garden party cake

two weeks ago, my sister called to chat as she drove home from work:
"so, what are you doing?" she asked.
"um... i don't want to tell you."
"why?"
"well, okay. i'm making 1,000 blades of grass out of sugar."
[pause, then she asks:] "do you ever ask yourself, 'why did i think this was a good plan?' other people wouldn't think of doing this stuff! well, they might think of doing it, but then they'd come to their senses and not actually do it, because they're not crazy."

i have to admit, she has a point.

i often find that i have these grand ideas for things that "won't be that hard" and then somewhere around 2 a.m., i'm starting to reconsider. yet, despite all my crazy plans, i can only think of one time where i actually threw in the towel and went with a less-cool Plan B (which was my Wii cake, which actually turned out to be my most viewed project ever, despite the catastrophic failure of Plan A).



in this case, though, the 1,000 blades of grass weren't really so bad, maybe an hour to pipe and and 90 minutes to place them. and, hey, this math major got to use some numbers! (hmm, area of the cake plate, minus the area of the cake itself, times the number of blades per square inch... i did have to recheck my figures when the answer came out to be 960-something.) but the very idea... i'm fessing up, it's a bit nuts.

i was inspired by a filler photo (not one of the featured projects) in "kate's cake decorating", a 2004 cake book by kate sullivan. that book seems to be out of print, but a newer book, "fun & fancy cake decorating" appears to be largely a reworking of the older book (from what i can tell peeking inside it on amazon, anyway). i quite enjoy the book i have; if you have some basic skills from a wilton class or something, but don't want to make the same semi-dated ordinary cakes over and over (sorry, wilton! i know you're trying...), kate sullivan's ideas can help you transition into something a little more interesting. that said, i disagree with some of her specific methods (why the obsession with painting over untinted icing? it seems easier and tidier just to tint the icing, IMO), but everyone has their own way of doing things, and i never follow the methods as presented to me anyway! overall, i definitely got my money's worth from it as a source of ideas, so you might want to check out the new book. (hopefully that typo about putting approximately a metric ton of leavener into the otherwise amazing (!) chocolate cake got fixed in the second version -- at least, the lava flow of cake batter that's still charred into the bottom of my oven feels that it might have been a typo. can't say for sure.)

enough with the mini book review (so timely and useful, reviewing a book that is out of print!). this cake was for my mother-in-law's recent birthday. we wanted to do something special for her this year, so larry and i brainstormed and came up with an idea for a little garden party. his mother lives in a beautiful setting, with a little green space next to a creek extending from her back yard, so we decided to utilize that wonderfulness and set up a table there. with some flowers, candles, paper lanterns, and a few other little decorations, we had a lovely table set up, all in green and yellow. the cake followed that theme, and included daisies which i knew to be one of her favorites. we ordered in food from a nearby italian restaurant that we all really enjoy (too many babies around to consider cooking ourselves). she seemed genuinely surprised (hurray, subterfuge!) and everyone had a great time. (and i'm learning that you don't have to stress about going 100% martha to have a lovely party...)



i do have one party idea i want to share, though. after dinner, we played a bit of family-themed pictionary. i wasn't sure how this idea would play out, but it ended up being really a lot of fun: i made up pictionary cards with concepts or events from the family, that most everyone would be familiar with (people, professions, cities where we had lived, family quotes, etc, as well as funny notable events like "the time the boys changed the baby brother's diaper by hosing him off in the yard".) as we played, people started making up their own clues, too, which was really funny. we used one of those giant presentation pads from an office supply store, but that wouldn't be necessary if you were indoors. the fact that the game triggered lots of remembering and joking around made it perfect for a family party. try it out at thanksgiving, ideally after some wine but before the naps take over.

pysanky

i've created a flickr set showing and describing my Ukrainian eggs (pysanky). i haven't worked on this project for a while and have been really wanting to start back up again, so this is part of my motivation to do so.

rather than repeat everything here, if you're interested in reading more, i invite you to click through to the flickr set. as always, i'm more than happy to answer any questions, so just leave a comment (either place).





Update 09.16.2008: I just found out I've been accepted to Maker Faire! I'll have an interactive display of these eggs -- if you'll be around, stop by and try your hand at making one, or just to say hi!

kid craft: fun with food coloring

i don't find much time for crafting with a preschooler and (not-so-)newborn in the house, thus the dramatic slow-down in posting the past three months. today, though, we did a bit of kid crafting that i wanted to share. not quite a guest blogger post, but a collaborative effort to be sure: not only is the artwork eva's, but she took all the photos as well (she got her own camera for her third birthday, complete with her own flickr site -- have i gone off the deep end?).

we started out by playing around with food coloring and water, as suggested by a fellow mama. as you can see, we decided to start with the three primary colors in "tiny" (ahem, shot) glasses and go from there. we worked out things like what colors you need to make green, what you get if you mix red and yellow, and that no matter how many times you try it, mixing all three will give you a version of brown. ("how about if we add blue to the orange we just made? oh, look, that makes brown too, mama!")

we used a syringe to suck up water and mix it in a small white bowl (the needle-less syringe i happened to have lying around was a marinade injector. why? because my sister is a foodie, that's why. normal people can use a dropper from a craft or teacher supply store). from there, the new color went back into the syringe to be placed on our medium -- first, a paper towel. (the original idea was to use coffee filters, which would be great, but we didn't have any handy.) the colors bled and mixed in cool ways, and being a paper towel, it soaked up enough of the water to prevent a huge mess. we even made a duplicate "print" of the original by pressing a second paper towel onto the first. neat.



