Crafts and Design
Rainbow Shuffle shirts available
It’s been a while since I first had an inquiry for my Rainbow Shuffle design to be printed on a shirt, and now it’s available from my cafepress shop. The original butt-shuffling dog is also available on light apparel and gift items.
Unicorn and dog doing the butt-shuffle
Don’t settle for poor imitations! (Believe me, there have been a few and I’ve dealt with the ones I’ve caught.)
Maybe when I get some more free time I’ll make some new designs, but for those who have been wanting a unicorn wiping its butt on a shirt, you can now have it!
→ Visit the Eggshell Green shop on Cafepress (products ship from USA and prices in USD unless otherwise stated)
Wedding cake dramas
Oh the dramas with this wedding cake!
I was asked to make a simple elegant cake, with a bunch of flowers on top. Sounded like fun – I was looking for an excuse to practice making sugar flowers so was quite excited.
Sugar hydrangea in the making
The cake was three tiers: the bottom was a 12 inch chocolate cake, and the 10 inch and 8 inch tiers were a very delicious fruit cake speckled with dark chocolate bits.
Assembled hydrangea and rose
First drama: Burnt fruit cakes
The last time I made fruit cake was for my own wedding. From that I learnt that the ‘classic bake’ function on our previous oven is a very handy thing. It means that only the bottom element is turned on and when baking for 3 hours it helps prevent the tops from burning. Our new oven doesn’t have this function so alas the tops needed a bit of ‘levelling’. Tasted fine in the end though.
Sugar bouquet version 1
Second drama: Broken bouquet
After hours of labourious intricacies, the hubby accidentally knocked over my completed sugar bouquet, smashing half of the flowers. Luckily I had enough time, and experience by then, to whip up the replacements without too much bother. Luckily for him he was helping me roll fondant and it was indeed an accident. (My husband tells me that I have to mention that “In hindsight I should’ve put them in a better place and not teetering on the edge of the bench”. Who’s writing this post huh!? :D )
Third drama: Squished cake
Well bad things seem to come in threes. During transportation to the venue, a friend’s hands moulded into the sides of the top tier while he held it in the car. We got there and the round cake looked more like an hour glass. NooOoooOO – why now!?! Not now!!! I kept my cool, which is surprising for a pregnant lady, and luckily (yes, luck was the saving grace for this cake) the icing was thick and soft enough to mould back into shape. It wasn’t perfect but it at least it was round (mostly) again!
The finished cake, repaired and displaying the second version bouquet
Plenty of lessons learnt from my first commissioned cake and it was worth it all in the end to see how happy the bride was.
You can view the gallery of my cakes on the Cakes page.
Wedding cookies
A friend asked me to make some wedding favours for her – either cupcakes or cookies. Cupcakes would have been great but we had to fly from Wellington to Auckland, and then they’d have to get transported via ferry to the venue on Waiheke Island. Auckland is also notorious for its humid summers so I ruled out making frosted cupcakes pretty quickly. So cookies it was.
The original plan was to make gingerbread ones because I know the gingerbread recipe I have is delicious. However, we experienced a bit of humidity ourselves here in Wellington and my trial cookies turned into cake. They became so soft that they fell apart if you tried to pick them up! So we went for a simple sugar cookie by Alton Brown which proved hardier and still yummy.
100-something cookies
After several test runs of different icing colours and patterns, the final product was a heart flooded with light pink icing, and piped with blue and dark pink criss crossing. I have to say the hardest thing about all this was the piping. I almost gave myself carpal tunnel syndrome again from the hours of piping to achieve the stripes – my hands ached and started tingling that night.
The iced wedding cookies - not bad for a novice
But it was worth it. They looked really nice on the tables and tasted pretty good too.
The table layout
Domo-kun keeki
I asked the husband what cake he wanted for his birthday, and we went through the usual “Ummm, I dunno… uhhh”. (It’s kind of like trying to get him to choose baby names, or make any decisions that require creative thought actually. He says that’s my forté.) He’s a geek, so we thought about doing a robot, ipad, motherboard, and other various typical geek things. He had bought me some Ninjabread men cutters because he wanted them at the party, and I said if he wasn’t going to choose something then I’d make a harpooned whale with ninjas doing scientific research on it.
He must’ve had an epiphany or something, and said “Ooh! I know what we could have – you know that furry monster thing on the motivational poster about God killing kittens whenever someone masturbates?” – ok, maybe not an epiphany but he decided that’s what he wanted (because of the Internet meme association, not because of the fate of kittens). We’re talking about Domo-kun (we weren’t geeky enough and had to Google for that).
The Domo cake
He also wanted a red velvet cake and ended up baking the cake himself (yay) and I decorated. Things worked out really well because the cross section of the cake looked as if we had given Domo an autopsy.
Mmmm meaty
And the cake was delicious. I hadn’t tried red velvet before, only heard about it, usually in the form of cupcakes. We tried the Waldorf Astoria Red Velvet recipe – it’s a perfect density for decorating and the bonus is that it tastes good and isn’t dry (and pretty easy to make).
Will definitely make red velvet cake again – just got to remember to get lots of red food colouring each time!
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