Birthday cake!

So last Saturday was my parents' friend Mark's birthday. (He is also the Destroyer of Trifles.) Being the awesome and forgiving person I am, I baked him a birthday cake.

I taught myself how to do the criss-crossy shell thingeroo on the top when I decorated it. I had seen it in my baking book and I thought it looked neat. I always need to improve my piping skills. It was pretty difficult to make it in a countertop oven—it didn't bake very evenly. I had to switcheroo the two layers halfway through the process and the bottom one had risen higher than the wire rack, so it got a little torn. I also somehow managed to layer it weird, so it kinda... leans.

Oh well. It still tastes super duper delicious! It's a yellow cake and it is light and fluffy, but still very rich. (And of course, so does the frosting!)

I love cake. I wish I could eat cake every day all day.:-d

I also took a boatload of pictures of random things I love in Twin Mountain. :)

What I've been up to: aka, picture-spamming my way to forgiveness.

Ok, I said I made lots of things, and I know you want pictures, so here we go! Things I have created recently include:

A knit bunny. Mostly a prototype, I'm planning on making a larger one later. Not sure how well it will work out, but it's a cute (and easy) pattern from my knitting calendar. I'm hoping it will look a little less like an evil white ant with ears next time.

And as usual, cupcakes for my coworkers!

These were for a meeting to go over editorial standards. I wanted to butter up the writers so they'd be nicer to me. ;) They were my tastiest yet; I had coworkers coming to my desk the next day to see if there were leftovers.

These were for a group outing. I had a lot of fun making the sugared raspberries. The left is gluten-free chocolate with vanilla icing, middle is coconut-lemon meringue with lemon-curd filling, right is vanilla filled with wild berry jam-filled and topped with vanilla icing and a vanilla-sugared raspberry. I picked the berries for the jam, too. :) The berries on the cupcakes are from the supermarket, though.

My Mom's birthday cake. I know, I am an awesome daughter. ;) I didn't have any more pastry bags, so I ended up using my cookie press to do the frosting decorations. It's not really even close to my best, but my mom was happy, and that's what counts. That bonsai tree in the back is also for my mom. You can't see it too well, so another pic.

Also for my mom's birthday. A lil' fishin' dude. A long time ago, my mother and I were looking at bonsai trees. She saw a lil' fishin' dude similar to the one here, and said, "Oh! How cute! I want one!" (or something close, it was over a decade ago, gimme a break!) I said, "I could make that." And I did. Then that lil' dude was broken, and so I made another. I think that story was too long.

I also made this totally sweet flatware organizer out of duct tape and cardboard. I couldn't find any that actually fit in any of the drawers in my new kitchen, and doggone it, I can't have my chopsticks touching my spoons! They'll just fight and make a mess! Especially the Nesquick Bunny spoon. That guy is fiesty.

Ok, does making a dandelion wreath count? My parents' dog really liked it! And by liked, I mean, liked to chew on it. (I also just really like this picture.)

I made... a ... fort? Does that count?? Ok, now I'm stretching. I think this is where I stop and admit that I didn't really make all that much stuff. :(

Anyway, plans for the future involve a lot of knitting, embroidery, painting barbies, and making doll clothes. :D

Hey mom!

Well, this weekend contained Maternal Figure Day. (My PC term, since not everyone has/likes their mother.) Since I am in the happy position of having a wonderful mother, I celebrated the day with her. And of course, since I’m me, I couldn’t just buy her some fancy-pants present; I had to make something. Well, more than one something.

First, I decided to remember how to do embroidery. Embroidery is actually something I really enjoy doing, it’s just so tedious that I tend to get lazy and not finish. Also, I really need to sketch out what I’m going to embroider in detail, and I’m always lazy and use a pen, and then the pen bleeds and it looks crappy. (And yes, I made that mistake this time, again… -sigh-)

I forgot to take work-in-progress pictures, which is too bad, since you would be able to see how I totally changed my mind while approaching the end of the piece and decided to fill in the branches with a poorly-done staggered satin stitch. (I know that’s not the proper name, but I can’t for the life of me remember what it is!)

