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.

What Would Oprah Do?

I haven’t been drawing or baking much over the past few weeks, preferring instead to work on some felt gingerbread houses in my free time. The gingerbread house is my first ornament from Fa La La La Felt, a book full of felt Christmas decoration patterns. I’m in love with felt—it’s so easy to work with. I’m going to do a bunch of different patterns from the book and put the ornaments together in packages to give as Christmas gifts.

The thing about making things like Christmas ornaments by hand is that they’re so time consuming with lots of fiddly little details, which is why I’m starting these in May. I also want to make some more pinecone elves, but the thought of cutting out and sewing all those little felt shoes and mittens by hand makes me groan. And you can’t glue them together because then they don’t look like proper shoes and mittens, and proper elves would wear proper shoes and mittens. Or maybe they wouldn’t mind at all, but I don’t know any elves who I can ask these sorts of things.

What is it that makes me put so much effort into seemingly small things?  Most people wouldn’t bother. And why is it that most of my life and energy seem to be directed toward the Christmas season? Not the gift-getting part of it, but the giving, making, baking, eating and planning part of Christmas--that's what makes me really light up.  If there was one thing that I could see myself doing forever, it would be making Christmas decorations, toys, and baked goods, kind of like what Santa Claus and his elves do. Plus, write and illustrate books, which I’m not putting any energy into at all. Perhaps I am in the wrong line of work.

It’s funny that when I was little, I wanted to be a nurse, like Mom, a topic which I seemed to focus on in my art and writing of the time. I just happen to have some drawings from my early years to show that I was seriously thinking--at the tender age of 6--of going into nursing or another health-related field, which oddly enough, is where I work now.

In this first piece above from Grade 1, which I like to call "Ambulance," there is a Circle of Life theme. A person gets medical treatment, thus saving a life, and a cat is about to get squished by the tires of the ambulance. The ambulance is, then, a life saver and a killer. It's a comment on the double-edged sword of modern medical technology. I think. So, yeah! Circle of Life. Think about it. Oh, and notice the arms coming out of the back of the ambulance. That's an interesting little detail.

In this next drawing, which I like to call "Private Room," you can see the health care system working  because both the nurse and the patient are happy and smiling! Although, that might be because they've been dipping into those unidentified bottles of pills on the tray. I even drew a glass of water with a straw in it on the tray to wash the pills down. Notice the patient's arms over the blanket on the bed. It's like, she's in bed, but her arms are on top of the covers. Genius.

The final picture is called "When I grow up I'm going to be! A nurse." The clever use of an exclamation point after "be" is the expression of my early existentialist philosophy. When I grew up, I just wanted to be. But if existing didn't pan out, I would go into nursing. Yeah, something like that. I'm not sure what I was thinking when I drew the tall nurse with the long, long legs in a little miniskirt and high heels. It's not an outfit conducive to providing health care, that's for sure. And notice the short little doctor with his stethoscope and black doctor's bag standing next to her--that's clearly a subversive artistic statement about gender, power and authority in health care. And check out those sound lines coming from the TV! The patient was most likely watching Days of Our Lives or whatever mind-numbing daytime program I figured patients watched from their hospital beds.

And here's an early essay about my future:

When I was little and I went to the hospital with my mom, I would often go to the front nurses' station at the big desk where my mom's friends and colleagues would ooh and ahh over me. Behind the nurses' desk was the room where the "medicens" were kept. So, from this, I concluded that nurses either sat at front desks and took medicine off of shelves, or they took care of sick people. But not both. Mom must have told me at some point that she took care of sick people, but for all I knew, she was making it up because all I saw was the front desk and the pills.

