Tag: card

baking, Cross-stitch and Embroidery, Other Crafts

Pink cake and orange cat

wittychild

Hello there!

My mom had her birthday at the end of January, but due to work scheduling, I wound up having to make her cake the weekend before.  I saw the basic idea in an old issue of Woman’s World, which is a magazine that I would generally never, ever buy – except that this issue had featured adorable Hello Kitty cupcakes on the front cover, and I had been unable to resist it.  They also had a layer-cake version of the cupcakes inside, but their recipe used something like four egg whites in the batter and another two in the icing, with no mention of what to do with the yolks, so I quickly dispensed with that idea and instead used my trusty vanilla cupcake recipe from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World as well as the fluffy buttercream icing from the same.  I also thought I might leave the kawaii characters off the cake, and maybe give it a more mature vibe.  Because nothing says “mature” like pink cake, right?

Ombre Cake 1

I, of course, did not think to get a picture of it while it was intact and free from candle holes.

Ombre Cake 2

Holy ombre, Batman!  I used varying ratios of gel food colours to get the different shades, and they worked like a charm.

Ombre Cake 3

That’s a chocolate-cream cheese filling between layers.  Since the cake itself is just vanilla and not overly sweet, it provided a nice balance and helped keep it moist for the next few days until we could get it all eaten.

She had to wait a couple more days to get the rest of her birthday goodies.  I always try to make a handmade card of some sort:

Surprised Hedgehog

And when I first saw this design on Urban Threads, I knew it had to be made into a t-shirt:

Meow Shirt

I did him in orange to look like her big ol’ furbaby.  He’s painted on – not embroidered – and I think the blue really makes him pop!

Thanks for looking – have a wonderful weekend!

baking, Cross-stitch and Embroidery

Take me right back to the track, Jack!

wittychild

Where does the time go?  One day, I was stitching up Christmas ornaments, and now, poof!  Finals, summer birthdays, that feeling of irritation that occurs when you upgrade your operating system only to find out that none of your (admittedly embarrassingly rudimentary) Windows XP software will run on Windows 8.1….

But I digress.

My dad celebrated a birthday a few weeks back, and in keeping with my Birthday Cake Rule*, I knew I had to come up with something good.  I had seen this cake on the Brown Eyed Baker some time ago and had been wanting to try it for a while.  Here’s my take:

traincake1

traincake2

Since my dad is just a wee bit (ha!) older than the BEB’s birthday boy, I passed on the rainbow cake in favour of something just a little more adult.

traincake3

This is my modification of the basic chocolate cupcake recipe from…wait for it…Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World.  It’s rich and moist without being too sweet, nice and light, and goes down easy.  Absolutely worth skipping a half-day of classes to make!

I also took a break from needling away at the rather large needlepoint project that’s been occupying my leisure time to stitch him a card.  I saw the pattern in an issue of The World of Cross Stitching, and he rather reminded me of my parents’ cat.

morkandcard

*The Birthday Cake Rule, for the uninitiated: If you really love someone, you’ll make them a birthday cake, or pie, or cookies, or other dessert of choice, from scratch.  None of this store-bakery sheet-cake stuff.

cooking, Cross-stitch and Embroidery

Mother’s Day – Better Late Than Never

wittychild

Don’t worry –  I didn’t forget Mother’s Day.  I was oh-so-dilligent, producing a homemade card and breakfast.  I just had some…issues…securing appropriate photographs.

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This is not one of the giant apple pancakes (à la Pancake House, but better!) I made last week.  Those got devoured within minutes of their hitting the table, and it wasn’t until we were halfway through that I remembered my camera was in the other room.  This is from a second batch, made today, and with camera close at hand.  It’s criminal how good these are, and how easy they are to make, too.  This may be my new special occasion recipe.

And it’s not Mother’s Day without a homemade card, is it?

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I found the pattern in an issue of Cute Cross Stitch I bought last summer, and had pretty much hung onto the magazine specifically for this card collection.  I modified it a bit – made the kitty’s nose black to look like mine, and left off the tail since she’s a bobtail – and mounted it on some pink cardstock I had on hand.

