No Knead Bread!

I was looking for a really easy loaf of bread to make a few weeks ago when I stumbled across something called no knead bread. I'm not sure how I haven't heard of this before, but I'm glad I have the recipe now! I read about a zillion similar recipes and methods before trying it myself, so I don't have a particular blog or anything to credit. I will link you to this version of the recipe though, where an adorable 4 year old shows you how to do it! I have tried this bread a few times now, so I will tell you what works best for me.

Ingredients:
- 3 cups all purpose flour
- 1 tsp instant yeast
- 1-2 tsp salt (I used 2, I like salt)
- 1 1/2 cups water

Making this is really easy. Mix the dry ingredients in a big bowl. Pour in the water and stir with a big spoon until you have a very rough dough. You really don't need to stir too much. Next put some saran wrap or a lid on the bowl and leave it in a relatively warm place for 8-18 hours.

When you next look at the dough it should have doubled in size and be bubbly. Wet your hands and pull the dough out. Form it into a ball and leave it on a lightly floured surface, or on a piece of parchment paper like I did. Let the dough rest like this for half an hour.

To cook the dough there are two methods. The first uses an oven safe pot with a lid. The second uses any oven safe pan and a steam bath. I used the second method. First, put whatever container you chose into the oven and turn it on to 450 degrees. You want the pot to preheat with the oven and get hot too. Make sure your pot container is oven safe though, or you could not only ruin a pot, but also your oven. I used a 9x9 Pyrex baking dish for mine. I also slid a metal baking pan onto the bottom rack. Once the 30 minutes is up and your oven and pot are hot, quickly put the dough ball in the pan/pot (I just plunk the parchment paper right in it) and fill the metal pan in the bottom with water to create steam. I have found that about 3 cups of water is necessary. Be careful, steam can burn you! I like to wrap my hand in a towel so it can't burn. If you are using a pot with a lid you don't need the steam bath, steam will generate inside the pot while it cooks. Bake the bread for 30 minutes with the steam bath or lid, then bake it for another 15 minutes without.

And voila! Bread!

It is seriously that easy! This has a lovely crackly crust and soft insides. I enjoyed a few slices of this loaf dipped in some olive oils and balsamic vinegar!

I have a few notes to add after baking this multiple times. The first thing is that I like to let the steam bath go on a bit longer, sometimes an extra 5 minutes or more. This makes the crust a bit thicker and crunchier, which I like. Next is that the longer you leave the dough to rise, the bigger your loaf will be. It will also have slightly bigger air pockets inside. I left one loaf for only 8 hours and it was considerably smaller than the ones I left for 12 hours or more. This means a slice of the smaller loaf will be a bit denser and heavier to eat. I have also found that this is a great recipe to mix other ingredients into. You can mix herbs, nuts, raisins or basically anything into it and it will still work out fine!

I hope this inspired a few of you to go make some bread! This is a very easy recipe to start with, and it is really delicious!

The Unrefined Olive

A few days ago my mom took me to an amazing place called The Unrefined Olive. It is an olive oil and balsamic tasting bar, and it was so much fun! It is located just off Bank Street on Second Avenue, in Ottawa. If anyone reading this happens to live around here, you should go!

The tasting bar has long rows of keg type things filled with oils and vinegars. The first row is plain olive oils ranging from very light to strong intensity. Apparently I like the stronger, more bitter olive oils. One of the strongest ones had a really peppery bite to it that was awesome! The 2 rows are the infused olive oils, which were all delicious. Some of the most interesting ones to me were the lime infused oil, the ones with various peppers in them and the butter olive oil (it tastes exactly like butter, but it is just oil! So cool!!!).

The final row is lined with their balsamic vinegars. This was definitely my favourite part of the tasting, and I found it refreshing (that sounds weird, it's vinegar...) after tasting so many oils. I couldn't even tell you which were the most interesting of these, because they were all so good. There were also a few different oils and vinegars to try as well. At the end of one row there was honey vinegar. This is made from fermented honey, and it was really tasty! At the very back there was also a row of different types of oils such as sunflower oil and almond oil. These oils weren't for tasting though, so I can't comment on them.

When you are ready to buy something, you can pick out a bottle size (s,m,l) and they will fill it up for you from the keg. My Mom was nice enough to buy me a few small bottles of the ones I liked. Thank you Mom (I know you're reading this)!!! Here are the ones I picked out:

I picked one balsamic and two olive oils. The vinegar I chose is Blackberry Ginger Balsamic. It is very sweet with a tiny bit of gingery bite to it. Blackberries are my favourite, so I couldn't resist. I have already had with with a little plain olive oil and some bread and it was fantastic. I can't wait to try this with a salad next!

The olive oils I picked were the garlic olive oil and the chipotle olive oil. The garlic is just classic and was calling to me, even though there were so many more interesting ones. I have a garlic addiction (vampires beware!) and just couldn't resist. This one will be great for cooking so many different things. The chipotle olive oil is one of the pepper infused oils I said was so interesting. This was the least spicy of the bunch, but I love the smokiness of chipotle and that really comes through in the oil. I don't have a ton of ideas for what to do with this one yet, but I'm thinking my next grilled cheese will be fried in this instead of butter for starters! The girl who was helping us with our tasting said that she uses this oil to fry eggs in and that sounds delicious too.

