Macarons!

I finally managed to try baking macarons last night. It takes a bit of advanced preparation, because the egg whites called for in the recipe have to be separated and left in the refrigerator for 24 to 48 hours before they can be used, and of course I never think of doing any baking except on a weekend. I used unblanched almonds, so there are lots lof little brown flecks, but otherwise I think they worked like they are supposed to. I even got little feet on most of them. I used a very basic recipe - I was quite disappointed to find that the luscious color of macarons is actually just powdered food coloring, and not flavour. I think I will try making them with a bit of cassis to see if I can't get them to make the same with a bit more flavour. I also tried putting them on a silpat, and that was a disaster. They didn't cook, and they stuck. The ones on parchment paper worked perfectly and slid off without any effort.

The recipe seemed small, and my weigh scale doesn't measure in such small amounts, so I doubled the recipe. I ended up with 8 or 9 sheets of cookies! I got bored with all the piping and started making them bigger and then made some heart shaped ones as well. This would be really pretty in pink or purple sandwiched with some purple jam.

Encaustics - again

Since I had all my encaustic materials spread all over my work table, I decided to play a bit with some small boards 4x5 I had prepared. The first board was well primed and had a fairly smooth surface, so it was possible to treat the surface like the slick paper usually used for encaustics, and the brushstrokes are similar:

I think that the second one turned out more interesting. The surface was still rather porous (which makes for better adehsion anyway), and the final image looks more like an oil painting from the 1800s:

Although it is small, you can still see the trees in the foreground, and the creek, hills and bluffs in the background.

encaustic

Rather than work on any of the sixteen projects I currently have underway, I decided to pull out my encaustic materials on the weekend and work on a rather large (for encaustics) painting. I spent a full day working on it, and another day struggling to make it look like the image in my mind. I finally decided to put it aside, because it simply wasn't working. I don't know if I will bother to spend the time scraping the wax off so I can reuse the board (it is a lovely 2 feet square), or just chuck the whole thing in the garbage. How frustrating! and a waste of a lot of time on the long weekend that would have been better spent raking grass.

Another fairy

I finished another fairy baby yesterday:

She is about the same size as the previous one (2.5 inches) and made from polymer clay.

Here she is asleep in her moss bed:

fairy baby

I finished this little fairy baby a couple of days ago:

She is about 2.5 inches long and made from polymer clay.

Lust cookies

After reading Dogs and Goddesses, I simply HAD to try making butter cookies. The only recipe I could find was for Cardamom cookies, and while they are tasty, they certainly don't inspire any lust or need to fulfill my deepest desires. Although, I was inspired to dig up a few ideas for paintings, so maybe they had more of an effect than I thought!


The book is definitely a must-read. It was hilarious, and I couldn't put it down. I am hoping for more from this collaborative of authors.

movies and books

I had to take a quick trip out east for work, and encountered a couple of quirky movies on the flight. The ‘Hollywood’ movie choices were pretty drab, and not really to my taste, so I started searching to see if there was something else I could watch. I decided to take a look at the Canadian movies. The first one I watched was called Evelyn: the Cutest Evil Dead Girl. This was a cute movie about a dead girl who tries to make friends with living people and after getting ridiculed, she tries to kill herself back to life so they will accept her. It is short and funny and very quirky.

I also read (there is a lot of time for reading while waiting for planes to arrive and depart) Joanne Harris’s new book “The Lollipop Shoes”. It is a kind of sequel to “Chocolat”, and the book and the movie explored the same theme – dealing with being different. It was curious how similar the two characters Evelyn (in the movie) and Zozie (in the book) were.

The second movie, called Just Buried had a lot of promise but the system died before I got very far into it. Just buried is about a young man who inherits a funeral home from his estranged father, in a town where there hasn’t been a funeral for over a year. He and the young female mortician who works for him then try to figure out how to drum up business. Now I am going to have to buy the DVD or figure out how to find this movie so I can finish watching it.