No- bake Cupcake Pop tutorial

It's not mine but so worth watching if you plan on making cake pops.

No-bake Cupcake Pop tutorial

How to make wood pattern fondant and scones :)

I love baking :)
I just made some scones. It's been 15 years since I did that. The last time was in middle school and they tasted awful! My friend and I got the amount of salt wrong, yuk! I decided to make these because as I already said I love baking, and because there's a pot of lemon curd in my fridge which just screamed SCONES! The recipe wasn't the best in my opinion so I'm not posting that. You can google and find much better.



Btw if you read my last post, the cake turned out fine. Actually better then I expected and everyone loved it. Plus it tasted great, or so I heard. That's the only downside to making cakes for other people, you can't taste them ;)
It was my first try using buttercreme instead of ganache. I'm not wildly thrilled. It works a lot easier and quicker but jeez that has trouble with temperature fluctuation! Every time it got a little warmer bubbles started to appear and I hate it when a cake doesn't look absolutely neat. For this cake it was ok to see the layers but generally I want those to be invisible. Maybe I wasn't using the right recipe buttercreme, it was nutella.
I did spend a while trying to find out how to make fondant look like wood. Eventually I just winged it. It worked out really well!


To make fondant look like wood:
You need a base color (I used chocolate brown). Take enough to cover the whole cake, because you're using just a little of the other colors.

Now take about a sausage roll of a much darker color (I used black) and the same amount of a much lighter color (I used white). You need these colors to deviate enough from your base so when you're kneading all of them together they don't vanish into your base color.

Now knead your base fondant a little, push it down so it makes a rectangle the same length and a little broader than your two sausage rolls (the other two colors). Lay the two sausages on your base, not touching each other. It's very important not to start kneading like you're used to or you're just going to mix everything together. Instead fold your base lengthwise in half with the sausages on the outside. Pull it apart and fold it the same way again. It's like pulling taffy. Repeat this about 5-10 times, depending on the amount of fondant. Don't make the lines of dark and light too thin because you also have to roll it out so they'll get even thinner. If after you rolled it out, it doesn't look right, you can just start afresh with two new sausage rolls of dark and light fondant.

I hope it's clear. If not, don't hesitate to ask in the comments! 

Venting

I just spent a few hours working on my woodwork cake and am now totally discouraged. It has to be done the day after tomorrow and it's not going so well. I had to back the 4 layers separate because I don't have a square deep dish pan. I also had to make the batter from scratch which I never do. This resulted in two layers being ok, I hope and two being totally ruined because the batter didn't mix well and the cake sagged. Sigh. Now I have to bake more tomorrow. Also it has to become a box, with dove-tail joints and I just noticed that I already iced the bottom two layers without cutting the cake and it's corners are round.... aaaah! This is the last time I agree to make a cake with just 3 days to do it in.

Spare time

I read books, lots of books, even when I really don't have time to read books like when I was writing my master thesis and it had to be finished within a month, I still read books. And I don't mean literature.
Right now I'm reading two books at once. The book of awesome and a book about Adventures in the American suburbs. While I mostly find it annoying to read multiple books at a time, because it doesn't do any of them justice, this combination is rather interesting. The book of awesome tells about all those little things in life that make you really happy, like bubble wrap and rain on hot pavement. The Adventures in the suburbs focuses mainly on dramatizing rather off the point aspects of American culture, making them look absolutely awful, like not staying for a glass of wine when picking up your kid from a play date and play dates in general. While the first makes me appreciate life and laugh about little things that are absolutely true but don't often come up in your brain, like playing in old playgrounds, before everything was cushioned. The latter makes me irritated to even be reading a book like that and is cultivating a small internal hate for the writer while bringing a smile to my face because some things are just absurd. The difference here lies not so much with my own interpretation as with the two writers. While The Book of Awesome is written by an upbeat Canadian, as my chiropractor once put it: a decaffeinated American, that other book is written by one of those down casting Dutchmen. It shows exactly why those cultures are opposites and I love and hate both. (Mind you, I get to because I grew up in both.) I'd rather be upbeat and love to focus on those little things, but a good sarcastic joke can go a long way too!

How original...

So, random things... that has got to be the most unoriginal blog theme ever. But as I do not have a current interesting blog theme, this will just have to be it for now. Maybe along the way I'll find one that suits me, or potential readers and I'll change the name.

My blogging efforts started ages ago, when I did have a theme: my family vacation to Disney world in December 2011, but as such things go I forgot and having just checked, my last post was march 2010. Nice... Don't even try to find it because I hid it. Not only to hide my embarrassment but mostly because the world (whether it be online or off) does not need more places that store information about the Vacation Kingdom! There are so many sites, blogs, books, dvd's and just plain people that can tell you this information that it's useless to write it again.If you are intrigued to find some, google away! Or go to my favorite sites: touringplans.com; allears.net; and the disney mom's panel. Disneyworld.com actually tells you a lot too, who would figure that, right?!

So random things it will be. The first one being that I just wrote my first job application letter with pretty resume. Yay! I'm officially unemployed. No longer a sweet student, but business women. Though I have no job, so really I'm just a bum. But writing letters so yay!

Maybe that should be my theme, that which everyone who has a job somehow wants to relate to a person that just graduated university: "Now your real life starts!" Which begs the question: what was I living before? My fake life?

This would be suggesting that I have not been living it properly since I was born. I cannot help it that our society dictates that we learn stuff and so we learn that learning is good and so when we get to make our first life altering decision we go off to learn some more. Which is exactly what everyone said I should be doing, because that would eventually lead to better job perspectives, and in conclusion we must then conclude: a better real life.



Alright I got my theme here: the better real life it is. So if you didn't understand this at all here are the Cliff's notes: My blog started out being called Random things, and it took just one entry to find what my purpose should actually be, though I can assure you it will still contain many seemingly random things ;)