Rainbow-licious

Holy cow, I can't believe I haven't posted here in over a year!  Quite a lot has changed in the last 15 months.  For starters, last spring, I decided to devote less time to crafty stuff and more time to starting a photography business, focusing on kids' parties.  Shortly after that, we decided to get our house ready to put on the market, which meant my craft room had to be dismantled and packed up.  And then, the biggest change, the hubby got a job in Seattle, so we moved across the country!  Crazy.

Believe it or not, I have still been making stuff, just not as often. I noticed recently that I'm still getting a decent amount of traffic here, thanks in large part to the hot pads tutorial, and thought maybe it was a sign to revive this blog now that my photo biz is on hold.  So with the exception of last year's Yo Gabba Gabba party, I'm going to skip playing catch-up and just dive in to my latest project, E's 5th birthday party!

Hot pads tutorial

I know there are only a few days left before Christmas, but there's still a little time left to whip up a few quick gifties.  So I figured why not go ahead and put up my very first tute?

I love to bake, but I hate oven mitts and find most other potholders bulky to use.  I've always wanted something that I could use to quickly grab a cookie sheet out of the oven or a hot plate out of the microwave.  I remembered seeing this blog post a while back about making little round pads that had pockets for your fingers.  I wanted something slightly different, so I thought I'd give it my own spin.  This is a great way to use up scraps and other odds and ends from your stash.  I actually had all the supplies necessary to make these already on hand - ah, the benefits of being a fabric hoarder.

Cake-tastrophe

I've been busy with family and travel lately, so no new crafty stuff to post as of yet. I did get a chance to bake yesterday though, which has become a rare treat ever since I started dieting last month. I've had this chocolate matcha (green tea) cake bookmarked for a while now, and used a Knitting Night as an excuse to finally make it.

It was pretty easy to whip up, although the batter did look very very curdled after I added the milk (probably because I didn't quite let it get up to room temp). But once I added all the flour and such, it was fine. I love the deep green color of the matcha batter.


The whole thing baked up like a dream, including the little heart cupcakes I made with the leftover batter,

but I had a horrific time trying to get it unmolded from my pan. I used to never ever have problems with this pan but I seem to have lost my magic touch, even after greasing the bejeezus out of it. This was the end result :(


With a little careful surgery, I managed to do get most of the rest out of the pan and salvage a little of my pride, but I was still pretty bummed. It never fails that this always happens when I'm baking for other people, dammit.


In any case, the cake itself was quite delicious. I did not get quite the deep dark chocolate color that Bakerella did, but then I used natural cocoa powder, not dutched. I suspect that Dutch-processed cocoa may have yielded a different result. Here's a shot of the cake after sliced.

Animal Crackers

Today I hosted a sort of birthday party for a bunch of kids that are all right around E's age. As per my normal obsessive compulsive self, I decided that I had to make something crazy. So I decided to make some fancypants animal cookies. I will say though that unlike my usual, I did do a little bit of forethought and planning this time around. I took advantage of the fact that my in-laws were here all last week, which gave me time to bake the cookies over the weekend and at least get started on the decorating.

One thing that a lot of people don't realize is that the icing on these types of cookies takes forever to dry. So you usually have to do one part, like say, the outline, and then give that time to dry. Then you fill in the middle part and that has to dry (usually overnight), and then any little embellishments have to be done last and allowed to dry as well. So on average, between baking and decorating, they take about 3-4 days to make.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with how these turned out. I think that they could've been neater, but I always think that. The colors could've been brighter too, but I was trying to save time by just adding to pre-mixed colors. There were actually 10 animals in the set, but I skipped the monkey, polar bear and camel. The monkey just seemed like an odd shape, the polar bear seemed boring, and the camel just didn't seem to fit in with the others. In retrospect, I probably would've made more lions (I somehow only made one) and skipped the gorillas and rhinos. They were kind of blah. I think the giraffes turned out the best.

C is for Cookie

I really miss doing pastry-related stuff. Lately, I've been dying to get back into cookie decorating. So I was happy when I got a chance to make these palm tree cookies for a mom-friend for her daughter's first birthday.

I'm in the process of finally using my set of Williams-Sonoma animal cookie cutters to make some cookies for a playdate I'm hosting next week too. I've got them baked but not decorated yet, so I'll post those when I'm done. Oh, and my mother-in-law and I are dying & decorating Easter eggs today too (also from a WS kit), which I've actually only ever done once in my whole life. I know it sounds nutty to have never dyed eggs, but my family never really celebrated Easter when I was growing up. The one time I did it was when I convinced my mom to buy one of those Paas kits from the grocery store and my brother and I did it on our own. Let's just say that most of the eggs turned out gray or brown.

I have to confess, it's kind of fun to have an excuse to do stuff like this, even though I'm not religious and E is really still too small to enjoy any of it just yet.

Happy Valentine's Day!

I love any excuse to bake something crazy. Lucky for me, today was my turn to host our weekly playgroup for E and her little friends, so I decided to go all out and make some fancy schmancy Valentine cookies. The iced sugar cookies didn't quite turn out as nice as the picture in my head, but considering how rusty I am, I was pretty happy with them. These were more or less the best of the bunch: And the shortbread hearts up top (from the Barefoot Contessa Cookbook) were really tasty, even though the dough was really hard to work with. I was so fed up with how crumbly it was that instead of re-rolling the scraps after my first cutting, I just tossed everything. I had enough for about 15 cookies (top and bottom), which I figured was more than enough for 7 moms and babies. And I was right: there's a ton of leftover. I guess I know what T & I are having for dessert tonight. I'm not complaining.

A few more pics. Here are the ones that came closest to what I originally wanted:
And here are the rest of the cookies, including the reject ones that in my typically OCD manner, I deemed unfit to put out.

Only a crazy person...

...would agree to making 10 dozen cookies for a cookie exchange. And I am that crazy person. Or actually, I guess I'm one of 20 crazy people. Don't get me wrong. I love to bake, and normally this is the type of thing that I would consider super fun. But I think I forgot that it's hard to work with hot ovens and such when you have a 9-month old baby crawling around, pulling up on your pant legs and whatnot.

On the plus side, I will have 20 different half-dozens of cookies to eat. Or wait, is that the minus side?

Did I also mention that yesterday was T's birthday, so I felt compelled to bake for him too? Normally, every year I bake a German Chocolate cake since it's his favorite. But this year, I just couldn't bring myself to commit to it. The thought of dealing with beating egg whites and coconut pecan frosting....*sigh*...let's just say I wasn't up for it. So instead, I made cake balls. OK, go ahead and insert your schwedde/salty chocolate balls joke here. Got it out of your system now?

Anyways, they're basically cake and frosting mixed together, coated with chocolate. Sort of like a cross between a rum ball and a cake truffle. They are far too easy to make and far too good for me to ever make again. I should also note that one batch turned out to be like, 5 dozen of them. We kind of made ourselves sick from eating so many last night.

I know that cooking/baking technically doesn't fall into the "crafty" category, but I figure it's close enough. And hey, it's my blog, I can do whatever I want.