First Time Fondant

Oh fondant. I already have a love/hate relationship with it. It makes a cake look so pretty but it tastes so awful. Those lovely gum paste daisies aren't so delicious, either.

This was the first full fondant cake I've ever made. It was for my cake decorating classes that I was taking the last few months. There were a couple of things I learned.

The first thing I discovered was that tinting your gum paste with fondant will drastically lighten the color. This really should not come as any surprise as that, like with paint, white + regular color = pastel color. I chose daisies in particular because they're kind of special to me. I also ran out of time to make the chrysanthemums and daisies are easy. They were supposed to be the same neon teal (my camera made them blue) and pink as the rope border.  Oh well, they were still cheery! 

Speaking of that rope border...

While not as bad as I was rolling clay in grade school, my rolling could use improvement. Thin areas here, thicker there. Note to self: work on that.

Those flowers look a little messy. Had this not been for a class and thus classified as "practice" I assure you they would have been cleaned up once the gum paste was dry. I rolled it out a little too thick I think and that may have caused the problem. The leaves turned out surprisingly clean and that could be because I rolled the green a lot thinner.

Biggest lesson: black is hard to make. Yes, I wanted a black cake because it would really make the bright colors pop! Plus, a black, pink, and teal cake is very Stephanie. I used a chocolate fondant as a base and after adding what seemed like way too much black gel icing color I stopped at the color you see there. The colors still popped but it wasn't as dramatic as I had envisioned. It is my goal to one day achieve true black.

Confession time: I used a box cake. When I made this cake I had less than a week before I moved and a lot of my good stuff was packed.  It was still enjoyable and it served it's purpose as a way to display butter cream and fondant.

This cake concluded my cake decorating courses. Hopefully I'll be getting more practice in and out of school this coming year. I'm already planning my next cake and it will certainly have fondant. I bought some fun silicone molds and I can't wait to play around with them. My plan for next time is to make my own fondant from marshmallows. I did that once before and the taste is so much more pleasant than anything store bought that I've tried.

xoxo

Stephanie

Polka Dot Dress Part One: The Pattern

I'm just going to come right out and say it: I am not good with sewing patterns.

Once, way back in high school, I wanted to sew a corset. Nothing fancy or anything that cinched up like a real corset, just one of those tops that looks like one. I thought "that should be easy." Never mind that I'd never sewn much of anything in my life, that is what I wanted to do! I found a pattern, got some fabric and gave it my all! It was wearable.... once... but not super comfortable. Looking back, I should have started with something easier. Since then, I've had my mother help me with Halloween costumes. No joke.

Most of my sewing, as I've shown here, is re-fashion. The only thing I've made thus far from a pattern that I actually like is an apron. A full sized pink and black plaid apron. I love it to pieces and I should have blogged it. I didn't because I got over excited and forgot to take any pictures. It may turn up in one of my baking posts one day because I do wear it all the time.

Whoops. Digressing there. Patterns intimidate me a bit. Will I ever make something as cute as what's in the picture? Aprons are easy, corsets are do-able, but a dress? Well, I've decided to go for it.

Look! It's even marked "easy" for me. It's like they know...
I bought this pattern for $0.99 when Jo-Ann's was having a sale. No $20 patterns for me, no way. I didn't actually have any fabric when I bought this, nor did I buy some during the sale. Nothing spoke to me that day. I knew the fabric would come when it was ready.

 About two weeks later, it did. I was visiting one of my favorite thrift stores (now that I've moved, I need to find some new ones!) and I found the most adorable pink & purple polka dotted sheets. Yes, sheets. I can't remember the exact amount, but I don't think they were more than $2 or $3. It was just too cute and there was certainly enough for a dress.  Like the dress made of curtains in "Enchanted." Except I won't be as regal.

As always with thrift store finds, I ran the fabric through the washing machine and ironed it all out. I've decided to go with pattern "C." That's the red one in the picture if you can't read the label. I think it will look precious with polka-dots.

That's another first up in the top right corner. Fusible interfacing. This pattern is getting intense! This is what I have so far. I've only cut out the main pieces of fabric. I still need to cut out the lining pieces and the interfacing pieces. Once that's done I can start the actual sewing process.

I'm pretty excited about starting this project. If it all works out I'll have actually made something wearable from scratch! I know plenty of people do it all the time, but the only things I make from scratch are edible and don't last long.
I'm older and more patient than I was in high school, so hopefully I'll come out with a dress at the end of this.

Wish me luck!

xoxo
Stephanie

Blueberry Tree Cake

Hey. This cake looks familiar. A month and a half later, my life is out of moving boxes and it's time to show the world. Here is is: the blueberry tree cake. Complete with pine cones.