Despite the essay and all the drawings about health care and becoming a nurse, I never did become a nurse even though I did entertain the idea seriously a couple of times while I was working on my B.A. Yet I still sometimes wonder what my calling is and what I'm really meant to be. I suppose I have all these questions because I watched the Oprah show finale yesterday during which she shared her words of wisdom with her audience. It was the following part of her goodbye that resonated with me most:

“What I knew for sure from this experience with you is that we are all called. Everybody has a calling, and your real job in life is to figure out what that is and get about the business of doing it…[Your calling] lights you up and it lets you know that you are exactly where you're supposed to be, doing exactly what you're supposed to be doing. And that is what I want for all of you and hope that you will take from this show. To live from the heart of yourself. You have to make a living; I understand that. But you also have to know what sparks the light in you so that you, in your own way, can illuminate the world…My great wish for all of you who have allowed me to honor my calling through this show is that you carry whatever you're supposed to be doing, carry that forward and don't waste any more time. Start embracing the life that is calling you and use your life to serve the world."

What lights me up is making and baking things, which is why I started this blog in the first place, just so that I would have a reason and a platform to do what I love and share it with others. So, I am already embracing that part of my calling in my relatively limited free time. I’m just not making a living at it. In the interest of not wasting any more time, then, as Oprah recommends, here’s the question that I need to ask myself: how on earth can I make a living at this? Or do I even need to in order to reap the benefits of following my makey-bakey calling?

I keep joking (but I’m really half-serious) that I want to open a toy, book, and Christmas decoration store and a bakery so that I can sell my various creations. I'm talking about two separate free-standing buildings here: one's a store that's shaped and painted like an actual toadstool and called “The Toadstool,” and the other's a baked goods store that's shaped and painted like a gingerbread house called “The Gingerbread House.” Don’t ask me where these ideas came from because they’re not the result of conscious, rational thought processes. It's like they just appeared in my mind one day and haven't left. I suppose I could conclude that my 6-year-old self was vaguely prophetic when I wrote that I might like to be a storekeeper of sorts, even though I have never, ever, ever considered becoming a waitress or a teacher.

I just don’t know how realistic it would be at 33 years old to leave my current job, which I really like, to pursue a Santa/Dr. Seuss/writer-illustrator/toyshop and bakery owner-type job. Calling that “ambitious” would be an understatement, but despite what I’m doing, that’s the vision I have. I was right when I wrote "There are many things that you can be" as a child, but the hard part is that now as an adult I want to be everything! If you asked me what I would do if I didn’t have to worry about money ever again, I basically just outlined it all in this post. For whatever reason, all of these things are part of my vision, despite it being nowhere near the work I do now, and perhaps not even sensible to be musing about in the first place. Don't get me wrong--I love my current job. But nothing makes me happier than when I'm being creative and making things that make other people smile, like little felt gingerbread houses and pretty cakes.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to making my next cake. It’s going to be for Father’s Day and it’s my most ambitious cake yet! I just hope I haven’t forgotten all my icing skills by the time that June rolls around.

Making (and baking) the most of my free time

Now that I have finished my M.A. (I'm just waiting on the university registrar to process the final project grade and gimme my hard-earned piece of parchment—C’mon, c’mon, c'mon!), I’ve been busy looking for other things to do. Yesterday I signed up for cake decorating classes, and I’ve been  buying new cookie cutters so that I can practice my sugar cookies and improve my royal icing decorating techniques.

The impetus for signing up for the classes was the sugar cookies that I made on Thursday evening. After following a terrible recipe for royal icing from a well-respected book on decorating sugar cookies that encouraged profuse thinning of the flooding-consistency icing, I had the most disgusting looking sugar cookies that I have ever seen. The cookies oozed icing all down over their sides and onto the plate. They looked sick. Ugh. But, man, were they tasty!

No matter how yummy my ugly cookies might taste, I’ve realized that half the battle with baking and working with icing is having the right recipes and the right tools, and I've never bothered much about the tools. For the cake decorating course, I had to buy a beginner’s kit that has all the tools a beginner could want. Now that I’m turning my love of baking and decorating into more of a regular hobby and I'm beginning to amass various cutters and tips and couplers (which sounds vaguely like a collection of medieval instruments of torture), I feel better prepared for any decorating situation that might come my way. Nope, nothing can go wrong now!