next, we tried doing a modified tie-dye: i rolled up an old tea towel and bound it with twist ties and rubber bands to make a "caterpillar" shape. eva placed different colors along the caterpillar, then we unrolled it to see the design. this is a somewhat ephemeral project, as my understanding is that you can't permanently dye cotton with food coloring (maybe next time, we'll try kool-aid?). i may try heat setting it with an iron -- still won't be washable, but might be good enough that i can let her use it for her toy kitchen without worrying that it will stain the carpet.



now, since this is eva's project, here is the method in her own words in a 17-second-long video, which she recorded herself with her camera. (it's only her third (or so) video, so you can hear me telling her how to turn it off at the end. :)



[caption: "mom, we used this colored water, and we used "play water", and we put it on that cloth right there. with twist ties and rubber bands."]

this isn't earth-shattering stuff of course, but we sure enjoyed ourselves. and with minimal set-up/clean-up, we did the whole thing while baby hazel slept. perfect for our rainy afternoon!

globe cake

here's the cake i made for eva's third birthday. she loves her earth ball (an inflatable globe ball) and likes to talk about where different places are on the map -- where we live, places she's traveled, where family members live or have traveled. so, why not make an "earth ball cake"? sure it's round and complicated, and sure i just had a baby, but why not? :) luckily my sisters are visiting, so i had both hands free for long enough stretches to enable me to make this. hurray for sisters!

it's hummingbird cake (pineapple/banana/pecan) with cream cheese icing, and each half of the earth is composed of two 8" cakes (torted into four layers) plus half a torted 6" cake on top. then, the whole thing is carved into shape (i could have bought a special pan, but this worked fine). i covered each half in fondant, inverted one, and stuck them together. (structural notes: there are dowels supporting the bottom tier (hemisphere?) of the cake, and i put hot glue between the two pieces of cardboard to help hold the two tiers together.) the fondant on the bottom half threatened to fall off -- and in the heat at the park, it did start to slip -- but i added a band of fondant around the center to bind the two halves together.



the continents are piped on in royal icing, which i did by looking at a map and using latitude and longitude lines as a guide. i got a bit impatient around 1 a.m., so the filling in of the land masses got a bit sloppy at the end. good enough! (i'm learning the beauty of that phrase.) the topper -- a girl holding a toy airplane -- is made of fondant, with a piece of wire in there to support the arms. it's eva-like, but as she'll tell you, her hair is a little bit lighter... the flags are to denote places of interest, places we've found on the map time and time again. ("mama, show me seattle again. remember when we saw the face needle?" she's still working on pronouncing that "sp" consonant blend :)



the location of the party moved at the last minute from our back yard to a park 20 minutes away... so the cake suddenly had to survive an unplanned transport and *then* had to endure the texas summer heat. i'm surprised that it did all of that without a hitch. (we rigged up a clever support system in a cooler.) it didn't come out exactly the way i envisioned it, but i'm quite happy with it. and it was really tasty, too.

rocking chairs

in honor of father's day, here are photos of the rocking chairs my dad made for my daughter. (she received the larger chair for her first birthday, and upon realizing it was a bit too big, he promptly started making the smaller one for christmas! thus, two chairs...) now that he has two new granddaughters as of this year, he's got more woodworking ahead of him, it seems.

both my parents have always helped me to know that i can probably make most anything -- or, more accurately: it might not work out at first, but it's sure worth giving it a try. the first thing i made with my dad (that i recall making) was a wooden jigsaw puzzle. i colored a drawing on a scrap of plywood with some crayons, and he used the table saw (okay, so it wasn't a jigsaw, but who's ever heard of a table saw puzzle?) to cut it into about 10 pieces. strangely, this resulted in a really challenging puzzle that adults had difficulty putting together, even after a bit of practice.

happy father's day, dad. :)

home made

yesterday we welcomed hazel into our family. she was born peacefully at home, and we're all doing well...

frog meets bear

sometimes i get into this mode where i enjoy some project so much, i then repeat it (with variations) several more times before moving on to something else. well, those bears i made last week were pretty entertaining... so this week i made a frog. (seriously, the kyuuto amigurumi book is totally worth it -- for the price, it would have been worthwhile had i made only one project out of it, and i've done three already...)

my main difficulty, though, is the facial expression. this is as true of stuffed animals as it is of dolls (when i made eva's doll, i restitched the second eye about ten times so she didn't look depressed or crazy, and in the end i gave up and settled for half-drunk -- isn't it weird how a pupil half a milimeter to the side can cause a whole different expression?). it took some effort to get the frog eyes to look roughly balanced, and then i did the mouth (which is embroidered since i had no red felt on hand) three times before he looked friendly and not like he might try to eat you in your sleep. expressions are harder than they seem, and i have much respect for people who have learned to do this well. (i luck into a passable expression eventually, but some people can achieve the look they want with actual skill.)

this is for a friend's little girl, but i think first i'll have to convince eva to relinquish it. she's been ribbit-ing it around the house for a few days now. and of course, she's now asking about her bear. soon...