Another weekend down the drain...
Well, it's Monday morning and I have once again squandered an entire weekend. Actually, for once, that's not entirely true. I did not spend Mother's Day with my mother so I do not have any cute pictures or nice stories about lunch and family for you all to read, so I will regale you with stories of what I did instead. Or something like that.
On Saturday morning I got up at 6:30 and got to work making the decorations for my cousin Hayden's graduation cake. My plan calls for no less than 10 colors of color flow icing. I don't know if you're aware of what kind of a mess occurs when you make 10 different colors of color flow icing, but let me just tell you, it's a VERY. BIG. MESS. I think I finished that fiasco around 9:30 and despite the fact that every bowl and spoon I own got dirty in the process, I'm mostly happy with how it came out.
The second part of the decorations for this top-secret cake design calls for stuff made from modeling chocolate. I've never made or worked with modeling chocolate before but the recipe calls for 2 ingredients- chocolate and corn syrup. Sounds like it should be pretty simple. Ah, not so much. So after I wasted like $8 on two white chocolate gourmet candy bars only to end up with a crumbly grainy mess, I scoured the internet some more and found a recipe that uses Wilton candy melts. Wilton Candy Melts are $2.99 for almost a pound. I made that recipe yesterday and although I haven't actually made my designs with it yet, it is infinitely more clay-like than the original screw-up. I figure no one is going to eat that stuff anyway so it doesn't matter if it actually tastes good, as long as I can make shapes out of it.
The other thing that I accomplished this weekend was finally trying out that recipe for 3 Vanilla Cupcakes. The 3 vanillas in the recipe are vanilla sugar, vanilla extract, and vanilla bean seeds. I used all 3- even used some of my homemade vanilla extract that's been brewing since November. The cupcakes came out just fine, but they're...eh. Marginal. I mean, they taste fine- especially when covered in some delicious Duncan Hines chocolate frosting- but they were really rather underwhelming. Ah well. At least now I can go forth with my boxed mixes knowing that I gave this 'from scratch' thing my best effort.
So that was my oh-so-exciting weekend. My new camera did not arrive on Friday. Or rather, it arrived and left again because no one was home to sign for it. Sigh. It's being delivered to my office today which is very exciting. Hopefully soon I will have some lovely new pictures to show you.
On Saturday morning I got up at 6:30 and got to work making the decorations for my cousin Hayden's graduation cake. My plan calls for no less than 10 colors of color flow icing. I don't know if you're aware of what kind of a mess occurs when you make 10 different colors of color flow icing, but let me just tell you, it's a VERY. BIG. MESS. I think I finished that fiasco around 9:30 and despite the fact that every bowl and spoon I own got dirty in the process, I'm mostly happy with how it came out.
The second part of the decorations for this top-secret cake design calls for stuff made from modeling chocolate. I've never made or worked with modeling chocolate before but the recipe calls for 2 ingredients- chocolate and corn syrup. Sounds like it should be pretty simple. Ah, not so much. So after I wasted like $8 on two white chocolate gourmet candy bars only to end up with a crumbly grainy mess, I scoured the internet some more and found a recipe that uses Wilton candy melts. Wilton Candy Melts are $2.99 for almost a pound. I made that recipe yesterday and although I haven't actually made my designs with it yet, it is infinitely more clay-like than the original screw-up. I figure no one is going to eat that stuff anyway so it doesn't matter if it actually tastes good, as long as I can make shapes out of it.
The other thing that I accomplished this weekend was finally trying out that recipe for 3 Vanilla Cupcakes. The 3 vanillas in the recipe are vanilla sugar, vanilla extract, and vanilla bean seeds. I used all 3- even used some of my homemade vanilla extract that's been brewing since November. The cupcakes came out just fine, but they're...eh. Marginal. I mean, they taste fine- especially when covered in some delicious Duncan Hines chocolate frosting- but they were really rather underwhelming. Ah well. At least now I can go forth with my boxed mixes knowing that I gave this 'from scratch' thing my best effort.
So that was my oh-so-exciting weekend. My new camera did not arrive on Friday. Or rather, it arrived and left again because no one was home to sign for it. Sigh. It's being delivered to my office today which is very exciting. Hopefully soon I will have some lovely new pictures to show you.
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