Happy May Long!

baking, Cross-stitch and Embroidery

Birthday Quickie

wittychild

Ha!  You thought this was going to be something salacious, didn’t you?  Get your mind out of the gutter; this is a wholesome, family-friendly post.  Literally, actually, since it was my mom’s birthday the other day, and I’ve only just gotten around to posting pictures.

Since the birth-flower for January is the carnation, I snapped up this mini-kit when I saw it at my local needlework shop a few months ago, figuring it was a card just waiting to happen:

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The corally-pink card, although not exactly a match for the flowers, matches almost exactly the top I bought her.  She claims this was a deliberate theme; I claim coincidence.

But what’s a birthday without cake?  After all, you don’t really care for someone if you don’t bake them a birthday cake, yadda yadda, you’ve heard this before.  After drooling over pretty much all the cakes in Kris Holechek’s Have Your Cake and Vegan Too, I decided on the Almond Mocha Cake.  It’s like an almond mochaccino in cake form!

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Layers of moist almond cake with a rich chocolate ganache in between, and topped off with a coffee buttercream?  Yes, please!

We started the day with banana-split French toast, but that disappeared before I could get my camera…

And now, I’m off for a piece of cake…

baking, Cross-stitch and Embroidery

Happy Mother’s Day!

wittychild

This year has been a far cry from last year’s adding French knots and framing on Sunday morning.  For once, I actually came prepared for Mother’s Day.

Besides the towel that I posted last weekend, I stitched up a little card for Mumsie:

It was a free kit that came with a recent issue of Cross Stitcher magazine.  The kit included googly eyes that looked freaky-deaky (the mama koala looked merely surprised; the baby looked like a strung-out Keane kid), so I added French knots to give a somewhat more natural look.

And you can’t have Mother’s Day without dessert, can you?

This is a variation on the raw strawberry cheesecake from The Post Punk Kitchen.  I made the filling as per the recipe, but used the vanilla cookie crumb crust from Vegan Pie in the Sky instead.  I’m not normally a cheesecake fan, but this wasn’t bad – light and mousse-ish, with a nice strawberry flavour.

The cake, incidentally, made a lovely finish to our breakfast of cocoa-Kahlua pancakes from Hearty Vegan Meals for Monster Appetites.  Dense and chewy, they were like eating brownies for breakfast.  Yum!

Happy Mother’s Day, everyone!

baking, Cross-stitch and Embroidery

Paws up for birthday cake!

wittychild

What is it with Margaret Sherry and cute cat designs?  While flipping through a back issue of Cross Stitcher magazine on New Year’s Eve (is that a debaucherous evening or what?), I found the perfect design to turn into a card for my mom’s birthday.  While the red velvet pancakes were charring cooking, she opened a rather unassuming white envelope to find this staring back at her:

I used 18-count fabric instead of 14 as called for by the magazine to get it to fit in the card, and used random colours that looked close enough to those on the model – perfect way to use what I had laying around.  I love the concerned look on his face, and promised to use fewer candles on her birthday cake – if only by one.

(Please excuse the “arty” shot.)

I don’t think the cake could have been any simpler to make: a double batch of the basic chocolate cupcakes from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, divided between two round layer pans, topped with a coffee-and-Kahlua’ed version of the chocolate buttercream frosting from the same.  Because I had serious doubts about my ability to wield a tube of decorating gel, I had the foresight to trace the words onto the top using a toothpick, and then follow the lines.  Hey, it may not be terribly skillful, but it worked.

And now that it’s all over, I get to breathe easy again, at least until Mother’s Day.

Cross-stitch and Embroidery

Hellooooo, nurse!…er, I mean, Hello Kitty

wittychild

I almost have the feeling that I haven’t been terribly crafty since the holidays – but then I realize, that isn’t strictly true: I’ve been sufficiently productive, but without much to show for it.  For example, a couple of weeks back I completed a set of curtains of which, due to the sunniness of their location, I was unable to obtain a decent photo.  And I’ve been working slowly but steadily, since late December, on a rather large needlepoint picture, effectively adding another UFO to my pile.  At approximately 38,416 stitches, it’s going to take me a while, but it will get done.

