Jessie's 3-canvas painting

Jessie was commissioned to do this for a friend who wanted it on a deep red wall, to go with a bedspread design with a pattern of red cherry blossom flowers (you can see the pillowcase in the first picture).  This is what she came up with!

Colourful fruit

So pretty!

Red Riding Hood earrings

My friend Kate told me she wanted some earrings that were shaped like Little Red Riding Hood.  After fiddling around with a few different designs I came up with these ones (as seen in the banner).

The inspiration for them was drawn from various different pictures I found on google...

The teapot is so cute!  I want it!

Another recent painting

Here's another recent painting, from this photo which was taken by Dad near Auburn in SA.

I painted it (on and off) over the course of about a day and a night, which explains the  lighting differences in the photos.  I can't really say which of them is the most accurate depiction of the colours etc.  I guess it looks different in different lights.

The finished painting!

Rainbow Cake

My husband held a "Regression Party" this week, while everyone was still on holidays.  A Regression Party is a retro kids' party, with all the fairy bread and mini frankfurters of childhood, but for adults.  He came up with this concept himself and was quite proud of it.  It was pretty much an excuse for him and his friends to get together and have Nerf-gun and Supersoaker wars and eat cake.  Anyway, he wanted that cake to be suitably exciting, so we decided it should be a rainbow marble cake and in the shape of Beartato (a character from Nedroid, a comic that we love).

To make the rainbow cake I made a white chocolate cake using this recipe:

    175g white chocolate, broken into pieces
    4 eggwhites
    1 cup (250ml) milk
    1 tsp vanilla extract
    2 cups (300g) self-raising flour
    250g caster sugar
    A pinch of salt
    1 tbs baking powder
    125g unsalted butter, softened

1. Preheat the oven to 180°C, grease and line cake pan.
2. Melt the white chocolate, set aside to cool.  In a separate bowl, whisk the eggwhites, vanilla and 1/2 of the milk to combine. In another separate bowl, use an electric mixer to mix the flour, sugar, baking powder, butter and salt with the rest of the milk.  Beat until the mixture is light and fluffy. Stir in eggwhite mixture, then the melted chocolate.  Mix until well combined.
3. Spread the mixture into the pan, then bake for 45-50 minutes until a skewer inserted in the centre comes out clean (cover the cake loosely with foil). Leave cake to cool in the pan for 10 minutes, then turn out onto a wire rack to cool completely.

Except before I got to part 3 I separated the mixture into 6 bowls and added food colouring.  Apparently you can get some kind of gel food colouring which doesn't thin the mixture, but they don't have it at my shops.  I just used regular liquid food colouring and it turned out ok. 

I poured the coloured mixtures into the tin one by one, like so:

When it was cooked it went a kind of brown-purple colour on top but with patches of different colours showing through.  Spectacular!  This is a cupcake made out of scrapings of leftover mixture:

For decorating ideas I googled "Beartato cake" and found this one which I shamelessly copied.  My cake tin was a bit too long for Beartato, so I chopped off about 10cm at the top.  I rounded the corners and used the chopped-off bits to fashion two ears, then slathered the whole lot with blue buttercream icing and put it in the fridge to set.  Buttercream icing is really gooey when you first put it on but it hardens when you put it in the fridge for an hour or so, and once it's hard you can smooth it with a warm knife to get a finish almost as perfect as fondant icing.  I actually don't like the taste/texture of it that much, though - it's just like eating a lump of  pure butter.  You can feel it hardening your arteries as it goes down.  Anyway, after that irresistible selling point, the recipe: 

    250g white chocolate, broken into pieces
    300g cream cheese
    150g unsalted butter, softened

    Melt the white chocolate, then cool. Transfer to the bowl of an electric mixer, then beat with the cream cheese and softened butter until light and fluffy.   Add food colouring as desired.

So yeah, once I'd neatened it up I added details a la Beartato with black gel icing from a tube and a few bits of fondant icing from a packet.

I don't think it looks as good as the one I copied it from, but oh well.  The inside of the cake looked great!  Next time, though, I would probably make less red and orange and more purple and blue - the purple was only a thin layer on the outside and the red was all pooled in the middle, so it seemed like there was more of it.