Thing-a-day.com

Ha, ha, ha. Since the last time I posted on thing-a-day was on the 12th, I have obviously not done very well with making something new every day. I suppose I can blame my lack of posting on school work or the many college visits and auditions that I went on, but it’s really just attributed to my lack of persistence to do this every day. However, I figure I may as well still post what I have gotten around to do - less on the craft side, but I managed to take some pictures of what I did make… memories.

OH, that was bad! Ew, haha.
Anyway, here goes - mostly photographs.

Late night cupcakes in the cold! I love the store display - Crumbs, in Westwood.

Grins with missing teeth - February days in the park!

Filled my city with bubbles! At least for a minute.

Secretly planted flowers in the middle of the night with Katie!

The beach in Santa Barbara on a cloudy day.

Organized social activities for my choir - a trip back to childhood!

On the non-photo side, I made some index-card collages to send in the mail. Fun!

Besides that, I also baked a few batches of brownies, a round of dinosaur-shaped sugar cookies, made a home-made lava lamp, started a journal, and a bunch of other things that I currently cannot remember or photograph.

In any case, I am hoping that this isn’t my last post! I will be back in these last few days, I hope. But if this is my last post, I must say that I thoroughly enjoyed looking at what everyone else made - everyone is so creative! Thanks for reading, and perhaps our paths will cross again in the future.

Playing catch up here, but still behind two days.   Tonight I made three felt cupcakes for Tricia’s girls. I had a hard time getting a nice photo of these.  I’ll have to try again in the daylight.

visit my blog: hot air! 

Thursday the Fourteenth, Valentine’s Day: Piper and I made lemon coconut cupcakes with pink icing and loveheart sprinkles!  I employed a bit of lateral thinking and used a tiny bit of beetroot juice to bring the icing to its blushing state.  Felt good to avoid using red food colouring, even though the sprinkles weren’t so healthy, no doubt…

Friday the Fifteenth: I finally convinced Piper to play outside.  Not sure why she’s been so reluctant to do so.  Meant I could take some photos outside - nothing too special, but still good to get some practice in.  Training my eye to see things from a different perspective.

I wanted to make some cupcakes today, but I had no confectioners sugar for the frosting.  So I threw together some blueberry yogurt, neufchatel cheese, sugar, butter, corn starch and salt.  Then I put it all in a blender because I don’t have a hand mixer.  They turned out really delicious!

it’s week three of thingaday and i have a new theme, “flora and fauna” (although i’m thinking things will more than likely fall heavily onto the “fauna” side of things.)

these cupcakes actually *are* dual purpose.  not only are they for thingaday but i also made a bunch of them (most not pictured) to thank people who had voted for me in a local blog competition i’m entered in.  wanna vote too?  click here,  go to the second grey box and click “glitter pissing”.  many thanks for your effort if you do!

Today I attempted Red Velvet cupcakes. I hadn’t heard of them until recently. They have a pretty interesting history it seems. I underestimated how much red food colouring I would need…so they ended up a pinky brown colour.

My bf is a fan, I however was not. They weren’t sweet enough for me. Mind you the icing was tasty.

For day 15, I will try my hand at Calligraphy!

On Day 13…

 I fed myself (yet another salad, and an improvised blt using pancetta for bacon- which works pretty well):

I planned to feed others (lemony “sunshine cupcakes” from William Sonoma Deserts cookbook, frosting forthcoming):

and I did my laundry:

exciting, no?

Valentine’s Day is almost here! I made a batch of cupcake for work, complete with handmade toppers.

For Valentine’s Day, I was courageous enough to make half a batch of Brooklyn vs. Boston Cream Pie Cupcakes (VCTOTW, page 65).  My vegan pastry crème is not as clearly visible in the photo as in the cookbook but the taste is purely heavenly.  My rich chocolate ganache frosting came out a little thinner than usual this time (probably because I had a heavy hand in measuring the soy milk) but what the heck.  I’m still loving this batch of not-overly-sweet-and-super-rich cupcakes.

I can’t believe I’m posting here at this hour.  I feel like I haven’t slept in 2 days.  I actually feel as if I had been waiting for a midnight flight at the airport.  Obviously I wasn’t feeling too creative.  Anyway, it was my mother’s birthday and since she doesn’t like eating much sweet food, I made half a batch of vegan cupcakes for her.  They were the basic chocolate cupcakes with chocolate buttercream frosting (VCTOTW) and a strawberry cut into halves on top.  Both my husband and I took photos of the cupcakes.  I like both photos below so I decided to post them together.  The cupcake looked like a bunny rabbit, don’t you think?

no, that doesn’t mean that i forgot to use baking powder, silly. these cupcakes are modeled after takashi murakami’s eyeballs that were part of the superflat art movement. (you can see an example of the painting in the right of the photo. (image from amazon))

Here is the recipe for my Cream Cheese Chocolate Cheese Cupcakes

For Day 3, I am going to make 3 cardboard toys for my cat, Serif.

Today I baked my trademark Cream Cheese Chocolate Cheese Cupcakes. My friend, Heather shared the recipe for the batter with me. It uses tofu in place of the eggs and oil, making it less of a guilty pleasure! The icing is a modification of one I came across a few months back on a craft blog. I use stevia in place of sugar. I also use low fat cream cheese and simply egg whites…the worse thing in it is probably the chocolate chips! I made these for several get-togethers over Christmas with rave reviews.

For Day 2, I am going to layout the recipe for anyone interested to download.

Eventually I would like to design a little recipe book. Perhaps one with all tofu based recipes.

Happy Friday folks!