Happy Australia Day!

My friend over at Rhyme Time shared an idea with me for Australia Day that is from the New Idea Magazine. She knows how much I love to make and bake gorgeous food, and felt that I would love these too. Very easy to make, these Koala Cupcakes are sure to be a huge hit with my kids tomorrow. They will love their special Australia Day treat.

I will let you in on a dirty little secret though... I didn't make the cakes from scratch! When I decided to make these little beauties I knew that I would want to send some to my lovely neighbours next door. Their young son has a dairy allergy, so the recipe needed to be adapted to suit him too. I have had the most insane couple of weeks (I'll fill you in at the end of the post about everything that has been going on) and really really didn't feel like baking, but I also really wanted to make these for the kids. So instead, I went to the supermarket and found a packet mix that is gluten free, dairy free, nut free etc etc. Super easy to make once I used the milk and margarine that he can have, and I know that it won't make him sick.

Anyway, once the cakes were made, I whipped up some buttercream frosting and coloured it with black food colouring until it made the most beautiful silvery grey colour. Then dipped them in the coconut, made the ears from pink marshmallows (cut in half, iced and coated in coconut); the eyes are mini choc chips or mini chocolate M&M's; and the nose is a black jelly bean. Add one Australiana prop and you have a True Blue, Dinky Di, Aussie Morning Tea!

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On a side note... The reason for the madness and mayhem at my house lately is that I have quit my job at Curves - I am instead embarking on a new career as a Family Day Care provider. Basically this means that I am my own boss, working from home caring for other people's children. This is all very regulated and official and runs through our local council. It has involved lots of work around my house getting it all up to scratch as far as safety issues go (Big thanks to my Dad for all his hard work, as he has been the one making it all happen!). I will also be going back to school, studying for my Certificate III in Children's Services. I'm very excited about all of this and hope that it works out well.

In addition to all this we are madly packing for a holiday. Just before Christmas my SH entered a competition with an online Cruise magazine and he won a trip for two onboard the Celebrity Century cruising from Auckland to Fremantle for 18 nights! We have come to realise just how great my parents are as they have agreed to watch our kids (and our house) while we make the most of this opportunity. What a great start to the year!

Pay It Forward 2012

Well folks, I have done it again! I swore that I wouldn't do another PIF project after last year and I have just committed to doing another! It was a great experience last year, but far too involved for what should have been an easy process. Painted projects are time intensive and very personal. I found the whole process very stressful and I constantly worried whether my work would be as appreciated as I would hope. I know that wasn't the point of doing the project, however my heart and soul went into each piece that I worked on, and it felt like giving a little piece of me away each time with no guarantee that the recipient would love it as I did.

So that being the case, I have decided that I won't be painting anything for the project this year. I have other plans in mind! I'm going to make 6 pieces again (it's supposed to be five, but seeing that I couldn't count last year and completed 6, I'm going to do the same again this year) but this time they are all going to be the same item, just different versions thereof. The good thing with this method is that I can work in batches, so I should be able to complete them more readily. Last year I worked on the projects one at a time and began in February, finishing the last one at the end of September! Hopefully I will be able to complete these ones in a more timely fashion.

Who knows, if it all works out, I might do a "Part 2" for the second half of the year! I love giving people things that I have made. Usually it's food, but in this case it's something that they can use. No Spoilers! Nearly gave it away there! You will just have to wait until I have posted them out before I will be posting photos. So... until next then, I'll leave you guessing!

18 Christmas Cakes & A Gingerbread House

Well it has been a marathon couple of weeks in my kitchen. I have been baking Christmas cakes for sale as I blogged about earlier. I finished decorating the last of my cakes today and it was such a relief. I am really pleased with how it all went as I ended up with orders for 18 cakes. So far the response to the cakes has been extremely positive. The decorating went well, helped along by my awesome mum. Between the two of us we decorated 16 of the cakes in 2 hours last week. The other two cakes were still baking, and I decorated them this afternoon.

Some of the cakes ready for decoration. We cut out boards to fit under each of them.

The first six cakes decorated. My mum brought a selection of ornaments to put on top of the cakes.