Anyway, here is the finished piece:
Probably the best part was filling in the bluebird with crayon. (Note to self: next time, do that before finishing all of the embroidery.)

My mom really loves it, and it’s already on display in the kitchen. I put black cloth on the back so that you can’t see my messy stitches in the back, and it makes the cloth look kind of dirty. And I keep looking at it and getting irritated, because I can see all of my mistakes and how easy it would have been to fix them. I was on a schedule, though, and I just barely finished it in time (1am, Friday night). Why did it need to be finished by Friday night, you ask? Oh, because I had to make these:
Mmmm. I used vanilla bean seeds for the first time in these cupcakes. My mom was really happy. I hope she doesn’t mind me posting a picture with her in it!

These tasted pretty good, but served as a life lesson: don’t try to bake or make meringue buttercream when it is REALLY FREAKING HUMID. Also, don’t forget to put in the last egg white when making said meringue buttercream… >_> In other news, Swiss buttercream was a lot easier to make than I thought it would be, and delicious to boot. I’m bringing in the leftover cuppies for a meeting tomorrow! :D

(And see that cupcake in the bottom-left corner? That's the one my brother ate. Because it had the most frosting. Of course!)

picture spam!

Happy Earth day!! I've made a couple things since my last post, and I've been too lazy to post... sorry. :( A lot is going on. And I have lots of writing that I should be doing... :(

Anywho, Heather came to visit and I made her a mini cake:

(Note to self: next time, DON'T forget the baking powder! hehe)

I also made trifle for my mom:


This is my parents' friend, attempting to ruin my trifle:


And a very scribbly self-portrait:

(At the bottom, it says "Self-portrait #18 million." Probably accurate.)

Caaaaake.

I baked a cake. :3
It's a yellow cake, with white chocolate buttercream frosting and raspberry filling. I layered raspberry jam, raspberries, and frosting in the middle. The pink frosting is raspberry frosting. It is delicious! :D

It really bothers me that all of my cakes and cupcakes come out lopsided. I'm not sure if it's because the oven cooks unevenly, or if the oven is slightly tilted forward. I'm gonna have to invest in something to prop up my pans. Or I could wrap the pans in a wet towel. Y'know.

I'm going to be doing Script Frenzy, starting next... Wednesday? I should probably check that. I'm writing a "script" for a graphic novel about superheroes with useless powers with AJ. It is seriously hilarious. Perhaps I'll post excerpts.

I think I'm going to go work on my painting of Medea

moar cupcakes

I made pina colada cupcakes this weekend. Very delicious. I only got one picture of them, though, which doesn't at all show how pretty they were.

-sigh-

You can almost kind of see how pretty the frosting swirl was, and how there's lime wedges and shredded coconut on top. You can't really see the pretty yellow color they were. I knew I should have taken pictures before I gave them to people, and had someone who wasn't well, er, marinated take a picture.

The recipe was really good, though, and really easy. I used box white cake mix, (lazy) replaced a portion of the water with pineapple juice, and added crushed pineapple to the batter. Then I made simple sugar syrup with pineapple juice (note: do not take eyes off of boiling pineapple juice for more than 5 seconds... seriously.) I added copious amounts of Malibu to the sugar syrup once it cooled, and soaked the cupcakes in it! :3

The buttercream was made the American way, with butter, powdered sugar and milk Malibu. Heh. I also added some of the pineapple simple syrup, and colored it.

32 of the cupcakes went to my friend's birthday party on Friday, with good reviews. (Best review: "Whoah... this isn't an onion. Awesome!" nom nom) I brought the remaining 15 to bf's pre-show band practice. Bf's friends really liked them. I have decided that my groupie responsibilities are pretty much just to make cupcakes for the band.

I drew up a pattern to sew a gumdrop penguin (you gotta see it to understand). I'll get around to making it once I have suitable fabric. Maybe I'll use the same fabric I did to make Matt Demon.

