pretty paper. true stories. {and scrapbooking classes with cupcakes.}

It’s Thursday. So it’s my second favourite topic to discuss. {Which reminds me I need to email Relly about her Christening Cupcakes. Cute!}

It’s gone suddenly cold, the leaves have gone from green to the ground and I am craving warmth. I’m getting odd looks for wearing my hoodie when walking between buildings and I’m typing wrapped up in Icelandic wool. This must mean it is autumn. Which also means it is time for spiced baking.

I wanted to bake the apples for this myself but last night we had a professional development evening at work (after-school training with a more polished name!) and ya know…those are the times when even someone who tries to avoid canned foods remembers that they do serve a very important purpose. So these are the no-mess shortcut. But they do have more preservatives than cooking them yourself. Not that much though.

Apple Spice Cupcakes Long Winter Cupcakes

Ingredients:
250g unsalted butter
400g sugar
5 large eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla
3/4 cup milk
170g self-raising flour
170g plain flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1 teaspoon nutmeg
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
1 tin apple pie filling (or 350-400g stewed apples)

Heat the oven to 160C. Place liners in cupcake pan and set aside.
In mixing bowl, beat softened butter until smooth, then add sugar and beat until fluffy.
Add the eggs one at a time and mix until well distributed.
Stir in the self-raising flour until consistent.
Add the milk and vanilla and mix again.
Add the remaining dry ingredients and mix until even.
Fold in the apple pie filling. If your filling is too solid and the batter seems excessively thick, add milk or apple juice to thin slightly.
Fill cake cases 3/4 full and bake for 18-20 minutes, until a chopstick comes out clean.
Makes about 32 average sized cupcakes.

Cinnamon Cream Cheese Icing

Ingredients:
500g cream cheese
175g unsalted butter
150g light brown sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 teaspoons cinnamon, plus extra for sprinkling

Soften the cream cheese and butter in a bowl and mix with a spatula or mixer until there are no lumps.
Add remaining ingredients and mix until even in colour and texture.
Chill overnight in the fridge to thicken and improve the texture of the sugar (brown sugar is crunchy until it sets).
Pipe or spread over cupcakes.
Sprinkle with cinnamon to garnish.

And although I don’t normally reveal my little lyric subject lines, I will point you toward this one because it’s so bloody brilliant. I never tire of this song (it’s the fourth one on their player…cinnamon, aptly). I think I will call these my Long Winter cupcakes from now on. They are playing Europe with Keane and…well…this may actually be something that would make me go to a Keane gig. Scary.

xlovesx

Comment [20]

Just keeping you guessing with more of the contributing artist team…love these little accent groupings throughout her pages.

While you’re surfing, check out Angie Pedersen’s blog. She wrote The Book of Me (and others!) and is running a contest to give away a free place on the class!

Still. So. Excited!

xlovesx

Comment [10]

So, so excited for this. A class totally different than anything we’ve done so far. The sort of thing I think about when I get into big dream mode. Except it’s for real.

You Think You Know Me is not a class with a supply list, a set of instructions or a guide for creating something similar to many other participants.

You Think You Know Me is a class that pushes you to create something all your own, while offering inspiration from a range of artists with a variety of styles.

You Think You Know Me is about you.

You Think You Know Me has no right or wrong answers. But it does have a workbook.

You Think You Know Me can include lots of pictures, a few pictures, lots of words or a just a few words.

You Think You Know Me can be a 12×12 scrapbook, a smaller format album, a minibook, a handbound book, a journal or a three-dimensional keepsake.

You Think You Know Me has no deadlines and no stress.

Here’s the deal: *Sign up between now and the 15th of October.

*On the 10th of October (or when you sign up between the 10th and the 15th), you’ll receive an electronic workbook with questions to think about.

*Between the 15th and the 25th of October, you’ll receive 10 idea sheets filled with the work of a team of artists. Each has completed the project in her very own style, from clean and graphic to grungy and hands-on.

*You can create your project at any speed. Work along with the October time frame, or keep the materials and create when it fits your calendar.

*You can listen to audio files to cheer you on throughout your project.

*You can publish your images to the web via a community blog.

*You can chat as much or as little as you want on an opt-in email list for the group.

