Z as in Zebra

My buddies Stephen and Melissa are huge fans of Lost, so it made perfect sense for Stephen to have a Lost-themed 33rd birthday party. Melissa asked me to make the cake and suggested that the Dharma logo would be perfect.

Admittedly, I’ve never seen a single episode of the show, but I do have the power of Google working on my behalf, so it wasn’t too hard to figure out what kind of cake I was supposed to make.

I started by printing out the logo at the size I would need for the cake (a 12″ round, which I cut into an octagon).

I then used all the bits and pieces from the template to create black fondant pieces (thanks, Anya, for generously giving me your leftover black fondant!! You are awesome!)

I allowed those to dry overnight on hunks of waxed paper, then transferred them over to the octagon-shaped, buttercream-covered cake.

The waxed-paper-backing technique worked really well and allowed me to get everything lined up almost perfectly!

Then, all it needed was a little buttercream lettering to round out the logo.

Not bad, huh? Especially since I have no idea what this logo represents. HA!

Stephen, happy 33rd birthday, pal! Glad to hear your party was a smashing success! Happy to have been a part of it in this way!

My mother-in-love found this old hymnal at a thrift store and immediately knew I could use it to make a repurposed journal.

Old books are so awesome because the covers feature different variations of embossing or debossing. So neat!

Since this was an old hymnal, I used sheet music scrapbook paper for the inside paste pages.

I also added a ribbed brown ribbon bookmark.

Sing it with me, y’all: Joy to the world, this book is done!

In September, I started a cupcake adventure. If you haven’t read about it yet, you can do so here.

***

I guess I can bake faster than I can blog! That said, here are the shots from the cupcakes I made for St. Patrick’s Day.

The dry ingredients are the typical ones you’ve likely come to expect: flour, salt, baking soda, baking powder.

And, naturally, the batter starts by creaming together these two studs: butter and brown sugar.

Mmmm.

Perhaps the name of this post gave you a clue as to what else comprises the batter: pistachios!

No St. Patrick’s Day treat would be complete without green dye!

To round out the batter, I alternated adding sour cream and the dry ingredients from the first photo.

…and then the chopped pistachios.

Yummy!

Then, the suckers were baked until brown around the edges.

To make the icing, I started by melting a little bit of butter and water.

Next came the powdered sugar.

And, naturally, more green dye and some vanilla extract.

Green, green, green.

Here’s the final product as a group:

…Better make sure these taste good.

Um, YUP! They sure do!

Sláinte!

In September, I started an adventure. The goal was to work my way through an entire cupcake cookbook, one recipe at a time. The whole book features 113 recipes, and to date, I have baked, tasted, and posted about 38 of the 113 types; roughly one third of the book.

Some have been extra-tasty-ooh-let’s-make-these-again-sometime recipes while others have been ‘never-agains’. No matter how they taste once finished, each batch has taught me a little more about cooking (and myself). I’m telling you, there are life lessons to be learned in the kitchen!

You can find the corresponding post to each one of these batches here. Thanks for following along and commenting as I make my way through the book. The feedback I get from you makes this crazy idea all the more worthwhile.

Cheers,

Abbi

It’s not very often that I get to make journals for kids, so I was very excited when my friend Anne contact me regarding her nephew’s upcoming birthday.

Teddy will be turning 4 this month, and in Anne’s words, “he would love a personalized field journal to write down ‘observations.’”

How cute is that?! Anne did some research about Teddy’s favorites and as luck would have it, he loves green frogs! I happened to have the perfect fabric for his book!

To jazz up the fabric a bit, I added orange brads to give the frog’s warts some texture (eww?)

I also used silver embroidery floss for the bugs’ flight patterns.

I love the depth that the sewing gave both the wings and the swirls. I’d been wanting to try this technique for a while, and this fabric was the perfect opportunity!

Teddy’s favorite color is red, and since no observation journal is complete without a writing utensil, I added a red ribbon pen loop and a red mechanical pencil.

Teddy also loves the alphabet, so for the inside paste pages, I used lettered paper in coordinating colors. Anne also included the verbiage for a personalized inscription, so I added that to the inside cover as well.

