Dragon Rambles

I’ve been good with not buying stuff for a while, but this week I felt like a little retail therapy. Of course, I could have gotten off lightly, but I went into John Lewis in Cardiff to check out the new Amethyst range from Denby. Since I was in my favourite part of any department store, I thought I’d walk around a bit. BIG mistake. I fell in love with this plate and just had to take it home.

Of course, I may have been able to resist if I didn’t immediately picture it with lots of little cakes on it for an afternoon tea

Well I haven’t been doing much stitching for the last few months, but when I have had 30 min or so to pick something up, I’ve wanted something easy (both to the mind and eyes). So I’ve been working on Rhapsody in Red, Part 1 (the sampler).

I started this piece when I first moved to Cardiff two years ago. Obviously from my progress I haven’t worked on it too much, but it’s progressing. This is being stitched with Vikki Clayton’s silks – similar colours to the charted ones.

Back in Jan I started Blue Faery (art by Marc Potts, chart by HAED). I’ve loved that artwork for some time and had been hoping it would be released back when Marc Potts art was released the first time. Looking at the chart though, I was a little concerned about how it might turn out. So instead of starting in the top left corner like I normally do, I started in the bottom left. Right from that first page I wasn’t sure I was going to like how this turned out. The colours in the frame were all wrong. Instead of mostly grey tones it was mostly mauve. Odd given there are plenty of greys in the DMC range. But I continued, and I’ve posted pics here. Working on the mushrooms, I thought the colours were too dark, but persevered. Even when some of the mushrooms disappeared into the background because chunks of them where charted as black. Then I hit the faery. Uh oh. Not good. Here’s the original artwork.

Now here’s the stitched piece. If you compare them, you’ll see the faery is missing part of her behind. It bugged me to begin with but I continued into the next page hoping it wouldn’t look too bad. Unfortunately it did. The more I looked at it, the less I liked it. You might need to click on the original to see the large version to see what I mean.

Here’s a close up so you can see just how much of her behind has disappeared. It should be curved down to the border (suggesting the frame covers some of it) and right up past that lower leaf. Nope, instead someone has taken a big bite out of her butt.

I’ve emailed Michele at HAED. Not sure what I’ll do even if she is able to fix the chart. Depends what ends up being fixed and how much I am able to undo. Really, the whole chart should be redone. But I don’t know if I’d start again. I’ll wait and see what she replies and let you know.

One of the girls at work asked me if I’d make a cake for her daughter’s birthday as she likes the goodies I bake and bring in. I agreed and started plotting. I found out that her daughter likes turtles (very good taste), so used that as my starting point. I was originally thinking of trying for a 3D cake, but didn’t have the right size cake pans to start with that, and on more thought I started thinking that much sugar was probably not a good idea for a little girl. So this time around I decided to go for something simple and make turtle cake toppers.

I decided on mudcake. Apart from it being delicious, Monika had mentioned she would like a chocolate cake and this is one that keeps well. Also, I could bake it Thursday night and decorate it Friday evening ready to be picked up Sat morning. First though to pick the recipe.

I’ve made a great one before (in particular a choc-mint one for Vicky’s 30th), but for the life of me I couldn’t remember what recipe I used, or even if I still had it. Some of my favourite recipes were unfortunately lost in the move here. So, on Thurs I baked a mud cake from the Donna Haye cook book I have. Of course I didn’t notice until I was making it how much flour was in it – or rather how little. It seemed this was a bit too much of a dessert cake and not really right for what I wanted. After it was finished baking, it was obvious that I was right, this cake wasn’t right.

So next plan, bake a different recipe and make the cake toppers on Friday night and decorate Sat morning. I got home early to get a good start on the cake. This time I picked the recipe that Vicky posted on her blog last year. Unfortunately I forgot to set a timer and by the time I realised, the cake had been baked for almost 30min too much. It wasn’t burnt, but I new that it would be too dry. Time to bake another.

Of course, by this time I was out of butter and eggs, and running out of chocolate. I had to stop at the shop to get some fresh strawberries anyway so off I went. First shop had no strawberries. This started a panic hunt as I had to go to several shops to find some. Finally I tracked some down and off I went home to bake again. Of course, in the hunt for the strawberries I forgot the butter so had to go and get some from the corner store. I was a little worried because I could only get salted butter. Gotta be worth a try. There was going to be a stack of sugar in the cake so surely that would offset the salt. So finally, 9pm and I’d collected the ingredients, time to bake the third cake – this time, setting an alarm.

Third time seemed to be the charm, yummy cake made and cooling on the counter. Alarm set for 6 am to put it all together. Crash time.

Next day an early start and a danish for breakfast saw me building the cake. Not a bad effort given it’s been such a long time since I did anything like this. Looked good enough to eat ..

And the turtles didn’t look too bad for a first attempt. Monika seemed happy too, so I’m counting the cake a success.

A couple of weeks ago I made some gorgeous cupcakes. I’m not the only one who thought they were great either. I took them into work and they were gobbled up in no time. I tried one of Martha Stewart’s recipes for chocolate cupcakes, then added a teaspoon of peppermint or orange extract. They’re low fat too, but of course what I put on the top of them wasn’t I used a choc fudge frosting and used a jaffa (the kiwi ones of course) or half a mint stick to decorate the top.

For those who want to give them a go, they are incredibly easy to make. here’s the recipe. I used plain milk instead of buttermilk as I didn’t have any on hand. I got about 18 cupcakes from one batch.

Choc cupcakes

1 1/2 cups flour
3/4 cup cocoa
1 1/2 cups sugar
1 1/2 tsp baking soda
3/4 tsp baking powder
3/4 tsp salt
2 eggs
3/4 cup buttermilk
3 Tbsp vegetable oil
3/4 cup warm water
1 tsp peppermint or orange extract

1. Preheat oven to 175ºC. Line standard muffin tins.
2. Mix together all dry ingredients.
3. Add all the liquid ingredients and beat with a mixer on low speed until smooth.
4. Divide batter among muffin cups .
5. Bake, rotating tins 1/2 way through, until skewer in centre comes out clean (about 20 min).
6. Cool in tins on wire racks for 10 min. Transfer cupcakes to racks and cool.

Ok so I’ve been absent from the web for several months now. No blogging, no facebook and very little emailing. Work got crazy, and I got exhausted. Work is easing up – well, I still have way too much to do but no more crazy deadlines so I can just work my way down the list of things to do. So I’m clawing back a life again. No more 7-day work weeks.

The timing of this change is great too. It’s summer. And not Brisbane, oh-my-god-I’m-gonna-die summer, no this is a beautiful Wales summer. Where you can actually go out and enjoy the warm summer days, and evenings. I’ve been doing a little of that and plan to do more. I have a list of places I’ve been meaning to visit since I arrived here, so this summer I’m going to make a list and work my way through them.

I plan to get back to blogging, including finishing the series of posts from San Francisco (I’ll probably back date those ones, so they’ll appear before this one). Facebook? Well, that’ll probably wait a while longer.