Despite these large-ish undertakings, I managed to work up the requisite hand-stitched card for my mom’s birthday at the end of January.

Actually, I’m the Hello Kitty fan in the house, but what better way for her to remember who it’s from?  That’s 14-count Lavender (or Lilac?) Whisper aida cloth, although the next time I attempt one of the charts from that leaflet, I’ll be using evenweave – the freaky-deaky backstitch was annoying, but ultimately with great effect.

Cross-stitch and Embroidery

What’s shakin’, Daddyo?

wittychild

So here’s the problem with parents: you stitch a card for one, and then the other one starts clamouring for one.  Okay, so not really – but I couldn’t not make a homemade card for my dad for Father’s Day.  I found a motif in an old issue of Cross Stitch Crazy that bore a vague resemblance to our youngest cat, Skeeter, and then changed the markings just a bit to make it look more like her.

That mocha-y colour around her face is the result of tweeding, my friends.  Oh, and the ball has blending filament in it for a little added sparkle.

She seems to approve:

(And so did he, for what it’s worth.)  Also under the Homemade Goodness category, I made the No-Bake Black-Bottom Peanut Butter Silk Pie from Vegan With a Vengeance. It didn’t turn out quite as it should have, I suspect – agar tends to behave unpredictably for me, and this time, although it firmed up somewhat, there was no way it would hold its shape once cut – but I calmly stuck the whole thing in the freezer and turned it into a really delicious dairy-free ice-cream-type dessert.  I miss ice cream cake sometimes, but this was definitely a worthy substitute.  How worthy?  It got devoured, and I didn’t get a picture.

Cross-stitch and Embroidery

Mother’s Day Post: Short n’ Sweet

wittychild

I don’t think I could let a Mother’s Day pass without making at least some small handmade item…that would be too weird.  I knew I wanted to do a stitched card this year, and after flipping through my ample collection of British stitchery magazines, I decided on this one for two reasons:

1) Mumsy likes dragonflies (this sort of stems from the fact that the kitties like watching and chasing them in the back yard, and since the card was supposed to be from the kitties, well, that made perfect sense)

2) It was a welcome break from my latest project, a Charles Wysocki kit called “Too Pooped” which, though enjoyable, has possibly the largest tree ever and is primarily brown and more brown.

Bonus: Now that I’ve finished it, I feel confident that I can one day tackle the Frederick the Literate kit I’ve got stashed away.

Without further ado:

Happy Mother’s Day!

baking, Cross-stitch and Embroidery

Birthday Bonanza

wittychild

Update: I was finally able to give the birth sampler/card to my coworker last week, more than a month after the baby was born, but no matter…

My mumsie’s birthday was also last week; naturally, much home-made goodness was in the works.  I made her blue velvet cupcakes (blue is her favourite colour) with vanilla-coconut buttercream frosting.  It’s kind of hard to tell in the photo what colour they are, but trust me, they’re blue.

I think that icing may be my favourite thing that I’ve ever made…all coconutty and yummy…

She still collects hedgehogs, so a hand-stitched card was a must:

It’s from issue 216 (I think!) of Cross Stitcher, and originally said “Nice Cross Stitch”, but I took some artistic liberties with it.  I still have a baby-sized callous on my finger from doing the backstitch on that.  Uurgh.  Trying to pierce the fabric where there’s no hole and it plainly doesn’t want to be pierced becomes old after a while.  Still, I think the end justified the means.

For the next piece, you must understand that “Bork” is a verb in our household, and not just an interjection.  In the kitchen, dropping, spilling, or mixing vigorously and flinging, well, anything, will cause someone to yell, “You borked the ice cream/potatoes/toast!”  (Much as the Swedish Chef yells “Bork, bork, bork!” just before he sends his utensils flying.)  She “got it” as soon as she opened it, and I daresay as custom designs/projects go, this was one of the best.  Also simplest.

It’s on one of those awesome tea towels from Sublime Stitching which was an absolute dream to work on, and is currently brightening up the oven door.

As always, thanks for looking!