Like cakes through the hourglass, so are the days of my life

I know that as you get older it's supposed to feel as if time is speeding up, but I can hardly believe that it's been over a month since I last posted here. This morning I spent about 15 minutes before I got out of bed just lying there groggily trying to figure out what day it was and if I was late for work even though it's Sunday. All the days seem to blend together, the passing of time marked only by the styles of the cakes that I make and plan to make.

In late June, I made a 6-inch birthday cake for my mom. It was a mixed berry cake with orange cream icing/filling and fondant decorations.







Last weekend, I made a 6-inch cake and mini cupcakes for my coworkers. They were chocolate cake with vanilla buttercream icing, and I used a couple different types of sprinkles, violet coloured sugar, and silver dragees for decoration. The lighting was poor when I took the following pictures, but you get the idea.











By the way, despite what the My Little Pony-esque colours and the precious wee cakes might suggest, my coworkers are not six-year-old girls. That didn't stop them from wolfing it all down, though.

I’m going to try to make a cake a month just to keep my icing and decorating skills fresh. You start to forget things after a while, which I discovered when I tried to make buttercream icing last weekend for the above cake and nearly messed up the order of the recipe. I picked up Wilton’s 2012 Yearbook yesterday at Bulk Barn and it’s given me some great inspiration for future cakes. Some of the cakes in the Yearbook look so fancy, fussy and time consuming that I'll have to modify and simplify things consideribly if I'm going to try and replicate any of them. My mother saw the Yearbook and told me that she wants the candy and ice cream themed cake on the cover for her next birthday but that's way out of my skill level at the moment. Good thing I have 11 months to practice.

I can’t believe August will be here tomorrow.  Late August to December is my favourite time of year, mainly because the anticipation of Halloween and Christmas--not to mention my birthday in late November--seem to infuse everything in life during those months with a bit of extra excitement. I woke up this morning and made a list of things I need to get to make Halloween cupcakes and cookies, and I picked out some Halloween cookie cutters to buy online (they're cheaper than in-store). I have a lot of my Christmas gift shopping done (yes, really), and I just ordered some different styles of How the Grinch Stole Christmas themed cotton fabric (this, this, and this) to make a Christmas tree skirt.  I need to get back to working on my Christmas decorations, too. My desk in my office/craft room is covered with little bird shaped pieces of felt that need to be decorated with tiny beads and assembled to make tree ornaments.

Finally, although this isn't making or baking related, my living room was repainted, as you can see from the painting-in-progress photo below that was taken on Friday.


I just wanted to document the big change from red to green! As much as I love my new Grinch-coloured living room, I miss the vibrant cherry red. After the tape was peeled off, I went around with a smaller brush and tried to cover up the bits of red still peeping through under the green around the baseboards and doorframes. Everywhere I looked there were hints of red, and just when I thought I’d covered over the last patch of red, I’d spot another one. You'd never know from looking at my living room now that it used to be painted red thanks to my obsessive touch-upping, which I can only liken to trying to find and clean away every last incriminating drop of blood at a crime scene. Not that I have any experience with that sort of thing. I'm just saying.

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!