Sunday, August 14, 2011

Lasagne Cupcakes


"Holy smokes, batman!" says all twelve of you, "Two posts in one day?!"

I've been meaning to make this post for a while now, but these things are impossible to get nice looking photos of. They inevitably look like... cheese blobs. What they are, is pure brilliance! (I'm allowed to say that because it wasn't my idea!)

Using the No 1 Best Lasagne Recipe (they really aren't kidding), instead of layering it in a lasagna dish, I layered it in a muffin tray. For the pasta, I used home-made pasta (Flour, Salt, Eggs) and pressed out little circles with a cookie cutter. You want to cut your circles that are about the size of the TOP of the muffin trays, allowing it to fold up the sides, thus keeping your layers together.

As for the layering, I didn't follow the exact layering, I just add stuff as I feel like it. I used about three pasta circles for each "cupcake".

The nice thing about it is, if you have picky dinner guests, you can make three different fillings (beef, chicken, vegetarian) and just layer it differently for each guest!

Cupcake Swap!


So I entered a Cupcake Swap on my favourite site, Crafster. The aim of the game is, you get given a swap partner and the both you craft cupcake-themed items and mail it to one another.

Completely by chance, Urban Threads happened to have a special on cupcake themed embroidery patterns, AT THE EXACT SAME TIME! Coincidence?! ...probably.



After splashing out horrendously I decided that I was going to make an apron. Mostly because I know how to make aprons. I also decided to make a matching dishcloth and due to the fact that half of my baking episodes consist of going "where the hell is the dishcloth", I decided to velcro the dishcloth to the apron.

As you can see from the top image, I also added a cupcake pincushion (which my husband says looks more "muffin-like" and little cupcake notebook (which I didn't make).

Surprisingly our postal service even managed to get it all the way to Canada!

Sunday, July 31, 2011

Soap.. at last I have attempted it!


So after perving (almost literally) over the wonderful soaps I've seen the people on Crafster make for months, I've at last tried my hand at it. Now before you get excited, it's only Melt-and-Pour soap, I'm still girding my loins for lye (and searching for lard).

The first step was of course trying to get my hands on supplies. Which is pretty much the first step of ANY craft in South Africa, other than scrapbooking. Eventually after much searching, I found a South African site (Fun With Soap) that sold the stuff. Yay! I ordered my box of supplies and a couple of weeks later (thank you SA Postal) my box arrived, though it looked like someone had kicked it around a bit, it'd come open and a bunch of the stuff inside had leaked (thank you SA Postal, again).

The first soap is a Brown Sugar and Vanilla Soap (with added Vitamin E).


The second soap is a Lavender and Olive Oil Soap. The flowers were supposed to be suspended, not floating on top, but oh well.

Now I just have to find people to test.. I mean gift them to.