It’s been a while…

I’ve been so busy these past 6 months that I haven’t really had time to update this thing. I also had the misfortune of having my laptop crash and so I lost all of my photos of my birthday cake and my Christmas cookies and treats that I made last year.

Luckily, I still have a few photos of my Christmas Eve cake that I had saved in my email account that I can share with you.

The winter house cake was a traditional cherry pound cake with vanilla buttercream icing. I baked the cake in Wilton’s stand-up, 3D house cake pan. I made the wreath from royal icing and decorated it with sprinkles before letting it dry and attaching it to the cake. The green garlands around the door and windows were made from buttercream piped directly onto the cake and decorated with various sprinkles to look like ornaments. The snowman and the hedges were made from Rice Krispies treats molded by hand and covered in royal icing. The snowman and the icing snow on the cake board were covered in coconut to make them look fluffy. The evergreen trees were ice cream sugar cones covered in green royal icing that was piped using a star tip. I used chocolate pebbles to create the step in front of the door and for the border around the snow-covered flower beds. Originally, I wanted to dust icing sugar over the trees and the hedges to look like freshly fallen snow, but I decided against it because dusting powdered sugar never works out quite right for me. So, I left it as is. FYI, that's my Christmas tree in the background of the photo.

And here is my father’s birthday cake that I made a couple of weekends ago.

The pig pen cake is a two-layer, 8-inch brownie cake with chocolate ganache between the layers, decorated with chocolate ganache, chocolate cookie crumb "dirt," green vanilla buttercream "grass," and a pretzel fence to look like a pig pen. I made a gate for the pig pen by gluing pieces of pretzel together with royal icing and then letting it dry on a piece of wax paper. I made the pigs, vegetables, bees, ladybugs, and flowers from homemade marshmallow fondant. In case you're wondering, I made potatoes, carrots, apples, corn, cabbages, and pumpkins. Notice the pig at the top of the pen who dove right into the mud to get at his grub. All you can see are his leg, bum, and ears sticking out.

I also made some Easter brownies.

These are chocolate walnut brownies covered in a layer of chocolate ganache and decorated with homemade marshmallow fondant flowers and leaves, assorted sprinkles, and Hershey’s Eggies.

It's likely that I won't have much time to update for the next little while. For some (stupid?) reason, I applied and was accepted to another master's program. So, my cakes and cookies will be few and far between, but I'll be twice as master-y as I was before.

Waiting for Spring to Spring

It's so cold this morning here in my office/craft room. Strangely, though, it feels as if winter never happened. I don't remember much about it. That's not to say that it was a good one or that it passed quickly; it was just unremarkable. And it's not as if we're having a great spring or anything that's wiping out the memory of winter. It all feels sort of...unremarkable. And yet here I am, remarking about the unremarkableness of the changing of the seasons so far this year. I'm waiting for Spring to start springing so that I can say that it has officially "sprung." If it has sprung, it has fallen flat on its backside. I guess I should stop wishing for snow days and just put away my sweaters already. Maybe that would help.

I've kept myself busy over the past few months, though. For one thing, I made some little felt magnets, which take more time than I could ever have possibly imagined. So cute yet so tedious. I made these during the winter and only just thought to take a picture of them last night.



They’re stuffed with polyester fluff so that they’re a bit plush. To get a sense of their size, the birds are about 2.5 inches wide, and the cup of tea is about 1.5 inches high. I mainly used clip art that I found online of things that I wanted to make and then resized them, printed the images, and traced the outline of those templates onto the felt. I modified this template to make the birds.



In late March, I made a 6-inch chocolate birthday cake for my father with raspberry jam filling and covered in chocolate buttercream and marshmallow fondant, which I made according to this Wilton recipe. It was my first time making fondant, and even though I only made one quarter of the recipe it turned out great.



In an attempt to make Spring feel like it was here, or at least on its way, I made mini chocolate spring cupcakes decorated with vanilla buttercream "grass", Hershey’s mini chocolate Eggies, fondant flowers, and flower sprinkles.



For Easter, I made more mini cupcakes. I made the marshmallow fondant again and used cutters to make chicks, bunnies, flowers and leaves.



And finally I made an Easter cake. It’s vanilla with raspberry jam filling and covered in vanilla buttercream.The pink icing had some raspberry flavouring added.



For some reason, the buttercream that I made didn’t turn out quite right and I wasn’t able to ice the cake to a smooth finish. In all my cake baking and decorating busyness, I likely forgot to put in the final cup of icing sugar and inadvertently made the consistency too soft. I tried to make the top look like a sky but I ended up putting a pink border around the edge to cover up the rough icing edges. Oh well. The little fondant birds don't seem to mind.

Happy Accidents

I’ve been busy the past few weeks. I bought a set of acrylic paints on sale and tried my hand at painting on canvas, which I’ve never done before.




It's 11 x 14", and it’s perhaps best described as a somewhat uninspired snowy forest scene. Those obese-looking birds in the birch tree with the unbirch-like branches are chickadees. Those bare branches sticking out of the ground have small red berries. I like to think that after a lunch of berries, the chubby chickadees decided to rest in the branches in the tree nearest the food, too full and too lazy to fly anywhere else. I don’t know if this is what happens with birds in nature but I decided to use my imagination. It’s not like I had this scene in front of me as a reference—I just sort of thought of things that might look good together and painted them. If by chance there are any birds reading this, perhaps they could comment on its accuracy and set the record straight.

