Valenversary Present (Mostly a picture post)

Look what I got for my Valenversary?

Are you jealous? I am so excited I am halfway jealous of myself!

And in a fit of pure glee, I used my crikey to make it mine!

My big Bay is named Dreamer, and his registered name is Heza Dreamachine, so I named my new favorite and long awaited kitchen appliance after him.

I used the "Old West" cartridge and cut the letters out at 2 inches. I cut the horse out at 3 inches.

OMG, I love it so much! Thank goodness for Cricut, and sticky craft vinyl.

And thank goodness for my DB who very clearly loves me and wants me to be happy.

And to cook for him.

Happy Valenversary...or How to make a cake using your Cricut Expression

So my DB and I have the pain pleasure of celebrating our anniversary on Valentines day. So, we lovingly call this holiday our "Valenversary." Every year I try to make sickeningly sweet treats and sappy gifts.

Hey! It is my Valenversary after all!

On another note (it's related, I promise!), I have been wanting a Cricut Cake since I knew they existed. I have the expression and I use it fairly regularly so I don't want to ruin it to make cake things. But Last week I hatched an idea...

I could use my regular old Cricut to cut images out and then I could use those images to trace out fondant. I was so excited. I went and bought Fondant, cake mix and an Xacto knife. I knew just the cake to bake for this.

I have one of those Checkerboard cake kits and I have NEVER been able to make it work. I can't ever get the cake mixes to pour in evenly and they come out sloppy and sad. Everyone seems to love the "marbled cake," but it makes me sad inside because I know the true failure.

Then BAM! Another idea hit me...and it was a great one! I could use ziplock baggies to pipe the batter in. I am the smartest gal alive! Ahem.

So here we go with the fun pictures taken by my horrid camera phone in my kitchen that happens to have bad lighting. Can lights are artsy, but they are not good for seeing things...seriously!

And we start this project off with a mistake right away. I used a package of Duncan Hines Red Velvet cake and a package of Betty Crocker Vanilla Cake that I dyed pink. Yes, I used Wilton gel dye...I love that stuff!

This is only a mistake because I have learned that half of my problem with the cake I am making is that I use 2 different mixes. Next time I am using 2 of the same mix, colored differently. I WILL make this work!





Now, I set my gallon sized Ziplock baggies up in a large container and poured batter in. Also, in a rare moment of clarity, I greased all 3 cake pans AND floured them. I tend to get excited about cake so I rush and forget that part. Ugly cake tastes good, but it is still ugly cake. I also set up some paper towels to put my bags of batter on when I wasn't using them...so totally prepared and proud.!

I got everything set up and snipped the end off of the bags and began to pipe.







And here is what they looked like when I was done:

Awesome right???? I thought so at least.

So I baked the cakes until a butter knife came out clean and brought them put to cool. So far they were looking OK, though I began to worry about the mixes that had mostly red velvet. Notice how the red velvet seems to have taken over?

Well, I used my handy dandy cake leveling device to level each sheet and then I used some frosting to glue them together. This is all after I let the cakes cool completely of course.

See, now that the tops are cut off the red velvet layers look like only red velvet. Not fun. But turning out cute. What did I do with the scraps? Stay tuned, no cake is thrown away in my house!

I let the cake chill over night and I brought it out to put the crumb layer on. This I was most certainly NOT happy with. How do people get such a clean crumb layer? Mine was just so...so crumby.

I am personally blaming this crumb catastrophe on the frosting. Maybe if I actually took the time to make butter cream it would be cleaner. Or maybe it was the cake mix. I will most certainly be trying this again!

Moving on though, the cake got covered and put back into the fridge. Then I raced upstairs and cut some images from card stock. I used Heritage, Old West, Mickey and Friends and Jasmine. Of course, I left my phone downstairs so those didn't make it in the gallery. But I will do my best to give specs when I can.

When I had everything gathered, I rolled out my base layer of fondant and covered the cake. I should have put a little more research into this because it ended up pretty wrinkled and icky...but maybe not a bad first try.

You can see the shapes in the background! YAY.

I had some fondant left over, so I decided to dye it red with my Wilton gel. Didn't work. It was a very lovely bright pink though, so I cut the basic shapes out of that.

I rolled the fondant out, and laid down the shape I wanted then traced around it with the Xacto knife. After I had cut my shapes, I still had fondant left, so I added purple food coloring to it for the lettering. The lettering was hard to get right. I used Jasmine and cut out the "I Love You" phrase at 3 inches. The cuts were clean, but the lettering is wispy so it was difficult to not tear it. The horses were also a little more challenging. Next time I will roll fondant and chill it so that it doesn't pull so much. Other than that, not bad. What do you think?

It started to look very "I love Lucy" but then the "You" plopped lop-sidedly onto the cake and the purple stained the white so I had to leave it where it was. Again, the lettering was "Jasmine" cut at 3 inches. The heart was from "Mickey and Friends" and I cut that out at 5 inches.

Here is one of the horses (cut at 3 inches from "Old West"). See the fondant wrinkle? ARGH!

And here is a truck that I cut at 3 inches from "Heritage." Isn't this cool? It is actually my favorite of the shapes I cut.




All in all I used 2 truck cut outs and 2 horse cut outs to go around the cake. I chose these shapes so that the cake represented both of our interests. Well, the main interests at any rate.

I did not take a picture of the inside of the cake. It didn't work! The red velvet seems to be less dense than the vanilla and most of it sort of rose to the top while baking. So, again I am going to use 2 boxes of the same cake next time and see if that works any better. If not, then this darned checkerboard kit is got to goodwill! No reason for it to take up precious pantry space if I can't get the bugger to work.

Overall I still want a cricut cake, but I feel good knowing that I can manage with my sweet little regular Cricut.

