byootaful

Not literally, because I think that would be borderline animal cruelty?

Anyway, turns out enviro bags are just like boxes, because Puddy did this:

I had left the bag next to the chair while I gathered up a few things to put in it. Turning around, I saw that the bag had been claimed by Puddy, who was sitting in it, ears perked up, looking quite pleased with herself. I must admit, it’s a nice roomy bag, so it must be pretty comfortable in there, with its padded floor and flexible sides.

Do you use enviro bags?

Or rather, do your pets use enviro bags? Heh.

My favourite thing about birthdays is the cake. I love putting time and effort into making something that makes people go “WOW!” – even if it’s not fantastic, I think it still means so much because of that time and effort. You might remember the “boob cake” I made for Phill for his 21st in 2007? It was lost in the great blog explosion of 2009 so the post about it no longer exists, but it was quite a hit for a while there and I was pretty proud of myself. Professional I am not, but I do enjoy spending half a day in the kitchen making a big mess and making a cake.

This year, I decided to do a Simpsons-themed cake. Phill is a huge Simpsons fan and I normally buy him a Simpsons gag gift, just a little something Simpsons-related as a sort of tradition. This year, there was no Simpsons gift, so I figured, why not do a cake? I searched the internet for some inspiration and found this:

This cake was made by Meg of megscakes and I was absolutely blown away by her amazing skills! I decided to use this as my inspiration and I’d see how close I could get (HA, not very close!). I knew I wouldn’t be able to create something as professional as Meg’s but I’d at least use the characters as inspiration.

My first hurdle was the black fondant. I decided to buy ready-made icing and colour it myself, but I know black is a difficult colour to make and I hadn’t left myself enough time to buy some online. I spent a few hours racing around the local shopping centre trying all the bakeries and kitchen shops to no avail and alas, I decided last-minute that Snowball II would have to be sacrificed. The frame also went. I didn’t want to over-do the icing so I decided to just make the characters and stick them onto a chocolate buttercream, so they’d be easily peeled off if people didn’t like the taste.

It took me a good four hours (!!!) just to do the Simpsons characters. This didn’t include making and baking the cake, making the chocolate buttercream and getting the cake to the point of being ready for the characters to go on.

I basically tore off bits of icing, dyed it and then shaped it to mimic Meg’s characters. I used grease-proof paper which I found stopped the icing from sticking and kept a knob of butter nearby to keep my hands greased. Of course, I had forgotten to buy gloves so by the end of it all my hands had turned a funny shade of red/green/blue/yellow, but that came out after a few rounds of hand-washing.  I didn’t take a lot of photos during the character creation process (because my hands were so dirty), but here is the end result:

Vanilla cake with chocolate buttercream icing, with Simpsons characters made out of coloured icing. I was actually quite happy with the end result. The only thing that really bugged me was the length of Lisa’s neck. I had originally prepared all the characters on some grease-proof paper and was happy with the size, proportion and colours but once transferred to the cake (the point of no return!) I realised Lisa’s neck was huuuuuge! I wasn’t sure how that slipped by me, but oh well, I decided to leave it because I didn’t want to make a mess trying to fix it.

There were little creases and dints everywhere, but overall I was pretty happy. You should have seen how tall Marge’s hair started off as – once I’d got all the characters together, I realised it was pretty massively out of proportion, so I trimmed it off. There were a few (polite) comments from party-goers that they resembled the Simpsons cast from when they appeared on the Tracy Ullman show and I smiled and said that was what I was going for (ha).

I think my favourite character turned out to be Santa’s Little Helper, with his turned-up nose and sticking-out tongue and crazy eyes. I wish I’d been able to figure out the black icing for Snowball II because she’s slightly crazy too and her fangs would have been cool to make. Maggie turned out ok too (I was worried her dummy would look like a crazy red zit on her face or something but I think it’s passable). The hardest part of the characters would probably be her bow. Every time I prodded the sides in, it pushed the middle out – I couldn’t make it small and keep it proportional – it took forever, but I was happy with the end result.

So what do you think? I’m no whizz in the kitchen, but it was a really fun way to spend the majority of the day. When Phill came home and saw it, his eyes lit up and he was so excited – and that made all the stress worth it! Now to start planning next year’s cake…

Fixed, fixed, fixed!

1. Phill managed to get another modem which means I can access my blog again like normal, which means I can get back to posting and commenting. I probably have a gazillion blogs to read, since I haven’t really had use of my laptop for a couple weeks (so it might take me a while to get to your blog)

2. The new power pack *just* arrived and IT FITS! We were a bit worried because we ordered it online and it wasn’t the same brand as my old one, but we had checked the specs and it seemed the same – and it is! We plugged it in and the charging light immediately came on – phew! This morning my laptop had refused to even turn on, that’s how empty the battery was, and although I could get the power pack to light up, I couldn’t seem to get the electricity from there to my laptop – it was that connection that was dead. I’ve missed my laptop so much and while a break from the internet was great, I’m also relieved that it’s back.

I was worried it would take a long time to get this all fixed, but everything has worked out and I’m excited about blogging again. Perhaps this was all for a higher purpose – my blogging mojo was waning and I guess maybe not being able to blog made me want to even more. It’s funny how you want something you can’t have.