Pretty in pink

Yesterday I craved cupcakes. I think you know where this is going:


I stopped at AC Moore on the way home from work (well, it's really quite out of the way, but nevermind that). I bought myself a mini cupcake pan, and a 1M tip. This tip is amazing!! I don't know how I survived without it before! I'm still a beginner with it, but I think I did all right. I had the green cupcake papers from when I made the truffles (I needed something to put them in!). They kind of clash, but I don't really care.

These are (gluten-free!) rice flour cupcakes with strawberry buttercream frosting. The frosting was a learning experience. I don't know what I was thinking last night, as I joyfully poured the (defrosted, sorry!) strawberries in with the butter, and then tried to mix in the sugar (I'm going to blame it on it being 10pm with only 5 hours of sleep the night before). It was a complete failure. An awful, terrible, disgusting-looking mess. I wish I had thought of taking a picture, because mere words cannot describe how gross it looked. I panicked, and scooped it out of my mixing bowl into another bowl. Then I mixed up some regular, no-flavoring-added buttercream, and slowly added the curdled, nasty blobs that were supposed to be strawberry frosting. The result, as you can see, had no nasty blobs, and had a good strawberry taste, despite only having half the amount of strawberries it was supposed to.


Actually, eating one of these cupcakes tastes a lot like eating strawberry ice cream in a cone. But sans the brain freeze. I have like 2468735789 of these in my fridge. Why did I make them last night!? I knew I wanted to bring them into work, and that I wasn't going to work today because of snow. I set myself up for eating-all-the-cupcakes failure!

My dinner date with Heather

Oh yeah, and our menfolk came as well.
Heather and I spent wayyyy too much time making craploads of cupcakes. We made 12 Mars bar/rice crispies "no bake cupcakes" (you can see them in the tower picture), 12 carrot cake cupcakes with coconut cream cheese frosting, and 12 Victoria sponge cupcakes, half with chocolate buttercream, and the other half with raspberry filling and whipped cream. Delicious. A couple of pictures:
Heather really wanted to try out my snowflake fondant cutters, which I warned her were less-than-useful. It only took her about 18 million tries, but she got 5 snowflakes! Then we stuck the Cornish hens in the oven, later than planned. We made sangria which tasted like "raisin juice," but damn, did it look pretty! I was at the supermarket and I saw some starfruit, which has always interested and intrigued me. I smelled it, and I was SOLD. And, it's even as delicious as it smells. I want to go wherever these things are grown, when they're in season, and try some of those. It must be magnificent. (Yes, I am biased against produce in the supermarket, and for good reason.) But slices of the starfruit looked lovely as garnishes for our sangria. I'll have to try to think of more things to do with it!
The hens were kind of a failure, because Heather and I stuffed them with dates, and then I forgot to factor in that extra time, and we cooked 4 instead of 2, and I didn't factor that in, and we didn't cut them in half, either. So, you guessed it! They were seriously undercooked. It may be tacky to stick a little hen in the microwave during a dinner date, but we were too hungry to wait. Reviews said, however, that the recipe was delicious. I will make it again, but I won't stuff it, and I'll only make 2. And I'll use less olives, cause Josh doesn't like 'em, and who else would I cook it for!?

Should I be making a New Year's resolution to write here more? Nah.

So, for Christmas my parents gave me a sewing machine. Oh yes. You know how this is going to turn out. My plan is to set up a little craft area in my basement, because my room is really just too small for me to do crafts in. So hopefully, I will start churning out those angels and demons soon.
I did a lot of cooking for Christmas, and even took a couple of neat pictures. I love deviled eggs, and I got a new cookie-maker-pump-thingy device from my sister. It is my new best friend, and I used it to make swirly centers in the deviled eggs. :D

And (of course) I made cupcakes, too. I was lazy and used cake mix and premade frosting. My sister was happy. She loves the crap stuff. Eventually I will convert her to my delicious baked goods.
This weekend I have some grandiose plans with Heather to make an excessive amount of baked goods, all magnificently decorated. I'm not sure how well it will work out, but at the very least, I'm gonna make some more cupcakes. We're also making a fancy-pants cornish hen dinner for our double date. I'm crossing my fingers for success.

