Avocado Report #2

On the outside of her envelope she modestly notes: "I am apparently a pottery prodigy on the wheel."

1) I wonder what this augers for our (admittedly hectic) interior decoration scheme, and

2) do both of my children sound like me? Yeah, I thought so.

She appears to be having a wonderful time.

Week Four of Frosting-O-Rama

Week 4's Cake
Originally uploaded by madrobins

Sorry: still no photos from last week's cake. Maybe next week?

Tonight we learned to make little ruffles and fill space with them. As noted last week, no matter how fussy and unpreposessing a cake may be, the addition of frosting flowers suddenly legitimizes the entire enterprise and makes it look like I meant it. I, mad iconoclast that I am, scattered my roses off the lines (okay, one was in the center, but the other two were not on the edges, which seemed to make the instructor a touch nervous). As much as I hate making roses, I love making leaves. Leaves are easy and fun. I started thinking how I could make an entire cake decorated with nothing but leaves. Maybe autumn?

Pansy
Originally uploaded by madrobins

When we had finished adding swags and ruching to our cakes (and no matter the colors--and there were cakes with orange and blue ruffles and yellow and brown ruffles and pretty much every combination imaginable, and none of them looked particularly, um, manly) we moved on to the Flower of the Week.

After my frustration with roses (which are just hard, and really require doctoring the frosting with cornstarch for added stiffness) pansies just made sense to me. The one here was made by my instructor as a guide. I made some nice ones, but they didn't survive the trip home, alas.

The variation in color is achieved by painting the inside of the frosting bag with food coloring, then adding the frosting. If you twist the tip relative to the bag, you can get variations in where the color appears in the flowers. Pardon me, I'm waxing neepish...