All finished and ready to be wrapped in cellophane.

In the midst of baking and decorating Christmas cakes I have also been baking decorated Christmas cookies, gingerbread Christmas ornaments and now today, a Gingerbread House.

My kids were given a kit of cutters to make a Gingerbread House, so we decided to use it before Christmas so that they could show their uncle on Christmas Day (he is the one who gave them the kit). I love making gingerbread and have a great recipe from my mum. We make it every year, cutting out Christmas shapes and then once they are baked, we hang them on our Christmas tree. My kids love spending the week before Christmas eating them, and it makes the house smell delicious.  So this year I have made gingerbread twice, once with my neighbour and her two kids, and now again today to make a Gingerbread House. Once the house was cut out and baked we started taking photos and putting it all together.

I used a recipe for the royal icing that I found over at Sweetopia. The only thing I found was that my egg whites were very fresh and I think that affected the consistency of the icing. I needed to use almost twice the amount of icing sugar to get it right.

Once I did get the right consistency I was about to start raising the walls and putting the roof on.

Raising the walls.

First side of the roof is going on.

I did decorative trim along the joins to make it prettier.

 Because the icing is so thick I did all the assembly work and then my kids were able to start decorating.

I have to say that I am really happy with the job they did. They worked really hard, and only ate a few of the lollies as they were going along. Most of them ended up on the house!

Painted Presents

My sister and I have been busy painting again, and this week we both finished the projects we have currently been working on. We are starting to advertise our pieces for sale, and are putting together an album on our facebook page for people to look at. If you are local and would like to purchase one of our hand painted items for a great Christmas gift, feel free to pop over and browse our album at Painted For You. If you like what you see there, feel free to share our page with your family and friends too. We are trying to build our profile and would love it if you could "like" our page. The more the merrier, I say!

Also, you might be interested in having a look at the new page I have created called  Pay It Forward Project 2011 at the top of this blog. The Pay It Forward (PIF) Project was something I took part in on Facebook. It began as a status update (somewhere, by someone - I don't know who) that offered to give 5 friends something handmade if they promised to copy and paste the status as their own and offer the same to 5 of their friends; thereby paying it forward. I thought this sounded like fun, and it was a good reason to get back into painting again. I finished my first project on the 19th of February, 2011 and finished my last project on 28th September, 2011. It took an average of 8 - 10 hours to complete each project. I had great fun doing it, but won't be participating again next year.

Christmas Cakes by Jen

"Christmas Cakes by Jen." That's what the sign on the wall at my work says. I decided a week ago that I would try to sell a few Christmas Cakes at work to make a bit of pocket money. Optimistic in my selling power, I put 12 spaces on the order form as I thought that I would be doing well to get that many. I am selling 8" Decorated Christmas Cakes for $35 each and this is obviously a bargain as in the space of a week I have have received orders for 15!

Needless to say, I am madly preparing myself to bake and decorate this many cakes. So far I have baked 5 and have another 4 ready to go in the oven over this weekend. I need to do something each day to make sure that I keep up with demand. I'm hoping to decorate them all next weekend, so they must all be baked by then.

The exciting thing about all this? I said on my form that I would be taking orders up until the 9th December. So I still have another week of potential orders! Who knows how many cakes I will end up selling by the end of the week! I am truly thankful that I said COD and pick up only, I would hate to have to deliver them all!

Cookies for a Cure & Gingerdead Men

I've decided that cupcakes are so last year. I have discovered decorated cookies and I love them! I think they are gorgeous and some of the ones I have seen are so intricate that they scare me. I have begun following a couple of bloggers on Facebook who do these cookies on a regular basis and I am head over heels in love with them. You can check them out here Bubble and Sweet and here Sweetopia. I am not the most confident person when it comes to working with icing, so this is a bit of a stretch for me. Luckily there are some great videos over at Sweetopia that have given me a head start on the decorating with royal icing. I also thank Bubble and Sweet for some great tips with recipes to follow and advice on using the fondant icing.