Sign up now:

$15.00

More teasers through the week.
xlovesx

Comment [42]

simon, garfunkel & i drove back from bristol in the rain last night. such a good little mini weekend…hanging with elsie in her classes and taking tons of photos for the magazine. zipped over to a nearby castle in my family tree…but it’s privately owned so couldn’t go on the grounds. very pretty though. might have to book in and stay there sometime just so it will be okay to wander around and take pictures.

elsie and i had some scary colour coordination going on…pink and black tops, jeans and green shoes. freaky. but perhaps if the whole scrapbook thing doesn’t work out for us, we can open a green-only shoe store?

just gonna finish some details for the new class and the info will be posted here later tonight. so. darn. excited. !!!

xlovesx

Comment [4]

Just finished work—off to Bristol now for a bit of Scrap Camp. I’m really there to take pictures and do some interviews for the magazine…but I’m also hoping to work on this for a little while, even if it is just downtime in my hotel room. So far I am loving my little Atlanta book.

A couple of questions to answer: *Yes, there is a new class coming up—you may have seen a teaser from Klala. Details posted by the end of the weekend. *Yes, of course we will be Journaling Christmas again! That starts December 1st…I’ll put the sign up button up at the beginning of November.

Enjoy your weekend…and go make something!

xlovesx

Comment [4]

Somehow I have managed to have no fewer than six conversations this week involving the dairy queen. I can’t explain it. It just keeps coming up. And we don’t have the good old DQ here, but I did spend nearly five years working the DQ line and I really can’t knock it. I worked at a total of four different stores, but the one where I worked for much of high school was just a pleasant place most of the time. Even if I wrote a college comp assignment on the supposed tragedy of working the fourth of July one summer.

When I first started working there, lifers told me I would stop liking ice cream pretty quickly. I laughed. Surely such a thing is not possible. When you like ice cream, you like ice cream. And yes, yes I do. I ate ice cream every day I worked there, without fail. I secretly loved the night shift because you ended up with a treasure trove of ice cream in your freezer…if someone made a mistake with a flavour or something, it would go in the freezer rather than the rubbish. Every night we had to clear the freezer, and taking it home was just as viable as throwing it, so why not? In the summer, friends would meet up with us at close to share in the mysterious flavour combinations; the rest of the year I took it home to share with the family.

The other day I was really in mood for what used to show up on my drive-thru screen as ORBZCC. That’s an Oreo Blizzard with Chocolate Ice Cream and Cold Chocolate Fudge. We used to make an unofficial blizzard that was half that and half plain old cookies and cream. Aside from the time we put Cherry Nibs through the Blizzard machine, our unofficial menu was fabulous, I tell ya.

Except we don’t have a Dairy Queen here. But we have cupcakes, you know. My kitchen smells just like that unofficial Blizzard. Perfect.

Oreo Cupcakes

Ingredients:
180g unsalted butter
400g brown sugar
250g dark chocolate
3 large eggs, separated
2 teaspoons vanilla
200g plain flour
100g self-raising flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
8 Oreo cookies, smashed to bits
1 3/4 cup milk

Melt the chocolate in a bowl over a saucepan of simmering water. Set aside but don’t chill.
Heat the oven to 180C and line cupcake tin with papers.
Beat the butter until it is soft, then add sugar and mix until fluffy.
Stir up the egg yolks, then add them to the butter and sugar.
Add the vanilla and the chocolate (just make sure it’s not so hot that it would cook the eggs).
Add the flour, baking powder, soda, alternating with the milk.
Stir in the bashed Oreos until evenly distributed.
In a separate bowl, whip the egg whites until peaks form.
Fold in the egg whites, until no more whites show.
Scoop into the cupcake liners straight away, filling them 3/4 full.
Bake for 20 minutes or until chopstick comes out clean.
Cool on a wire rack before icing.

Cookies & Cream Icing

Ingredients:
225g unsalted butter
400 – 600g icing sugar (to taste)
1/4 cup milk
2 teaspoons vanilla
3/4 cup marshmallow fluff (they have this at sainsbury’s now!!)
8 Oreo cookies, smashed to bits

Beat the butter, then add in the sugar gradually and mix well.
Add milk and vanilla and continue to mix.
Once this much is to your taste (a basic vanilla buttercream), stir in the fluff with a spatula.
Add the bashed Oreos until the texture is even.

This will go through a piping bag, but you’ll need the Oreos to be very fine! Otherwise, just use a knife. The tops of these cupcakes are a bit fragile and the icing is sticky, so take your time and make sure the cupcakes are fully cooled.

