I’ve recently been on a sheet-cake binge!

Whenever these handi-foil Cook-N-Carry pans with lids go on sale, I stock up on them. They’re so handy to make sheet cakes in, decorate (the domed, clear lid allows you to frost the top however you like), package and just give away.

This means I don’t have to worry about asking for my pans back anymore. And believe me, I’ve lost so many pans over the years, that I think these are just the smarter way to go.

Last week, I had to make two cakes in one week: one for a birthday and another for a christening. Since my Red Velvet Cake calls for buttermilk and they never sell just a cup’s worth, I decided it would be more efficient to make the same kind of cake for the two occasions. I just made them different by changing the ribbons!

A Girly Merry Unbirthday Cake (it was a belated birthday present)

A Little Boy’s “Wow You’re Christian Now” (haha) Cake

The sprinkles are adorable Jumbo Confetti pastel dots from Wilton that I’d also gotten on sale after Easter.

Have a sweet weekend, everyone!

Three of my friends are getting married this year. I guess this means I have to watch out for a fourth wedding!

Could it be true? Has Archie finally decided to take the plunge and propose to one of comics’ favorite girls? It sure looks that way! Earlier this year readers got a chance to relive “Freshman Year” with the famous teens of Riverdale High. Now make way for this special story that takes a look at Archie and his friends after they graduate college! What careers will they seek? Will the friends stay in Riverdale or disperse? What would lead Archie to have marriage on his mind? And who would he choose Veronica or Betty? How will Betty react? How will Veronica react? Can Archie shake off his klutzy past and hold down a steady job… for more than a month? One thing is certain: this will be the biggest Archie Comics story ever! 

Who’s your pick? I’m going with Veronica, because everyone seems to like Betty more, and I like rooting for the underdog. Hehe.

More details here and here.

These are new at Trader Joe’s, a specialty food store in the US. When I spied these on a shelf  I had to do a double take. I’d never seen peanut butter cups in this mini size before, and thought they would be interesting in place of chocolate chips in my standard chocolate chip cookies.

They are “ka-ulomol!” That’s a word in my dialect that I don’t even have a direct English translation for. In Tagalog, it would be “nakakagigil,” I guess. Otherwise, it means something along the lines of, “They’re so cute and tiny and I just want to them to get in my belly!”

I had to stop myself from snacking on them while making the cookies. They’re just like little itty bitty Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, but since they’re teensy, you tend to pop them in your mouth more readily and easily like you would the regular-sized ones.

And they were absolutely yummy in the cookie dough! Had to stop myself from eating THAT too!

I hope Trader Joe’s keeps this product in stock. Some of their goods are seasonal, like that one time they weren’t selling my favorite lady fingers for some reason. I’d buy these again in a heartbeat, because these cookies were just ooey gooey good!

Now I want to try these next. They’ve been around for a while, but this mini-peanut-butter-cup experiment turned out so well that I’m thinking these would be great too!

Hope you’re having a sweet week, all! (Yum!)

I made yarn! Wow.

What you see above is my very first yarn skein from this past weekend’s yarn-spinning class at The Urban Craft Center in Santa Monica. Yes, it looks like something made by a six year old, but I’m quite proud of it. That’s four hours worth of spindling, working the treadle, listening, learning, hunching over the spinning wheel with beads of sweat forming under my curls on my forehead, quietly cursing under my breath, pulling and tugging at wool.

I’m not going to lie—it’s probably one of the hardest crafts I’ve ever tried to learn. But I think this absolutely explains how fascinated I am by it. You’re basically taking wool from a sheep and twisting it into itself, either manually with a drop spindle or with the help of a spinning wheel, to make thread, so you can use the thread to create something else. You’re working with fiber in its raw form, and you get the chance to be a true artisan and craft something from start to finish. I don’t know about you, but THAT is pretty awesome.

I’m quite horrible at spinning my own yarn. I can’t quite make the threads thin enough so they look like they’re made for a giant, I manhandle the spindle and wield it like weapon and I end up with wool all over my clothes and even in my hair. But that all didn’t stop me from trying my hand at it several times, even after the class that night in front of the TV (while re-watching Transformers, because there’s nothing like cars coming to life to get you spinning!) I’d like to think that with any craft, I hope to get better each time I try my hand at it. I just try to always remember my teacher Ana’s words: “Just keep practicing!” And the best ones yet, to make myself feel better about my knotty yarn: “It’s not supposed to look like a machine made it!”

