Gosling beaks and sugar peaks

 
Have I been outside in the past week?  Not very much!  It is hot, humid, and unpleasant.  I'm mainly working indoors until...well, it might be a while before it cools off here!  I *do* go outside if I've got a good reason...like hanging out with our "goz."  I love their sweet faces.

The one we call "Flipper" because of his floppy wings is always the first out of the water.  I'm nearly certain that his wing condition is the result of a birth defect.  If you look closely at his wings, you'll see that the feathers just stopped growing.

He's still fat and sleek like the others, but we'll definitely be keeping an eye on him.  I also enjoy our visiting strays, like Clotilde.

I'm done planting flowers for the year, but I'm amazed at the self-seeding that goes on now that we have massive amounts of sun.  I bought ONE vinca plant two years ago.  From that single plant came a million seeds.  Now we have vincas completely lining one portion of the driveway on both sides. This year, I spent weeks thinning out the seedlings and painstakingly replanting them, interspersing them in the front beds and along our side slope.  They've really filled in!  It's hard to tell from these pictures, but maybe if you blow them up...

Anyway, the high humidity has mainly kept me inside.  Todd built a small "extension table" that lines up with my sewing table and has a recessed compartment for my sewing machine to fit into.  Now the table surface is even with the needle plate, and I can't tell you how much easier it has made sewing.

I started on a new quilt, the Wallflower Quilt from Craftsy.  I expected a queen-size quilt to take many months to make, but after spending one day cutting fabric and a few days putting together huge 18" blocks, I realized that I was HALFWAY DONE with the top!  It's because the fabric pieces are so big.

Fabric pieces:

A block, laid out:

Several blocks, sewn together:

They're going to alternate with star blocks, but you get the idea.  It takes about 15 - 20 minutes to sew one block, and in four days I've already got a quilt top that, although unfinished, is larger than any quilt I've made before.  Talk about instant gratification!  I've got a ton of fabric left over, too, for future scrappy quilts.  Heck, I might have this whole quilt completely done by August!

I've been baking a lot too.  A friend had something to celebrate, so I made cookies.

Although I don't particularly enjoy working with royal icing (that hardens), making the roses was easy, and the piping was surprisingly easy, too.  I made way too many for just one person who actually doesn't have much of a sweet tooth...

...so I decided to mail one or two to anyone I knew that had something to celebrate.  It was so fun!  I used my go-to no-fridge sugar cookie recipe that never lets me down.

I also made patriotic cookie cups for Todd's office.  I couldn't find a cookie cup recipe that I liked, and wondered if ANY cookie recipe could make cookie cups.  Apparently so.  I took a chocolate chip cookie dough recipe, rolled the dough into large balls, and dropped the balls into greased muffin tins. I baked at 350 degrees for 10 - 12 minutes.  The cookies had a natural depression in the middle, which I increased by pressing down with a small glass.

I tried a new frosting method.  I made a standard buttercream and separated the batch into three bowls.  One bowl I dyed burgundy (out of red, argh!), one batch blue, and one I left white.  I took my piping bag and smeared a generous stripe of burgundy on one side, blue on the opposite side, and then stuffed white in the center.  Voila!  A patriotic swirl!

And SO delicious.  Cookie cups, where have you been all my life??

The baking is not done for the week, either!  Today is "Fourth of July Eve" and therefore I decided to make a patriotic flag pie.  Recommended fillings online were blueberry on one side, strawberry or cherry on the other, but that was just too fussy for me.  I made my favorite three berry pie (blueberry, raspberry, blackberry) with a simple all-butter crust.  I used a cookie cutter to cut out stars for the flag.

It is NO FAIL and so simple that I don't even need to pull out my recipe binder.  Six cups of fruit...3/4 cup sugar...1/4 cup cornstarch.  It's not too sweet and the filling is delightfully thick, which is important to those of us who can't stand runny pies.

After this week of treats, I'm going to be ready for a major sugar detox!

Have a great week!

Come on baby, let's do the {peppermint} twist...

Before too much time goes by and I forget, I wanted to post a few completed projects that I enjoyed working on. 

First, an anniversary gift for Todd.  We're both fans of post-apocalyptic literature and zombies, so I wrote a 70-page choose-your-own-adventure book set in a post-apocalyptic South Carolina, with zombies, and Todd as the star.

"Pat" stands for Post Apocalyptic Todd, and I assure you that the mechanic coveralls he's wearing with the PAT name tag make sense in the story!  It took forever to finish, but was a labor of love.  His card was more simple - a chest of drawers with brads for drawer pulls to give it a little depth.  Socks on the back.  I also do a store-bought card every year where I write the more serious message.

I haven't had much time for card-making or fun projects lately, but when I heard about a friend's good news, I had to bake cookies.  I got the idea from Bakerella to make small round sugar cookies with royal icing on top, swirled to look like a peppermint, then wrapped in plastic to further mimic the candy.

Take your favorite sugar cookie recipe and roll out the dough.  Use a small round cookie cutter to make your shapes.  Mine was about an inch across.

Bake and cool.

I love having leftovers for later!

