Whimsical Spring Cottagecore Garden Makeover 🌿🧚‍♀️ + The Prettiest Fairy Cake I've Ever made

Hello, whimsy friends. Welcome back to another video. If you're new here, my name is Maya and I create whimsy witchy lifestyle content. So if that's something you're interested, please follow along. Also, if you're not already following, give my Instagram a follow. I love to do short form content over there as well. So welcome back to another video. I feel like it's been a minute, but I've been very busy for good reason. Mostly working on my garden and you're gonna see a lot of what I've been doing. This time of year, I feel the most busy because I'm just literally outside with my hands in the dirt and helping my husband move things around. He does a lot of the heavy lifting and I just kind of come up with the ideas and move what I can. Because of a surgery I just had, which I'll talk about in a minute, I wasn't able to and slash am not able to help as much with physical labor and more just creating ideas and the actual planting of seeds and stuff and tending to the garden. It's just kind of what I've been up to the last few weeks as far as the whimsiness in my life and showing you guys a little bit of my spring whimsy. And before I get into the video, I do wanna touch on the surgery I just had. So I had a breast augmentation a few years ago when I got out of the army because I was struggling with my femininity and feeling feminine. Essentially, I felt like I was just surrounded by masculine energy constantly and I just didn't feel very feminine. I have learned, for me at least, that your femininity is not defined by the way that you look or how you present yourself, it can be. But for me, it's defined by how I interact with the world, what things that I do for enjoyment and just how I view myself and honestly, my connection with witchcraft has really helped me feel more feminine and I realized it really doesn't have to do with a pair of breasts. So all that being said, I do wanna just say, I don't care if anybody gets any sort of plastic surgery, anything like that. I am the kind of person who, if you wanna do something to yourself, it is your right. It's your body with everything. Your body, your right, your choices. Just for me in this circumstance, I just realized I didn't do it for the right reason. I wasn't doing it for myself. Yeah, I don't know if that's a good explanation but anyway, I had them for a few years and they were just very uncomfortable and the surgeon put too big of ones that I did not want. I didn't realize how big he had put them until obviously after the surgery and yeah, they just didn't feel comfortable and fit my body. I felt like I was sexualizing myself every single time I wore something that was low cut or in the summer, I just felt like that was the first thing you'd look at when you look at me and I just don't want that to be the case and for some people, that's what they want and that's great but for me, it wasn't, isn't and so I got them removed and I had a female doctor do it. She's really cool and I felt very safe with her and everything and yeah, so I've been kind of recovering from that surgery. It's a lot because not only did I get them removed but because they were so big on my body, it stretched my skin out quite a bit so we had to do a breast lift as well because my breast tissue and everything was sort of sagging so it's a pretty big surgery so my chest has been healing but I can't really lift my arms a whole lot but I am so happy that they're gone and I'm so happy to feel more like myself and honestly, I feel more feminine now than I did before and I think that's just because I feel more aligned with myself and I really just don't want to make it a big thing but I know it would be obvious seeing what I look like before to seeing what I look like now because my breasts will be one size and then no, they're much taller. So anyway, I just wanted to put that out there and just be transparent about it but I'm doing great. Thank you for everyone for well wishes even though you didn't know what surgery I was having. I do appreciate that but I'm doing great and hopefully in a couple weeks I'll be able to get back to running and everything and living a little bit more actively. I've basically just been sitting, watching a lot of Great British Baking Show, a lot of Bob's Burgers, been drawing a lot, been reading a lot. The last thing I want to mention before I get into the video is the book club. So the book club has kind of been a little bit like bouncing around from two different apps. It started out on the App Fable, which is great but you can't really discuss things live on there. It's sort of like chat rooms that you can like talk about things as you go. And then I sort of moved it over to Discourse and Discourse is great but it doesn't have that, you know, chat as you go vibe. It's more of a like live once a month. So I'm going to be combining the two. So we're going to use both. So I'm going to put the link to both of those below but this book club is the Whimsy Witch Book Club. And basically once a month, we're just going to be reading a book that's very whimsical and witchy related, fantasy, cozy fantasy, that sort of thing in a community where you can meet like-minded women. Yeah, so I just want to clarify that and apologize. It's been all over the place, but like I said, I've been dealing with a little bit of recovery recently. So I have not had that at the forefront of my mind but I'm feeling better and trying to get back into it but it is going to be on two different apps and hopefully at the end of the month, this month we'll have our first live. So if you'd like to be a part of that discussion, it's all free if you didn't sign up in the links below. Also, just to clarify, all of this was taken before my surgery, which is why I'm lifting. Definitely not able to do that for a couple more weeks but in case you're wondering, this was right before my surgery. I find that I can grow almost anything with a little bit of compost and just really organic, good soil. You really don't need fertilizer. Sometimes I put it in there, just like an organic fertilizer but I feel like most of the time it's just good compost and really good organic soil and you really can grow anything. This would be an example of when I would use a little bit of fertilizer because I'm trying to grow sweet peas and every single time I plant them, they die. And I just don't know what I'm doing wrong. I've tried different locations and everything. So these sadly did not make it but I did try using a little bit of this organic garden food. Did not work, but it's okay. That's all about gardening, trial and error. And I just moved on to the things I do know how to grow really well which is