Orange you Glad!

After weeks of school, utter exhaustion, vacations, and life getting in the way...Emilee and I are finally getting to hang out and have a Pinterest/Pinstrosity day! We're pretty excited about this and we have some fun projects in the works that we'll show you in a few days.

 

 

With summer rolling in I've been trying to find summery and cheap ways to liven up the décor and to add some fun summer pizzazz to the house. I love having the windows open, the breeze blowing in, and all the summer smells sifting around. I have been trying to think of things I could leave on the windowsill to pretty things up and maybe add some nice summer scent. I hadn't gone as far as looking on Pinterest yet...wasn't that motivated yet, but one nice thing about this blog is that sometimes ideas come to us in forms of submissions. Sarah-Jane sent us a Pinstrosity she had on her windowsill and, this may seem odd since it didn't work so well for her...but I think I'm going to try it.

 

The Original Pin:

 

Sarah-Jane says, "The idea is to peel an orange in one continuous piece and then use the peel to make cute orange-scented decorative flowers or roses by rolling them up and letting them dry out."

"Attached are my versions. In the first picture you might notice the 'orange roses' are on a plate full of crumbs, that's not where I was keeping them after I made them (they were on my windowsill) but I put them there when I realised what was happening..."

"First of all I was quite pleased with the result and even as the peel dried a bit, the edges became more crinkled and petal-like. However, I started to notice an ant crawling around on my window sill. Now, I'm a very clean person and never leave food lying around. I had a closer look at the orange-roses doing their job prettifying my window sill, and noticed something else starting to bloom in the middle of the orange-rose peel..."

 

The Pinstrosity

 

Mold!

 

 

 

Sarah-Jane definitely didn't like the direction these took. "I don't really know what other conditions I could have put them in so that they would dry out without going mouldy but this was definitely becoming a health hazard, especially if ants were being attracted to my room. The orange-roses were destined for only one place - the compost heap!"

 

I'm so sad that these didn't turn out! I love how the original ones look in the Pin. Here are my thoughts on this. If you're leaving these out in the open to dry out, your climate will make a huge difference. My sister just moved from Mississippi and she said that if her little boy spilled water (or drooled) on his shirt and they just threw it in the hamper, the next morning it would be stained with mold. Humid climates will not allow an orange peel to dry out completely. Out here in the Southwest, I think these would work great. In fact I know they would because I've left orange peels out on the counter (I wish I could say I was as clean as Sarah-Jane) and they've dried out almost within hours. You may be able to dry these out in the oven (lowest temp possible!)...but that's just a guess...never tried it before. If you do live in a humid climate, you'll need to dry these out before setting them out, or they will most likely mold.

 

I think I need to get me some oranges and try this out, because I love how those look! Thanks Sarah-Jane for sending this in. I'm sorry yours didn't work out...but I'm glad to have the idea now!

 

I hope you all have a great Saturday! We're off to rummage sales to find the perfect touches for our projects. Have a most wonderful Memorial Day weekend!

 

 

Cacaphony of Cakes

Why do people say, "Oh, it's a piece of cake!" or "That's a cakewalk!" when they are referring to something easy? Cakes are not easy. I have never attempted a big fancy cake before because I'm pretty sure it'll turn out like the Fairy's cake on Sleeping Beauty. 

I'm sure someday though my kid will say, "Mom, I want a cake that looks like that!" and I'll give it a try. For now, until I get brave enough to try a big cake, I have some courageous cake makers and their cakes to show you. Starting with this one that Liz sent us. 

The Original Pin

http://whipperberry.com/2013/03/cake-decorating-made-easy.html

Looks like "a piece of cake", but Liz found out it wasn't. 

The Pinstrosity

"I'm making a smash cake for my sons birthday so I wanted blue poofs and I wanted them a bit bigger, minus the balls. Well, I made them too big and too far apart. So I tried to do a big one in the center. It has been referred to as 'a forest' and 'smurf turds'."  -Liz

Let's go to our 2nd cake. 

