Piano cake and cupcakes

This is my third piano keyboard cake. For this one, I decided to step it up a notch and use rolled fondant over the keys to give it a smooth, clean look. The black keys are made of miniature Charleston Chews. The display box, designed to look like a grand piano, was made out of foam board and cardboard, and painted black with nontoxic tempera paint. Three different types of cupcakes fill the box.

(Photo by Aslan Askarov.)

Appa cake

Back in December, I became obsessed with the idea of making a cake in the shape of Appa, the flying bison from Avatar: The Last Airbender. With help of my more experienced cake-making friend, Fran, I set out to make the Appa cake.

These photos illustrate the process starting from two boxed cake mixes and four pans, to assembling and decorating the bison.

We started with one flat 8.5x11 pan, one small loaf pan, and two domes (from the Wilton "sports ball" kit.) With some trimming, the flat cake became Appa's body and tail. The loaf was cut into six equal slices, which we laid flat to create Appa's six legs. After a coat of thin icing, we layered the domes to create Appa's head and "hump." (We trimmed the rounded top off the "hump" dome and used it to bolster the head dome. This also helped create the shape of Appa's face.) We used the corner scraps from the flat cake to create his puffy cheeks, and a trimming from the front of the "hump" to help round out his tail.

Next, Fran iced the whole thing, and we piped a little extra icing into any spots that needed smoothing. A thorough coating of shredded coconut helped hide any remaining flaws, and created Appa's shaggy fur.

I had puzzled a long time about how to best make the brown arrow/stripe down Appa's back. After deliberating over using store-bought fondant, making my own fondant, or attempting to do a neat job with icing, I went with an online recipe for marshmallow fondant. (I added cocoa and food coloring to make it chocolatey and brown.) This was a very messy step and I thought the fondant would be too sticky to use, but after much kneading and adding of powdered sugar, it magically acquired a Play-Doh consistency. We rolled out the fondant to cut Appa's stripe.

I also used a large amount of the fondant to sculpt the horns. I left the horns in the freezer for several hours, then dipped them in melted dark chocolate. (I say "dipped," but really it was more like painting the chocolate onto the horns.) They went back into the freezer to harden, then were attached with toothpicks. The horns still had a little trouble staying in place, and you can see them sagging in some of the later pictures, unfortunately.

Appa's toes were made out of chocolate-covered almonds. I frosted his cheeks with chocolate icing, then cut another piece of the fondant for his nose and coated it with black icing from a store-bought icing pen. His eyes were made from chocolate-covered espresso beans dipped into the white frosting, then pushed into his face; I dotted black and white icing with a toothpick to create pupils and highlights.

Lastly, Appa's ears are created from large marshmallows sliced on the diagonal, coated in icing and coconut on top and chocolate icing on the bottom, and attached with toothpicks. Another marshmallow was cut in half and covered in icing/coconut to give Appa a lower jaw.

The whole project took two nights to complete, but it was worth it; many people thought we must be professional pastry chefs! :)

Bulldog pillows

Inspired by the excellent bulldogs, Lola and Messier. This is my first experiment in heavy duty color knitting. Here are pictures of the finished product, along with both dogs and their corresponding pillows.

I started by drawing a color sketch of both dogs' faces, then scanned that and outlined it using GIMP. I printed the outlined version on knitting graph paper, which I colored in to make a rough pattern for knitting.

The backs are attached using blanket stitch. I used an acrylic yarn (Paton's Canadiana), chosen for their wide range of colors and the fact that theoretically, the pillow covers are machine washable, just in case the real dogs get too close and have some kind of slobber incident.

I've posted the original sketch and one of the outlines here too, just so you can see the whole process from beginning to end (minus the messy part of weaving in all those ends). The project took maybe 6 months of irregular working to complete.

Laura's birthday book

For the past few months, I haven't done much of anything except put together this gigantic photo album/scrapbook tribute to my sister for her 30th birthday, which was Nov. 26.

I have to admit, I can see why people really get into scrapbooking. There are about three huge aisles of stuff at A.C. Moore, and although I started out planning to do everything by hand, I ended up finding some neat ready-made stuff that made things go a lot faster.


The book is an alphabet of things that have to do with Laura: Childhood memories, favorite actors and baseball players, etc. So there were a lot of inside jokes from when we were kids, including excerpts from Colin McNaughton's obscure 1970s alphabet book, ABCs and 123s. I also had a lot of fun making little clip art in Microsoft Publisher.

The front cover is a painting in acrylics and it's supposed to look like "The Castle in the Pyrenees" by Magritte, because for some reason I thought he was Laura's favorite painter. (Turns out I was wrong, but at least she liked the clouds, I think.)

The back cover is also painted and it depicts the constellation for Sagittarius, which both Laura and I were born under.



The "Happy Birthday" scene at the end of the book has Brak, Zorak, Jimmy Fallon from Saturday Night Live, some Smurfs, a Muppet, and two Giants baseball players -- Barry Zito and Tim Lincecum -- having a birthday party for Laura. It is loosely based on a dream she described to me, but apparently Jimmy Fallon did not appear in the dream after all.

Actually, I just liked the picture of him playing the guitar.

Somerville open studios

On May 7 & 8, I sold some knit things and jewelry at "Cafe Crista" (Christina & Ed's house) during the Somerville open studios. Here are photos of my tiny table with hats, earrings (yup, that's an IKEA wine rack being used as the display), wristwarmers, scarves and a little pouch with a cat button on it. Christina was kind enough to model one of the scarves for me. There are also close-ups of the cat pouch and one pair of earrings.

selling hats at Remedix