After they've properly cooled, mix your royal icing to a piping consistency (Sweet Sugar Belle has an amazing tutorial and recipe if you need it!), and outline your cookies.

Add a bit of water to your icing and flood the cookies.  The piped barrier keeps the icing from spilling over.  Next, tint a portion of icing pink, and dab 5 drops of it around the perimeter of the cookie. 

The swirl is easy!  Just dip a toothpick into the pink dots and drag inward, then swirl.

After they've dried overnight, wrap them.  I used plastic sandwich bags with the tops cut off.  Tie with baker's twine, and hopefully you have a reasonable facsimile!

I found a cute box for them, and I couldn't resist a little pun on the card.

I had so much fun making these, and I never need much of an excuse to make a celebration for good news! 

Now the cleanup is another story...sigh.

On to the next project.  Have a great weekend!

This Takes the Cake!

I noticed today that I've got quite a backlog of photos, due in part to the photo frenzy that spring always sparks for me and in part to not having my computer for several weeks. Hence, a mid-week post dedicated solely to baking!

I love to bake on holidays, even 'minor' holidays like St. Patrick's Day. Some years are more elaborate than others, but this year I decided to just make cupcakes. But not just any cupcakes...rainbow cupcakes! Alas, no pot of gold.

I don't have the kind of food coloring that makes really lovely saturated colors, so mine were pastel. I whipped up a basic white cake and split the batter into 6 separate bowls. Each bowl was given a different color.

Then, I dropped spoonfuls of each color into the cupcake liners.

When baked, they looked more psychedelic than rainbow.

I frosted them with a simple white buttercream and topped them with green sprinkles.

They were really, really delicious. I think I've found my go-to white cake recipe. Score!

The recipe made around 20 cupcakes. About 1 minute after I took this shot, the left-hand leg of the cooling rack I was using folded and half of them slid off the table and onto the floor...frosting side down. Splat.

At least I had some Irish soda bread to ease my suffering!

A week later, I decided to make some Yoda cookies for Todd, who was getting together with some Star Wars friends. Showing up with cool cookies = instant popularity boost, right?

I was inspired by Sweet Sugarbelle's tutorial for Yoda. I am clearly not as talented as her, though, so mine weren't quite so nice!

I took a spider cookie cutter and stretched the body out a bit. Perfect Yoda face. With royal icing, thinned to a piping consistency, I outlined the face and made a grid for the forehead. You're supposed to fill in alternate sections of the grid and let them dry to give them more definition. Outlining and filling in certain sections, waiting for them to dry, and filling in other sections took a REALLY long time.

I made some royal icing eyes on the face using quick drops of frosting...really easy. Then I filled in the rest of the face, but I wasn't very happy with how it looked...especially with icing encroaching upon the eye space.

I ended up pounding down the surfaces of the old eyes with the blunt end of a chopstick, taking a perverse pleasure in my task after so many long hours bent over my decorating space. To cover the gaping cavities in Yoda's face, I made lots of royal frosting eyes on wax paper and set them over the holes with icing 'glue'.

Piped icing covered any remaining evidence. At last...complete!

Part of the problem for me, I think, was that I decorated so many Yodas.

Not ten, not twenty, but rows and rows of them...enough Yodas to haunt my dreams for weeks to come. Shudder!

I chose a more pleasant topic for my Easter cookies...spring!

Royal icing chicks hatching out...

...simple dots...

...swirly lines...

...tulips...

...and sheep!

The sheep were my favorite. I only had a stegosaurus cookie cutter so I had to improvise.

They're so cute!

I boxed them up...

...made little Easter tags...

...and got them ready to send to out-of-town friends and relatives!

And today...I made this.

I'm really proud of it! Recently I'd seen a tutorial for making fancy-looking icing roses with a simple twist of the wrist and a Wilton 1M icing tip. Sometimes at night, while waiting to fall asleep, I went over it in my head, practicing. I became obsessed, telling Todd, "I have got to try to make those roses." A friend of mine is due to give birth any day, and I'd just seen a recipe for a strawberry cream layer cake, so I had the perfect excuse to make a cake for a friend and try those icing roses. Yay!

Make a mound, make a swirl, and you've got a rose! It may look complex, but believe it or not, it only took about 10 minutes to decorate the entire cake.

Ladies and gentlemen, there are SIX sticks of butter in that cake if you include the frosting. One and a half pounds of butter. It weighed a ton!

And, because the house smelled so good after the cake was delivered to my friend...and because I didn't feel like doing my real work...and because it's spring and I still had some strawberries left...I made another one.

Because I hadn't planned on doing any fancy swirly roses, I added a brick of cream cheese to my buttercream to complement the strawberries.

I've never had a strawberry cream cake before. The taste was very subtle and mild. The addition of the cream cheese and extra whipping with my KitchenAid gave the frosting a fabulous, airy texture.

Really good!

Todd's birthday is in two weeks, and I think I'm going to tackle Martha Stewart's six layer salted caramel chocolate cake with real drippy caramel and fudgy frosting between every single layer.

I can't wait.

Hope you have a sweet week!