Posts Tagged ‘Yummy’

Morning everyone!

A lot of you have written saying you have lots of earrings but no way to store them all. I like to display my earrings because they’re pretty so this is what I’ve come up with ^_^

Continuing my theme of sweets related storage solutions it’s a gigantic hanging heart made of whipped cream It can hold as many earrings as you want and it doesn’t matter what type of backs the earring have because they can all just poke through the tulle.

So let’s get crafting!

What you need:

• An old wire coat hanger
• Pliers
• Tulle in whatever colour you want
• Artists Modelling Paste
• Piping bag and tip
• Ribbon
• Glue gun
• Needle and thread
• Tray to do it all in so you don’t make a mess

Firstly you should take your coat and use the pliers to undo the top twisty bit.

Use the pliers to shape it into a heart. Use the twisty ends to secure it together. You can make the heart as big or as small as you need, it just depends on how many earrings you want to hang at the end ^_^

Cut out a piece of tulle which is big enough to cover your heart with a few inches either side for hems.

Thread your needle with the same colour as your tulle. Fold the tulle over the sides of the wire and sew in place. You might want to pin it all before you start sewing. You should make sure to sew it quite tightly, if it doesn’t have tension it won’t be able to hold up earrings.

You should stitch like this:

Keep going around to the other side:

Make sure to pay extra attention to the pointy bit at the top of the heart. You might need to cut the tulle a bit to make it fit.

Cut off all the extra tulle around the edges.

Now time for some whipped cream Put your heart onto the tray. At this point you should make sure the heart sits flat on the floor, if it’s not flat it won’t sit against the wall. You might want to put some cling wrap down on the tray to make it easy to remove later.

Get your modelling paste and icing bag ready. You can buy modelling paste from most art stores.

I got the idea to use modelling paste rather than silicone etc from Hikaria who is the master of making sweets! Modeling paste will be more durable for a wall hanging, keep it’s shape well and doesn’t have the safety issues that silicone does.

Use a spoon to fill your piping bag with the paste.

Eventually we are going to make 3 rows of little icing swirls but we want the top ones to be much higher than the sides so we need to make an icing platform for it to sit on! Use your piping bag to make a line around the edge of the heart, you should put it directly on top of the wire.

It doesn’t matter if it looks terrible or is broken up because we’re going to cover the whole thing up with more icing later

Put a bit of extra icing at both of the points of the heart.

Put it outside to dry for a while. Depending on how hot it is in your part of the world, drying might take some time.

After it’s dry to the touch bring it back in. Use your piping bag to make a bunch of icing swirls on either side of the first line you made.

You should now pipe the top line of icing swirls on top of the first line you made. It should form a nice little dome ^_^ I forgot to take a photo of that step sorry! Make sure the icing covers all of the wires.

Now let the whole thing dry! It was quite cold when I did mine so I left it for a day then I turned it over and let the back dry for another day.

This is the back:

Once you are completely sure it’s dry gather the rest of your materials.

Cut a length of ribbon for it to hang on.

And hot glue it to the back of the heart. Make sure you do it in a way that’s not visible from the front.

And there you have it! It’s a gigantic whipped cream heart ^_^

To attach earrings just hook/pin them through the holes in the tulle. I made the ribbon hanger longer to make it easy to access the back of studs.

Here’s a close up of all the cream. Because it’s made from modelling paste it should be very hard, be careful because the tips of the cream are pointy!

And so the cycle of sweets themed storage continues My next sweets storage is going to be candy cane themed, any guesses to what it is?

Hope you enjoyed!

Macarons… it’s become a serious obsession now. I blame Lolita brands for this obsession. If they didn’t keep including them in prints or in sweets deco maybe I could forget about how melt-in-your-mouth-delicious they are… maybe I could ignore the fact that they are incredibly pretty… and maybe I could stop thinking about how I desperately want one for breakfast today with a cup of tea…

But no!

And so it goes on until one day I got so frustrated I decided to make them myself. I suppose that’s in keeping with the spirit of this blog ^_^

I searched and searched for a recipe. Many were too complicated with things like measuring the temperatures in the room and comparing the humidity to get the correct amounts for different parts of the world!? Macarons are apparently the most fickle of all deserts.