Anne, thanks for asking me to make Teddy’s book! It was such a fun change of pace to make a child’s journal!

Teddy, HAPPIEST OF HAPPY BIRTHDAYS!! May this book house all your big ideas!

In September, I started a cupcake adventure. If you haven’t read about it yet, you can do so here.

***

What, you’ve never heard of a Cupcake Kabob before?!

The first thing I did to prep the kabobs was grab a bunch of these:

And a bunch of these:

If I could help it, I didn’t want to repeat colors on each kabob, so I skewered the candied fruit slices on the sticks so I could get a feel for how things would pan out.

The next several steps are the same ones I followed to make the Lamington Mini-Cupcakes. In fact, the same mini-cuppies were used, so I just repeated the photos here in case you missed the Lamingtons post (shame on you, by the way).

Like I mentioned before, it made a BIG batch…which is good when you have lots of kabobs to create!

The icing was a simple paste made of warm milk and confectioner’s sugar.

Each mini cupcake was hand-dipped in the icing,

and the excess was given a moment to run off.

Here’s the tricky part…you have to refrain from just gobbling these up after they are dipped. It’s difficult, let me tell you! Especially since they are so miniature and cute!

Since I managed a sliver of self-control long enough to add some sugar sprinkles, this was the final result:

Now, repeat a million times with various colors of sugar sprinkles.

Okay, maybe not a million, but MANY times nonetheless.

Mmm. If you are the impatient type, you could just stop here, slap these babies on a plate, and call it a day. You just wouldn’t be able to call them “kabobs.”

I then added one cupcake of each color (orange, yellow, pink) to a skewer, alternating fruit slices in between.

And repeat. And repeat. And repeat. And repeat….

Since these were for a bake sale, I wrapped each one in cellophane, tied the ends with cheerful yellow ribbon and called it a day.

They were absolutely darling.

And I was absolutely spent.

In September, I started a cupcake adventure. If you haven’t read about it yet, you can do so here.

***

Halloween?! Yes, I know it’s April now. I didn’t choose the names for the cupcakes I make…I’m just working my way through the book. Never mind the timing, or the title for that matter, if it bothers you that much. Besides, the finished product doesn’t look Halloweeny at all. So there.

First, of course, I creamed together butter and sugar.

If you EVER need to zest something, get yourself a microplane zester. It will change your life (at least in the kitchen). Promise.

I zested the living daylights out of this orange, being careful not to shave down into the bitter pith.

Then, I squeezed the juice from the zested orange,

added some lemon juice,

and then added some water to make 2/3 cup.

I gathered together my dry ingredients, including the orange zest.

Dry and wet ingredients were alternated into the mixer with the butter/sugar combo to make the batter.

The zest was folded in,

and red food coloring was added to make the batter a deeper orange color.

Now, if these aren’t the most fun papers…makes me feel like singing and dancing around in the summer sunshine! (oh, wait, it’s only April.)

The final batter reminded me so much of the orange sherbet push-up-pops from my childhood.

And the color was so pretty after the cupcakes baked, too.

Next, orange juice and powdered sugar formed the basis of the “icing”, which you’ll soon see isn’t much like a frosting at all.

In fact, after it boiled, it was more like a jelly.

Few things make a cupcake cuter than a jellied fruit slice.

Each cupcake had a corresponding slice and they waited to be merged using the jelly topping.

Again, to deepen the orange color, food dye was added.

THAT’S more like it!

A dollop here, a dollop there, here a dollop, there a dollop, everywhere a dollop dollop.

Ta Da! Looks like a tropical drink of some sort!

So many neon orange cupcakes…

and they just looked so cute, I couldn’t stop myself from posing with one of them.

Nor could my husband avoid jumping in the shot after I peeled the paper in preparation for the “bite shot”. Ha!

The jelly topping definitely made for a different experience, but if you like orange-flavored foods or jelly-filled donuts, you’d probably dig these.

Boo! (had to get some sort of Halloween reference in there!)

This post is about dreaming up experimental ideas and seeing them through to completion.

