Owl's House

A second gingerbread house, made without a single sticky thumb of child's influence but with reverent attention to A A Milne's Pooh of Pooh corner.

"Owl lived at The Chestnuts, and old-world residence of great charm, which was grander than anybody else's, or seemed so to Bear, because it had both a knocker and a bell-pull. Underneath the knocker there was a notice which said:


     
      PLES RING IF AN RNSER IS REQIRD.
     


      Underneath the bell-pull there was a notice which said:


     
      PLEZ CNOKE IF AN RNSR IS NOT REQID.
     



      These notices had been written by Christopher Robin, who was the only one in the forest who could spell; for Owl, wise though he was in many ways, able to read and write and spell his own name WOL, yet somehow went all to pieces over delicate words like MEASLES and BUTTEREDTOAST."

Here's E.H. Shepard's illustration. Being halfway up a tree, it's not the easiest subject for gingerbreadification, but after Elsa's Frozen castle I felt magically all-powerful.

Cinderella Christmas Cake

Another kiddy kristmas spektakular - this time, Cinderella getting ready for a rather seasonal ball.

Iona helpfully designed me a fairy godmother:

I painted her on to royal icing, in a vaguely Rackham-influenced scene that I improvised in the last hours of Christmas Eve.

Oddments of marzipan went to make buttons and cotton reels for the "frame" - I remember the dress-making scene in the Disney Cinderella having a huge influence on me wanting to make clothes, so wanted to echo their enticing chaos. The sides of the cake are indented to look like quilting, with a fabric-like ruffle and marks like tiny stitches.

Thank heavens for tiny nine year old thumbs to help make those buttons: they were made from a tiny ball of marzipan, indented with the lid of a Berol felt tip to make the rings, then holed with a toothpick.

 

Elsa's Ice Castle

Never give a nine year old girl free rein over the theme for your annual gingerbread house...Or maybe do. This was a huge amount of fun, and consumed a whole day in a flurry of planning, making and icing sugar. My niece Iona (said nine year old girl) drew some pretty elaborate plans

Which clearly called for a whole 3D diorama, not the mimsy little castle I'd imagined. She was particularly keen on the narrative elements: the treacherous ice bridge, Elsa's balcony, and Anna's struggle up the mountain on a rope.

 

We paused the YouTube video of Frozen again and again to unravel the fiendish architectural plottings of Elsa's ice magic. I still don't really understand how her nest of ice promontories fits together, and most of them were cut from our still-complicated scheme. What did stay was the way she makes the floor from a single, swollen-up snowflake. Our castle was built on a hexagonal floor plan, with gothic arched windows made from melted Fox's glacier mints. How appropriate.

 

The rest of the scene was built from a dentist's nightmare of meringues, cake, and 2 kg of icing sugar. Iona had the brainwave of adding an ice rink for Elsa to skate on, and was insistent that we didn't leave out the liquorice rope, even if the mountain wasn't quite high enough for a truly perilous ascent.

Here's the castle when Iona went to bed: a sticky but structurally sound monolith of gingerbread and icing sugar. But that night I performed the delicate operation of threading battery-operated fairy lights through its rooms. In the morning, we couldn't face the thought of yet more gingerbread - the castle had over 20 separate pieces to bake - so we printed out more Frozen characters to live in it. Here's an aerial view...

And here it is, sitting in state and sisterly love as we ate Christmas dinner.

 

 

 

Greenhouse Cake

I've never seen an edible greenhouse before. Gingerbread houses with sugarglass windows, yes. But since I love making life complicated my original plan for a vegetable patch birthday cake was hothoused into a mad sugar structural challenge. I made the frame out of chocolate gingerbread, rolled out and cut to shape, then filled the holes with crushed glacier mints before baking, then glued the whole thing together with more melted chocolate.

Sugarglass doesn't last long before it gets sticky and melts, so I made it the morning the cake had to be transported to my Aunt's garden party - in a marquee right by her actual greenhouse. You can't really tell in the photos, but I filled it with marzipan "plants" - seedlings in pots, aubergines and cauliflowers. And there's a tiny marzipan replica of one of her cats, sitting by a pot of pansies.

The soil is crumbled gingerbread (left over from making the greenhouse frame) and the stones are hazelnuts. And because life wasn't complicated enough already, I decided to make multicoloured chocolate leaves to decorate the sides. I painted melted chocolate onto real (washed - authenticity only goes so far here) leaves from the park, left it to set, then carefully pealed off the leaf to leave a delicately veined chocolate leaf. 

You can't tell in the photos, but the whole cake was sparkly with edible gold powder - unfortunately, this fairy dust wasn't  magic enough to prevent the cake from meeting with a horrible accident en route to the party...

A huge chasm opened up in the middle of the cake -  a falling box had skewed the layers so they slid out from under the greenhouse in chunks, scattering icing and crumbs. My sister kindly took me on an emergency dash to Lidl to buy more hazelnuts and a huge pot of Nutella, and I used them to fill up the chasms. Amazingly, the greenhouse stayed in one piece, but the leaves crumbled to autumnal dust. 

