8.01.2021

HOW I MAKE REALLY GOOD HOMEMADE PIZZA

Hi hello it’s been a while since I’ve posted here. I thought I’d come back with a completely off topic pizza recipe! (not exactly my usual content but I couldn’t not share this with the world) so if you’re interested to know how to navigate a normal oven to make deepish pan, soft but crunchy crust homemade pizza where the cheese and toppings don’t slide off when you bite into it, this is the recipe for you!

In rebellion of those food bloggers who write long, annoying and not to mention completely utterly unnecessary stories to accompany their recipe, I’m gonna just jump right in. (Now having read this back, I am so sorry but I fear I may have eaten my words, its actually really long hahaha buT I promise my brain feels its essential that I explain each step as there is infact method to the madness)

YOU WILL NEED:

Sourdough bread mix (I get mine from Tesco but I imagine they’re all very similar) (Yes I have given up trying to make dough from scratch it always ends up way too dense so here we are.)
25g Butter (or however much butter/ oil it says on your bread mix packet)
4g of dried yeast
320ml warm water (or however much water it says on your bread mix packet)
250g of grated Mozzarella
Tomato purée
Spray oil (that low cal spray oil stuff)
Semolina
1/2 teaspoon of sugar (optional, makes it taste like dominos dough in my opinion)
Whatever toppings you want on your pizza

(It’s noteworthy that if you wanna use vegan butter and cheese that’s totally fine. I’ve not tried it but I don’t see why it wouldn’t work as long as you use melty vegan cheese. Sometimes I substitute the butter for vegetable oil or olive oil anyway!)

METHOD
Put the bread mix in the bowl, add the sugar and then continue with the packet instructions HOWEVER before you add the water, make sure it’s warm (not super hot) and add the extra yeast into the warm water. Give the warm water yeast mixture a lil swirl and then pour into the bread mix.

(Small mind wander: I was having problems for years with trying to get bread to rise and after a lot of time on google I’ve come to the conclusion that living in an area with very hard water simply just doesn’t agree with yeast and so adding extra yeast seems to help encourage it to rise, even though the bread mix supposedly already has it in!)

It says on the packet to knead the bread for 20-25 minutes but I never bother and it still turns out fine. I just mix/ knead until the dough is combined which takes about 3 minutes.

Cover the bowl with a tea towel and leave to rise for ONE hour in a warm place. (I always wrap the bowl up in a few tea towels so it’s cosy. And in the winter I put it next to the radiator.)

Here is my pizza dough baby all wrapped up on the sofa where its warm!

Divide the dough into however many pizzas you want to make. I cut the dough in two, which makes two very big 13 inch pizzas, but you could make 3 or 4 smaller ones.

Roll/ stretch the dough out.

Sprinkle dough with lots of semolina, especially on the crusts and base.

Place pizza bases on a flowered baking tray. I give each pizza its own tray so it knows it’s special.

Heat the oven to the highest possible setting, ours is 250.

Use a spoon to spread out the tomato purée, and don’t use a lot, less is more otherwise the cheese will just slide off the pizza while you’re eating it.

Add toppings and mozzarella, I usually use an entire 250g bag of mozzarella. I used to use the mozzarella that comes in water but I find it makes the pizza soggy so don’t do that.

Sometimes if the dough is looking a bit flat and sad I will cover the pizzas with a tea towel and leave them for another 30 mins to rise a bit more, but it’s definitely not required.

Use the low cal spray oil to spray all the crust around the pizza. This is a lil trick I tried on a whim a while back and it makes SUCH a difference, it helps the crusts to rise and go crispy on the outside but remain super soft and squishy on the inside.

Once the oven is up to temperature (this is literally the only time I will ever tell you that preheating the oven is essential) put both pizzas in.

They won’t take very long to cook, I’ve never timed it, maybe anything from 5-13 minutes. Ehhh wing it. You need to sit by the oven and keep checking! The one on the top shelf will cook the fastest.

Once the cheese on the top pizza starts to bubble and go golden and crispy in places, transfer the pizza at the top to the BASE of the oven. Not the bottom shelf, the actual bottom of the oven! (Also move the middle pizza shelf so it can go golden too!) !IMPORTANT! Leave the pizza on the base of the oven for a MAXIMUM of 1 minute, then get it out and check if the bottom is crispy. If it is, perfect! If not, put it back on the bottom of the oven for another 30 seconds. It can burn really fast while on the base of the oven so you will need to keep checking. This is what makes the base super crispy like takeaway pizza! (I guess you could probably get the same effect with a pizza stone which apparently does the same thing, but I don’t know if they’re any good and also there’s absolutely no room for one in my kitchen.)

