Author: Irish Bees Don't Do Mondays

A blog for me, about the things I like. After Effects, Procreate, Illustrator, Photoshop, Drawing, Painting, Paper Cutting, Sewing, Embroidering, up-cycling old furniture. Whatever grabs me in the moment/

Ganache drip cake with meringue kisses

by Irish Bees Don't Do Mondays, posted in Baking

The basic meringue mixture is a ratio of exactly 1 egg white to 2 of sugar. Add a tsp of vanilla essence or extract and a pinch of salt to flavour the mixture.

Get a piping bag and draw lines of food colouring inside it using a long-handled paintbrus (reserved for cakes only :))

Fill the piping bag with meringue.The food colouring will streak the meringue as it’s piped onto the tray.

Get a baking sheet (or two) and pipe the meringue vertically leaving a good inch between them as they will spread as they cook.

Put them in the oven (130 for approx. 35 mins) then get them out and leave them to cool.

Lessons learned:

1. Make 1.5 times the usual amount of buttercream, not double.

2. Ditto gananche. Only needed 150g choc and 75 g of cream (converted from ml).

3. Less is more when it comes to drip cakes. Too much ends up pooling on the cakeboard or running over.

4. Plan to make this cake! Get the butter out the night before so it’s soft. Check the ingredients and get in what you need before you start.

5. Think ahead about how to use up the egg yolks. We had a Spanish Omelette for tea.

Papercutting and Dupion Silk

by Irish Bees Don't Do Mondays, posted in Papercutting

I’m working on a papercutting for somebody at the moment and wanted something special to back it with.

I went to a shop that specialises in raw silk from China, Thailand and India. It’s called Roisin Cross. It has the most beautiful range of silks.

I chose three Dupion silks – these are woven in India and have a wonderful texture with little imperfections in the weave that makes them so pretty. They’re not so flowy or soft as the lighter weight silks as I needed the stiffer backing. They have a certain irridescence about them as well.

The choice of colour had to be something that would contrast with white paper – Canson brilliant white, 250gsm, acid-free cartridge paper. In the end I chose a sharp green, a dark sea blue-green and a dark mulberry.

The pic above is the first cut, on Canson natural white on the dark sea green.

On the sharp green:

On the mulberry:

The Dupion silks:

It’s been difficult to find good quality backing paper for papercuts for the past year and silk makes a superb alternative.

Latest revisions:

xox

Ganache

by Irish Bees Don't Do Mondays, posted in Baking

Movember is a big thing in Ireland, and UK, as well I think. It’s the month where the chaps grow a moustache for charity to help raise awareness of testicular and prostate cancer. I sponsored a couple of guys to have their legs waxed.

There were two baking fund raisers – I made the chocolate biscuit cake Christmas pudding for one of them (last post) and a rich sponge with brandy buttercream filling topped with white chocolate ganache with chocolate stars, chocolate silver balls and a ring of Malteasers for the latest one.

Ganache

Ganache is very easy to make. It’s just double cream and chocolate – generally a ratio of 2 choc to 1 cream.

Weigh the cream to tare it in grams then break the chocolate into a bowl.

Pour the cream into a saucepan and bring it to the boil; stir it so it doesn’t burn and stick to the pan.

When it’s broiling and roiling, take it off the heat and pour over the chocolate. Leave for 30s or so.

Stir until it’s melted and blended together. Let it cool a bit if it’s on the hotter side of warm then use it on your cake.

On the way in there was some minor damage.

S

Some of the Malteasers got dislodged but were quickly pressed back into position and a few stars got broken.

My cakes sales (the two together) raised nearly €100 so delighted they were enjoyed and raised money.

Wind Rose

Spoon Graphic blog posted a free set of treasure map assets for Illustrator. There’s an Illustrator tutorial here:Wind Rose Compass that’s easy to follow and the end result works well with the map; this is how mine turned out:

Call the midwife!

by Irish Bees Don't Do Mondays, posted in Baking, Crochet

Nothing finished but getting there. Sums up where I am with Everything at the moment!

The blanket is growing. I’m going to continue until the whole ball of wool is used up (providing there’s enough to complete a ‘block’ of pattern). I swear the ball gets no smaller no matter how many rows I do. It’s like when Prometheus stole fire from the Gods. Zeus had him bound to a rock and an eagle ate his liver… every single day. Imagine eating liver EVERY day! I swear the ball grows back every night and will never diminish.

** Update: Finished the blanket!!***

I posted the pattern here.

I tried a new recipe and made a bakewell-flavoured bundt cake. Bundt cakes aren’t the easiest to make. You have to cook the cake for longer than in conventional shallow cake tins. They can end up crusty and dry on the outside and still mush on the inside. The recipe came from Dolly Bakes: Bundts on the brain

The cake molded beautifully; I coated the Bundt tin with melted coconut oil followed by sieved icing sugar (turned upside-down and tapped to dislodge the excess). Perfect. The flavour was really nice but I confess to finishing it in the microwave because I wasn’t convinced the middle was cooked.

