Cake cake cake

Tis the theme of my 26th birthday, I reveled in cup cakes for the whole week, every where I went I was confronted by this delectable treat, I had cup cakes for breakfast, it was great!

I dragged Alex to Patisserie in Illovo last Sunday, go there! Its wonderful!

So many options...I have to go back and sample some more...

Hmm cheese cake...my favorite!

I went with the granadilla cheese cake, it did not disappoint! The best cheese cake I've had. I was happy because their cakes are frozen and then thawed, which made me skeptical, but the cheese cake was good in both consistency and taste. Alex ordered the cookies and cream cake and that was unfortunately a bit dry, but I must eat more cakes from there to make a proper judgement :D

What's this? My boss' wife made me cupcakes for my birthday! What a treat ^_^ and she blinged it up with all these sprinkles and edible glitter! They know me so well.

A cupcake smorgasboard! Tarryn also gave me cupcakes, these awesome rich chocolate and mint ones with  a gooey caramel centers omnomnonmnom... I also made cupcakes (the yellow one in the back) they are lemon poppy seed with cream cheese icing. My first time! I think they came out nicely, and the recipe (here) was quick and easy. Personally I would use less sugar next time and maybe more lemon zest, because I like a super intense lemon flavour. I used a standard cream cheese icing, but I think I will try the icing with the recipe next time (it uses lemon juice! More lemony-ness! raaa!)

Maropeng cradle of humankind Duhdun duuun!

During the holiday season last year we took a trip to Maropeng and the Sterkfontein caves! It's one of the places I've been wanting to check out, they've really vamped it up since my last visit on a primary school trip :) Ahhh the nostalgia...

How awesome is this building? It's like a giant burial mound from Lord of the Rings! Hehe.

They've really gone to lengths convey the history of evolution/beginning of the world - this is the entrance to the ice age! And you go on a boat ride! and get to touch real icicles and stuff!

I'm very impressed with the museum, the information is presented in interesting ways and there are many interactive mini games to engage with children. This is a great place for a school trip or a family with kids.

Some of these could be art installations!

It took us about 2 hours to get through the museum, and we didn't even read through everything, so there is a wealth of information on display there.

After you exit through the back of the building, there is a small play ground with a mini cave for the kids to explore! There is also a restaurant/bar on the roof for the grown ups, with an amazing view.

We also went down to the caves, which is in a separate location to the Maropeng museum. That part of the tour hasn't changed much, but it was nice to go see the real thing after learning about archaeology and fossils and such. Its not a very long tour, and there are some exciting areas where you climb through narrow spaces. It's not the most awesome or beautiful cave, because it been open for so long, plus miners used to harvest the limestone by cutting into and blasting away the cave walls. Still cool to be able to get so deep under ground though! My favorite part is the under ground lake, so mysterious and creepy...it really fires up the imagination!

Kapow! Higher knowledge level achieved!

organic lace painting

This is the second painting of this series I'm doing. I'm quite happy with how it turned out, discovering accidentally that I could sort of shade with the blue ink that I was using. Yes, still pandering to my obsession with lace, this time from a more cellular, organic angle.

This is both pictures living on my wall. You can find the older purple painting here

The rise of Bubble Boy

So I've been absent for the last few weeks, but for once it's because I have been really working my ass off! I reached mental twilight zones unattained since the student days and guzzled coffee like an insane person.

This is my entry for Festival International du cinema et la mer. I found that what I learnt from working at The Deli really helped me pull my project together, so I'm going to go through my process abit - it's pretty standard.

Firstly, after deciding on the story line, I made a story board. This helped me visualize how the action will play out as well as offering reference for how my scene will be framed once I start making elements.

Click for larger view

Then I made an animatic! I was not very good at this, because my timings did change when I started animating, but it's very useful in giving you a rough idea of how long your animation would be. I also gave this to my friend so he could start considering audio for the animation.

And here are some of my final boards!

And have a look at my final animation on vimeo!

I took on this project as an exercise to see just how productive I can be when I really push myself to find time for my personal projects. So no excuses now! It's the first animation I've made that's not work related since graduating, so I'm quite happy with it :)

Love is...