I do the above again with the second pizza whilst I’m cutting the first pizza, and by time I’ve cut the first one up the second one is usually perfect!

And there you go, that’s all the hoops I have jumped through to make delicious pizza. With many failed attempts in the past I am now passing my wisdom onto you in the hope that you wont have so many failed attempts as me. It’s not exactly authentic but it’s the best I’ve found trying to work around a normal oven rather than a pizza oven and Nick has actually said he prefers it to takeaway pizza! ENJOY do let me know if you try it!!!!

11.20.2020

ETSY GIFT GUIDE

Hello friends! Please enjoy this kind of unrelated photo of me with a painting I haven’t worked on in months!

Sorry its been a while. I sat down at my laptop an hour ago and instead of focusing on what I should have been doing, I thought it’d be a great idea to spontaneously make an Etsy gift guide which you will find at the end of this post!

I tried to choose a variety of items all at similar but also different prices (that doesn’t make sense but you know what I mean). As far as I’m aware, nothing is over £100 and most items are below £40. Theres lots of weird shaped candles (yay baby head candles, not weird at all!) a mixture of resin and clay items along with tshirts and beanies, wall hangings, plant pots, yearly planners, diaries, notebooks, accessories and of course the currently ever sought after handmade face masks.

Whilst I’m here, I’m going to be launching a few trinket trays, clay wall hangings and stickers over on my store on Sunday should anyone be looking for some nice creepy items to gift your weird friends this christmas or even y’know.. yourself. (GreeboGirl Store)

Maybe I should have put this pic as the cover photo however, as of yet, I’m still kinda scared of showing people my art because I think they might recoil in horror hahaha. Despite ditching the pink I’m still always worried that everyone who viewed me as the pastel princess will see these and think oh my god the, devil has posessed her. I mean, they’re probably not wrong but that is besides the point.

I hope you enjoy this lil gift guide!

[all links are affiliate links]

3.14.2020

How I went from Black to Pink hair with minimal damage

The one thing people like to warn you about is that there is no coming back from dying your hair black.

Why did I do it, you ask? I wanted to try it! I’ve been varying levels of blonde and pink/ pastel for the past ten years and I was bored! Unfortunately, history repeated itself and within two months I was already bored. Don’t get me wrong, I really loved having black hair, I just hated that by having black hair, I forfeited the option to dye it whimsical bright colours on a whim. That, and people kept saying to me “I bet it’s so much easier to take care of now!” which for some reason made me mad.

Fortunately, I kept the whole “but what if you want to go back blonde” idea at the back of my mind and chose a semi permanent black dye, thinking that this would be easier to remove than a permanent dye should I want to. If you’ve used a permanent dye I’m not sure if the results will be the same as mine, but of course that is keeping in mind that this semi permanent dye definitely had staying power! The above photo was taken two months after dying it black and although it wasn’t AS dark as it had been, I would say it was still a pretty strong semi-permanent colour. And that was with me washing my hair every day!

I did a lot of research on how to go blonde from black. I watched so many youtube videos of people ruining their hair with bleach, I watched a ton of YT tutorials by professional hairdressers and also read a ton of threads on a few salon forums (who annoyingly told me to get stuffed as I wasn’t a licensed hairdresser) if you have any specific questions, I’d recommend HairCrazy.com as they have a really friendly forum for people looking for hair dying help!

All in all, I deduced that the best method would be to use a hair colour remover and then to bleach my regrowth with a low volume professional bleach. I decided on Colourless – Max Effect for the hair colour removal- it has the best reviews out of all the hair colour removers I’ve researched and I was pretty much convinced by the before/ after photos posted in the reviews that it would do what I wanted.

REMOVING THE BLACK BOX DYE

The Colourless box came with three bottles, two that were to be mixed together and one that you needed to apply in the shower as a shampoo. I did as instructed and applied it all over my hair, one box was enough for my hair length but it’s noteworthy that my hair is incredibly fine. I then wrapped it up in clingfilm for 45 minutes and let me tell you, it smells like rotten egg. Seriously, it’s bad. Your house will stink for days, but its totally worth it.