Aside from baking, I’ve also made a commitment to drawing every Saturday morning while I listen to CBC Radio One, which on its own has long been my standard Saturday ritual. So for the past two Saturdays I’ve been holed up in my office/craft room with my pens and some proper drawing paper. Again, like with baking,  half the battle with drawing is having the right materials, like the right pens and the right paper. I'd never bothered to buy proper drawing paper until last week, but the price (confession: I got a good discount!) is worth it—it’s easier to draw on and shows the ink better (it makes black look blacker!) than plain old computer paper, which in my inexperience and ignorance I’ve been doodling on all these years.

So now armed with the right tools, I will draw every Saturday.  I figure I have to put some time aside for it each week or otherwise I’d never do it--that's just the way my organized brain works. My only rules are (1) I have to draw for at least an hour, and (2) the drawing doesn’t have to be good but I do have to finish the drawing rather than throw it in the garbage halfway through, no matter how awful it is.  The past two sessions have produced three odd scenes of Paris with the Eiffel Tower in the distance, as if it is being viewed from the balconies of apartments. Although I wasn't consciously aware of it as I was drawing, I think that somewhere in the dark recesses of my mind I was inspired by that cool, orange-y Grand Marnier ad, “La Vie Grand Marnier,” that I saw on my last trip to Florida. It played at the beginning of a lot of the films and TV shows on the plane, so I saw it a bunch of times.





I love the style of the animation in that ad. My drawings are not nearly that good, however, and because I have no intention of showing them to you (not unless I've had a few shots of Grand Marnier first), I'll describe them to you. The first one is a night scene with a befuddled looking French artist/mime cliché, complete with a black beret and stripey Breton shirt à la Picasso, attempting to put the moves on a sophisticated Parisian woman. The second one is another night scene of a lone woman with big hips in a polka-dot dress with a glass of wine looking out over a balcony at Paris. Maybe she’s alone because her stereotypical French artist boyfriend is hitting on the more sophisticated woman in the first drawing, or maybe she’s alone because she wears hideous polka-dot dresses. I don’t know. The third one is like the morning after the other two drawings; it has a hairy looking Eiffel tower in the background of a breakfast table set with a strangely anthropomorphic coffee service. Two coffee cups look at one another adoringly while a despondent coffee pot looks off into the distance, trying desperately hard to appear indifferent but the plume of steam coming from his spout/nose betrays his true feelings. Meanwhile, three coffee spoons are lying on the table nearby gossiping amongst themselves about the whole affair and looking rather smug. And yes, there's a croissant on a plate, but it doesn't have a face and so it doesn't appear to be feeling anything at all.

I’d show the drawings to you but they’re awful. I wondered whether or not to put my signature on them, or whether I could put someone else’s signature on them to hide the fact that I drew them. As if people would actually believe that "Picasso" came back to life just to travel all the way here to break into my office/craft room, quickly draw three crappy scenes of Paris on my discount-bin drawing paper, and then disappear again. But the point is not to try to draw something good or even mediocre (and I'm a champ at the medicore game); the point for me is just to DRAW. The one thing that having no free time for the past few years has taught me is that I should strive now to use my free time doing all the things I said I’d do when I was up to my eyeballs in research and essays and intellectual pursuits. Like drawing, for example. And making cookies. And making little toadstools from felt.

And so, last weekend I made a prototype for some felt gnome-home toadstools I want to make. Look:








It's about 5 and a quarter inches tall. It’s my first time making one, and so there are a few kinks that I still want to work out before trying another one. I got the free pattern here. It's actually a pincushion pattern, but I can see making a whole bunch of varying sizes to make a Christmas gnome village. Last year I said that once I had finished my M.A. I would make a Dr.Seuss-style Who-Ville Christmas village. Maybe I could make TWO Christmas villages, a felt-y one for gnomes and another one for Whos! Hey, the sky's the limit now, what with all this free time!