Chocolat

Do you remember that film, Chocolat, with Juliette Binoche as a charming chocalatier and Johnny Depp as a rapscallion manouche? I could probably watch that movie at least a million more times, and listen to the soundtrack at least three more times after that. I love seeing the creamy, luscious Johnny melted chocolate and the perfectly tempered chocolate sculptures, and that roasted chicken with the chocolate mole in that dinner scene. Now I'm getting hungry.

Anyway, I always think of that movie whenever I make chocolates. I haven't quite the same amount of skill—making chocolate from scratch using rocks or whatever is definitely out of my skill set. However, tempering and molding chocolates, and making truffles and chocolate-coated fruit? I can totally do that.

Oh yeah. Totally. 

I don't know what it is about Valentine's Day. I'm not really all that big on celebrating it. But I love it because it means it's that time of year when I make chocolates. :D So, in there we have regular chocolate truffles, bonbons with white dots on top that have mocha truffle inside them, striped/zig-zaggy bonbons that have butterscotch truffle in them, yin yang bonbons that have nutella in them (because my bf loves it and it was easy), pink marzipan hearts, chocolate-covered strawberries, and chocolate-covered cherries. 

The cherries were fun—I was thinking about making cherry cordials, but that involves a lot of effort and waiting a week and stuff like that, and seeing as I was making the chocolates the day of when I was planning on giving them to bf, I ended up just coating them in vanilla sugar and then chocolate. The result is absolutely scrumptious. Maybe if my bf reads this he will send me one of his fantastic closeups of the cherries, since my camera did a shoddy job, and his camera is made of magic and rainbows and generally takes good photos. Bf was definitely a fan of the cherries. Yesterday I suggested that I might make a double-layer box of just chocolate-covered cherries for him for his birthday, and he looked like he was going to cry with happiness. So I guess they're pretty good. 

ETA: Picture from bf! Huzzah.

Beautiferous.

Anyway, since I made bf chocolates, I also had to make him a card. I'm not the best at papercraft or love-dovey declarations of love-dovey-ness, but I figured I'd give it a shot using a piece of cardstock, a heart-shaped paper doily, and my paper cutter:

See. It's a heart! Folded in half! With things cut out of it! Magic!

I thought I did a pretty nifty job. I like simplicity, so I figure this worked out pretty well. No peeking for you at the love-dovey declarations of love-dovey-ness, though! :P I'm guessing my cat approved of either bf or my efforts, because she wouldn't go away when I tried taking pictures. (In the picture above, she is behind the card because of the way I angled myself.)

Or maybe she just likes being the center of attention 24/7. 

Speaking of cats, my other cat just clawed the crap out of my poor, legging-covered knee because it was absolutely imperative that she be on my lap RIGHT NEOW possibly because I was paying attention to the other cat via a computer screen. My poor legs.

Welp, I will probably post next week. Looks like Thursdays may or may not become a Thing. I make no promises. I've been doing a lot more work on my Tonner goddesses; a little at a time. Maybe I will post my progress next week. I've also been working on some silly embroidery that I might also post; I just need to finish the Q! But it's hard. :( Until next time!

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. :)

I are wizard?

I don't know what sort of voodoo magic I used, but somehow I managed to get my word count up near 60,000 by the 28th of November. Impressive, right? What's more impressive is that I somehow managed to convince myself that I still had only about 30k words written, and I gave up. That's right, my friends, that last weekend when I should have been rejoicing, I gave up. I knew I couldn't handle writing 20k words in two days without going crazy. And then, on December 1st, I checked my real word count. Head? Meet desk. You're going to be friends for a while.
I don't really feel like I won, though, because my story still isn't finished. So I'm trying to get it done by the end of December. I'm pretty close, I just need to get my lazy tush around to doing it.
And, in my writing spree in that last week, I managed to scrounge up the time to bake a pretty cake for Thanksgiving. I've already eaten most of it, but you can still see two of the three pretty roses. My brother ate the yellow one. Pic will be posted when I get home. It's vanilla cake with raspberry filling and lemon buttercream frosting, and it is freaking delicious. I've got a slice in my lunch box right now, and it's killing me to have to resist eating it until afternoon snacktime. Yes, I know it's old, but I have a magical cake storage device that, despite looking cheap and lame, does a really good job of keeping my cakes fresh!

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?)

Lazy

Documenting my creations is beginning to prove to be a bit difficult. This is because of two things:
A. I have no idea where my digital camera is.
B. I am lazy, and haven't been doing anything.

Perhaps "anything" is not the correct way to say it. I have been lazing around trolling the interwebs. And baking. Baking counts as creation!

I wanted to know what it tastes like to use tea in cakes, (more specifically, cupcakes), and I was (you guessed it!) too lazy to bake them from scratch. So I used white cake mix, and used vanilla chai tea instead of plain ol' water. Then I whipped up some cream cheese frosting (from scratch cause it's easy, and cause there is an overload of cream cheese and powdered sugar in my house). The result tastes a lot like spice cake, to be honest. When you eat the cupcakes with butter pecan ice cream, though, you can really taste the essence of tea-ness.

So next time I might use something a little less spiced, and a little more obvious. Perhaps Earl Grey, with lemon frosting? Speaking of frostings, I bet Chambord would taste great in frosting! Alcohol is always good with desserts.

And the cupcakes:

Notice that quite a few have been eaten. They are extremely delicious. Sorry for the crap-tastic photo, I suck at taking pictures.