A few people asked if I'd learned a lesson from the whole experience, and muttered darkly about assembling on site. Well, maybe. But I think my strongest resolution is to make a marzipan witch to go along with the pumpkins next time, to defend her property against natural disasters. 

Thassa, God of the Sea

All my bakery is a bit nerdy, but this one takes the cake. Although arguably it's not my fault - I don't even play Magic: The Gathering, although I do secretly quite enjoy the artwork. I just picked the prettiest card to try and replicate -- she's a cool David Bowie-looking mermaid, which I obviously like. Here's the original card:

My interpretation is a bit more pastelly, in part because the cake-odds were stacked against me. I only had purple and pink food colouring to work with, and had to improvise other colours from leftover tinted marzipan, melted dark chocolate and coffee grounds. Sigh. I do actually quite like the 3D look the cake came out with as a result though.

A mise-en-scene also starring my favourite rabbit mug and my beautiful new Tala icing syringe -- it's exactly like my Grandma's one that she bought in the 1950s, and which I started to feel guilty about using, in case I was damaging it. The only difference is that my new one comes in a nice sturdy tin instead of a battered, yellow sellotape-coated cardboard box.

  Aand there's Thassa's disembodied head, thinking up ways to wreak divine vengeance for indignities suffered. I might not know much about Magic, but apparently I scored some accidental fan-points for ensuring she had her signature two-pronged bident with which to do spells -- not the more conventional trident upstart newer versions of the card have tried to impose.

Cassette Tape Cake

This was a commission/birthday cake for Lone Omi -- a handy bit of multipurposing! After a bit of Photoshop primping it'll be the cover for his joint EP. For now, it's sitting partially dismembered in the kitchen, after a mammoth photography session.

I was extra proud of the way the window came out -- it's made of glacier mints melted down -- but it's not very camera friendly. But getting the writing done was the really hard bit, because I wanted it to look as much like Sharpie on paper as possible, not like raised icing, and had to make sure it would come across in the photos. Really specific commissions like this are so satisfying to do because it means I can skip the agonising and deliberating stage and get on with baking, icing and piping -- more please!

Christmas cake - Puss in Boots

A bit less high brow than last year's effort, here's Puss in Boots in full 18th century garb (this is the Perrault version dahling) on stage in a grand panto.  The curtains and edges are 3D, but the stage scene is just painted straight onto royal icing. I sometimes wonder whether decorating the fruit cake is actually my favourite bit of Christmas!

Aand a side view...

Three Sisters resin dioramas

Brooch #2 in the tiny plays series... I've tried to cram as much detail as I can, and even got a bit conceptual -- the golden buildings are meant to be Moscow, seen through the trees. Also included -- text accurate(ish) costumes, a tiny samovar, a birthday cake, and a very boring book (history of the local school, since you asked) in Olga's hands. On Etsy here...

Jerusalem resin dioramas

I've been trying to do tiny scenes in resin for a while -- it's been half fun, half frustrating trying to work out how to make all the tiny parts (some are only a few millimetres high) and to put them into in a coherent scene. These are inspired by my memories of seeing Jez Butterworth's Jerusalem a few years back.

I've tried out a few different designs. They've all got the caravan, but beyond that it's a mixed bag of chickens, tortoise, union jack, beer bottles, drums, litter in each one.

When they're blown up as photos, you see all kinds of imperfections you miss in real life, since they're less than two inches wide. Still, I've worked out that the reason I'm getting microscopic bubbles in the resin is because I'm working in a (very) cold room, so the next batch should have better clarity.

I'm listing them on Etsy even though they're not perfect, because it would be nice for them to have a life in the sun. Now into extensive preparations for the next ones in the series: Three Sisters and Waiting for Godot...

The witching hour

This is a bit silly, but so much fun... a haphazard chocolate cauldron on Flake logs, with sugar glass flames, green potion goo, tentacles, bones, eyeballs....

I was more than usually reliant on cornershop goodies -- part of the fun of Hallowe'en is coming up with novel ways to consume sugar -- so things are made of jam, malteasers, and chocolate fingers. The potion had to look as wet as possible so I used honey with green food colouring on top of buttercream to make a perma-sticky mess.  

Mermaid Brooches

The Poems Underwater project, already responsible for two mermaid cakes, tempted me into making some new brooches for its zine and craft fair in Deptford today. They were just pure fun to work on -- I'm planning to do some more, with slightly less classic looking mermaids/more narrative schemes. Originally, these were meant to be mermaids raiding shipwrecks, hence the nets made from thread and matchstick timber, but the skulls I bought to litter the sand with turned out to be too big, and I was on a deadline...next time.

They are the size of conventional badges, and about half an inch thick in clear resin, with embedded drawings, paint, beads, and couscous impersonating sand. Getting the shine/clarity in photos is none too easy, especially on dark evenings, but they're pretty sparkly.