Blueberry seems like a funny cake flavor, doesn't it? That's what I thought too when my wonderful boyfriend said that's what he wanted for his birthday. The conversation went something like this:
Me: "What kind of cake would you like for your birthday? I'll make anything you want!"
Michael: "Hmm.... blueberry. With trees on it."

That, ladies and gentlemen, was what I had to work with. So I started brainstorming. How could I make a blueberry cake? It was during this brainstorm session that I remembered the strawberry cupcakes I had made last Valentine's day. Those were delicious! In theory I could easily swap the strawberries for blueberries and it would work. I was very confident about this.

Tell you what, it worked. Peek underneath the cut to see how I did it.

Moving Madness!

My life is chaos.

Okay, maybe it's not quite to the chaos level, but it's positively stressful. I'm in the process of moving to a place seven hours away and we don't have a place to actually live yet. My house is full of boxes. Some of those boxes are filled, most are not.

The point I'm trying to make is that my blog posts are suffering for it. My apologies. For an example of how behind I am here's a cake I made almost two weeks ago and have yet to post:

In the next few days there will be a large post about it that I'm pretty excited about. This cake was SO much fun to make.

I also have some t-shirt revamps coming up. With all the packing and cleaning, it's hard to find time to blog. Thanks for the understanding.

xoxo
Stephanie

A Hand-made Cardigan Sweater for my Baby!

It's finished! 

Looking back to when I first began this project, I felt that knitting a sweater, even a little one for a baby, was going to take a long time. Despite the intermittent ‘click-click’ of the needles as I snuck in a few stitches whenever I could throughout my busy days, completing this special project really only took me a month and a half to complete….the first of many things I will create for my baby boy (I hope!).

So, since my last update, I did quite a bit: I finished the two sides, the all-important sleeves, and of course sewed it all up. I confess that I would have finished sooner, but I read the directions wrong and had to pull out half of a sleeve to do it all over again! (Hey, it happens; all part of the knitting process, you know).

One sleeve ended up a slightly crooked once sewn on to the sweater body, but that is what blocking is for! Blocking is easy, but it makes the sweater smell like a wet dog for the night while it dries, yet it essentially straightens out the relative form of the garment. After it was blocked and dried, my husband with his wonderful eye found these fantastic blue buttons that seemed like there were made for this sweater.

I opted to hand-stitch the buttons on, to add that last little ‘made by hand’ touch.

So there you have it. My baby’s first cardigan, made lovingly by hand by mummy! Here in the beginning of summer it’s too big (and too warm) to wear now, but rest assured that as the cool late autumn comes around he will be ready for it and there will be lots of pictures to share when this sweater is put on for the first time!

Thanks again to Stephanie for finding this yarn for me, and thanks as well to me for being awesome enough to want to do this it through to the end!

Pretty Peach Roses

I'm a little bummed. I went to my decorating class this last Tuesday night and made so many different flowers: daffodils, violets, lilies, and roses. The daffodils and lilies I was especially excited about because I just love those flowers. Lilies in particular are my favorite.

The flowers... didn't quite make it through the drive home.

Really, this is okay in the big picture. I wasn't going to use them for anything. I just wanted to share them on the blog and now I can't.

Instead, I have these cupcakes that I was going to post about along with the ill-fated flowers. I  made these a couple of weeks ago (see how behind I am on blogging?) and they were my very first attempt at making roses.

I felt pretty good about them, being my first try and all. The Wilton method has you do them in layers of 3-5-7, but sometimes I forgot to count so I ended up with extra petals on some of these. It just makes for fuller roses!
Roses are so simple to make. They always looks so lovely and, with practice, I think that anyone can do it.

These pictures don't do the blue roses any justice. In real life they were a wonderful and quirky aqua color. I mixed leaf green and sky blue and the result was just beautiful. For the peach I mixed rose pink and lemon yellow. I had never tried either combination before. I was pleased as punch.

The cupcakes themselves were a delicious, moist chocolate. I didn't bake from scratch, I used a box mix. To spice it up a little bit I used the same method I used for this bundt cake; although I didn't have enough Bailey's to make them Irish cream-chocolate. I'm sure that would have been tasty. Instead I used what I had and used replaced the rest of the liquid with water. The Bailey's was just enough to make the cakes super moist.

The frosting was a simple powdered sugar buttercream. I added vanilla bean paste instead of vanilla extract and oh. my. goodness. It makes such a difference.

I have a big cake project coming up in the next few days that I'm excited about and I can't wait to share it!

xoxo
Stephanie

Buttercream, Royal Icing, and Gum Paste, Oh My!

