Happy Canada Day!

The mid-week break was a welcomed one. I tried to veg for most of the day. The past couple of weeks have been tiring and to have a day of not doing much was great! We slept in and watched Wimbledon. Then my "maybe I really shouldn't veg all day" kicked in and we went out to weed the front lawn.

It's an uphill battle with the front lawn since we're right across a park and a school. But if our neighbours can have decent lawns it must be possible. It'll probably require more time than I'm able to give it but if I'm able to resuscitate the backyard (which actually looks good now!), I should try with the front. After two hours of weeding, I have 3 words to say, clovers are evil!! They grow low and wind all over the place. I think my grass was actually not growing well because the clovers were choking them up. I don't know if what we did actually helps, but we'll see!

The other scary thing about weeding are the random insects and worms that come out while you're digging. Now weeding isn't out a good physical work out, it's also cardio! I must have jumped from where I was kneeling, sitting, squatting, over a dozen times today.

After weeding was more vegging. :) Iron Chef America with Canadian chefs were on. Watched Susur tie Bobby Flay. :P I know it's an old episode but still good nonetheless. :) We went out for Viet food and then went to Richmond Green to catch the fireworks. I've never seen so many cars around that area, but I'd still rather go there than downtown. At least there's parking! And probably due to the Toronto strike, more people drove up to see it. I took some pics but silly me forgot to bring an extra memory card. And since I haven't downloaded pics from my camera since the beginning of the month (I know, terrible!) I was only able to take so many. Firework pics are the best, barely any post processing needed!!! (Thus, the quick posting. :P)



I've also put together a collage of the fireworks here.

Yet another sign...

...that I'm getting older. The days of staying up all night for even days in a row, or only getting 4-5 hours a sleep without feeling any effects are over. Now I stay up late one night (late as in til 4am or 5am) and it takes a few days to recover.

This past week was filled with late nights. I attended the General Synod for the Diocese of Toronto on Friday and Saturday. It was great but I was SO drained when I came home. Coupled with the fact that I had trouble sleeping on Friday night there, I woke up with a dry, scratchy throat this morning. :( A four hour advisory board meeting probably doesn't help either.

Even after taking and advil cold and napping for 2 hours today, it still feels the same, if not worse. I don't have a fever so I don't think I have the H1N1 thing, though the thought did occur to me. :P

So what kept me up til 4am last weekend??



It's the first time I assembled a desktop so it did take a while, but a fun while. :) Reminds me of the days of doing circuits in school. The case is great, other than the fact that my DVD ROM still uses an IDE cable and the port is right beside the casing for HDD. Even with my small hands I had difficulty! Anyway, I'm now thoroughly enjoying my new desktop and post processing has now resumed. :) I'll be updating with photos that have seemingly disappeared into the blackhole.

Well...that is if I don't get sick.

My first 2 tiered cake!

I haven't blogged for a long time and I'm waaaay behind my posts. I have a gazillion pictures (mostly of food, cakes really :P) to put up. And though I contemplated on waiting for those to come up first before I put this up...but why wait?



This picture kinda sucks since I took it when I got home. The lighting isn't the greatest. Maybe I'll take other ones tomorrow.

It's the final cake from my Wilton Course 3. My first 2 tiered cake! Bottom layer is chocolate with mocha buttercream. Top layer is vanilla butter cake with raspberry filling. Flowers are royal icing lilies. And of course, it's covered with fondant that smells oh so good (like cotton candy!). It's a bit sweet, but it makes the cake look so pretty.

The cake will be going to H&D's rehearsal dinner...I hope they like it!

GAGNEZ!!

"GAGNEZ", that was the first thing I saw when I rolled up the rim. I was expecting the usual "AGAIN" or "ESSAYEZ" or "Try". All it really takes is one word for me to stop rolling. So I was quite puzzled that I saw something different today. After all, including the last Roll Up The Rim Campaign, my streak was at...0 for 43?

The streak is OVER!!! No, I didn't win a laptop or money or a car. Only a coffee. But hey, after 43 loses, a coffee is quite enough to make me happy. Though if the luck quota theory were correct, shouldn't I be winning a car? :P

To bake or not to bake?

As you might have noticed, I've been quite the baking fiend (as Steve likes to call it). Perhaps it's my greatest form of procrastination, but I have the urge to do something this afternoon. I have these mangos that need to be eaten and while I would like to make another mango mousse cake (I'll blog about the first one I made later), I also feel like mango pudding. I also have these egg whites from making key lime pie (which I'll also have to blog about later) that I'd like to make swiss meringue buttercream with. Steve's requesting for me to make Lemon Meringue pie. I have a lot of whites left, so I have enough to do both! I'm having a hard time deciding what to make.