“Spinning class” in a city like Los Angeles usually means that aerobic, sweaty thing you do at the gym. So I’ve gotten the strangest looks from people when I said that I was busy on Sunday afternoon spinning–that is, learning how to make yarn. But I’ve also had people say they want to be with me at the end of the world, like during a nuclear fallout. In case we survive, I can spin my own thread to make clothes. That makes taking yarn-spinning class worth it, strange looks and all.

By the way, I want to LIVE in The Urban Craft Center. It’s a studio space/crafts store for crafters on the west side that has all the equipment, resources and classes for all your creative twitchings.

It even has a library full of art and craft books that you can thumb through while you’re working!

I love it so much I’ve signed up to learn this Coin-Stacked baby quilt in June, and hopefully will get the chance to ask my quilting teacher how to the best finish my own quilt.

I hope to pass some crafting tips and ideas that I learn to you. And some day do a post on how yarn is actually made on a drop spindle (my hands were too busy in class to take pictures!) And some day, make enough of my own yarn, craft a big, wooly scarf with it and live to tell the tale.

Learn more about all the wonderful classes at the Urban Craft Center on their website HERE.

…is that I’m spinning yarn!

Am at a yarn-spinning class right now at The Urban Craft Center in Santa Monica. Enjoying myself even if I’m making the world’s ugliest yarn. Haha!

Will blog about the experience soon, after I crawl out from under all this wool!

Happy birthday, Mary Cassatt!

Mary Cassatt, Self-Portrait, 1878

American Impressionist painter Mary Cassatt was born on May 22, 1844, in Philadelphia. She lived in France for most of her life until her death in 1926, befriending notable artists like Manet and Degas. Maybe this is why I love her paintings so much—Degas is my one true painterly love, and they’re apparently painters of the same palette. (Or something like that!)

I love crafting depicted in art. Did you know Cassatt had quite a bit, especially of women and their needlework? I used to always imagine hanging one of these lovely prints in the craft room of my dreams.

Above: L: Young Girl In The Garden Sewing / R: Young Mother Sewing

Above: L: Mary Ellison Embroidering / R: Woman Sewing

Above: L: Lydia (the painter’s sister) Crocheting In The Garden At Marly / R: Lydia At A Tapestry Loom

Above: L: Augusta Sewing Before A Window / R: Francoise in Green, Sewing

The last one of the little girl in green is my favorite. Doesn’t she kind of look like she might be a girl with a curl?

Felt monster CYCONE says, “Eye see you!”

Making Cycone was a mini breakthrough for me. This little fellow is proof that as a crafter, you learn something new with every project. In an unprecedented moment in crafting history, I agreed to work on something with someone else, and actually really enjoyed it!

See, I’m sort of a crafting monk. I like working by myself. When I cook I’m often the only one wielding the wooden spoon/whisk/spatula. When I sew, it’s just me and the hum of the Singer. I mean, I can certainly craft with other people in the room, and can even talk to them as I flit about sewing, beating, beading and kneading. But I have to admit I have problems handing over the rolling pin after I’ve started a piecrust or watching my knitting needles in someone else’s hands on an unfinished scarf.

Chalk it up to my curls, I guess. In my culture, curly-haired people are supposed to be alabuton, an Ilonggo word that means “prone to unwarranted fits of sullenness.” This implies that my fickle moods make it difficult for me to work with anyone, especially when I’ve been seized by the malady called craft-itis.

But since I’ve always wanted to make a felt monster and didn’t know how to design one, I had to rely on someone whose needle and thread was a mouse and a computer screen. This meant turning over my felt and scissors to the Monster Maker tracing, cutting and shaping.

This design was the prototype. Felt Monster beta, if you will.

However, it was quickly decided that the design wouldn’t work, despite initial approval from the production team (me). The “tentacles” were too tiny. When the fabric was turned out, the little monster looked disturbingly unfinished because where there were supposed to be fun, tentacle-y appendages, there were sorry-looking stumps! Back to the drawing board, where a more basic conical shape was designed. (The nerd in me secretly liked the revised design better because it resembles a single straight quotation mark! I heart punctuation.)

After all the new pieces were cut (while I sat back and nervously bit my lower lip waiting for my turn at the project), I set about sewing the pieces together. Monster Maker stepped in from time to time to help stuff the body with fiberfill, arrange the facial features on the body and suggest some stitches and colors for thread that would deliver maximum monster effect.

It was WEIRD working with someone like that! But somewhere in the middle of all that needling (both figurative and literal), I realized, why hey, I can actually do this! I’m all grown up now! Haha.

Cycone’s first Monster Mission is to watch over little Noah. Here you see he’s doing a darn fine job! Hee.

I have a lot more felt left, along with the discovery that it’s never too late for an old crafter to learn new stitches. There will definitely be more monsters to come!