After the 45 minutes had elapsed the instructions on the third bottle were to lather your hair for a good five minutes with half the contents of the bottle, rinse, and repeat. Thats a full 10 minutes of shampooing! I’m quite sure that this is the part that’s really important as it helps to wash away the hair dye colour pigments.

I must admit, as I shampooed my hair I was panicking; my hair had gone bright pond green! I had suspected this might happen, seeing as blonde + black = dark green undertones. It makes sense that once this lifts out the green will remain. This happens because a lot of black hair dyes don’t contain warm tones and if you’re dying your hair dark from blonde you should dye it red first. Annoyingly, I had gone from blonde to auburn and then to black and so I assumed this wouldn’t happen to me, but alas, I was wrong. As you can see here, we have a lovely, STUNNING pond green! Oh yay for green pigment (the most difficult to remove colour of them all. Black ain’t got nothing on green!)

Honestly, what a look. I mean, I’m kinda into it because its v grungey but um… not today.

On the upside, it had 100% worked. My brown regrowth was back to my natural colour and the parts of my hair that had been previously bleached were, well, dark blonde-tinged-green. I was ok with this because I knew that pink dye would cancel out the green! However if I were wanting to go blonde that would be a whole other conundrum, but I’ll discuss those options later on in this post.

BLEACHING

For bleach, I had decided to use Schwarzkopf Blondme Bond Enforcing Brightener Powder with their Premium Developer.

I bought both the 2% 7 volume developer and the 6% 20 volume developer because I wasn’t sure which one I should use. I wanted my hair to remain as undamaged as possible and after having researched the “low and slow” method I thought that by mixing them together to create a lower volume developer I could go blonde with minimal damage.

Apparently 2% is only for lifting the hair and then depositing colour, so for example, going from black to a dark red. However, I had watched a salon professional tutorial on the Schwarzkopf youtube channel where one of their stylists used the 2% 7 vol developer on a girl with hair very similar mine (very fine) and they had managed to achieved a nice banana blonde, which was what I wanted. So I thought I’d give the 2% 7 vol a go. Of course, I think this may only work if you have fine hair. Thick, dark hair (from what I have read) will need something stronger like a 6% 20 volume or even a 9% 30 volume.

I did a strand test with the 2% 7 vol- surprisingly it worked really well so I decided to go ahead with just that! The 6% 20 vol bottle lay forgotten in the corner.

I would have photographed this part but applying the bleach is really stressful, I get why people go to salons just to avoid doing it themselves!

I sectioned my hair and applied the bleach to the brown regrowth (but not the roots) with a tint brush. I was careful not to overlap it with the already bleached areas as I didn’t want to damage them too much. I waited for the first area to develop for 15 minutes before then applying it to the root area (the root area develops faster because of the heat from your head). Then, 10 minutes before rinsing the bleach out I applied more 2% 7 vol to the green bits, just to give them a little lift.

It worked! Sorry that these photos are in the dark, I didn’t think to take any the next morning before I dyed it pink! As you can see its quite yellow but I don’t mind, you can’t tell once its dyed crazy colours. Also, I didn’t want to go too light as last time I went white blonde it all snapped off (but thats a whole other blog post). The ends are still green tho haha!

HOW TO REMOVE GREEN FROM BLONDE HAIR

If blonde is your end goal and you want to get rid of the green I would recommend a warm coloured toner to neutralise it.

I’d say ‘just go to the salon’ but lets face it, you’re probably in the same boat as me- you can’t find a hair-colourist you can trust and its expensive.

You (normally) can’t bleach green out of hair, it will just go further into the hair shaft and bleaching more than once is super damaging. Alternatively, maybe another Colourless application?

In the past whenever my hair has had a green tinge I’ve tried everything from pink dye to ketchup (gross, would not recommend, but can sometimes work!) You could try diluting some pink dye with conditioner and painting it onto the green bits, but it might go lilac and also this will wash out really quickly.

Basically, you need to add a warm tone. There are many warm toners out there so I’m sure you’ll find one that suits! My favourite toner range is Wella Colour Fresh, so perhaps the Light Natural Gold Blonde would work. I’ve never used this specific toner as I’ve never needed to so don’t quote me on it, but it looks like it could be the right one for the job.

