My First Gingerbread House

Last Saturday I went to a Gingerbread-House-Decorating evening with a colleague. We were supplied with everything pre-made and ready to go, which made the whole process very easy. I feel that my cooking skills would let me down more than my decorating skills.

I took a photo once the major construction was finished, just in case it later collapsed.

While that set, last year's MasterChef winner, Kate, talked to us about food and Jesus and stuff.

Then we got to decorate. I had to steal some of the supper items to complete my vision, and it was very hard  not to constantly eat the decorating supplies, but I succeeded on both counts. Mostly.

I feel inspired. Next time I think I'd like to take on something more ambitious (of course I would). But with less Jesus. We're going to have our own gingerbread house making. With Blackjack. And hookers.

Pre-Halloween Craft Party

On the weekend I had some friends over for an afternoon of Halloween cupcake-decorating and pumpkin painting (and an excuse for more gross punch) and an All Hallow's Read Secret Skeleton.

Having tested some cupcake designs earlier, I decided the best ones were the Owls and the Creepy-Crawlies, so I got the stuff for those and we started with those. Then we improvised, with extra help from a bag of lolly facial features.

First up, here's the punch. Another round of frog spawn punch...

...and a second go at eyeball punch. The colour wasn't as good on this eyeball one because I mixed in some juices and soft drinks with a less vibrant colour.

Then later the colour leached out of the black jelly at the bottom and turned it all disgusting. Plus the eyeballs were starting to disintegrate.

Secret Skeleton was fun. We had struggled with knowing appropriate age books for kids, but it seemed to go ok.

Then we started on the cupcakes. Owls and creepy-crawlies (including chocolate-coated sultana ants)

Then the moustaches and mouths came out!

Oh no! I ate a bug!

Early Christmas Special - Demon Rudolph.

And with the most mutated mouth award, demon zombie panda.

I wanted to try painting on pumpkins this year for a few reasons. One, as I mentioned in my introduction to this year's Halloween series, is having no desire to set fire to anything in my house. Also it isn't dark when trick-or-treaters come. Also, good carving pumpkins are not easy to get or cheap here. I carved a Queensland blue once and it was very hard physical labour. So I picked a pumpkin I like to eat, and we painted instead.

Can't wait to eat some pumpkin.

I blatantly copied mine from the colouring-in sheets I'd printed for the kids.

What a fun Halloween-y day! Although I think we all had severe sugar crashes.

Snails!

Another Halloween recipe test.

This was from the Vegetarian Society website and it seemed like a cool-looking idea. Slimy snails full of slimy stuff.

I don't like a bunch of the ingredients so I left them out in my test, and I wasn't really excited about the flavour. I guess that's what you get for messing with recipes! So I can't vouch for whether it would be good as intended or not. I guess you'd have to like gherkins, coriander and spring onions to find out!

But visually, super awesome.

And texturally, yucky! Slimy and weird.

Halloween Punch, Round 2

I needed to find a second punch to go with the Frog Spawn, so I experimented a bit.

Blood Orange Agrum blended with strawberries and peach slices. Black-coloured rasberry jelly chunks at the bottom.
 

Lychees with blueberries in the centre to be eyeballs. Once again, thank you Martha Stewart.

I just don't like the texture of the fruit blended in there. For the weekend I think I'll stick to a mix of juices and soft drinks with the same eyeball and black sludge extras. I hope it will also make the eyeballs more visible.

Cupcake decorating tests for Halloween

After my cupcake-decorating hens night, we were keen to do some more, and Halloween was agreed on as the perfect occasion. And so my pre-Halloween Craft Party was planned. Today I tested out some decorating ideas.

First, I wanted to try making red velvet cupcakes using my mum's recipe which uses grenadine. After putting a few ingredients together and getting this gross-looking concoction, I knew the Halloween baking was off to a good start. Now I need a recipe that looks like this when it's done!

The first decorating idea was creepy crawlies. This comes from "Hello Cupcake" by Karen Tack and Alan Richardson. I used an icing pen for the legs and antennae, where I think they use chocolate, because I happened to find one while shopping for ingredients.

Then the bodies are made out of M&Ms.

I stuck to centipedes and spiders, but in the book they do ticks, scorpions and ants as well.

Things I learned - centipedes need longer legs than you think, and a bend in their body to look creepy. The redbacks managed scary easily enough (well, scary for something made of sugar).

Next up was eyeballs. Inspired by this lady on Martha Stewart. I had some trouble with the eyeballs. The pupils are slices of soft liquorice, the irises and red streaks are bits of jelly snake. The problem? The snakes kept wanting to straighten up again. Any suggestions?

