Belated Christmas Round Up!

As promised, its time for a slightly belated crafty christmas round up!

Several months before Christmas, my mum asked me to make her a set of Christmas bunting to hang in her front room to replace the non-festive bunting she has there all year round. We managed to find a cute robin print fabric in cream and green which was perfect for the christmas theme, and added a plain red to break up the quite busy patterns. I added this to some cream bunting cord and ta-da!

To finish off the ends I added some little holly leaves, complete with mini berries, to make it even more christmassy!

As for presents, my artsy craftsy ways meant I got a lot of making gifts! From my brother I got cookie mix in a jar - all I need to add is eggs! Holding off on making these until my waistline has got over Christmas itself, but they look yummy. And these a wooden snowflake ornament for the tree - ace!

We also received a slow cooker (and recipe book), Tatty Devine's How to Make Jewellerybook,Steampunk Softies (the follow up to my Zombie Felties book!) and an awesome skeleton gingerbread cutter!

Herman

After Christmas, I was given a 'friendship' sour dough cake by my mum called 'Herman'. The cake is bubbling and 'alive', the idea being that you look after the cake for a week, feeding it sugar and flour before splitting into portions and distributing to your friends. The last portion you get to keep and make into a cake yourself. Being a sucker for inanimate objects that claim to be alive (I once bought a half dead chive plant from a tesco reduced to clear bin because it had an 'I'm Alive' sticker on the side) I was happy to take Herman home with me.

I wasnt sure what to make of the cake at first. It smells almost beery (that'll be the yeast) and is really bubbly.

I ended up cobbling Herman a little bit, as when it came to feed him I ran out of plain flour and had to use self raising. This resulted in Herman bubbling up and out of the mixing bowl I'd put him in! As it was the biggest bowl I had he had to be moved to a cake tin for the rest of his growing time! Luckily he turned out ok!

The cake was surprisingly nice (mine had raisins, but the apple one is equally as nice!), although you really do need a cup of tea to go with him! Unfortunately, I wasn't able to pass on all of his 'children' - you don't realise how hard it is to get rid of bubbling cake mixture until you try it!

Bonfires burning bright, pumpkin faces in the night......

So Halloween finally came around. As I mentioned in my previous post I ran out of time for pre-halloween crafting (so much for the sugar skull wall hangings I had planned for my Rescued Rags shop!). However, I did manage to put together a homemade/vintage halloween party!

I always go slightly crazy on the halloween baking front, which has become a bit of a tradition. As we were having a party this year I went a little cupcake mad!

Bloody Brain cupcakes (from the Lilli Vanilli cookbook used for the Vampire Bite cupcakes). I was a little bit dubious about how good these would look as Ive never really attempted piping icing before, but I was very happy with the end result. They also went down a storm with party guests.

Chocolate Graveyard cakes with gingerbread tombstones (again, Lilli Vanilli) but with my own take on chocolate frosting, replacing fancy American frosting with good old fashioned chocolate buttercream.

'Ghost Cakes' - one of my housemates at uni used to make these, and they have become part of the halloween baking tradition. Really easy fondant sheets and a few blobs of black piping icing.

And gingerbread spiders complete with web plate :)

I also managed to make my costume this year. Halloween has always been a bit of an inspiration for me and an opportunity for me to dress up like an idiot. Previous years have seen Poison Ivy, Warhammer Orks and Zombie Morrisey, but this year I opted for the Corpse Bride. In my terms this was a pretty last minute choice (I usually start planning months in advance) but I think I managed to pull it off pretty well, despite having to explain to several trick or treaters that I wasn't in fact a smurf!

The dress is a vintage shop find which I managed to get for £10! Such a gorgeous 1950s shape, but sadly not quite big enough to zip up all the way at the back. With the help of my equally crafty mother, I added an extra panel to the back to make it fit. I also added some darts in the skirt to lift it up in places to show the net underneath(I have been dead after all!). I also added some beige lace around the neckline to make it a little more like the corpse bride's dress.

The veil was made from scratch, using a pound world alice band and 2 vintage scarves with fabric flowers to disguise the stitching.

Add on some blue tights/sleeves and some blue facepaint and I was good to go! I also dyed my hair blue for the occasion (cant stand wearing a wig for any length of time) but this may have been taking things a little too far!

Happy Halloween everyone!

Bananarama

Yet more baking!

In my office, there is a tradition of having a positive ending to our weekly staff meetings. Sometimes this takes the form of Pictionary but more often than not its rather cake-based. I was warned before I made my first cake to avoid bananas as our finance guy is allergic to them. So it was decided amongst the rest of the office that I should make a non-banana banana cake!

The cake itself is a chocolate tray bake from Beautiful Baking by Jane Asher. This was my first 'baking' cookery book and has some really good simple recipes for cakes, biscuits and random stuff like crumpets. Its pretty much my go-to book for easy but yummy cake.

I then chopped the corners and middle section off to make a basic banana shape (or wonky moon as by housemate described it!)

I then coloured some ready-made icing yellow (using trusty Dr Oetker) and covered the cake to make the 'inside' of the banana. I forgot to buy jam to stick the icing to the cake, so improvised with golden syrup!

I wasn't happy with the overall bananary-ness of it, so made some half peeled skin using a darker shade of yellow icing. I folded back the tops of the 'skin' pieces to make it look more realistic. Some scored lines down the banana and skin later and tah dah! One novelty cake!

This is my very first novelty cake and I am unbelievably proud of myself! Whether the finance guy will feel the same way is another matter!

Vampire Cupcakes

In a slight change from crafting, I have been doing some experimental cake baking. I love baking cakes and after a disastrous first cake made without help (during which I burnt my arm resulting in a permanent scar!) I have got pretty good at it. Decorating them on the other hand is not my strong point.

So I was recently given a book of cake decorating ideas called A Zombie ate my Cupcake by Lilli Vanilli, which, as the name suggests, has lots of gory/halloweeny ideas for the good old cupcake.

I decided to have a go at the vampire bite cupcake as it seemed to be one of the simpler decorations in the book, and didn't require too many ingredients that I didn't already have in my cake making stash.

Step one was to make the red velvet cupcakes, which are essentially vanilla cupcakes with added red colouring (4 table spoons worth in fact!)

As an early halloween treat I bought some orange and black silicone cake cases (fromSainsbury's if you were wondering), which were perfect for this. I get on much better with silicone cases, theres no fiddling about with paper cases, you dont need a separate case to hold the cupcake in place and theres no rubbish. Perfect.

Once the cakes were done it was on to the cream cheese frosting. Following the recipe, it seemed a bit too creamy, so i added a bit more icing sugar to mine.

Next I had to make the cherry sauce for the blood. This seemed a lot simpler in the instructions than it actually was and I ended up spending over an hour trying to get it right!

Task 1 was to blend the cherries with a hand blender. My blender wasn't up to the job and didn't chop up the cherries as much as was needed, which made life much harder later on.

After boiling the cherry mixture it looked more like jam than sauce, and I had to add water to make it even vaguely pipe-able. The lumps of cherry kept getting stuck in the nozzle of the piping bag which meant everything got sticky and the delicate blood drip effect I was going for turned into more splatters of gore.

But I got there. Some of the cakes worked perfectly and kind of resemble the illustartion in the book:
Others, not so much, but they almost worked (and they tasted good!) so thats a start. May be a while before I attempt any of the more complex decorations but I'm still impressed with my progress!