Finally just as I was about to give up a friend sent me a link to Not Quite Nigella’s Recipe. It seemed easy enough but I wasn’t too keen on the idea of pistachio as I wanted James to actually eat them too. I kept searching until I found the Tasted By Two version. Seemed easy enough… and so the experimenting began! After maybe 10 batches I have modified the recipe for our kitchen/temperature/humidity/what ever other ridiculous things macarons are scared of. I am not a baking purist, I just did what worked! These techniques might not work for you but I assure you that my result was freaking awesome

So here is everything I’ve learned about macarons and my modified version of the Tasted By Two Recipe:

What you need:

Ingredients for chocolate macarons with chocolate filling-

For the outside bit:

• 65 grams Almond Meal
• 80 grams Icing Sugar
• 40 grams  Caster Sugar
• 1 table spoon Cocoa Powder
• 50 grams Egg White at room temperature
• Oil spray
• Pinch of salt

For the filling:

• Cooking chocolate
• Butter
• Thickened cream
• Icing sugar

Utensils-

• Scales
• Sieve
• Aluminum foil
• Mixing bowls
• Electric beater
• Baking trays
• Spoon etc
• Piping bag/Small plastic bag

Gather everything together

Line your trays with aluminum foil. Yes in the photo I’m using baking paper… and you know what, it sucked. Every recipe I found said to use baking paper but EVERY batch that I did using baking paper failed miserably. So what I ended up using for the successful batches was aluminum foil *very* lightly sprayed with olive oil. I’ll talk more about the failed batches and how to avoid that later!

Measure out your almond meal. Having the correct weights is very important so be quite careful. Now about the almond meal… many recipes I found said that you should crush the meal even further in a food processor to make it extra fine. I don’t have a food processor so I used it straight from the pack. No problems so far.

This is how fine it was:

Do the same  with your icing sugar and sift them into your bowl. Make sure there are no lumps.

Then mix them together very well and make sure the consistency is even.

Now weigh your castor sugar.

And your egg whites. Egg whites are another highly debated point of this recipe. Some say you should leave them out over night, some say leave them for a week. I made macarons with eggs right after cracking them, over night and week old… and they were all exactly the same in my opinion. I really don’t think it makes a difference. Just make sure they aren’t too cold or else they won’t froth well.

Put your egg whites into a mixing bowl.

Add a pinch of salt to them

Now using your electric mixer beat them until they become slightly frothy.

When they look like this you should start adding the castor sugar a little bit at a time…

Keep beating…

… until it looks like this The eggs should be light fluffy and peaky.

Now this part is quite fun! You should take your mixed up icing/almond and add 1/2 of it to the egg mixture.

Mix it up carefully, don’t be over zealous otherwise it will end up like cake. Once the first half is mixed in, add the rest and repeat.

According to a lot of recipes it should form ribbons off your spoon when you’re done.

Now mix in your spoon of cocoa

Delicious yes?

Ok time to get ready to pipe them. You can use a proper piping bag but if you’re not keen on cleaning one you can just use a plastic bag and throw it away after ^_^

Put your mixture into the bag!

And tie a knot into the top of it.

Now cut off the corner with a pair of scissors and pipe circles onto your tray.

Apparently some people will actually draw circles onto the baking paper to make sure they are completely perfectly shaped… I don’t really think that is necessary. If I wanted perfection I would go and buy them, I like he idea of mine being a little individual ^_^

Ok! So we’ve done the hard part! You should take your tray and bang it on the counter a few times to get rid of any air bubbles. Then leave the macarons on the counter for 1 hour to settle. While they are settling let’s talk about some other variations!

James doesn’t like chocolate much either so he asked for some blueberry flavored ones.

I used tinned blueberries, crushed them and added to the mixture just before piping.

This is easy enough, you just need to add slightly more of the dry ingredients to counter the wet of the blueberries. If you’ve made a couple of batches you should be able to roughly guess at what the correct consistency should be.

My absolute FAVORITE flavor is green tea with pistachio filling. OMG this is seriously awesome. All you need to do is add 1/2 a teaspoon of matcha powder to the mixture instead of your chocolate powder. I’m using one from Tea2 but any will work.

Green!

They all look so pretty!

When you come back to the macarons the icing should have formed a very slight shell, you should be able to touch the top without getting your finger wet. Pre-heat your oven to 160 degrees Celsius. When the oven is ready you can put in the tray and cook for 5 minutes. After 5 minutes you should be able to see the little crinkly bottom feet, if not something has gone wrong! Cook for another 4 minutes and then allow them to cool on the bench.