Then I realised, as I went through the battered biscuit tin that houses years worth of resin experiments, that I've actually got quite a big sea creature inventory. This is a sea monster from a 13th century illumination...

Here's a mermaid cribbed from a medieval bestiary, in ring form.

This is a flying fish -- based on an 18th century naturalist's engraving, so apparently, unlike everything else here, it's real, though frankly I have my doubts.

These things can be got through my Etsy shop -- just message me if they're not listed -- or hopefully at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern Christmas Fayre in December.

My aunt gave me the wool for this cardigan in December 2011, and it's only reached wearable state now -- knitted projects are slow. Especially when you decide to make things as complicated as possible by adding in lots of colours and patterns, and fiddling around with the shape...

This is the pattern I used; from Noro Love Pattern Collection by Jane Ellison. But I'm as incapable of following a knitting pattern as I am a recipe, so made lots of changes. The half length sleeves definitely had to go, as did the knobbly stitch pattern, the breast pockets, and the round neck -- I improvised a v-neck instead.

The wool is brilliant -- it has a self striping effect you can see in its unaltered state on the back of the cardigan. Because the front pieces are half as wide, though, the colour gradation is longer, and I didn't want the long murky brown patches to dominate. It was already a bit of a nightmare trying to get both front pieces to match, because each ball of wool starts at a different part of the colour cycle - I ended up with lots of small balls to get the transitions in the right places. Adding freestyle knitted in fair-isle patterns in other colours made things even more complicated, so that the cardigan spent a lot of its life in bits, in bags of tangling, unravelling balls of wool. 

But worth the wait I think!

The red roses were vaguely inspired by my favourite knitwear designer, Kaffe Fassett's persian poppy design -- I'm working up to a full Kaffe-style all over pattern for my next project, even if it will mean carrying round an Old Sheep Shop's worth of tiny balls of wool.

I feel especially proud of the pockets, which were a lot easier than I'd feared, and ended up slotting neatly into the design. The wooden buttons felt right for the homespun aesthetic I was going for -- each was sewn on with a different shade.

Mermaid cake

A launch party for Poems Underwater on a boat needed a cake, and mermaids were heavily involved -- commissions don't come much more enticing than that. My last mermaid was a medieval one, and I wanted to stick to the theme, but wanted to do a Melusine -- a double tailed mermaid. Her story's different wherever you read it, but her two tails are usually a punishment for seeking revenge against her father, on her mother's behalf. But her mother is enraged with Melusine for her lack of respect, so curses her to swapping her legs for two serpentine coils every Saturday; when Melusine marries, she makes her new husband promise never to enter her chamber on that day. When he breaks his promise and walks in on her soaking in a green marble tub, she turns into a dragon and flies away, leaving only two magical rings and quickly cooling bathwater behind.

This myth is woven into geneology, part of the ancestry myth of several European noble families, notably the French royal family the Lusignans; Melusine is sometimes cast as a princess, who builds her husband a castle with her magic powers. This association has meant that the double tailed Melusine image pops up in heraldic imagery, as it does in this 1586 engraving.

I loved the idea of putting the tub into the design, of showing Melusine relaxed and serenely decorative, before she turns to serpentine fury. And using the shield seemed like a golden opportunity to reference Poems Underwater -- in suitable medieval, sinuous script of course. 

I drew up a quick idea, then while the sponges were in the oven -- I just baked two plain rectangles, ready for carving up later -- I had a brainwave, and remembered my Grandma's set of letter shape cutters. They were just the right size to use to cut the words out of fondant, and with a bit of tweaking and trimming the letters easily transformed to suit my typographical ends.

The actual shaping the sponge part is always brutal and messy -- I always want to use as little icing as possible, so it's an odd kind of geometry arranging the cake into the right kind of 3D shape, ready for draping with fondant. 

You can just about see the construction here -- a fairy cake dewrappered for the head, and then odd slices of cake for the rest, filled with jam and buttercream. 

And then the icing goes on, and it's all serene. The colours are painted on, watercolour style, with food colouring, and I dusted everything with ample blue and gold edible glitter. Because she's magic.

I especially liked how the tub came out...I was trying to make it look like green marble, like in the story.

I brought her head home for breakfast the next day, when both of use were a bit worse for the wear. She was still sparkly, though.

Patched circle skirt

This is one of the rare projects I feel almost completely happy with. The design is a lot more fiddly than it needed to be, but I think it was worth it. The flowery fabric was from Liberty's, and was fiendishly expensive, so I only bought half a metre, which meant I needed a bit of creativity to get a nice full skirt out of it. I cut it into segment shapes, then added strips of plain fabric in between them so the skirt made a full circle, then gathered it into an elastic waistband. I used gold metallic thread to decorate the waistband and hem, and then sewed sequins into the centre of the flowers. The colours are actually incredibly bright but my camera didn't do them any favours - definitely time for a new one.

Triangular performance with choir