The Original Pin

http://www.bakerella.com/fourteen-for-the-fourteenth/

A fourteen layer cake. That's amazing. 

Here's Christina's try at it:

The Pinstrosity

"I followed the blog photos and ideas pretty much to the letter, except that I wasn't so great at spreading such thin layers of cake mix around on the parchment paper sort-of-circles - I kept picking the paper up with my spatula. So I gave up on that, and assumed it would spread on it's own - it didn't, because there wasn't enough "weight" to spread itself."

"The pourable icing from the Smith Family recipe was wonderful, but I must have done something wrong because it didn't thicken at all, and was even runnier than the stuff in Bakerella's photos, but it sure was yummy! So anyway, once the 14 cakes were cooled, I started stacking them and pouring the amazing
icing on them. After the 3rd layer, I realized my mistake in not spending more time spreading that cake batter evenly. Of course they were thicker in the middle than the edges! I tried slicing the top-middle off of one of the layers to make it more even, which didn't work at all because the layers are so thin. So I gave up on that, and just went with the flow, with my cake really starting to look like a hill, and the layers sliding all over the place on the icing."

"I ended up using 12 layers for the cake, and the last two layers I tore into strips and stuffed around the inside edges of the 12 layers, to try and prop up the sides! That didn't work too well, as you can see from the photo. (Also note the major drippage of the icing!)"

"Bakerella's buttercream frosting was to die for, but I only glopped it on the top of the whole thing because frosting down the sides of a cake with 12 layers flopping and sliding around was just impossible for me. My whole cake tasted spectacular, but was a huge fail in the looks department :D"

-Christina

And then there are the 1 layer cakes that seem like we can't hardly get them wrong (I know from experience how easy it is to mess up even a 1 layer cake). Gina found a cake, gave it a try, and then sent us an email. 

The Original Pin

http://www.threeforkscakes.com/Baby-Shower-Cakes.html

"For my baby's 1st b'day I became obsessed with the onesie cakes I'd been seeing on Pinterest.

It looked SO easy!  Until my cake split in two and I tried to ice over it.  Then it became a onesie
with a very full diaper." -Gina

The Pinstrosity

And then for the final cake...the graduation cake Laura sent in. 

The Original Pin

http://karmascakes.blogspot.com/2010/08/tarta-graduacion.html

Laura said, "A couple of weeks ago, one of my friends made the last exam of the university degree he was studying. The rest of his friends wanted to celebrate a big party, with costumes and everything. And I had an amazing idea: 'Why don't we make a cake with the shape of a graduation hat?' Bad idea..."

"I surfed the internet looking for recipes and tips, and I met the world of fondant and other types of frosting (there are so many!). I read blog after blog without reaching a conclusion because all of them were written for people who already knew how to work with them. In the end, I realized I could buy the fondant instead of making it myself. "Good" - I thought- "one less thing I can spoil". And I asked the shopkeeper for advice. He told me that I could shape the fondant as I wanted and the following day it would be rigid enough so that it wouldn't lose its shape. He lied! After a whole afternoon (until 11pm) baking and shaping, the following day the fondant was as soft as always. When we tried to cover the cake, it lost its shape and we had to start molding again."

"Besides, I made another kind of pastry to make the string, but I mixed the wrong proportion of jelly and sugar and it was another mess: it was impossible to shape it and, when I finally got a string, I accidentally broke it!"

"Later that day (the party day), I was told that my friend had done a horrible exam, and he probably would not finish his degree. So I shaped a [poop] with the remaining fondant and, at the party, I told my friend: 'As you have made a [mess] of an exam, you deserve a [mess] of a cake'. And I gave him both things."

The Pinstrosity

So there you have it. Pieces of cake that weren't a piece of cake. Do you have cakes you tried to make off of Pinterest that just didn't turn out? Send them our direction!