The Christmas Pudding mold came in useful to create a Chocolate Biscuit Cake to look like a Christmas pudding. The holly is real and pinched from Shouty Man – his holly grows over into my garden. Not complaining – it’s lovely.

And getting more and more into the Christmas spirit, I made some Coffee Cream Liqueur. I posted the recipe a long time ago, you may remember it. If not, here you go:

And tree decorations! Love finding pretty new decs for the trees! These lovely hearts came from The Flying Tiger:

The reindeer are from Penneys – little and cute!

A robin on a post box (from Mr Dunnes – I added some red to his breast as he was a bit orange).

Am in love with this glass robin. It is far prettier iRL; my photo doesn’t do it justice at all.

And that’s about it!

Chocolate cake with Maltesers on top

by Irish Bees Don't Do Mondays, posted in Baking

A very indulgent chocolate drip cake. Three tiers of Victoria sponge, sandwiched together with buttercream icing, covered with buttercream icing with white chocolate ganache poured over the top with lots of Maltesers for decoration – oh – and some edible glitter as well.  My dripping went a little too far but stopped short of running over.

Pink, green and purple. Not brilliant but am getting used to the food colouring gels – they don’t match the colour of the label on the pot.

The cupcakes and chocolate sponge with coffee buttercream topping.

Here’s little Gracie. I recently posted about shouty man who said ‘He’d know what to do about her if she came into his garden again’ after finding a dead bird and believing her to be responsible and how less than a week later she had a length of her tail degloved. She is, of course, the only cat for miles and miles – said nobody round here ever. He obviously doesn’t see the 50-odd cats line dancing round his flower beds and plant pots every day.

Anyway, the fur is growing back now, just as the vet said it would. I thought she was going to have a bald patch. You can see where her tail looks thinner in the middle but it’s so much better now.

This is Gracie in front of the fire.

Her and Jess have a comfy, squashy bed right beside the hearth.

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I went hookey again and made another pair of these dolly-sized bootees. The wool is a mohair mix with sequins. Sparkles.

Adobe Video Fun with CC

by Irish Bees Don't Do Mondays, posted in Photoshop

The graphic above was created in Animate – I saw a video that used this effect and wanted to have a go myself. I ended up doing mine quite differently but the end result is the same. Check out the inspiration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SuUjUDGAqt8.

Adobe CC

I am upgraded to Adobe CC! The previous version was CS6 and a few years old. The new features across the whole suite is a lot to learn but I’ve been trying my hardest.

The video I’ve posted is a synergy of Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, Character Animator, Animate and Premiere Pro. It’s a work in progress with a lot still to do (the audio is awful – dunno why that’s so bad) but you get the idea. Stitching all the individual bits and pieces present sits own challenges and am still trying to work out how to include the Animate file (Adobe Fun posted above)  into the video I’ve posted. Hannah is obviously looking and pointing in the wrong direction for the glass ball particle explosion so when I re-do it will reverse the background picture and ball (the picture is taken from Rosie’s Walk by Pat Hutchins – I love the sweet graphics).  There are a ton of things to correct but I’m getting there. It all helps me learn and that’s the objective.

 

This mountain landscape was a happy little play in Illustrator to get used to the latest interface and icons. It was based closely on this tutorial: https://design.tutsplus.com/tutorials/how-to-create-mountain-landscape-in-flat-style–cms-28759

 

Juicy Illustrator Curvy Ribbons

by Irish Bees Don't Do Mondays, posted in Illustrator

The curvy, organic shapes was created in Illustrator and inspired by Veerle’s blog, which, sadly, seems to have disappeared and her tutorial along with it.

See my post: https://greenbee.blog/2019/09/20/make-a-segmented-curvy-wave-in-illustrator/  on how to create a segmented curvy wave. There’s my tutorial on how to create a basic segment and the rest is pretty easy to figure out.

Bees, Buttonholes and Bullions

by Irish Bees Don't Do Mondays, posted in Sewing

I finally got a shot of a red-bottomed bee.  These little red bums are very industrious and barely sit still. They’re triple F’s:  Fierce, Fit and Fabulous. Suits these little furry firebums perfectly.

Hover flies enjoy the Hebes, too.:

I’ve been practicing a couple of new embroidery stitches: Bullion and the Open Buttonhole stitch. One of my favourite places for inspiration and instruction is Sarah’s Hand Embroidery Tutorials. 

For some reason I always felt daunted by the Bullion Stitch and would never give it a go but always thought how pretty it was. You know what? It’s really easy. Simpler than the French Knot. If you don’t believe me, just try it. 🙂

The buttonhole stitch is a sort of Blanket Stitch and made pretty cartwheels, carousels and whirligigs:

The cartwheel of stitches might work against this dark grey-almost-black flecked tweed: