at 220 degrees in the convection oven:

 Finished:

And this is how I enjoyed it this morning:

 

Yummie! :-)

Pharmacy haul

Inspired by Lisa Eldridge and Essiebutton (who has been inspired by Lisa Eldridge as well ;-)), I have done my very own pharmacy haul end of May and ordered a couple of things from a pharmacy. Since I unfortunately do not speak any french, I had to order from a german pharmacy. 3 of the products, however, are french pharmacy products recommended by Lisa Eldridge and I really hope that one day I'll be able to browse through french pharmacies in Paris myself like Lisa Eldridge does. :-) 

Here are the things I ordered: 

The products are:

• Shampoo and conditioner by Lavera (Rose Milk Repair Shampoo and Rose Milk Repairing Hair Conditioner)
• Logona daily care Body lotion
• Bioderma Hydrabio Riche face cream
• Bioderma H2O micelle solution (makeup remover for sensitive skin)
• Caudalie Eau de Beauté (also known as Caudalie beauty elixir)

As far as I know, Lavera and Logona are german companies. They are offering organic skin care and makeup and I usually like their products. Bioderma and Caudalie, however, are french.

Except of the Caudalie Eau de Beauté which I really love (I have taken it with me on my last short trip), I haven't tried the products yet. I am curious how I'll like them. If you'd like me to write a review of any of the products, just drop me a comment or a mail.  

Dear hard work ... (fitness motivational Video)

I need motivation ... and the video below is really cool. :-) It doesn't only work for sports.



How do you like the video? Does it motivate you to do sports or anything else that has to be done? :-)

Pink Box June

There are several beauty boxes available in Germany and for a very long time, I just registered that they are available but did not feel any need to try them. I don't like the idea to be surprised once a month with a couple of beauty products. I rather prefer to buy the stuff that interests me and try it in the order that I find convenient. Additionally, there are areas where I have already found holy grails I don't want to mess about with.

In Germany, there is the Glossybox, the Douglas Box of Beauty, the Pink Box and very recently also the german DM released a DM Box. I don't know whether there are more such boxes available in Germany. These are the ones, I came across before and especially after the DM Box was released since this was the time when an interest into these boxes aroused in me. When the DM box was released last month, I thought "so what?" at first. But then, when no DM box has been available anymore (apparently, they all sold out within 2.5 hours!), I regretted that I didn't register in time for one of them as well. I even have been so disappointed about not being able to try the DM box that I decided to give another box a try. So, I had a look at all the boxes mentioned above. The Douglas Box of Beauty is also limited to a certain amount of users and I was not able to get one. But I am not that interested in the Douglas Box anyway, so I was not too sad about not being able to try it. The boxes that are available for anyone at the moment are the Glossybox and the Pink Box. The Glossybox is not very appealing for me, however, because I have read that they recently increased the price of the monthly subscription and a lot of subscribers were not very happy with the content. So, I decided to give the Pink Box a try.

The Pink Box seems to be well known in Switzerland. In Germany, it is rather unknown and also has a rather limited amount of supporters. In Switzerland it is well established and has a lot of supporters, similarly to the Glossybox in Germany. Nevertheless, I liked it compared to the other boxes (I'd only prefer the DM box over it ;-)). It costs 12.95 Euro a month and subscribers praised the content since there often seem to be expensive full sized products in the pink box. Apparently, the competitors only provide small samples in their boxes and hence the content is not really worth the money paid.

The June box is my first Pink Box which I received yesterday:

As you can see, my box consists of a pink box, an antiperspirant by FA and a magazine. It might be the case that the antiperspirant and the magazine are one time additions for the very first box. I am not sure but I think that usually there are only 5 products in a pink box. The magazine and the antiperspirant have not been mentioned on the black flyer attached to the pink box either (see a large and readable picture of the flyer below). 

Opening the box reveals a cute inner packaging with a pink bow and black decoration:

Alltogether, my pink box of June consists of a magazine, 3 full-sized beauty products, 3 sample sized beauty products and 2 codes for reduced ordering of beauty products:

Full-sized beauty products (all three full-sized products might yield a price of around 12.95 Euro and this is the price of the box - so this is an acceptable deal):

Samples:

On the flyer which was enclosed in the parcel, the content is nicely described:

In summary, I am satisfied with the content of my pink box and I still think that this box is the nicest one on the german market at the moment (except for the DM box of course :-)). Although I would never have bought stuff by Fa myself, I will try the shower gel and the antiperspirant and I am sure that I will also empty both bottles nonetheless. The full-sized body butter by Bioturm is a very nice surprise and I am looking forward to using it. The samples will be used, too - for sure. I don't read magazines for women, so the magazine is kind of waste. But I am collecting pictures for scrapbooking and decorating stuff - so maybe I can find some nice pictures in the magazine. So, altogether I am not unsatisfied with my pink box.

Since I am not the typical beauty box subscriber and still prefer to try stuff I choose and not stuff that someone else chooses for me, I am not sure whether I'll keep my subscription. Currently, however, I think, I am not yet done neither with the beauty box experiment in general nor with the pink box experiment and I am curious about the content of the July pink box. I also appreciate that there are full-sized products in the pink box and the box itself is really cute and can be used as a means for decorative storage. So, I'll keep the subscription for now at least. 

Isn't this a really cute box? :-)

By the way, here is an interesting video giving an overview of the DM Box and showing the very first DM box. I am indeed very jealous. :-/ But the Pink Box has comforted me well and has provided a kind of consolation! ;-)