A Mischievous Little Girl

Completed 2011

11"x14"

Oil

Does she have an evil smile in real life? Yes. In a good way!

Beer (Guinness) Mug Cake Pops

I've been meaning to post this for awhile....

 

 In keeping with the miniature theme lately, this week a few weeks ago I made miniature beer mugs. We are attending attended an Augtoberfest party and thought these would be a good contribution. Plus, I've never made cake pops before and wanted to try it out. I got this book for Christmas, and this was my first time making them. I recommend the book, or visiting her blog, if you want detailed instructions.

This activity took me a few nights. The first night was solely devoted to baking the cake. The second night I rolled the cake balls. This involved crumbling the cake, mixing with icing (store-bought of course), then forming into the shape of balls.

Adding icing to my cake crumbs

Okay, I forgot to take a picture of the balls, but these are in the mug form.

Enter day three. After refrigerating these suckers, it came time for the candy coating. I quickly learned that you can't just put a stick in these and go immediately into the candy dunking. If you do, balls of cake get lost in the candy goo. I had much greater success dipping the lollipop stick into the melted candy, sticking it into the cake pop, then allowing to cool. THEN proceeding into the candy dunking.

Awaiting a candy dunk

In the meantime I rolled and made a few mug handles fashioned from gum paste (once again, store-bought).

Turns out there was no need for that rolling pin you see here.

After heating up some candy in the microwave each cake got a dunk. I immediately gave them each a handle before the candy coating cooled. Sadly the beer color ended up a bit darker than I had anticipated, and so rather than some pale ales, they ended looking more like Guinness beer mugs.

Almost done

And lastly, I added a frothy finish...

So they ended up being a hit at the party. Would I make them again? Eh.... I would probably stick with some simple round cake balls in the future.

Pinterest

As if I needed to spend more time browsing fun things on the internet. I just discovered Pinterest. I'm well aware that this website has probably been around for quite sometime, but I still love it. There are so many great ideas and things I want, or things I want to make! I may need to sign up soon so I can start tagging things.

Miniature Polaroid Magnets

During last week's heatwave Meatball and I spent a lot of time in the basement to keep cool. Browsing through blogs, I stumbled up this Polaroid magnet idea from Ambrosia Girl and thought it was adorable! What a cute thing to pepper the fridge with! And so began this project.

I graciously used the Polaroid template on the website and got started.

The longest part of this project was probably selecting pictures to use. I also, for some reason, convinced myself I needed twenty of these little magnets. (A few didn't make it to the end.)

After printing out the pictures, I pretty much followed the instructions on the website verbatim. I even glued the pictures onto the back of old sketchpad, since I have plenty lying around. The other super tedious part was cutting out all the pictures with an X-Acto knife. It could have been that mine was just dull, but it took forever. And my edges weren't the best. It was at about this point that I regretted, for the second time, printing out 20 photos.

 

Finally starting to resemble the final product. The edges on the board were painted with a white paint pen:

 

And lastly, after the paint dried, I "laminated" with packaging tape. Here's the final bunch!

 

And here they are, doing their job on the fridge:

Cool New Mugs

Recently I found myself browsing through stores while waiting for a flight out of the Portland, OR airport. I stumbled upon these hand warmer mugs in a Made in Oregon store:

Of course the mugs are slightly less cool now that I've seen they can be ordered off of Amazon, but nonetheless, they are still a nice addition to our collection of mug. And I'm sure they'll be much appreciated when the winter months roll in!