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.

Christmas 2011: Part 1

Because I am short on time but long on baking and crafting updates during this hectic week before Christmas, I’m going to do my best (and probably fail miserably, anyway, despite my best intentions) to be brief. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I’m giving away my felt ornaments, cookies, and other treats as gifts this year, and I also made some treats for holiday social gatherings. I have a few pictures to share so that you can see what I’ve been talking about and working on.

Felt cupcakes and gingerbread houses, which I packaged in my handmade paper bags.



I designed the templates for the cupcakes myself. I used a gingerbread house pattern from the book Fa La La La Felt but modified it slightly to make peaked roofs on some houses.

Shortbread cookies. I made classic rounds and fingers, little Scottie dogs, and some chocolate chip shortbread bites.


Shortbread cookie dough is really hard to work with, mainly because the classic recipe that I used called for just flour, sugar, butter and a pinch of salt, so there wasn’t much to bind it all together. Maybe I need to play with the proportions a bit the next time or add a drop of cold water so that everything stays together when the dough is rolled out.

Cookies decorated with royal icing. I made chocolate sugar cookies (Christmas trees and blue snowflakes), sugar cookies flavoured with fresh orange zest (mittens and doves), and gingerbread snowflakes (the pink ones).



Some cookies have a shimmery look from the Wilton Pearl Dust that I brushed on after the royal icing dried and hardened. Pearl Dust is one of my favourite decorating products ever, and I now have the colours white, green and pink among my baking supplies.

I also used this cute Wilton Gingerbread Village Cookie Pan to make houses from the orange sugar cookie dough and the gingerbread cookie dough.


You just press the dough into the cavities in the pan and when the cookies are baked, the outlines of the house features are baked in to the cookies, which makes them easy to decorate. I decorated the houses with royal icing, sprinkles and small candies.

In total, I made about 5 dozen decorated cookies, and about 2 dozen shortbread cookies. Most of the cookies that I made were given away but I reserved some for Christmas. It’s so easy to put a bunch on a holiday-themed paper plate, curl a bit of ribbon, and make it into a pretty gift.


Rather than use the cellophane on the roll to wrap up the cookies, I used a plastic gift basket bag. I bought a pack of the right-sized bags for my paper plate at Michaels in the gift wrapping section, put the plate in the bottom of a bag, filled it with cookies, and then cinched it closed with the ribbon. Easy peasy, especially when you’re tired and covered in royal icing and cookie crumbs and so not in the mood to wrestle with a roll of clingy, stubborn cellophane.

I also made snack mix, which consists of spiced pecan and walnut halves (I doubled this amazing recipe that I found on AllRecipes); 1 bag of Ocean Spray Craisins, or you can substitute an equivalent amount of some other sweetened dried cranberries or even cherries, or any other dried fruit that you like. I bet candied orange peel dipped in chocolate would be nice, too, but then you’d have to make the candied orange peel ahead of time. Here's a photo of the nuts and cranberries mixed together.


I packaged a small amount of snack mix in individual serving-sized plastic bags and made the tags from the same paper from the pad that I used to make the ornament gift bags. I put about a ¼ cup of the nut/cranberry mixture into each bag and threw in a few mini reindeer, gingerbread man, and star cookies that were made using a teeny cookie cutters when I made my bigger cookies. I finished each bag with a few store-bought milk chocolate-covered pretzels. Then I came up with the clever name “Heather’s Snack Mix” to write on the label.



Yeah, the muses did a great job of inspiring my original snack mix creation but they really let me down in the snack mix-naming department. Oh well.

Cookies and Cream fudge made from this Eagle Brand recipe.



I only made a third of the recipe due to its serious habit-forming properties. The combination of white chocolate and Oreos is extremely addictive. This pan of fudge, seen uncut in the first photo above, was made for a work Christmas party.

Chocolate and Butterscotch fudge made from another Eagle Brand recipe.


I made half the recipe and added crunchy toffee bits to the top as the butterscotch chips were kind of clumpy and wouldn’t melt completely smooth, so I wanted to camouflage that a bit. Toasting the walnuts before chopping them and adding them to the melted chocolate base gives what would normally be a simple sweet fudge a more complex flavour. It’s kind of a boring looking two-layer fudge when it’s just on a regular plate but it looks much more impressive in this snazzy green snowflake tin, which I filled with two layers of the fudge and then gave away as a gift.



My Christmas tree cake, which was also made for the aforementioned work Christmas party.






It’s a two-layer vanilla cake with chocolate buttercream filling and is decorated with vanilla buttercream. I used Smarties, mini gingerbread man cookies, silver dragrees, and snowflake and star quins as tree “ornaments.” The star on top is actually a mini gingerbread cookie that I covered in gold buttercream. I added a few yellow star quins as an afterthought because the icing made the star look too lumpy.

And here is the link to see my gallery of my Christmas tree and festive living room decorations. Before you go and watch the slideshow, I want to draw your attention to one thing in particular:


It's my Chip and Dale ornament that I bought in Walt Disney World when I was there last December. When I was little, I loved the Disney Christmas cartoon where Pluto chases Chip and Dale around Mickey's living room as Mickey is busy decorating for the holidays. The two chipmunks get into the Christmas tree and walk awestruck around the branches amidst the bright lights and shiny bulbs, admiring the colourful view. I can still vividly remember watching that and longingly wishing to be small enough to walk around inside the branches of a lit Chrsitmas tree. I'd give anything to be able to walk around inside my tree this year, which, in addition to all of my sparkly, funky, and sentimental decorations from Ye Olden Tymes, looks especially pretty with the new "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" tree skirt that my mother made for me.