My personal favourite, although unrelated to the green issue (this is more of a ‘oh no my hair is YELLOW!’ thing) is the Wella Colour Fresh Light Pearl Ash Blonde which is PERFECT for removing yellow tones!

DYING MY HAIR RAINBOW-PINK

Finally, I used a mixture of Stargazer, Arctic Fox and Crazy Colour to dye my yellow-green hair a weird rainbow-pink colour.

COLOURS USED

I made sure to put a lot undiluted Arctic Fox pink onto the green bits, its been almost a month and its still going strong! Below are a few photos of how intense the colours were and how nicely they’re fading, especially considering that underneath I’m pretty sure its still POND GREEN (although, maybe the pink really has neutralised it).

As you can see its fading really well considering what it looks like underneath! Next I’m hoping to go… red? orange? YELLOW? What do you think? I’m very excited to try some colours I’ve never done before! Also not gonna lie I’m very aware of if I dye it blue that will just encourage the green however it is A RISK I AM WILLING TO TAKE!

3.08.2020

PICKING UP AN OLD HOBBY

Hiya! I have taken up a not-so-new hobby! I have returned to the realms of painting. I used to paint when I was at college (I did btec art, so I mean, pretty self explanatory) and I’d kind of just.. stopped doing it over the years. Recently I’ve noticed theres been a bit of a surge of artists on instagram and its made me want to get back into it too!

It also helped that earlier last year I had a ton of furniture delivered which was all packaged in huge bits of cardboard and I thought to myself, ‘nahhhh can’t throw that away, that’d be good to paint on!’ And so here we are.

Although I can draw I’ve never really had a specific drawing style, sometimes its really detailed and lifelike and other times its cartoonish, and I never know which one I’m going to get! I really envy those with a strong illustrative style but I do at least have a specific painting style! Or colouring style, generally using whatever I can find to paint weird rainbow faces. When I was doing my GCSE I used to paint in nail varnish, which I’m sure was really great for my lungs! These paintings are done in acrylic, I’m interested in trying oil paint however I’m scared it will get everywhere as my mom always told me it takes a month to dry ahh!

Also, whilst I’m here, I’ve started a new instagram @greebogirl because I wanted a fresh start. Feel free to check it out as I’m posting everything fashion, hair and arty stuff over there too!

12.26.2019

CELEBRATING 10 YEARS OF BLOGGING

Hiya! Hoping you’re all well 🙂 I just thought I’d pop on here to celebrate the fact that yesterday was my 10th blogging anniversary! Yep I’ve been doing this whole posting-my-outfits-online for ten years… a decade. Jesus christ.

Whats weird is I only started doing this as a hobby, I was 16 and had just started college. I had no idea that this could one day become my job. The only people who appeared to do blogging full time back then was Chiara Ferrangi, Rumi Neely and Susiebubble which is absolutely crazy to look back on.

At the time I was studying art, fashion and graphics at college and I was finding the online world increasingly boring. Myspace was pretty much obsolete and facebook was.. well…. full of everyone I went to school with.

I kept trying to find somewhere fun online, I spent a lot of time on sewing forums and deviantArt but that didn’t really cut the mustard. Finally, I stumbled across Lookbook.nu. It was the Christmas holidays and I had nothing else better to do so I immediately made an account and started posting. I also noticed that everyone else on there had a blog, so I decided to make one too, and here we are.

I think that my first post was titled “never gonna post” which is quite funny considering!

I have a knack of starting things and never, ever finishing them, this is probably the only thing I’ve ever actually stuck to! Although I admit this year I’ve only posted three times, I do still post almost every day on my instagram and I try to keep youtube updated too. Hopefully I’ll find some kind of balance over the next decade to keep this up and all the social media and video content that goes along with it!

I’m gonna pop some old photos from the past 10 years below just yknow, for fun mehehe.

Anyway, thank you all so much for following me for so long and happy blogging decade! Oh and Merry Christmas!

2009

2010

2011

2012

2013

2014

2015

2016

2017

2018

2019

Well that was fun wasn’t it!