It has been awhile since I've talked about my cake decorating classes. I'd like to first apologize for that; life has been a wee bit insane lately. So much to do and so little time to do it.

The second class of three is flower decorating. I am thoroughly enjoying this class. The first lesson we got a little taste of fondant and gum paste, but we'll be using much more of that in the third class. Right now we're working with royal icing, which is super easy to work with and dries hard. This allows for the flowers to keep their shape. Examples of both this and the gum paste are at the end of this post.  

Moving right along... I finished up the last of the beginning class a few weeks ago with this cake:

 

Before anyone thinks I was being snarky with the "Eat Me" written on there, it's actually an "Alice in Wonderland" reference. I just adore those books and when given the assignment to write something on there I couldn't help myself.

Also, please ignore the not-so-great photos. I was having one of those days if you know what I mean.

The cake itself was a lavender flavor, with lemon curd filling and lavender frosting. It was good, but not great. Lavender is hard to work with I've found. Not enough means you can't taste it but too much makes it soapy. Yuk.

So those ribbon roses up there aren't so great for two reasons. The first is that my frosting was a little dry; oops. The second was that my instructor admitted that they never, ever look as nice as the photoshopped ones in the book.

You see, the roses are supposed to look, as the name suggests, like they are made from ribbon. Well, when using the #104 tip the edges come out ruffled. That's great for real looking roses (coming up in my next post) but makes it impossible for these ones to look smooth. One of my classmates put a little piping gel into her buttercream and that helped smooth out the petals a bit so if I ever want to make these again, I'll try that.

 

Hmm... no idea what I did to that leaf, there. My poor, lovely leaf.
Just for fun, this is what the cake looked like inside. It wasn't as moist as I usually like my cakes, but it was still pretty good. Like with those lemon cupcakes, the lemon curd may have been one of my favorite parts.

The first lesson in the second class introduced us students to gum paste and fondant. It doesn't taste great, but it's really enjoyable to work with. Check out these gum paste flowers we all made.

Precious, right? The first flowers, the button flowers, were made by sticking the gum paste (colored with fondant) into a mold that we pressed together to cut out the shapes. You can see the little raged-edges on some of the petals. That can be cleaned up once the gum paste is fully dry.

Also, you can see that I didn't quite press hard enough on the large purple flower. It was my first time and I didn't realize how much pressure you really have to put into that mold.

Next were the pansies. I felt pretty good about these. They're rolled out really thin, cut out with a cookie cutter, then placed on foam. When on the foam we used this little ball-roller to give the edges that wave.

Lastly, the second lesson of this class was our first introduction to royal icing. Well, I'd worked with it the weekend before when I tried out real roses on some cupcakes, but I'll show you all those later. As far as classwork goes, it was the first time using royal icing.

I did a better job with the flowers at home.

When I got to class it was discovered that my icing was a little on the runny side. I made some apple-blossoms and primroses with it anyway. I had the motion down but they were not exactly pretty enough to take pictures of. Sorry.

I did take pictures of my rosebuds! I finally had to borrow some powdered sugar from a classmate to thicken up the icing.

These are the oddest little things. They really don't look like much of anything until you add the greenery (see what I was talking about? Runny icing for those.) Until you add that they just look like lumps. I've seen them look beautiful so I'm going to keep working on them.

xoxo

Stephanie

Sweet Nostalgia

I found the very best thing ever when at the used bookstore the other day and I just had to share.

What I have here is a little piece of my childhood. This book is the same one my mom had when I was a kid. At a bargain price of $4.00, I can relive some of my favorite recipes. Also, I won't have to ask my mother to e-mail me the sugar cookie recipe anymore.

This is a treasure of the early 90's. Just look at the shining face in that picture. I know cookies make me smile like that. What I really like about this book is that every recipe is straight-forward and simple. If I could do these as a kid you bet I can do them now even better. Something fun I like is that there's always a picture to reference. I'm not saying every cook/baking book needs pictures, but when trying new things I'm grateful when my cookies look like the ones in the book. Otherwise I'm just guessing.

   

Look at these adorable chapters! There's even a few cake and pie recipes in there, too. Everything looks so delicious I can't really decide where to start. Any suggestions for me? Those bar cookies are looking pretty scrumptious, but so are all the others.

Oh, and speaking of adorable and delicious: take a look at my new cake server.

Cupcakes! Isn't this darling? I received it as a gift and I adore it. It's the cutest piece of kitchenware that I own, that's for sure.

I can't decide if the cupcake wearing a crown is my favorite, or if it's the one with the party hat. It's too difficult to make that choice.

xoxo
Stephanie