I’ve been wanting to design a book like this for a long time (several years, if I’m being honest) and a couple weeks ago I decided to just bite the bullet and make it.

Besides, I had this amazing retro paper that needed a purpose! I couldn’t just leave it sitting in the shoebox for too long! It was created for something greater (much like all of us!)

And though the cover was fairly basic, the book’s insides were anything but.

In fact, this adorable book measures just 4.675″ square when folded. However, once its contents are allowed to unravel, the book measures an impressive 36″ from tip to tip.

(I could make all sorts of analogies here about “don’t judge a book by its cover” and all that, but I think you guys get the gist without me having to dumb it down for ya.)

The “book” has 16 panels (6 squares, 10 triangle halves) which could be used for a mini-scrapbooking project…photos in the squares, writing and ticket stubs and other ephemera. Or, it could become a canvas for writing, painting, collage, etc.

Once the book is full, the tie closures can be turned into a hanger, if you’d like to display the book’s contents. Think what a great gift this would be for someone you love!

The possibilities for this book are endless, and I’m excited that I FINALLY got around to making it. It went together fairly quickly and I hope to make more projects like this in the future.

In the meantime, if you have fallen in love with Ziggy Zaggy, I’m selling it! Click here for details.

First one to call dibs and send their payment will be the proud owner of this newest creation from Z as in Zebra!

In September, I started a cupcake adventure. If you haven’t read about it yet, you can do so here.

***

Now that 1/4 of 2010 is behind us, it’s a good time to remind you of the fun and excitement that came with ringing in a new year! What better way than with a batch of confetti cupcakes?!

First…you get to take out some aggression on a bag of Jolly Ranchers.

Aren’t they pretty? All those little candy bits look like pirates’ treasure! Jewels!

Then…guess WHAT!…you cream together butter and sugar to start the base for your batter.

Eggs and other such ingredients round things out.

Then the pretty candy pieces are thrown into the mix.

Sorta looks like a bowl of Fruity Pebbles that sat in milk too long, huh?

The yellow (and red) papers complemented the confetti batter quite nicely.

Next, sugar and egg whites are combined to form the icing.

Once that mixture is a bit frothy…

You use another pan to continue beating the eggs/sugar over boiling heat (definitely not for the faint of heart).

Once that process is finished, the icing resembles fluffy divinity.

Slap some of that sugary goodness on each cupcake and you’ll have something that looks a little something like this:

Naturally, you can’t have “confetti” cupcakes without confetti sprinkles!

Cute!

The Jolly Rancher chunks melted in the oven and gave the whole cupcake an interesting fruity flavor. There were no hard bits left and since the color blended, there were no bright, concentrated bits like you might expect from those commercial “Funfetti” cake mixes.

Overall, a fun way to ring in the new year (Or a new month. Or a birthday. Or for no particular reason at all.)

In September, I started a cupcake adventure. If you haven’t read about it yet, you can do so here.

***

Whenever I have several batches of cupcakes to make, I start by measuring out my dry ingredients into labeled containers. It saves me a lot of time measuring and dividing.

As with most every recipe, you start by creaming butter and sugar, and then add the egg(s):

With Red Velvet cake, you use an obscene amount of red food coloring…this recipe called for 2 TB!

Obviously, all that coloring give the batter a killer shade of maroon:

Then, the dry ingredients are added.

As is the milk. You’ll notice that the dry ingredients include cocoa…Red Velvet cake is essentially just chocolate cake with a boatload of dye in it.

Here’s our batter, ready to be baked!

And here they are, fresh out of the oven!

The icing the author suggests for these cupcakes is similar to the one I use for most of my cakes: a buttercream made from shortening, powdered sugar, water, and flavoring (vanilla used here).

Once that was whipped up, I prepped my piping bag to make decorating a snap.

LOVE LOVE LOVE rosettes. They are so simple and so elegant all at the same time. And what’s NOT to love about sugar sprinkles?!

I also made some red buttercream and accented the rosettes with large white heart sprinkles.

When the icings started running low, I mixed the two together to create a swirl effect.

They looked pretty cute as a set, too. These did very well at my cousin’s bake sale. I guess everyone loves Red Velvet!