In July 2010 we were lucky enough to go to Florence on a work trip. We were asked to film a wedding at the side of the seriously talented Joe Simon. The wedding was at the stunning San Biagio church in Montepulciano and a reception at the Castello di Vincigliata. It was an incredibibly hot day and I don’t think I’ve ever sweated so much in my life, but it was such a beautiful wedding and an incredible experience.

We did decide to make a little vacation out of it all too! You’d be crazy not to! A few days in Florence before the wedding, taking so many sights and being constantly reminded of all the things I learned way back when I was studying Art History back in Leuven. After the wedding we escaped to the Tuscan countryside where we stayed at a beautiful hotel in the middle of nowhere with the most amazing views. Unfortunately we started to come down with some major colds so spent a bit too much time sleeping. We finished our little Tuscan adventure with a day trip to Sienna.

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Last year we celebrated our 10th wedding anniversary by going on a dream holiday, a road trip through the USA. We started of in style, to get to the the good old US of A, we didn’t board a plane, we boarded the largest and most beautiful ocean liner in the world, the Queen Mary 2. A 7 night crossing took us to New York City where we promptly got on a plane to Las Vegas, Nevada.

We then travelled a grand total of 4255 miles in an RV through 9 states: Nevada, Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Colorado and Arizona. And we finished with a quick trip to Disneyland in California to go to Mickey’s Not So Scary Halloween Party. It really was the trip of a life time! We had high expectations, fuelled in part by so many of our American friends saying that it would be totally awesome. Well, those expectations weren’t just met, they were exceeded, this was just so much more amazing than we could ever have imagined! From the utterly breathtaking landscapes which seemed to change around every corner (except in Nebraska, that was just lots of grass) to the wonderful wildlife that we got so close to, from the wonderful hikes in the National Parks (Yellowstone being by far our favourite) to the evenings spent stargazing by the campfire, it all just took our breath away.

We can now present you with a film of our vacation. It wasn’t easy reducing 6 weeks of travel and hours and hours of footage into 1 short film. The password to watch this epic film is “4255miles”

The full story of our adventures can be found on www.2legalaliensroadtrip.com

I love to bake and every once in a while I like to go all out.

This was last year’s cake.

This year I decided to go for something I hadn’t done before. The plan: a strawberry cake, with a filling of crushed strawberries with a dash of Triple Sec and whipped cream, covered in strawberry buttercream and chocolate.

I looked up some recipes and decided to try this one for the cake part: Ultimate Fresh Strawberry Butter Cake. The result in my case was not as perfect as I had hoped, the cake was a bit on the dense and heavy side. Maybe I should have cooked the strawberry puree. Still, Niels was more than happy with the cake and was happily eating the top crusts.

Now for the filling part.

Crush some strawberries and add a dash of Triple Sec (or Cointreau or Grand Marnier) for a nice little kick. Let it rest for a bit before straining it and spreading it on the cake.

Add some whipped cream. Here I got a bit lazy and didn’t make my own whipped cream, but this is some really good whipped cream from Makro. It’s unsweetened and is heavenly on a hot chocolate. I digress.

Time to make the strawberry buttercream

The ingredients:

• 115gr of slightly salted butter
• about 3 big strawberries, puréed
• About 3 to 4 cups of icing sugar (by the way, if you run out of icing sugar, you can just blitz some regular granulated sugar in a food processor)
• 1/4 tsp of vanilla extract
• 1 tbls of cream

In a large bowl (in my case, the Kenwood Chef with a K-beater) add butter, vanilla, salt, and 2 cups of icing sugar to the puréed strawberries.  Pulse until well-combined.

Add cream and small amounts of icing sugar, until the mixture reaches desired consistency. The buttercream should be smooth & soft, yet hold its shape.

Done! Now time to put it all together!

The icing is on the cake. Put it in the fridge for a an hour or so and go watch an episode of Chuck.

Finally, melt a cup of dark chocolate (au bain marie). When it’s nice and runny, dip some strawberries in the chocolate and let them rest on a piece of baking paper.

Then, add about a tablespoon of cream to the melted chocolate. Mix in well. Make sure it’s all still nice and runny and pour it gently over the cake.

Before the chocolate starts to set, add the decorations: chocolate easter eggs and chocolate covered strawberries.

Let it rest in the fridge for a bit before attacking it.

PS: slicing it, not that easy…

I’ve added a new page, which you can find in the menu above, titled “Cinema“. Well guess what you can find there

Proof of our amazing adventures in full colour and at 25 frames per second! Yes, I made a page with plenty of videos of most of our vacations. You’ll find many of our cruise videos and Disney World videos there for your viewing pleasure. It features stunning scenery, postcard perfect beaches, magnificent ocean liners and over the top cruise ships, Donald Duck and Stitch, hula dancers and cowboys, NASA space rockets and star troopers, a scrumptious glittering cake and of course yours truly. Now, please don’t go expecting the same standard of work as you might have come to expect from our professional wedding films; when we’re on vacation, we really are on vacation and the conversation between the two of us tends to go something like this at times “you film” “no you film” “I don’t want to film now, please can you do it”. However much we love making our wedding videos and our vacation videos, when we are on vacation, we are like most other people and want to leave our “work” at home, but we also want some fabulous vacation videos. Not always easy to find the right middle ground.

But I also can’t help plug our real films here, now they are not on this site, but you find them here. Although since I just finished our brand spanking uber fantastic new wedding film showreel, I just had to share it here too.

A long overdue overhaul of our 2 Legal Aliens website! Hopefully this time we’ll be able to update it on a more regular basis. Sharing our favourite recipes and cooking experiments, our travel adventures, the veggie patch, our work and passions. So bear with us as we update and add more and more to this new website.