Presents for co-workers (another tutorial...Woot!)

I am so excited about this method! I found the original idea here. I have to say on a side note that I am totally addicted to Tip Junkie. There are lots of great ideas over there!

Anyhow, I work with horsey people (lucky me) so I found some horse head cookie cutters in which to make the fudge. Here is the recipe:

1 1/2 Cups Semisweet chocolate chips
1 Cup Peanut Butter Chips
1 14oz can sweetened condensed milk
2 tbs butter or margarine
1 tsp Vanilla extract

The original recipe says to mix the chips and milk and butter and microwave for 2 minutes stirring every 30 seconds.

YOu can do that if you want, but I think that the microwave was meant to be a time saver...so if I have to babysit it I don't want to play; I may as well cook over the stove. Which is what I did.

I set up my pyrex bowl on a shallow pot with water in it. Insta-double boiler.



I mixed the chips, milk and softened butter together and turned it on. You do have to stir it to make sure it heats evenly, but it smells so yummy, and the results are worth the time spent in front of the stove.



While the chips were melting I prepared the cookie cutters. I placed each one on a square of foil and wrapped. I had to get creative in the tight corners, but I figured out a system. Then I sprayed each one with cooking spray. I would take regular breaks throughout this process to stir my chips.




With all six cookie cutters prepared and my chips really starting to melt, I concentrated on stirring at this point. When the mixture was almost all the way melted and combined I mixed in the vanilla. Then let it get pretty melty. Once it was at a loose fudge consistency, I scooped it into each cookie cutter. I used a big table spoon (like really, a table spoon used at the table...)and I got about 3 scoops into each cookie cutter. I smoothed the mixture out as much as possible, then I covered the whole cookie sheet and put it out to chill. I have a handy dandy front room/porch thing that works as a cold room during the winter. Great for when I am doing Holiday baking.

While the cutters were cooling, I put a tub of leftover royal icing that I had from assembling my gingerbread house into the still hot but not boiling water in the pan. Then I cleaned up a little. Made some dip for the office party. Played with the dogs. Washed my hands.

After about a half hour, the royal icing was soft enough to use so I packed it into an icing bag with a medium small tip. I am sorry that I can't be more specific but I got a set of decorating tips and there is a tiny one, a medium small one and a bigger one...I used the one that was most medium. I put manes anf forelocks on all of the horses. Peter thought that they should have smiles but I didn't want to get too cheesey so I just added mouths. I think they turned out really cute!



And a close up. What a pretty chocolate palomino...har har.



I covered them and put them back out into the cold room to chill overnight. Then I headed upstairs and set up Crikey (that is the name of my Cricut machine for those of you just tuning in). I loaded my Winter Woodland Cartridge and selected the card feature, then the horse. I set it at 1 1/2 inches and cut. I used contrasting paper and shift+card+horse to get the background.



This morning I peeled the tinfoil off of each cutter, and wiped away the excess cooking spray. Then I put them into individual baggies and tied the gift tags to them.



So cute! I love the way they turned out, and I think that this would work with any cookie cutter. I tested one of them and the fudge would slide out easily, even though the cookie cutters I used were somewhat complicated. I think I am going to do a lot more of these. I got the cutters off of ebay in a big lot (9 total)so I might get more of different varieties to send friends and family. These are small so they would be cheap to ship and still let everyone know that you are thinking of them.

A word of warning, each fudge piece is about 700 calories. Not to put a damper on your excitement, but I thought that I should be up front about the drawbacks. I don't think that I could even eat a whole one though...the fudge is very rich as I found out from licking the spoon after I had finished filling the cutters.

I did it! (my first tutorial...sort of)

I finally cut fabric with my cricut using the freezer paper method. The last time I tried it was an epic fail. Fabric didn't want to stick to paper, then the blade just messed it up (as in frayed the fabric). So I canned the idea. There aren't really any tutorials out there for this method anyway...maybe it can't be done.

Au Contraire mon fraire!

Last night, for some reason, I just decided to do it. I took some zoo fabric that I have had for years because I don't know what to do with it (pretty standard cheap quilting cotton) and I ironed it to freezer paper. Basically you match the shiney side of the paper to the wrong side of the fabric and iron with a very hot, dry iron. I ironed the crap out of it and made sure that the fabric was indeed stuck down. It didn't stick very well around the edges, and the freezer paper peels off easily so I just made sure that a good portion of it was reasonably fused.

For this cut, my storybook cartridge was already loaded. The most simple design on that cartridge is the flower shadow (shift+shadow+I)so I decided to use that one. I loaded the mat and moved the blade to the point where the fabric and paper were really fused. Here is the technical stuff:

Blade pressure: 5

Size: 3 inches (personal choice...but I think too small or too detailed would fail)

Speed: Min (this is really important!

Multi-cut: I didn't actually use multi cut for this project, but I am going to try next time. there was one spot I had to finish cutting by hand.

Once it was cut out, I just peeled the paper off of the fabric and it is a clean, plain piece of fabric.

And here it is:



Sort of a modest little flower. but she has a special place right now as my first fabric piece cut from cricut.

Are you waiting for the irony? I can't remember why it was so important for me to learn to cut fabric this way. I have seen the multitudes of heat and bond success and every project I can think of (quilts, applique, etc) would be appropriate for that method. I do remember having a strong desire to learn to cut fabric with cricut sans anything permanent on the back...

Whatever. I can do it, and it is done. As soon as I remember why this was important, I will know that I can.

This has also bred a desire for adventure. I have so many ideas: felt story board, fleece. but I didin't know where to start. Last night I fused a small piece of fleece in between two pieces of freezer paper. I couldn't find my deep cut blade but as soon as I do I will try it. Hopefully it will work and I can share it with you here!