I am nearing the end of my 2011 holiday treat and gift making/packaging frenzy. If you’re feeling exhausted just reading about the amount of things I’ve made this year, you’re not alone. The thing is, I enjoy making things so much that it doesn’t feel like work while I’m engrossed in it. It’s not until after I'm finished when I am completely wiped out that I realize how much work I put into everything. But the results are worth it.

Now I only have one cake left to make for Christmas Eve dinner and then I am imposing a moratorium on baking for at least a month. Actually, I sort of already promised someone a St. Patrick’s Day cake. Do you think I can hold off until March? Yeah, me neither.

It's beginning to smell a lot like Christmas

Christmas is just around the corner. I can smell it! It's sort of a strangely scented mixture of gingerbread and fear. I can’t decide if Christmas is around the corner waiting to bring me joy, peace, and cookies, or if it's hiding in the shadows and waiting to club me over the head with a baseball bat. The thought of Christmas being upon me wouldn’t be so scary if I could stick to just one holiday craft or baking project, but once I get started, I can’t stop.

Case in point: I’d been trying to finish up my Christmas ornaments but then I got sidetracked by a clever idea to make small decorative gift bags to put them in. I bought a couple of packs of candy/treat bags at the dollar store with the intention of using them to package fudge, but I took one of the boxes apart at the seams and saw that it would make a simple template for handmade gift bags.


I bought a Martha Stewart Crafts Designer Paper Pad (so pretty!), traced around the template onto the paper, and then cut it out with scissors. I then used the bone folder/utility knife to score and fold the paper in all the right places, just like the original bag.




I made a bunch of bags using different patterns of paper. You can see in the photos above how the tabs are built in to the design and will fit together to form the bottoms of the bags. If you’re wondering why the bags have those funny peaked tops with notches in the sides, that’s the tab that tucks into a slot that I cut on the back of the bags to keep the top of the bags closed.

I used the contrasting scraps of paper to make tags, which I cut out with different types of pinking shears and glued on. I used a silver pen to add a holiday greeting. Then I glued the bags together using the Martha Stewart craft glue and let them dry before tying small red ribbon bows and gluing them on with a glue gun.



Finally, I used a small Recollections (that’s a Michael’s brand, I believe) snowflake punch to make silver embellishments. The great thing about the paper pad that I bought was that it included a silver finish sheet and a white pearl finish sheet, and I used those to make the little snowflakes. The finished bags are approximately 6.25" high (with the top flap folded over and tab secured in the slot on the back), 3" wide, and almost 2" deep.





This is my first real experience with paper crafting. I always swore that I would never get into scrapbooking type activities but I am starting to understand why people enjoy playing with paper; it’s so fun and addictive. I used Martha Stewart products because they were both beautiful looking and on sale at Michael's, and they were easy to use. However, I have no experience with other brands so I’m unable to offer a fair review. I can tell you that the Martha Stewart Crafts Utility Bone Folder is multiuse tool, which is convenient and clever with the way that the tools all fit together. It’s not too sturdy, though—the tip broke off when I applied pressure to score the paper. I think I’ll get the regular bone folder for more heavy duty work.

I’m very happy with the way the bags turned out, though. They’re almost prettier than the decorations I’m going to put in them.

Now on to my baking. Because I have several baking projects lined up during the next few weeks that require gingerbread men of varying sizes for decorations, I decided to make them ahead of time using this Martha Stewart recipe. I doubled the recipe so that I could make extra cookies in different shapes. The only other change I made was to use half ground ginger and half ginger root grated very finely. The recipe makes really great cookies with just the right texture. They're not overwhelmingly gingery in taste but they smelled amazing while they were baking.






I used a variety of cookie cutters, some new and some old, to make different shaped cookies. The red gingerbread man cutter and the pinkish heart cutter on the bottom right were ones that my mother had when I was little. The bubblegum pink cutters are actually for cutting out fondant shapes and came with a Wilton cake decorating kit.

You probbaly noticed the star cookies with the cut-out centres. I asked myself, why stop at plain old gingerbread cookies when I can make gingerbread chocolate-hazelnut sandwich cookies? So, that’s what I did, but I made them in the style of linzer cookies. I love the look of linzer cookies with their little cut out windows that allow you to see the filling inside and the dusting of powdered sugar snow that surrounds them.




Instead of raspberry jam or other fruit preserves, which is more traditional in linzer cookies, I used Nutella. The combination of gingerbread, chocolate and hazelnuts is so Christmasy and delicious.

 And here are the assembled sandwich cookies:



The powdered sugar isn’t really necessary—again, it’s what you do with linzer cookies, and it makes them look pretty and seasonal. The worst part is that the sugar can blow around and get into your cut-out windows, ruining the effect. The sandwich cookies would be just fine without the dusting of sugar. The messiness is totally my fault, though. I was a little heavy handed with the dusting. I also need a finer meshed strainer because the one I used was too big. A less aggressive approach wouldn't hurt, either. I need to learn to gently tap the strainer and not whack it because I'm in a hurry to shove cookies in my mouth. Patience is not one of my strengths.


Finally, here’s my plate of “reject” cookies, the ones I didn't want to share because they were a bit ugly, messy, burnt, and gooey from the extra Nutella oozing out around the sides. But I enjoyed them more than a bit. Yum.