Then I switched to cream cheese icing and some brains. I saw some on Pinterest and it looked so easy! At first my icing was too runny and the brains sunk and lost their shape. Even when I thickened it up it still wasn't as easy as I had imagined. (I kinda hate people who make the beautiful foods you find in cookbooks and on the internet. It looks easy. I just can't do it!)

Then some owls. These are also from Hello Cupcake.

Again, piping the feathers etc was harder than it looked (I've done that before though, and maybe butter cream icing is a better consistency for it) and my oreos just wouldn't come cleanly apart! But it is a super-cute design so I think it still works.

Looking forward to trying to perfect some of these designs next weekend at the Craft Party.

Frog Spawn Punch and EPIC Weeding

Mum came out for the wedding and she brought with her a magazine from their supermarket, Morrisons, because it had some Halloween recipes she thought I might like to look at. Particularly the Frog Spawn Punch (If you have a look at their online mag here, then go to page 4 and click on the picture of the punch, you'll find the recipe - actually it's a bit weird but they have extra recipes on the site than in the print magazine so that's cool).

Rhiannon came up to help me do some weeding today, so we had punch during our lunch break

I can see why someone looked at a kiwi fruit and thought, "Frog spawn."

Mum and I talked about leaving out the jelly, but then found vegetarian jelly crystals and I was able to proceed as normal. Although the jelly was clear so I added my own colouring.

Lots of lovely froth.

A rare excuse to use not only the cocktail glasses but my Halloween glass charms.

I don't actually like kiwi fruit and I felt personally that it tasted too much like kiwi fruit. But Rhiannon assured me it was good. On his return from work, Bennie liked it too.

Looks like it's on the menu for my Halloween Craft Party. I think I will find a second punch recipe (perhaps something orange?) that I do like to go with it.

The actual weeding went well. Today's mission was to rip into the Blue Periwinkle in the back. I'd had a bit of a go at it, and discovered chicken wire hampering my efforts and temporarily given up, slaughtering another Agapanthus instead.

Before shot, with one slight dent made by my previous efforts:

After about 3 hours of work. We reached the trunk of one of the trees! I don't feel these photos do justice to our epic battle.

But we also uncovered a lot of things (in addition to the chicken wire) - a section of pipe, a broken toy spanner, a nasty-looking spider, some rope, some string, a piece of metal that looked like it was once part of some play equipment, a golf ball, and a crazy twist of metal wire that is still in there. Looks like more epic battles will be required.

Cheers! We earned this punch!

Oh no not another potential hobby!!

My most amazing bridesmaids, or "Matrons of Awesome" as I also like to call them, threw me a superfantabulous Hens party yesterday. We had a cupcake-decorating class at my friend's house, followed by dinner, and it was an inspiring way to spend a day. I love learning new things, and as always I got very excited by it and have lots of probably-doomed plans to do a lot more of this.

We each made a monkey, a lion, a zebra and a cookie-monster face. In my house, we have already eaten cookie monster!

This is my monkey and lion. My monkey's head was too small and his neck was too long, so I gave him a scarf. Scarves proved popular with several monkeys suffering the same condition. This is almost the perfect camera angle to hide the bad bits of my lion.

My zebra:

All four of mine, including a crumb-covered cookie monster:

Here are Rhiannon's:

Here are the rest that I got photos of:

 

Best Hens night ever!

An introduction from Rhiannon

I'm Rhiannon, the other half of Jupiter Hollow.  What can you expect in a blog post from me?

• CRAFTS - I love textile crafts, and will blog about crochet, embroidery, sewing, costuming and other techniques that catch my eye.  I'm currently doing the NSW Embroidery Guild's basic course and some of my assignments might end up here for show and tell.
• NEAT THINGS FROM THE PAST - I have a strong interest in vintage crafts and food, fed by my historian's training. On occasion I'll try out a recipe or pattern from an old journal or book and share the results here.  Old advertisements, funny anecdotes culled from the Australian Women's Weekly -  all are fair game. I've written on the history of Christmas, and I'd like to bring some of that to a wider audience through this blog. 
• GEEKY CRAFTS - I'm a roleplayer and so are most of my friends. Those influences often come through in the crafts I make as gifts
• ETHICAL FASHION - I too have an interest in ethical fashion, so you can expect some posts about that, whether refashioning existing clothes or searching for ethical choices to buy, wardrobe planning or talking about other blogs that are doing cool ethical fashion ideas.
• REVIEWS  - Any books that I think are relevant to the general interests of the blog - so craft books, sustainable fashion & design, maybe some history of crafts/fashion/food - will get reviewed. I'm planning to review all the relevant books I own and the ones I have access to in local libraries. But I imagine I'll be busy just reviewing new things I buy. 

To give you a sense of the eclectic madness coming from me, here are some photos of past projects which may yet be blogged about if I feel so inclined!