Many curly thank you’s to E. for being a monstrously patient craft partner-in-crime. We will one day take the felt monster world by storm. All their base are belong to us. Hehe.

So, they apparently sell frosting, icing and ganache in TUBS at Costco (a warehouse-type store in the US). They’re unrefrigerated, by the way. What sort of things are in it to keep it edible? This brings out the haughty baker in me! I’m sorry, but I will make my own frosting myself, thank you! Real sugar, real butter, real milk! Hmph!

…to bring you the world’s funniest mom.

J: So, what did you do today?

Mama: Your brother took me to a movie! It was nice.

J: Really? Which one?

Mama: Dungeons and Dragons.

J: Oh, so you saw it at home? Like on the sci-fi channel?

Mama: No, in the theater. Tom Hanks has a weird hairdo in it.

J: Tom Hanks? Did you mean Angels & Demons?

Mama: Oh! (Guffaws.) Hahahahahahaha. Yes. They sound alike, don’t they?

J: Uhm, mother, NO.

LOL. I love my mom.

Shown below from R to L: The Girl With A Curl before her curls took over her head, The World’s Funniest Mother and The Brother Who Took Her To “Dungeons & Dragons!”

Growing up, I spent a lot of time in the kitchen with women who all loved to tell stories. I often just sat there, watching and listening (and eating!) as they flitted about stirring pots, kneading dough, shaping candy. The memory of being in the thick of a busy kitchen, the heat from the oven coaxing anything from Gospel truth to gossip from the cooks, is one of my most comforting ones.

It was when their hands were busy when my first cooking teachers found time to spin stories about all their greatest culinary exploits. For my grandma, it was when she made mayonnaise from scratch as a new bride. For my grandaunt, it was making seashell shapes from dough with nothing but the back of a fork and an expert flick of the wrist. But in between tales of baking the most tender-crumbed cake and making the best bunuelos were the inevitable kitchen myths. The foreboding ones, told over and over again so that they started taking a life of their own, transforming from fiction into fact.

One of the more ominous ones is from my nanny, who had taken baking courses at a local school. Nanay Manet’s favorite cooking story was about the unattainable, lofty ideal that is Angel Food Cake. In the humidity of the province, this cake wasn’t the easiest thing to make. Nanay Manet would recount how she often lost the battle of haranguing meringue into submission, all because of that one teeny tiny speck of egg yolk that found its way into the whites. She’d look at me, narrow her eyes and warn, “One drop. One drop! That’s all it takes to ruin the whoooolllleee thing.” And when you DID get yolk-free whites and WERE successful in whipping them into meringue, you had to fold the flour in quickly, quickly, quickly! But yet gently, gently, gently! All in the upper arm! No wrist, just arm! Or the egg whites may deflate! Nooo! Horrors!

Which is why in my 15+ years of baking, I couldn’t bring myself to make an Angel Food Cake. It seemed larger than life for me to do. It was made of whispery clouds and delicate whorls of sweet stuff—something too divine for even me to cobble together.

I bought a tube pan about five years ago but never used it for its intended purpose. But last weekend, I had to come up with a dessert that would go well with strawberries grown on a local farm. Angel Food Cake would be perfect, so it was time to grow up, and grow out, of my eggwhite-ophobia. I HAD to do it.

As I went through the nerve-wracking process of breaking eggs carefully and separating the whites from the yolks, I could hear my heart hammering in my rib cage. I know for some of you this will seem a bit much. But for someone who feels like desserts are an expression of her self, this was a huge, big deal! I wanted everything to be perfect!

I was thinking of Nanay Manet the entire time. Unexpectedly, instead of being hampered by my memories of her cooking myths, I was spurned on by them. Maybe this kind of kitchen confidence comes with age. When I was younger, my movements were more calculated and yet less sure. But that time, with a challenge in front of me, I simply went with my gut, little speck of egg yolk and all.

And this is what happened.

After cooling, I dressed the cake in a fresh strawberry sauce made from equal parts sugar, water and mashed fresh berries cooked until thick. Garnished with some halved white berries that were drizzled with white chocolate, topped off with slivers of fresh lemon rind and little bunches of mint.

I guess I’m waxing poetic about this cake because I’m so proud of myself for making it. More so than usual, since this was a project over 10 years in the making. I had to work up the courage to do it, and finally did. It made me remember what I love most about baking: how it’s part science, part myth and mostly plain old courage.

If there’s that one thing you’ve always wanted to cook or make, grab that wooden spoon, take out those tongs, wield that whisk with confidence and just make it. A little bravery goes a long way!