My SH and I have been trying to cut out sugar from our diets at the moment for health reasons, so I have been backing off the baking. This is all well and good, but I have to bring something to our Girls' Night In at work on Wednesday night this week. The other night I browsed the internet to find some Pink recipes that I could make that were relatively easy to make. I came up with Pink Marbled Meringues and Cookies for a Cure. Yay! I had a legitimate reason to bake some cookies now.

The first thing I decided to make was the meringues as I figured this would be an easy recipe as I make pavlova all the time with great success. I followed the recipe exactly, and they were a fizzer! The meringues took on a golden colour on the outside and they were undercooked inside. I have decided that I am never going to follow another recipe for pavlova or meringue again. Mine works, and I should have trusted myself to begin with. So saying, I made a second batch, my way, and they were awesome! Exactly how I envisaged them turning out. The recipe is the same as my pavlova with a few drops of red food colouring swirled through it. Then I dropped small spoonfuls of the mixture onto baking trays dusted with cornflour.

The cookies were next, and I used a recipe that I found over at Bubble and Sweet. It is the easiest cookie recipe to make and cut. I am really happy with how well they turned out. I chose a simple design, a heart shape, covered with white fondant and then a pink fondant ribbon on top. They are super delicious too, which is making it really hard for me to leave them safe inside their Tupperware container!

The other batch of cookies I made are very different from the first batch. I don't remember exactly what prompted my online search, but I was looking at cookie cutters and came across this little guy and just had to have him! I decided to steer clear of gingerbread as the base for these cookies, opting instead for a chocolate sugar cookie. Again, I found the recipe on Bubble and Sweet's blog. I decided to use Dutch cocoa instead of the regular cocoa I normally bake with as I really wanted a dark chocolate biscuit. I am so very impressed with this recipe and how easy it is to use. These are my gorgeous Chocolate Skeleton Cookies.

The skeletons are filled in with Royal Icing.

Yay for Birthdays!

I must be the slackest of slack bloggers. It's been nearly a month and a half since my last post in here. In my defense though, it has been the craziest of times for us. September sees my two eldest children through their birthdays, as well as school holidays, and Fathers' Day. Then in October it is my nephew's birthday and most importantly of all, MY birthday!

I have been very lucky this year to have some money put aside for myself. This never happens as I always end up spending it on my kids, or the garden (I love putting new plants in the garden, it's such a good feeling!). This time however, I was determined to spend it all on me. I have always dreamed one day of owning a KitchenAid mixer but the price is prohibitive. At $799 rrp ($AU) I didn't have enough to get one from a major store like Myer or David Jones, so I started researching online to see if I could get a better price. In the end I could get close, but not close enough. Which is when my SH stepped in and said that he would put in the remainder and give it to me for my birthday! Yay for Birthdays! Anyway, my Super Hubby is also a Super Shopper and he managed the best price yet from one of our local whitegoods suppliers, E & S Traders Moorabbin - $650!! I am now the proud owner of Rosie, my beautiful Empire Red KitchenAid Mixer.

I have already used it a couple of times now. My first task was to try out the chocolate cake recipe that my family all use. I have been struggling to get a cake to rise using this recipe and yet anyone else who makes it has no problem at all. I have cake envy! Well with my new mixer the cake was a success! Obviously my old mixer has been on its last legs for some time now. It is 15 years old and has well and truly worked itself into the grave. I also managed to whip up the most gorgeous Chocolate Pavlova from my Maggie's Kitchen recipe book. This was a hit with my family from a taste perspective, but the actual recipe needs to be tweaked as it spread when it was cooking and went very thin in the middle. Not at all like my pavs normally turn out. I'll show the picture here, but not the recipe until I try it again and get it right. I have spoken to someone else who has made this particular pav recipe and she had the same problem, so I know it's not my error in this case, there must be something with the recipe that is not quite right.

It still looks gorgeous though!

This is the pavlova mixture before I baked it according to the recipe.

Finished and decorated. You can see how it has spread to the very edge of the plate.

 
Anyway, my next post will be up very quickly as I am going to put up all the photos of my craft project that I have been working on this year, so stay tuned!