Painting intimidates me. I think it’s because once you start to lay that paint down on the canvas, you have to commit to it. Well, at least until it dries and you can paint over it. Drawing on paper is easy because you can just crumple it up and throw it away, but with canvas you’re roped in because it costs a lot more than a sheet of paper. Then you feel like you have to put it somewhere on display regardless of how it looks. Or give it away to some good-natured relative who wouldn't even think of turning their noses up at the earnestly creative yet poorly executed artistic efforts of their loved ones. Currently, it’s sitting against the bookstand on my mother’s piano.

As I painted my hackneyed winter scene, I tried to channel Bob Ross, thinking to myself, “What would Bob Ross do?” I didn’t keep a squirrel named Peapod in my pocket as I painted, but I tried to think of every mistake as a Happy Accident, and I made lots of Happy Accidents. And I tried to make Happy Little Trees, but sadly my trees look merely satisfied with their current situation and are open to new entry-level tree-related opportunities in other amateur paintings.

When I was little, I would get up early on Saturday mornings (or was it Sunday?) , go to the downstairs rec room, and watch the ultra-soothing Bob Ross on The Joy of Painting on PBS. That was pretty much my only exposure to art growing up  in a small rural Newfoundland town other than the mixed media "art" I usually made out of things like egg cartons, popsicle sticks, pipe cleaners, construction paper, non-toxic glue and glitter in primary school and Brownies. You won’t find popsicle sticks and glitter in the Louvre, though. I’ve always been more interested in illustration, animation, and commercial art than fine art, to be honest. Art that has a practical application is what I like. I collect and follow favourite illustrators the way some people follow their favourite hockey players. My dream was always to become writer/illustrator but that hasn't yet materialized.

Anyway, speaking of art with relatively practical applications, my cake decorating class is almost over. It’s Wilton’s Decorating Basics course and it's comprised of four classes. In the second class we had to ice and decorate our own cakes based on techniques that we had learned up to that point, including transferring a pattern using piping gel onto the top of our cakes and then using icing to fill it in.






In case you’re wondering, it’s supposed to be a cupcake. When I came home that night after class, I wanted to throw it in the garbage. I was discouraged because my icing was full of cake crumbs and I didn’t have time during the jam-packed frenzy of the class to smooth it all out and use all of the finishing techniques to make it smooth and pretty. Although it looked kind of rough, I brought it in for my coworkers the next day--they were thoroughly impressed. They thought all of my errors were intentionally planned details, so my embarrassing decorating mistakes turned out to be Happy Accidents after all. I’m glad I didn’t chuck it out because it was probably the best tasting cake I have ever made. It was a vanilla cake with a raspberry cream filling and vanilla buttercream icing. So, so ridiculously good. The taste more than made up for the appearance.

And these are my cupcakes from the third class this past Tuesday:






I now know how to pipe different flowers using icing, but the bright orange blooms on the cupcakes above are only one of two types of flowers that I can make at this point that actually look like flowers. And for anyone who might be curious about the taste of the cupcakes, they’re vanilla cupcakes with vanilla icing and filled with chocolate buttercream.

Next week is the last class of the course and so I’ve been planning my final cake design and busily hunting down pictures of cakes online for inspiration. My final cake is going to be chocolate with chocolate in it and covered in more chocolate, and decorated with all sorts of brightly coloured flowers.

It's almost Easter, which means I get a long weekend, a much longed-for long weekend. But seeing as how I have to make a cake for my final class on Tuesday night, I’m not going to spend the weekend making an Easter cake like I did last year. I need a break from cakes for a while. It seems as if all I've talked about or shopped for or thought about for the past three weeks has been cakes. I was tempted to pick up some marshmallow Peeps and Cadbury Creme Eggs and perhaps make an Easter-themed dessert on a smaller scale, but my cake decorating-rattled nerves convinced me otherwise. There are all sorts of interesting things you can do with Creme Eggs, and there are a surprisingly high number of creative uses for Peeps.

And then there’s the amazing annual Peeps Show contest held by the Washington Post where people submit their amusing yet questionably edible dioramas made with the marshmallow chicks and bunnies. My favourite from this year's gallery is a toss-up between The Silence of the Peeps (#21 in the gallery) and Spinal Peeps (#22). And the Mupeep Show (#29) is a runner up.

Maybe a Peeps diorama is a good creative project for me to think about for next year. Scene suggestions are welcome!

Easter Bunny Garden Cake

For Easter this year, I decided to make a carrot cake with cream cheese icing.  But it wasn`t just any old carrot cake.  No sir, I went all out and decorated it with green-tinted coconut grass and my painstakingly handcrafted marzipan vegetables and a bright-pink, wide-eyed, visibly scared Easter Bunny.

Those are chocolate pebbles around the vegetable garden and around the bottom of the cake. I didn`t make those.

The cabbages, carrots and potatoes are instantly recognizable, but those  purple things are my best attempt at turnips. Not bad for my first try at working with marizpan, if I do say so myself.