zinnias, sunflowers, and cosmos. And for anybody wanting to start a garden, those three seeds are so easy to grow. They almost always germinate for me and almost always turn into the most big, beautiful blooms. So along the back gate that's up against the forest, I've been working on a pollinator perennial garden. So lots of coneflowers, black-eyed Susan, lavender, rosemary, daisies, salvia, that sort of thing. And it's been really fun to see it grow because it just comes back every year and every year I've just been adding to it. So this was an idea I saw someone do on Instagram and they basically are taking supertunias and planting them in planters on top of their arbor or their trellis. And then over time, the supertunia flowers were kind of draped down and create the effect of like a wraparound plant because I did plant clematis at the bottom but it is gonna take a few years for it to completely cover the arbor. So this is sort of a fun interim project. So I think part of living whimsically is basically just romanticizing the little things in your life. And I know that's a very popular thing to say but there's a reason for that because it just makes life a little bit more fun and a little bit more, I'm trying to think of other words besides whimsy. Lighthearted, makes it feel a little bit more like when you're a kid and you're excited to make breakfast. You get to have dinosaur shaped pancakes or you get to go outside and make mud potions because it's just fun. Even though you know that there's no purpose to it, it's just fun. So today I'm going to make a little whimsy spring fairy cake. I've been so inspired by just like, I think the internet's calling it fairy food now but just whimsical food. I have this cookbook. Well, I have two cookbooks I wanna show you. The first is this enchanted baking and I talked about this on my winter favorites and it's just got the most like fun, inspiring little cute baking treats that just something that you would find at like, I can't. Something you would find at like a ball in Akita or something or, you know, drinking fey wine and having these little tea scones and although we know fey wine is very strong and it just inspires me. And like, even if I don't use the recipes, I really enjoy looking at the photos because they give me inspiration to make my own. Especially this one on the front, I think that's really cool. This is my recipe book that I started probably six months ago now that I just started filling with recipes that I really enjoyed and this is the lemon rosemary olive oil cake and it's something I hope to one day pass on to a daughter or a granddaughter or a son, whatever it might be, or just maybe a niece or a nephew, just somebody in the family that they'll have like all of my special recipes and honestly, like I feel connected to them because when I make these recipes, I put intention behind them. So like, let's see, I have, so this one, apple snap cookies and this is actually a recipe that is inspired by Fantastic Mr. Fox, which is one of my favorite movies and I made these cookies right around when my dog Flynn passed in the fall and that movie always reminded me of Flynn because he always felt like he looked like a little fox and so I put the intention with these cookies for when you miss a childhood friend or pet and I put that in the top. So I want to make this a recipe book for like when you need something, when you need the intention behind the recipe. Let's see what else we have. I have moon cookies in here, so for celebrating the full moon, that one's really fun, very easy to make and then my lemon rosemary olive oil cake, I said to get rid of negative energy and I think that the negative energy for me when I was first intending this is I know that like over the winter, I tend to have a bit of like seasonal depression and like getting into spring and getting into like more sunshine and feeling happier and getting outside more, feels like more positive energy and this cake I seem to make in the spring a lot. So I felt like it's like banishing all the negative energy and the sort of darkness of the winter and welcoming in the springtime. So I just really like having intention behind my recipes. I just think it's, it makes it more whimsy. Hi Salem, you gonna help me bake? My big boy Salem, he's such a good kitty. I love you. My first boy, my first baby cat, my first cat. I'm gonna get started on that, but I also have been collecting like fun things to decorate the cake with. Like I went to Trader Joe's and found these little pink strawberries and then I got some, this is chamomile, so an edible flower to decorate it with and then I have these little edible butterflies that I found on Amazon. So it's just gonna be a very fun little whimsy cake for you guys and hopefully inspires you guys to bake as well. Baking is one of those things that I'm honestly not the best at, but I still love to do it. And I'm here to tell you, just because you're not good at something, it doesn't mean you can't enjoy doing it. I make a lot of mistakes with baking. For example, during this, I accidentally used three tablespoons of baking powder instead of baking soda or the other way around. Honestly, I don't even remember. I just messed it up and I do that a lot. So I had to redo the batter. And on top of that, I ended up curdling the buttercream frosting. So it had a lot of mistakes, but honestly it wouldn't be a bake by Maya if it wasn't a little bit flawed. I've been feeling so inspired to just like paint things around my house. I feel like I am Rapunzel from the movie Tangled and I just wanna like paint the doors in my office and paint the railings of the new fence that we built around my garden. Just decorate things, just paint lots of fun stuff. Speaking of Tangled, I found these cool sun cutouts, the same sun that she has painted all over her castle in the movie. And I just love that movie. Like I feel like that movie just makes me feel really creative and artsy and whimsical and magical and kind of connecting with my younger self. And so yeah, I just kinda wanna do that to my office. I mean, the cool thing about being an adult is you have free will and you can do whatever you want to your home. Speaking of whimsical, Ruby is the most whimsical little cat. She is the heart and soul of a Disney princess and I just feel so lucky to have found her and to have rescued her. Oh, and she punched me in the face. All right, well, I think I wanna get started on maybe painting. I have like a whole box of acrylic paints and I'm gonna use acrylics because they're non-water soluble so they won't just come apart from water use. But outside I'm gonna spray it with like a sealant so that the rain doesn't corrode it after a while. But yeah, I'm really excited. So let's do that today.