Sleeping Spike Snowglobe

I had this tiny jam jar around (from an afternoon cream tea) always with the idea of turning it into a very tiny snowglobe.



I made this using fimo clay to make the little dragon, which I then baked. I added in a little detail using a super-fine archival pigment ink marker. I used some white sugru to build up a base that looks like a pillow and sealed up the jar with some water, a touch of liquid soap and some glitter.

Random Pretty Pictures #1

Cookery: Japanese Baking

This is kind of just a brain-dump/photo-dump post. Sorry for the lack of enrichment on this post.
Japanese Cream Puffs

With a cookie-like crust layer on top. It's from this recipe but tweaked a bit: http://www.littlejapanmama.com/2011/09/pai-shuu-cream-puff-recipe-like-beard.html

Japanese Milk Bread, using a roux base. This may become my new default bread recipe. It's lovely for cinnamon bread.


Related: Japanese Choco Coronets... Soft bread baked around cream horn moulds, filled with rich chocolate custard

Liquid Nitrogen Ice Cream at London Hackspace Open Day (May 2013)

How to make ice cream.

Put some double cream, a dash of sugar and a few drops of flavouring into your trusty Kitchenaid Mixer bowl.

Slowly pour in Liquid Nitrogen while running it on low speed.


Serve.

Playing with fimo some more

Warmed up my old black fimo in the microwave (really briefly, a couple of seconds at a time) then mixed up some translucent + white sparkly fimo to make faux cameos and ammonite/snail things. Used a twist drill and wiregauge drill bit to drill the holes after baking.




Having recently been to a talk on Art & Food Through The Ages at the V&A, these now remind me of oreo cameos... Hmm...

LASERS! Etching my new laptop

(originally written 30 March, 2013)



So... I got a new laptop back in December. It has a black painted aluminimum lid. I have access to a laser cutter/etcher. What a perfect time to personalise my laptop.

Bronies will recognise the balloons - it's Pinkie Pie's cutie mark.

It took me hours of tweaking vectors and screaming & yelling at Inkscape. It took 17seconds to laser etch at 100% power, 100m/s speed. It was so fast there's no pictures of the process.

Close up:



I'd really like to etch the inside keyboard surround but I'd have to take it off the laptop first and I've not bothered to look up how to do that yet. Definitely requires more pony.

Cocktails...

Get invited to a cocktail party, make a cocktail tool roll out of faux leather and velvet ribbon. Take awful picture of it. Of course.



Spend next morning making weird flavoured syrups to go in cocktails:

Rhubarb & Vanilla syrup (recipe from here)


(take more bad photos)
Fresh Ginger Syrup, recipe I kinda made up. Syrup with slices of fresh ginger steeping, then added freshly grated ginger juice to the final syrup but it still wasn't as spicy and kicky as I'd like it to be.

Also made but not featured, a strange combination of sugar, vodka, Balvarian Cream flavouring & vintage aged homemade vanilla extract which was dubbed Silky Cupcake Vodka (in honour of my pony OC which has a cupcake and a cocktail as her cutie mark).