But wait – I can now, so what am I doing? I’d better get to it!

Ok, disclaimer – I am writing this on my iPhone so please ignore the bad punctuation and probable spelling mistakes.

It seems there is a higher power telling me I shouldn’t be blogging because there are two things preventing me from blogging:

1. The power pack for my laptop is not working. It finally croaked which means my laptop has no battery and I can’t charge it. We ordered a replacement about a week ago but so far it hasn’t arrived.

2. We had some Internet problems which resulted in phill having to replace the modem BUT as a result, since we host my blog ourselves at home, for some reason I cannot load it AT ALL! So I can’t write a post, approve comments – nothing!

You may be wondering how I am writing this post? Well, apart from going to someone else’s house and using their internet, the only other way for me to access my blog is via 3G on my iPhone (since that isn’t using our Internet connection). As some of you might know, typing and blogging on an iPhone is not as nice as a computer or laptop.

I’ve commandeered phill’s Mac to visit your blogs but mine may be a bit quiet until we can figure this out. I thought having a broken power pack was bad enough, but not even being able to access my blog is much worse – especially since i recently made Phill a simpsons birthday cake I wanted to blog about!

Ahhhhh.

I’m not going to re-read this post so I hope it makes sense! Just thought I’d let you all know where I am. Hopefully it all gets fixed soon!

One of our latest obsessions is home-made pizza, usually a special treat towards the end of the week. We’ve been buying bases for a while and it’s starting to add up since they’re about $4.50 for two. They’re not the frozen ones, they’re fresh and found in the bread aisle – they’re really quite delicious but I was thinking about how to cut back and save some money. I figured, we’ve got a bread maker, why not make our own dough?

I found a simple recipe on Best Recipes that claimed to be “super easy” and, since there wasn’t going to be any practice runs, I needed something fool-proof. I must admit, I cheated a little. I had a lot of stuff to do before lunch and I had a bread maker in the cupboard so, instead of doing everything manually by hand, then allowing it to rise, I decided to throw all the ingredients in the bread maker and let it do it instead.

In goes flour, yeast, caster sugar and salt, then oil and water. Select the “dough” setting, press start… and walk away.

From memory I think it took about one hour fifteen minutes all up. It plays a nice little tune when it’s ready, just like the washing machine does. Ha, that reminds me of yesterday when I was outside taking the clothes off the line and I heard the neighbour’s washing machine finish. It beeped an alarm, like a truck reversing. I remember thinking how much nicer my little tune was. Puddy has even memorised the tune – as soon as she hears it, she comes running into the laundry because she enjoys flopping around in the sun as I hang out the clothes.

Anyway, here’s the finished dough:

Please ignore my creepy fingers. Let’s just say lighting isn’t my strong point.

The dough was nice and warm and a little strechy. I lightly floured the bench, tore the dough in two and rolled out two pizza bases. The amount of dough was perfect for two thin bases, but if you like your pizza bases a little thicker, you might want to make more. I think the recipe creater uses this amount of dough for one pizza, so I guess it just depends on your personal taste.

The speckles in the dough is some sort of herb – I can’t remember! We added it right at the beginning when we put all the ingredients in the bread maker. You can see the dough was quite thin in places, but we didn’t have a problem with it tearing or anything like that – in fact, it probably made it more crispy.

Toppings went on: tomato pizza sauce, mushrooms, cheese, red and green capsicum, mini pepperoni and some shredded shoulder ham (a old favourite from my childhood) and we popped it in the oven at about 200 degrees celcius for about 15 minutes. Keep an eye on it, once it’s golden brown it’s ready.

It was absolutely delicious! The darker bits around the crust aren’t burnt – I think we just managed to get the pizza sauce all over the place and it was cooked on. To get a crispy crust, you need to cook it for a little longer than a store-bought crust because then the pastry is cooked through and you don’t get that doughy taste.

We’ll definitely be making this dough the next time we have pizza and I think we might experiment with different herbs and seasonings – some basil or rosemary would be nice in the dough.

SUPER EASY PIZZA DOUGH
from Best Recipes

Ingredients:

2 cups plain flour
1 x 8g sachet dry yeast
1 teaspoon caster sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons olive oil
3/4 cup warm water

Method:

1. Combine dry ingredients in large mixing bowl and add oil or water. (If using bread maker,  now select dough setting and leave it to do it’s own thing. If not using bread maker, continue to step 2)
2. Mix to a soft dough.
3. Knead on a floured surface until soft and pliable.
4. Return to the mixing bowl and cover with cling wrap and leave in a warm spot for 30 minutes. The dough should double in size.
5. When it has risen, “punch” the dough once to remove air bubbles.
6. Remove from bowl and knead gently for 1 minute.
7. Roll the dough out to desired size and add favourite toppings.

Note: This is where the recipe ends. As for cooking, I just went off previous pizza recipes and guessed 200 degrees celcius for about 15 minutes. It depends on your oven, you just want it hot so the base fully cooks and goes crispy. Some people have suggested adding some oil to the pan before cooking – this helps the base crisp up.

Mmmm, now I’m craving pizza for dinner!