10.31.2019

a games night with giffgaff

[this post contains a gifted partnership with giffgaff]

Hellooo! Sorry its been so long since my previous post, clearly I’m not as focused as I once thought haha. However I am back again with another post about a games night with our friends! giffgaff kindly reached out to me a proposing the idea that we should hold a games night because these days its so difficult to actually get together and spend time with friends! This is something myself and Nick always struggle with, we never seem to be able to find time or keep in contact with people. We thought this collaboration would be a great reason to finally invite our friends Steve and Emma round (who are avid board, card and whatever else kind of game players) because we don’t see them very often.

We ordered take aways from Just Eat, it was a bit of a weird mix of Chinese and Indian which was very tasty although we would have probably have been better off with pizza, more of a games night kinda food, but no, curry and chow mein it was. Anyway, we played all three games which were sent to us; Obama Llama, Weird Things that Humans Search for and Bucket of Doom. I think my favourite was Weird Things that Humans Search For where someone draws a card and asked a weird question that you’ve probably found yourself typing into google at some point and you have to finish it! I guessed all of my answers, thinking that they wouldn’t be correct yet somehow I managed to win that particular game.

giffgaff also gifted us some sim cards to use with preloaded data, texts and minutes. Although we didn’t use these as we already have our own sim cards I’m definitely going to keep them as they will come in handy for various things in the future, especially festivals! I always consider taking a festival phone with me instead of my iPhone! I know some people who don’t bother to take a phone with them to a festival AT ALL but I think taking a old phone with a different sim card just so you can find out where your friends are is always a good idea!

We also received a GoPro, Amazon Echo and an Anchor charging power bank, all of which will come in super useful! Its a shame we can’t get the Amazon echo to play with us as well haha! Maybe we can train it?

no nicholas that does not belong to you!!!

At the end of the night we counted up our totals and in the end, Steve won! He looked very pleased with his little games trophy! Emma was feeling a bit ill so I didn’t subject her to any photos, but it was really lovely to see her all the same!

I loved hosting the games night and hope we can do so again soon, it was really fun as we rarely have anyone over! I do think we need to get a little coffee table though to put all the cards out on as at one point we were all sat on the floor haha!

I’d like to thank giffgaff for enabling us to have such a fab night!!!

I think we all know that the real winner is Buster the dog.

12.29.2018

SALE FAVOURITES

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Hello everyone! Hope you all had a nice Christmas, I had my first ever Christmas with my boyfriend so that was nice. We didn’t really do much but that was pretty much what we wanted.

It was also my blogs 9th birthday on Christmas Day, so happy birthday to my blog!

Yesterday I trawled through all the online sales to find my favourite items and here they are!

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12.08.2018

PINK WIDOW 💅









I just HAD to go on holiday after my rich husbands mysterious death…

Ok ok, all joking aside, I went on holiday with my boyfriend to Lanzarote and we had a very nice time. I made him buy me wine for this pic so that I could look like a princess. Or y’know, a woman that kills her rich husbands for financial gain so she can go on ridiculous holidays and live a life of luxury, or whatever.

Annoyingly, this robe went out of stock pretty much as soon as I bought it, so I’m really sorry its no longer available but I thought it was too good not to post. Click here for the original robe that I’m wearing! I’ll link to it just incase it decides to come back into stock but if not, I’ve linked some alternatives!

I think everyone at the resort we stayed at thought I was a little bit mad to be wearing this but ohhh well. Especially the gloves, but they were kinda the finishing touch!

BIKINI FROM FREYA LINGERIE
SUNGLASSES FROM PRADA
FLUFFY FLIP FLOPS AMAZON

11.12.2018

NOVEMBER FAVOURITES

I thought it was about time for an update! Here are all my favourite items from the past month, theres lots of snuggly things as its bloody cold!
(the below are affiliate links)

10.28.2018

WITCHY










Seeing as its Halloween and I never go without a Halloween blog post, I thought it was about time for a bit of an update! I’ve been focusing a lot on youtube recently and also lots of DIY projects for the flat! This week I painted my sofa pink! Yes… I painted my sofa, like with paint and a spray bottle and everything. I know you’re thinking , ‘wow that sounds crunchy’, but it really isn’t! I’ve documented the entire process on my insta stories if you want to go watch! @kaylahadlington

As for this look, I think we all know i rarely wear black but as its Halloween it seemed appropriate, this dress is actually from last year so its probably sold out by now but the crop top version is still in stock on asos and I’ve linked lots of similar items! Also I went on a bit of a Halloween shop so if you need some Halloween outfit inspo check them out below ^_^