zodiac nightlight

My nephew Huon's birthday was last week, and I used some of my gorgeous new Spoonflower fabric to make him a wall light in the pattern of the Aries constellation.

I trimmed the fabric to a 45cm square, and stapled it to a 16"x16" stretched canvas:

(incidentally, I love my staplegun. I'd always put off buying one because I thought they were super expensive, but this one was $16ish from Spotlight. Yay!)

When the fabric square was stapled taut, I turned it over and pierced the circles that signify the stars,

and through each piercing I pushed one of the LEDs of a string of battery-operated Christmas lights.

(I had a moment of panic when  -  obviously  -  I couldn't find Christmas lights for sale in Hobart in April, but eBay came through for me. Yay again!)

When all the lights were in I taped the spare ones with black gaffer (so they wouldn't shine through the canvas) and taped the battery compartment onto the back bottom corner. This is how it looks with the lights off:

and on:

Max and I wrapped it up and posted it in time for Huon's birthday,

where, I hear, it was excitedly received.

All up, the time it took was as long as half-watching an episode of Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries with Whitby on the couch next to me  -  that's around 50 minutes.

I was so pleased with it that I'm thinking about making them for my etsy shop. What do you think?

triple chocolate brownies

It was Friday the 13th on... er... Friday, and although we didn't do much in the way of spookiness, I did put chocolate bats on top of the brownies I made.

That counts, right?

 Right?

I think it counts.

This is how you make 'em:

125g butter

200g dark chocolate

1/2 cup caster sugar

2 eggs

1 plain flour

150g white chocolate bits

150g milk chocolate bits

Melt the butter and the dark chocolate over a saucepan of simmering water, then cool slightly. Stir in the sugar and the eggs, then fold through the flour and the chocolate bits. Cook in a greased and lined tin at 160oC for about as long as it takes to read "The Cat in the Hat" to Max, five times in a row.

(For those playing at home, that's about 45 minutes.)

Let them cool right down before you take them out of the tin  -  I know it's hard, but if you're impatient they just collapse and fall apart and then you have to crumble them up in a bowl and eat them with icecream  oh noes!

 

 Ahem. Where was I?

Oh yes. After you let them cool in the tin, cut them into 16 squares and pour melted dark chocolate over 8 and melted white chocolate over the other 8. Top the white ones with dark chocolate bats (I use this  mould for the bats) and the dark ones with the white bats.

I'm not even kidding, these will blow your mind. Best brownies ever!

easter eggs

What's this? Another blog?

Erm... yes. Another blog.

I know I've not been the most diligent at updating my other blogs, but I always do start out with the best intentions. This one, though, I think I really can follow through on. Yay!

The name and concept were suggested by the lovely Essie one morning when she and her husband were over for brunch at ours, and I'd made waaay too much, as usual. That was a little while ago now, but here we are.

So let's start with what I made today!



It's Easter, and I know the kids will go mad on all the chocolate, they don't need me offering them any more... but the idea of not having something special for breakfast - well, that's just not how I roll.

So I decided to trick them, and provided for breakfast a very austere carton of plain hardboiled eggs. Willow was a little suspicious but dug in anyway. They were delighted to find...



rainbow jelly eggs!

(Oops - we'd polished off three before I remembered to take a photo.)

It was Max's first taste of jelly, I think it blew his mind. Even Whitby deigned to try them and beneath the cool exterior, I've a suspicion he liked them too.





This is how I did them:


1. I used a corkscrew to piece a hole in the top of the egg - I've never done that before so I tried it over the sink while half-expecting the egg to explode in an icky mess, but it was actually surprisingly neat.




2. With a chopstick I broke up the yolk inside the shell so I could pour the egg out through the hole,





3. then I sterilised the shells by boiling and baking them.




4. The jellies were red, blue and yellow originally: Roughly, half of the red went in two eggs, half of the yellow in two, half of the blue in two. Then the remaining red I split in two and mixed half with half the remaining yellow to make orange and half with half the remaining blue to make purple. The last two halves of yellow and blue combined to make green.

Umm, that was unnecessarily confusing. What I meant was,

i.a) 340ml red = 2 x 170ml
i.b) 340ml yellow = 2 x 170ml
i.c) 340ml blue = 2 x 170ml

ii.a) 1 x 170ml red = 2 x 85ml red eggs
ii.b) 1 x 170ml yellow = 2 x 85ml yellow eggs
ii.c) 1 x 170ml blue = 2 x 85ml blue eggs

iii.a) 170ml red = 2 x 85ml
iii.b) 170ml yellow = 2 x 85ml
iii.c) 170ml blue = 2 x 85ml

iv.a) 85ml red + 85ml yellow = 2 x 85ml orange eggs
iv.b) 85ml yellow + 85ml blue = 2 x 85ml green eggs
iv.c) 85ml blue + 85ml red = 2 x 85ml purple eggs





Max was watching intently as I measured these all out - this is totes how I'm teaching him maths.




5. They set overnight in the muffin tin, then in the morning I placed them upside down in the old egg carton.




(after I took this photo, I rubbed the coloured stain off the eggtops to hide the evidence.)



So this was our Easter breakfast! I know, I know. Not the healthiest. But pretty cute!




...and all that was left were the shells.