Add more Oreos on top if you like. How could you not like?

xlovesx

Comment [21]

Are you getting Ali’s life art newsletter? Cuz it is pretty darn lovely, ya know. this week she has been talking miniBOOKS, to use her capitalisation. When I see it that way, I always want to whisper the ‘mini’ like the kid on the skittles advert, then shout the ‘books’ like I might very well be thrown out of the library. Anyway, on Monday, she challenged anyone out there to make a little something highlighting their five fabulous favourites of the moment, with the idea that we would all start posting them today. this, clearly, is mine.

my book is a tiny concertina from bazzill basics, with a fab green and pink print paper designed by rhonna farrer for autumn leaves, a label stamp designed by tia bennett for fontwerks, a daisy stamp that is the part of the current free gift with scrapbook inspirations, those classic PSX letter stamps, diddy flower jewels from heidi swapp and some pink ric-rac, ribbon and staples.

Just got a new printer as the old one has given up the ghost, so to pick my favourites, I went through my ‘favourites’ folder of photos and got excited to print them right then rather than burn them to a CD and take them to be printed. Instant gratification. I let the photos dictate the favourites, but five grabbed me pretty quickly so that worked. {My favourites shown here…favourite coffee – pret is totally winning me at the moment, favourite band – love this shy photo from the little summer gig, favourite treat – my favourite cupcake photo so far…always trying to beat it, favourite flower – all about daisies lately and the easy, gushy one…my favourite person. Aww.}

Gotta love this little book for fitting in the palm of your hand but still having mega space for journaling. The back of each panel carries a little status report on how long each thing has been a favourite, how I discovered it and how long I think it will last.

I am going to use this idea again next month when I start my kitchen-counter-album-collection. Which is fun to say, but really just means I want a little set of paper things with a home in my little kitchen. I’m working on my cupcake book, but that’s a bigger album. I want some little things on my kitchen counter. Before we had furniture (which was almost the first year I lived here…it’s a long story) I used to sit on the kitchen counter to read while I heated something in the oven (see, we are also talking pre-cooking days). Now that it’s getting cooler, I love to stay in the kitchen while things are cooking…so some reading material would be cool. Random perhaps, but fitting.

You can see more life artists at work here.

Thanks for the push, girl.

xlovesx

Comment [12]

it’s getting cooler (except not today) and i’m starting to embrace autumn. it’s a tough thing to do, but i’ll come around. even if the shoes are not as comfortable.

so the other day we had porridge for breakfast. which i still call oatmeal in my head but porridge aloud. ‘cause it’s england and all.

but my favourite thing about oatmeal (because it’s not the done thing with porridge, really) is stirring in chunks of brown sugar and then having the glory of eating one spoonful of hot brown sugar because the chunks haven’t melted into the oats just yet.

i wanted this in a cupcake. but i didn’t want oats in my cupcake. because a cupcake with oats to me…is a muffin. not a cupcake.

this is what i came up with. sugar rush, yes. but also yummy, we think.

Brown Sugar Cupcakes

ingredients:
250g unsalted butter
400g sugar
200g self-raising flour
100g plain flour
50g dark brown sugar
4 large eggs
3/4 cup milk
1/4 cup double cream
2 tsp vanilla extract

Heat the oven to 180C. Line cupcake tin with paper liners.
Use a mixer or electric whisk (or lots of arm strength) to beat butter until creamy and even.
Add white sugar and mix until fluffy.
Add eggs and vanilla and mix.
Add flours, milk and cream in stages to make it easier to mix. Mix until everything is smooth and even.
Then fold in the brown sugar—do not mix, just smash it through with a spatula to mix in the giant lumps, but you still want some little pockets of sugar that isn’t mixed. That’s the oatmeal effect.
Fill liners 3/4 full and bake for about 22 minutes (more time for big cupcakes, less time for minis).

Makes 30 regular sized cupcakes.

Brown Sugar Icing

75g dark brown sugar
1/2 cup milk
150g unsalted butter
400g icing sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract

Mix milk and brown sugar in a saucepan and bring to the boil, then simmer for ten minutes to thicken. While this cooks, sit the butter in a bowl to soften.
Remove sugar mix from the heat and stir for about a minute, then add to the butter and mix in until the butter is all melted.
Add the vanilla.
Add the icing sugar in stages, mixing as you go, and tasting to see if it is too sweet for your taste.

This will be soft enough (in hot weather, too soft) to pipe but sets up quickly in the fridge. Pipe then stick them in the fridge and they will set as they are just melting down the edges of the cupcake.

After eating, be aware of crash to sugar low due in approximately 25 minutes!

xlovesx

Comment [5]