This is a picture of the first time I tried to make them, they weren’t very pretty but you can see the little crinkly feet I’m talking about…

Leave the macarons to cool while we make the filling.Basically all that is involved in that is melting chocolate in the microwave, adding a little cream, butter and a little icing sugar so it doesn’t go solid again. Very delicious. Be sure to taste it along the way

The pistachio variation on this is basically crushed pistachios with butter and icing sugar to make a delicious paste:

Now it’s time to remove the macarons from the tray and turn them over… the bottoms should look like this:

Below is a good example of failed bottoms. The reason this didn’t work is because they weren’t cooked long enough so the insides were liquidy. They stuck to the (stupid) baking paper and collapsed when being removed. Still tasted good though.

Take a half and spread some filling on, pop another half on top and you’re done

Taadaa! Success!

And here are the delicious green tea ones:

So there you have it! No longer will I be a slave to sweets deco and brand prints! Next time I crave macarons I’ll bloody well make some! Mine may not be the prettiest ever made but they tasted damn good and nobody complained so I’m happy!

Hope you all enjoyed the adventure as much as I enjoyed eating all of the failed and successful batches!

It’s no secret, I love cake. No I don’t think you guys get it… I looooooove cake. So much so that the first thing I thought when I was trying to think of a way to store my false eyelashes was cake… and you’ll see why in a minute

If you’re anything like me you have a lot of lashes. Here in Aus they don’t come in the nice little trays, they come in stupid plastic packets which mean it’s really difficult to store and reuse them. My counter tends to look like this after a few days…

Very ugly, very messy and very unhygienic. So what to do? When I found this cheap craft storage box at a $2 store I had a great idea

I decided to turn it into this:

Yep. It’s an eyelash cake.

The storage container looks like this when it’s filled up. Each compartment has it’s own lid so when you need one set they won’t all fall out and it’s transparent so you can see them all at once. It’s exactly the right size so your lashes don’t get crushed or out of shape.

So let’s get started! What you need is:

-Paper clay. I picked up a kit from Singapore but I’ve seen this same kit available on Etsy as well.
-Container
-Cute ribbon
-Icing bag with nozzles
-Optional if your paper clay kit doesn’t come with white icing you can use acrylic modeling paste (read more here)
-Small false flowers

So this is what came in my kit. It has lots of molds and a couple of colours of clay and a ready to go icing kit.

I wanted a strawberry for my cake so I made one with the mold like this:

Put clay in both sides of the mold.

Squish it together..

You get this:

Remove the extra and you’ve got a strawberry.

You can make pretty much anything you want by hand as well as it’s really easy to work with. I made some macarons, hearts, icecream tops and some of those swirly chocolate wafer stick things.

Also squish some of the yellow clay flat and cut out 8 fairly equal triangles like this. These are going to be the slices of cake on top so make the roughly the same size as the container sections.

I make a bunch of clay bits and pieces at a time because they need to be left to dry over night.

The next day!

Now that everything is nice and dry let’s get going! Turn your container upside down so the lid parts are on the bottom and coat the top sections with epoxy glue.

Glue the triangles you made on

Now decide on the design you want on the top. I like to lay mine out first so I know that it will all fit!

Before I go ahead and glue it all, here is a mini tutorial inside a tutorial on making the wafer swirl things. After they’ve dried you can add the chocolate. I paint mine with brown nail polish

Paint the swirl… fairly self explanatory! Let them dry really well before you add them to the cake!

Now back to the cake!!

Time to cover the edges, get your pretty ribbon and glue it around the edge. You should align it as close to the bottom lids as you can without obstructing the opening/closing. Don’t worry about having a large gap towards the top, we’re going to fill that with icing

I decided to put flowers on the top of mine, glue whatever you decided to put there ^_^

Time for icing!

Fill your icing bag with whatever you’re using for the icing (please use the paper clay or acrylic modeling paste rather than silicon as silicon attracts a lot of dirt in the bathroom) and get any decorations you have for the top close at hand.

Start icing around the top gap of your cake

You can use whatever icing method you like, I just did this: http://www.wilton.com/technique/Shell

I did two lines of icing to fill the gap up to the ribbon.

Next pipe a gigantic swirl in the middle of the flowers

Then while the icing is still wet you should add in any decorations you want. I added the strawberry, two wafers and some diamantes

Make sure to leave it to dry at least a day or so then it’s ready to use

And there you have it! A delicious way to add to your bathroom collection of sweets! And oraganise your collection of lashes!

Also if your collection is bigger than 8 pairs (like mine is) you can just add more layers to your cake underneath ^_^ YUM!

So it would appear that my bathroom now has an unintentional sweets theme now