oh hai

So I did make those cupcakes for the company party, by the way. Only about sixty of them. They were gone within an hour, and I was a little too busy at the "special" eggnog table to take a picture of them. But! My peppermint vanilla cupcakes were a hit, despite being my own invention, and everyone was demanding the recipe I used for the chocolate buttercream frosting. Cause damn, son, it was some good frosting. (You can find the recipe on America's Test Kitchen's web site. Really, all of their recipes are amazingly delicious.) Two of my coworkers have gluten allergies, so they were very grateful for my gluten-free cupcakes. :)

Now I'm doing some secret crafting for Christmas (yes, last minute, whatever). Other homemade Christmas presents that I have already made include: Irish creme from scratch, home-brewed raspberry cordial, and delicious delicious fudge. And I'm supposed to make cookies and brownies, too. Mmm. Brownies. I'm not really worried about posting presents here cause the people they're for never read this blog, anyways. Heh.

Merry Christmas, Happy Chanukkah, Happy Festivus, Happy Yule/Solstice/Dong Zhi, have a wonderful Makar Sankranti and may the Flying Spaghetti Monster touch you with His Noodly Appendage this Holiday.

So hey....

Remember that time when I didn't post for, like, ever? Yeah man, me too! Totally weird.

I haven't really been creating much other than poetry, which I no longer will post on the interwebs (for publishing reasons). I also invented some recipes, which are definitely delicious.

Speaking of delicious, I have made some delicious, adorable cupcakes. Yesterday I tried making gum paste flowers for the first time. (Yes, I spent my Saturday night home alone with two cats and a lot of sugar.) My main successes involved getting gum paste all over my hands (and hair!) and getting powdered sugar all over the floor. I had forgotten my book on making gum paste flowers somewhere, so they are mostly magical flowers of my imagination. Very cute and girly magical flowers.

Today I decided to make cupcakes to show off my pretty flowers, not to mention, I'd been meaning to make gluten-free lavender cupcakes for ages. I made lemon buttercream frosting like two weeks ago for these cupcakes I intended to make, but alas, I am lazy. But the frosting has been a great midnight snack until now. (Don't worry, the recipe I use takes seriously forever for the frosting to go bad. As in, I have never, ever had my frosting go bad.)

So, here we have my adorable rice flour cupcakes, soaked in lavender syrup, frosted with lemon buttercream, topped with cute flowers:
Those little yellow bits are lemon "zest." I fail at zesting, so they are big chunks. And here is the front, so that you can see my pretty rose:
And a close-up of the rose that is positively soaked with vanilla vodka because I don't have any edible glue:
I am going to be getting a new digital camera, because I'm sick of my phone's subpar photo-taking abilities. And my old digital camera wasn't close to being the best, either, and I really don't feel like sifting through ten metric tons of crap to find it.

(Hey, does the excessive length of this entry make up for the fact that I haven't posted in like 18 years?)

Hm.

So I don't seem to be very skilled at sticking to doing something, like, say, posting regularly on a blog I made. Whatever.
I haven't been making any of the things I said I would (sorry Emily!) but I have been baking! Oh yes.
Last weekend (or was it three weekends ago? I don't know) I went to New Hampshire. During a thunderstorm, I decided it was an excellent time to go berry-picking, and I picked a boatload of wild blueberries and raspberries. And then I made some delicious turnovers! (Raspberry, blueberry, and mixed berry; yum!)
You can get a little preview of the operation I had going:


I made 3 dozen turnovers in a teeny leetle countertop oven. (The only pans that could fit into it are the ones on the table there on the left, with the turnovers on them.) They didn't even last a week. A close up of the raspberry ones:


Tonight I'm making chocolate chip cookies. I'm using my secret trick of throwing in some cinnamon, and I put a dash of allspice in too. The dough is resting right now, because the cookies taste so much better when you let it rest for a while. (I've heard that the optimal time is 36 hours. I'm too impatient.)
The cookies will probably be eaten before I can take a picture of them. Not that you need a picture. You know what cookies look like, right??