Too Cute!!

Wash Front with Dinosaurs , originally uploaded by artoo1121.

This amigurumi is so cute! And since I had no idea initially what an amigurumi is they are: little Japanese knit or crocheted dolls. To all my nerdy readers I suggest checking out some of the other dolls from this user... I must say they are terrific.

"Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!"

For all my non-nerdy readers: I offer my condolences in the form of a cute food blog: http://epicute.com/

Totally a College Level Project.

For my Public Speaking class we have to give a demonstration speech and I'm demonstrating how to make felt hand puppets. 


But Elle, why puppets?
It all began sophomore year in high school.... In my chemistry class we were assigned an element and in pairs we were supposed to make a commercial showcasing that element.  My partner, Emma, and I started brainstorming about how we could be creative with this decided to to ours in the form of a puppet show. And we did.


What element was it about?
Boron. Also staring Sir Humphrey Davy. 


This was like 3 years ago why bring it up now?
After doing this project Emma and I kept planning to get together and make puppets again. Later in Sophomore planned out some time and spent the entire day making puppets. I made Einstein, Schrödinger, Marie Antoinette  and Cleopatra. Emma made Westly and Buttercup, and Seth and Summer (from the OC). This is a good sign of who's the nerd and who's the hopeless romantic. 


So, what kind of puppet are you making?
Its a hand puppet so it'll be you'll be able to put your hand in it--not those cop-out Popsicle stick puppets. Since I'm demonstrating something I'm going to make two designs and make the puppet double-sided instead of having a back. 
And,  since it's almost Halloween, one side is Vampire and the other a Werewolf-- seeing that Scientist and Historical figures don't really appeal to "normal" people. That and I want them to look "cool".


So,  I've spent the better part of this weekend working on these puppets. And examples of the various steps along the way. In the near future I'd like to put the steps on here as a guide, since I'm already taking the time to break it down into steps. But this post is about what I've done so far--


1.) Give myself a second degree burn from the glue gun. Trust me, its a wonder that an injury so small can hurt so much. But, it stopped hurting and is healing now. This and the "Concussion Cupcakes" makes me wonder if I'm tough enough to be an artist. 


2.) I've completed the figures for each puppet now I have to put one together and make props for each step of the process.


Vampire:

Werewolf:

Part Three: The Conclusion

Yesterday I continued the  "Multipart Posting Spectacular. So today I bring you the conclusion to the series. 


I suppose I got a little ahead of myself yesterday (Don't worry, the cake is not lie... I just have some backtracking to do first). Before I was able to frost and decorate the cakes I still had to remove them from the pans and stack  them together. The first cake came out cleaning while the second (shown here on top) had a portion of the bottom stuck in the pan. In order to make a  single cake out of the two  I had to do two things. First I had to carve a flat surface to join the two  and join them together with a layer of frosting. And second I carved around the edges to make a smoother more continuos surface to frost. It was fairly simple I grabbed a serrated knife (in this case its actually a steak knife but it worked wonderfully) and set about cutting and sawing. I worked on a plate so that I could easily lift and flip the cake onto the serving plate. This also gave me an opportunity to taste the cake from the scraps. 

So now that we're all caught up-- the finished cake. 

And thus concludes the  "Multipart Posting Spectacular.  I hope you all enjoyed it.

Part Two: Baking and Frosting

In yesterday's post I began a special series I dubbed the "Multipart Posting Spectacular." So here is today's continuation. 


For David's cake I decided to bake a "yellow cake" mix-- partially because he likes vanilla flavored cakes and partially because it was the only type of cake mix I had. At some point I'd like to try making my own cake's from scratch, but for now the boxed mixes are convenient and rather tasty. So I gathered my supplies started to work while the oven preheated.

I whipped up the cake and poured the batter into the pans.

Then they hit the oven. I set a timer and approximately 30 minutes later I pulled the cakes out.

 

While I did not make a cake from scratch in favor a boxed mix, I did make my own frosting. And I must say that I learned quite a bit in the process.

I used a recipe that called for:

     1 cup shortening

     2 teaspoons vanilla
     4 cups powdered sugar
     4 tablespoons milk

From that I upped everything but the shortening, for taste and texture. 

As I began to color the frosting I realized two things: 

1.) I didn't have enough food color to make red frosting (so it turned out pink and actually a little darker than the first picture).

2.) food coloring is water-based and doesn't mix well with the oil based shortening (as a solution this recipe would need some sort of emulsifier (eggs for example) so that the two would combine better).

After mixing the frosting a lovely shade of pink I spread it over the entire cake and mixed the remainder into a darker color that was trying to black but ended up a grayish-purple and put that into a piping bag. I piped the words and a border on to the cake and "attached the characters."

Thank you for reading Part Two. Tomorrow in the conclusion, I'll reveal the finished cake. Stay tuned. 

Part One: Cake Design

Sorry for the delay in in posts and the somewhat secrecy (I couldn't have my surprise cake design ruined). Without further ado, I present you a multipart posting spectacular-- featuring drama, intrigue, and frosting.  

This past weekend a good friend of mine, David, celebrated his 20th birthday. And for some reason I decided to bake a cake him (it might have so something to do with my fondness for decorating cupcakes).

Thus began my dissent into frosting.

To start I decided to stack two round 8 inch cakes to create the shape of the cake. This gave me a canvas but I still had to come up with a design. And, of course, when I offered to decorate a cake I had no idea what I wanted it to look like. Eventually I decided to feature and image of David's character from WoW, Maynar, and my character's pet cat, Cindy. Here are some of the sketches I came up with.

At first I wanted to use this cake as an experiment with fondant,  but I just didn't have time to learn a new medium. So I instead decided to make the figures on paper and attach them to the cake.

I also planned to pipe a simple message that read something to the effect of "Happy Birthday, David!" However, all this was subject to change...

Check back tomorrow for Part Two.