Before the Blog!

Pumpkin Carving (2013)

Well, this year I set myself a challenge of creating a pumpkin within a pumpkin. I immediately thought of the aliens from the film Mars Attacks! I've used lino tools to cut out a brain from a smaller pumpkin that I then fitted into a slightly larger pumpkin. I had to cut a chunk out of the back of the brain pumpkin to make it fit.

Pumpkin brain.

Then I used my lino tools to carve the Mars Attacks! alien into the front of the pumpkin.

Here are our family pumpkins in the garden.

This is my daughter's 2013 pumpkin.

It did glow really well, shame I'm not so good at taking photos of it. Oh well, only got another year to try again.








Pond-dipping Birthday Cake


For my daughter's ninth birthday, we booked a pond-dipping session for her and her close friends at a local nature reserve called Brockholes.  Although they do lots of other more structured parties, we just wanted a party where a small group of families could all come together, siblings and parents and kind of do our own thing. We've always held original, do-it-ourselves kind of parties - maybe they'll be a section on the blog for this eventually!

Thanks to Brockholes for organising the pond dip for us. We followed the pond dip with snacks, then a short nature walk including den building (in what turned out to be torrential rain!) then back to ours for tea.

Our table centrepoint was the pond-dipping themed cake. I try to make cakes suited to the party theme and will post others on the site once I dig out the photos.

To decorate the cakes I usually use a mix of buttercream, which my children prefer over fondant. 

I made a simple plan of my basic idea. I decided I'd cut the cake to a pond shape, cover the top in blue buttercream and then add all the details with fondant and some chocolate fingers.

I've never made fondant figures before and though I'm sure there are proper tools for the task I set off making a small kneeling girl using only my fingers and cocktail sticks. To stop the fondant from sticking I used a little icing sugar on the board. 

There is plenty of advice in books and on the net for hints and tips for fondant modelling but I do tend to just 'have a go'. If I was intending to do it for more than one-offs I'd probably do a little more research.

Nevertheless, I started by making a flesh coloured fondant by mixing together some of the ready made fondant I'd bought. I used white, red and a little bit of yellow. I then moulded leg shapes, a body shape and a head shape. I used a bit of water to stick the body to the legs and then used a cocktail stick to secure the head to the body.  After I'd finished I read that a better way to stick fondant is to make a water/fondant mix (slip).

I made a pair of shoes from red fondant and propped them on the end of the legs.  Making the dress was particularly difficult - I'm sure a book or class would have helped no end.  After a lot of experimenting I cut a piece of thinly rolled out yellow fondant into a long rectangle, wrapped it round the body and then cut and pinched the edge of the dress so that knees were showing. To finish off my messy edges I rolled a really thin yellow fondant snake and wrapped this around the neck of the dress.

After adding some arms I set to work on the head.  Again, I mixed fondant to get a mid brown which I rolled into thin strips and placed on the head.  There is a strip of red as my daughter has a reddish tinge to her hair! I then gave the girl a haircut to neaten the style. I made the eyes and nose with fondant and used a cocktail stick to carve a smile which I coloured lightly with food colouring. A final touch was a small flower in the hair. Ahh, how sweet!!

The other details on the cake were dragonflies, lily pads, reeds, stones and grass. The stones are black and white fondant rolled together but not completely mixed so it looked kind of marbled.

The grass is a neat little trick. You just push green fondant through a metal sieve and scrape it off.  I've used this idea before, it looks really effective especially if you use more than one shade of green.














The dragonflies were made by rolling different sized balls of fondant to make the body and head parts and then holding them together with half a cocktail stick. For the wings I've used some leftover laminate that I cut to shape but you could use anything else appropriate. I wanted one of the dragonflies to hover over the cake so I've also skewered it to a cocktail with more fondant. 

I left all the fondant bits to harden up and then assembled the cake. I left them on plates but they were a little hard to remove - perhaps I should have used baking sheets/greaseproof paper.

I used the chocolate to make fencing (secured with buttercream) and the pond dipping boardwalk.

I popped it all together and.......

Really happy with the finished cake!


Pumpkin Carving (2012)

This year I thought I'd have a go at 3D pumpkin carving. As per usual I don't have all the right tools - you can get small fine dual edged saws and some people use mini angle grinders. 

I have only a small kitchen knife.

I started late one evening by scraping off a large section, leaving some spikey bits at the bottom. These were meant to be grass as my original idea was to make a pumpkin in a pumpkin.

By the morning I had decided to try a troll face - I figured it wouldn't have to be anatomically correct as its a troll!

I loosely plotted out the key features.  My starting point was to try and think what parts of the face would stand out most. So I started with the nose.  I can't really explain what techniques I used, I just started carving little bit after little bit until a nose shape started to form.  




I moved onto the eyes, cut out the slits and just carved underneath the socket and above the socket so that the eyes were sunken in.  Luckily, by carving above the eye this began to make the brow.



Finally, I carved the shape of the lips and carefully cut out the teeth. I tried to give the lips some roundedness through gentle carving. Throughout the carve I used my fingers to smooth over the pumpkin.

Check out the pumpkins made by my daughters.  My eldest used lino tools to carve out this gorgeous skull butterfly pumpkin.  My youngest designed her own spooky face and as simple as it is, it was probably the most effective when lit.

I'm really pleased with my own troll face pumpkin but it did take several hours.

As my brother said to me 'You've obviously got too much time on your hands!'

Well, the rest of the pumpkin didn't go to waste.  We had a go at making pumpkin soup. No recipe. Just boiled up the pumpkin in vegetable stock with some onion, potato, carrot and added some cumin powder and touch of cream (not essential, just had some in).  Served it with cheese and black pepper. Yum!

Lily Painting 

The 40days project (see links) has helped me to kick start some of the other projects I've had part finished around the house - this is one of them. I've always loved drawing and painting and so decided about a year ago that I would paint my own wall art rather than buy it. I made a start by photographing some lovely lilies bought  for me by my husband and enlarging an outline onto a large rectangular canvas.  I'm using acrylic to paint the lilies but for the background colour I've used wall paint in the same shade (earth green - I think) as two of the walls in my living room as this is where the painting will go. Fed up with not getting much further I've decided to hang the incomplete painting on the wall anyway in the hope this will spur me on to finish it bit by bit over the coming months.

Oh yes, the coving still needs painting too!