Today is the birthday of Diego Velazquez, iconic baroque Spanish painter. Why am I blogging about him? Because my brother showed me two paintings of his once, and I’ve never forgotten them. He is a craftster of the supreme kind. Above is Vieja Friendo Huevos (An Old Woman Frying Eggs), below is Las Meninas (The Maids Of Honor).

Vieja’s colors matches my blog’s. Eyeluvit.

Ah, I love this store–and all the original, crafty designs on it. I can’t believe I finally caught one of their sales. Many of their tees are $5 off, a lot are $10 until the sale ends on June 8th. My favorite is this design!

Hurry, hurry over there! (I am!)

I was online, checking if I could order stamps off the United States Postal Service (USPS) website, and hello, there–look at what I found. Eyeluv this Tropical Fruits series.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen good-lickin’, I mean, good-lookin’, stamps. The last time was probably a year ago, when I actually shelled out cash to buy some Star Wars Special Edition stamps at the Star Wars Convention. (No snickering allowed, thank you! I’m such a dorkfan, I know.)

But now, there’s this entire set of great stamps that’s part of the American Design series, featuring the history of U.S. craftsmanship. Eyeluv them too.

Can’t wait to get new stamps. And maybe this? Heehee.

Whenever my brother talks about my blog, he just says the acronym GWAC (for Girl With A Curl) out loud. It sounds like “gwak”. While he was designing the top banner, he kept saying “GWAC” over and over again. I was close to being annoyed with the oft-repeated name until an idea popped into my head: “GWAC” sounds just like “guac”, which is short for guacamole, and the way most of my American friends call that green concoction you serve tortilla chips with.

So, I decided to take some of my favorite flavors and create a curlified guacamole. This one’s filled with the delicious tastes and textures of avocados, lime, tomatoes, mangoes (a nod to the tropics where I’m from) and feta cheese. Why feta? I needed a cheese sharp enough to cut through the creaminess of the avocados.

Putting this together, I found out that the traditional Aztec way of making guacamole was through mashing the avocado with a molcajete, a type of mortar and pestle that looks like this:

I wish I had such tools to work with because I’m a stickler for tradition, but seriously, a plain old bowl and a fork worked just as well. Mash together two small avocados, the juice of 1 1/2 lime, 1/2 cup diced mangoes (firm, not mushy), and 1/2 cup crumbled feta cheese. Tweak the flavors as you go along; trust those tastebuds!

A traditional herb that gets thrown into this happy mix is cilantro, which I hate with a passion. Most people expect this in guacamole, but I frankly think it tastes/smells like a stink bug we call “changaw” where I grew up. With this recipe, I can finally enjoy guacamole without feeling like I’m willingly ingesting the grossness of those insects. Hehe.

My secret ingredient? Don’t use traditional salt. Seasoned salt is the way to go! It has celery seed, turmeric, paprika and onion and garlic salt all mixed in, so you skip the step of adding all those in. The one I use is Lawry’s. (Another tip: season according to how salty your chips are. People sometimes forget that the chips are salty enough.)

After leaving your GWAC-amole in the fridge for about an hour (so the flavors can develop), plop it all onto a plate and make a round indentation in the mixture with the back of a spoon. Decoratively arrange a bit of the feta, mangoes and tomatoes in a ring in the hollowed part of the dip (I ran out of tomatoes!). Sprinkle a bit of seasoned salt on top for contrast, and fan out tortilla chips around it.

Ole! Enjoy!

I made these cupcakes about a month ago for Simeen’s birthday and I’ve been waiting for the right time to blog about them. As I’m on an SATC high, I figured it’s a good a time as any to debut these Couture Cupcakes.

These were inspired by the celebrant’s favorite flavor–chocolate–and her distinctive, fashionable sense of style. I thought it would be great to make sophisticated cupcakes, and nothing spells that out better than the elegance of chocolate.

These baked in no time because I used my favorite chocolate cake recipe, one I know by heart and can do in my sleep. But the decorating–craaazy! These 24 cupcakes took me till about 1:30 am (I started at 10 pm). And it’s all my fault. I wanted to try and decorate each cupcake as individual mini cakes (I ended up duplicating some I really liked) by making small, purposeful designs on the canvas of smooth chocolate ganache on top of each cupcake.

I used anything and everything in the fridge and pantry: fresh fruit (cherries, strawberries and mangoes) cut in interesting ways, chocolate tasting squares, thin English biscuits drizzled with melted chocolate, mint leaves, crushed graham crackers, nuts and all manner of chocolate candy bars that I shaved, slivered and sliced–you name it, I did it. And even if it took me that long to complete all 24 cupcakes, I must say I didn’t feel tired at all. Once I started, I just took off on a creative frenzy and rode that decorating wave till the wee hours of the morning. I guess it’s true: Time flies when you’re having fun.

The idea behind bringing all these small “cakes” together into what was hopefully an impressive spread was to translate that often-said saying in the cooking world: “We feast first with our eyes.” And since you can’t actually have a piece of these with me, I hope the pictures have you “munching” happily away.

My latest guilty obsession is visiting the Hermes website.

There are tons of interactive, crafty things to do on the site–watch a glove maker cutting his materials, look at swatches, play with tangrams and even download a yummy-sounding recipe for Mango Curry!

With all that web fun, my favorite feature is a quick paper project that allows you to download mini versions of the Hermes Kelly purse and cut them out to play with however you want. The designs are so pretty. My top pick’s the one below.

Whether you’re a craftster who wants a fun project to do, a designer looking to be inspired or a web troller crawling the net for interesting things to see on your daily surf, the Hermes home is one you should definitely visit.

I actually liked the bird in her hair.