Strawberry Whipped Cream

I couple weeks ago I read a post for strawberry whipped cream. Seeing as I had fresh strawberries at home, I was really really tempted to make it. So tempted that I came home from work to bake cupcakes right away for small group. :P

Everything was going really smoothly and it seemed as if we were actually going to be on time! I like using my Cuisinart stick blender with the whisk attachment to mix whipped cream these days. It's fast, convenient and I don't lose quite as much whipped cream on the whisker as I do with the Kitchen Aid mixer. So here I was, the whipped cream was done, but I had to grab the strawberries. Steve came down to check on me so I asked him to hold the stick blender for me. However, when he handed it back to me, he had let go of the cup, and I had accidentally pressed the power. Whipped cream went flying everywhere!!! It really was quite a mess and we were both covered in whipped cream. So messy, but so funny. Needless to say, we weren't on time for small group. :P

Due to the flying whipped cream incident, I think the amount of sugar in the whipped cream wasn't quite right the first time around, could have been a bit sweeter. When I made the whipped cream for the second batch (without anything flying), it tasted great! Steve took them to work and they even wrote me a card to thank me! I feel like I should write them a card instead for helping me consume the food so I can try out new recipes. :P

Lemon Raspberry Cupcakes

The last two weeks have been quite busy at work that I haven't really gotten a chance to bake much (boo) nor work on my pictures much (another boo). But it's the weekend and while I do have some real work to do, I'd much rather procrastinate on that and work on these other things that I've wanted to do for a while. So let's catch up on some posts!


I had extra batter left over from Winson's cake, so I made some cupcakes (surprise, surprise).

I cut out the top for each cupcake and filled it with raspberry filling and then put it back on. The cupcake is topped with vanilla whipped cream and a raspberry. I had forgotten that Steve wasn't working on Wednesday so the cupcakes dried out a bit. :( Next time I'll put finished cupcakes in a sealed container first to keep the freshness.

Winson's Cake: Lemon Raspberry Cake

Two weeks ago was my good friend Winson's birthday. I bluntly asked him what cake he'd wanted and the silly boy actually said he was going to buy his own cake! Obviously that's not going to happen so I offered to get the cake. He didn't offer much in terms of cake flavour preference other than wanting it to be something he hasn't tried before. Thus becoming the perfect opportunity for me to make a cake!

I've been wanting to make a lemon raspberry cake for a while, in my (very weak) attempt to replicate one of the layers of our wedding cake. So haven't had no other inspiration and not being able to make anything with chocolate due to allergies in our group, lemon raspberry cake it was! As with any new cake recipes, there are lessons to be learned.

Lesson 1: Don't start making a cake at 10pm.

Well, in my defense, it was a very impromptu decision. So even though it wasn't such a good idea, I went ahead with it anyway. :P Here's the lemon cake batter all ready to be baked.


Lesson 2: If you cool the cake upside down, there's going to be rack lines on the cake.

I was afraid that I'd repeat the marble cake incident again, so I decided to cool the cake upside down in the hopes that it will come out in one piece. I actually decided to go to bed after the cake was done baking since it was getting quite late and I can't ice it while it's warm anyway. But I got worried about the cake coming out in one piece and went back downstairs to make sure it actually came out okay. It did but I didn't bother turning it back right-side up for fear of breaking it. The result? Cooling rack lines on the top of the cake. The top was being iced over anyway so it wasn't a big deal but next time I'll flip it back right-side up once it's out of the pan.


Lesson 3: Make more buttercream.

I decided to make a lemon buttercream (with real butter!) to ice the cake since the shortening stuff they make us use in class doesn't really taste that good. I thought since butter isn't that healthy, I should aim for a thin coat of buttercream icing. I had a small, I didn't make enough buttercream (didn't start off with enough butter, doh!). Ah well, since time was running short and I had a morning meeting, the imperfect icing had to do.



I didn't have enough icing to do anymore decorations on top so I decided to change the original design. I did small rosettes for last minute additions (you'll see later) and a shell border on the bottom.



Lesson 4: Lots of filling require border

I usually get lazy and don't pipe an edge when I do a filling in the cake but I was a bit too generous this time with the raspberry filling. The filling oozed out a bit while I was icing the side of the cake :( so I think I can't be so lazy next time.

Lesson 5: Don't use bake even strips?

The cake turned out a bit too dense. Maybe I shouldn't have used the cake even strips. Good thing the flavour was light but I think after a full meal, having a dense cake is still a bit much.

Here's the final cake topped with raspberries. :D I'm quite happy at how nice it turned out by just adding simple raspberries on top. Not perfect, but an okay first attempt at making a birthday cake from scratch. Hopefully with more practice (and time planning :P) it'll be better next time!