...waking up at 5am to make cookies for Alex. I was too gatvol last night to make them, plus we were meant to have a scheduled power outage sometime after 10 pm so the possibility of  the oven dying with half baked cookies inside just stressed me out (the power ended up staying on for all the hours I was awake though, curse you! I procrastinated for no reason!)

I found the recipe for these cookies here. They are indeed easy to make! Just take them out after 10 mins (unlike me) even if they feel spongy in the middle - they will harden as they cool. They hold their shape quite well, just don't make any indented patterns on them (hearts in my case) because those will disappear. But the raised little hearts I made with left over pastry came out really nicely :) Next time I would make it with less sugar, especially if you are going to use icing as well. You could probably add all sorts of awesome things to the basic chocolate cookie dough - almond flakes, coconut, orange rind?! Nonetheless, these cookies are much better than the ones I made last year, heehee I'm improving!

Happy love day :) I totally ate 4 "reject" ones for breakfast, and showering everything with colourful sprinkles made me very happy :) bake these cookies! They make everything better!

Year of the Snake

Happy Chinese new year! Because this festival (like all other Chinese festivals) is very food centric, I thought I'd do a small doodle about food symbolism during Chinese new years. The main meal happens on new year's eve, where the whole family gets together and watch the Spring festival concert/party - I swear the whole of China watches this, it's become a part of our new year's tradition. We ate so much food! For new year's eve supper there is usually an excess of 10 dishes served (normally everyday meals have about 3 dishes). We also got tons of fruit and a giant cake as presents from my parents' friends (Chinese people like giving fruit as house presents, fruit is quite expensive in China so greatly valued -how awesome!) So I've been totally stuffing my face, starting out quite healthy in the mornings with giant bowls of fruit salad, but ending up shoveling mouthfuls of cream laden cake late at night - heehee!

Ooh I did forget to list the traditional year cake (nian gao) that we eat too - wikipedia will help me here. Its for success and good luck with achieving your goals (especially important for young people and students to eat this!) We slice ours up and fry it like haloumi, so it's crunchy on the outside and gooey and sticky sweet in the middle. But this year my parents got the cake as a present and when my Mom tried to fry it it melted! It was grey too, instead of the usual red beany maroon colour we are used to - it was so sticky and stuck to the roof of my mouth and it looked like gloopy snot wahahahaha! So turns out there another type of nain gao that you are not meant to fry :) I prefer the haloumi one, it tastes better - beware the grey snot cake!

I'll have the salad please

Urh, well I originally wrote this whole blab about struggling to understand social perceptions of vegetarianism and veganism and my personal experience (somewhat horrible) of unseen pitfalls once I tried labeling myself as vegetarian when I first started having kind of an identity crisis about what I eat. Anyways, I guess it was a clumsy distressed ramble that went nowhere and I'm not ready to discuss it with friends who may have read this post, because I don't know what the heck I'm doing yet. So I've deleted it. Suffice to say that I  discovered this blog (http://aliensdayout.com/), that really opened my eyes to a different lifestyle which appeals to me, so I've been dabbling in it.

Now look at some food I've been stuffing my face with :)

My new found love of oats :) I like making it with soy milk, I'm not a big fan of that warm milky taste. Sprinkled with toasted flax seeds, sesame and wheatgerm (new nutritious things I learnt about recently)

A super huge tasty sandwich I had for lunch a few weeks back :) Its filled with: Chinese greens, tomatoes, garlic mushrooms, olives, brinjal, tofu and Greek yogurt. I really get too excited and pack too much so my sandwich can hardly close (its even worse with wraps)

I found these nommy glutinous rice balls at the Chinese supermarket. They are really tasty! It has a little chocolate filling with peanuts in the center :) I will definitely buy them again.

 

I made dahl the one night, but I got impatient and didn't cook it for long enough for the split peas to break down, Gawd it takes forever! It tasted alright though, I had it with some pumpkin and a simple cucumber tomato and olive salad with a wrap. I like how colourful my bowl is :)

Potato pumpkin gnocchi with mushroom parsley sauce. I bought ready made gnocchi - the best gnocchi I've had so far. I always find gnocchi to doughy and it sticks to the roof of my mouth. This was alright, it's got a really strong potato taste which bothered me though. The sauce was tasty.

So far I've been enjoying myself, I have this thing about having colourful food, its pretty awesome.