A Load of Lemons

1960's Shift Dress

noreply@blogger.com (Lizzie Turner) — Wed, 25 Mar 2015 21:14:00 +0000

I made a dress! It looks like an old tablecloth, but that's exactly what I like about it. I had hoped it would come out a little more like a 'shift' than a sack, but at least it's wearable. I'm going to put it's shape (or lack of it) down to the fact that I didn't actually have a dress pattern to work from. Instead I

used another dress as a guide and cut fabric pieces to match. This meant I had to guess the size of facing I needed for the neck and arm holes. It was basically a nightmare and I have since bought a load of patterns!

Chevron Card

noreply@blogger.com (Lizzie Turner) — Sun, 01 Feb 2015 15:37:00 +0000

This card turned out pretty good, hopefully all the bright colours and hypnotic patterns keep your eye away from the wonky lines and gaps. I made it quite a while ago, so don't have any photos of the ball-aching process of making it. I could explain, but it wouldn't make enthralling reading.

Spiced Chutney

noreply@blogger.com (Lizzie Turner) — Sun, 18 Jan 2015 16:53:00 +0000

I love cheese, especially with chutney. This leads me to think that chutney, particularly homemade chutney, would be a brilliant gift to receive. I am probably wrong. Nonetheless, every Christmas I make a huge batch of it for my family, who probably all hate chutney.

The Recipe

I used a Mary Berry Recipe which I hadn't tried before, but it had hundreds of good reviews online. I can't understand why, as it's probably the worst chutney I've ever made (I'm definitely putting that down to the recipe, not my cooking). There seemed to be a lot of pointless, time consuming steps like peeling skins off tomatoes and crushing coriander seeds. I don't own a pestle and mortar so spent ages bashing the end of a rolling pin against the seeds, all the time wondering what is the point of this and can you not already buy these crushed? After a few hours of chopping, peeling, bashing, stirring and simmering I only ended up with 4 jars of chutney. I'm not sure what was more annoying, knowing that I needed to make another 4 jars, or that it tasted disgusting.

The Packaging

As the saying goes, you can roll a shit in glitter... so despite it's flavour, I still made each jar look pretty and handed them out at Christmas. I added round black sticky labels to each lid to cover the old branding. This also helps people identify what's in the jar, gathering dust at back of their cupboard once the tag has been taken off. I just used hessian and red bakers twine to finish them off.

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Ombre Petal Cake

noreply@blogger.com (Lizzie Turner) — Sun, 21 Dec 2014 17:00:00 +0000

Do not make this cake. This is a bake for people with far too much time on their hands. Of course, I'm pleased with how it turned out and it received plenty of 'oohs' but somewhere between the shades of purple, I was ready to throw the icing bags away and give up. Even the best bit - the eating, didn't
make it all feel like time well spent. There's enough icing on this cake to induce a diabetic coma, it's more sugar than anyone can handle in one slice. If this hasn't put you off, or you're simply curious as to how I did it, then read on.

The Cake

I made a basic Victoria Sponge cake, but you could make any cake you fancy. You'll need to ensure you have enough tiers so that there is plenty of height in the cake to create the ombre colour effect. I used a simple Mary Berry recipe, but found that 2 tiers didn't give enough height, so halved the ingredients and made a third tier.

The Icing

You'll need a serious amount of icing, I used the following recipe:

- 250g Unsalted Butter, softened
- 600g Icing Sugar
- 1 tsp of Vanilla Extract
- A dash of Milk
- Dr Oetker Gel Food Colouring in 'Ultra Violet'

For my first, palest layer of 'petals' I didn't use any colouring, but if I was doing this recipe again (never) then I would add a small drop, as I feel it looks quite yellow and doesn't blend quite right with the other shades. I also could've done with more definition between the middle rows of colour. In all I used the whole tube of gel colouring, so you may want to buy 2 so that you've got more colour variation.

Start by covering the whole cake in a very thin layer of icing so that you have a smooth, even base to work with. The petal icing technique was actually very simple, I'd never tried it before, so I'm sure anyone could get the same results. You could try practicing first on a piece of baking paper, but if you do make a mistake on the cake you can easily wipe it off.

Pipe a small blob of icing, then with a palette knife, hover roughly half way across the blob. Gently squash it down and drag it out. Pipe the next blob in the drag of the previous blob and repeat. You'll need to continually wipe your palette knife to ensure each petal is neat.

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