My mom also got herself a few bottles. She got the 18 year aged balsamic, the lime infused oil I mentioned earlier and the blackberry ginger balsamic. We both loved that one so much! Once again, thank you Mom!

Going to The Unrefined Olive was a great experience. The staff was very friendly and helpful. The girl who helped us was especially good, and knew when to explain things to us as well as when to leave us be to try things. To anyone in the area or who will someday visit Ottawa, add this to your list of places to go!

What's For Dinner? Veggies In Peanut Sauce

This is a dinner I made a few nights ago, served over some leftover rice. Whenever I make rice, I like to make the biggest pot possible, so that I can make at least one more meal with it later in the week. It is less work and dishes in the long run!

Ingredients:
- Onion
- Chinese Broccoli
- Baby Bok Choi
- Nappa Cabbage
- Zucchini
- Eggplant

Sauce Ingredients:
- Peanut butter (about 1/4 c)
- Coconut Cream (about 1/2-3/4c)
- Water (enough to make it runny and smooth)
- Soy Sauce (a few tbsp, until it tastes salty enough)
- Lime juice (to taste)
- Fish sauce (just a few drops)
- Chili paste (a few spoonfuls, depending on how much heat you like)
- Garlic, grated (about 3 cloves)
- Ginger, grated(2 cubic inches or so)
- Cilantro, chopped (a big handful)

I made the sauce ahead of time and let it sit in the fridge for a few hours, so that all the flavours would mix together well. When it was time to cook it all I chopped the veggies into fairly large pieces. The cabbage leaves and the leafy parts of the chinese broccoli were set aside to add at the end. The rest I threw into a hot wok with a bit of sesame oil and started to fry it all up. I then added the sauce and let it simmer for a minute before adding the leafy greens. Once the leafy things are added it really only needs to cook for another minute or two. You want the leaves to soften, without turning to mush. When it is all ready, serve it over some rice (I used basmati), then top it with a little more cilantro.

And voila!

This meal can also be made completely vegan if you omit the fish sauce. If you do this, add a few extra squirts of soy sauce.

Hungry now? :)

Food: I Ate A Cactus!

Ok, so not the whole thing, but I tried a prickly pear fruit for the first time the other day and thought it would make a neat post!

I'll start off by saying DO NOT JUST GO PICK ONE OF THESE UP WITH YOUR BARE HANDS!!! Seriously, it looks like all the spines have been removed but it is still covered in tiny little barbed hairs that you will never get out of your hands! I was itchy the entire rest of the day!

Here is the painful fruit, sitting in a bowl of water. I rolled it around with the spoon, so I wouldn't have to touch it, until the little hairs were all rinsed off. Those are all the things floating through the water. They are seriously annoying, so make sure they are all rinsed off before using your bare hands! Next I cut off both ends and sliced down one side about 1cm in like this:

That is some quality iPhone camera work right there... Next you just stick your fingers into that slit and peel off all the outer skin! The skin part that peeled off ended up being a lot thicker than I thought it would be.

You could stop here and eat the whole thing with your bare hands like the animal you really are, or slice it up like I did.

Can I just say that this is the most amazing shade of pink? I want lipstick and eyeshadow in this exact shade and will now be on the hunt for them!

As for the taste of the cactus fruit, I really like it. I read before eating it that it is often compared to kiwis in flavour and I think I agree, but it is still kind of different. It was really sweet and had and interesting soft texture. It does have big black seeds all through it that are too hard to chew. You can spit them out or just swallow them apparently, so I swallowed them. Why not get the full experience? I didn't mind having to swallow them, but I can see how some people might.

This was a pretty off topic post, but I liked it so too bad. I am definitely going to be going back to the grocery store to get more of these soon! I'm also going to look into growing one of these if you can indoors. I always love adding to my house plant collection, and my favourite plants are edible ones/cacti. This is both so I WANT ONE! As long as it can grow in a 12 inch pot or smaller. My window ledge can only do so much...

What's your favourite fruit and/or the weirdest fruit you ate? I'm counting this as my weirdest fruit and my favourite is pineapple.

What's For Dinner? Yellow Vegetable Chick Pea Curry

I have decided I am going to make food posts a regular thing on my blog. Up until now I have just thrown in random posts if I made something particularly exciting, but I love talking about food about as much as I enjoy makeup, so why not? A warning before we dive in though: I rarely use a proper recipe or measure things out when I am cooking. I will often find an inspiration recipe and then do my own version of it using what I have. Even when I set out to follow a recipe, I can never seem to stick to it. For this reason, I won't always have a full recipe to give you, so people who need serious step by step instructions for cooking might not like this so much. I will try to start writing down what I do as I do it, but no guarantees!

Today's dinner came about because cans of full fat coconut milk were on sale for 98c at the grocery store yesterday, so I grabbed a whole pile of them. There are so many awesome things you can do with this stuff (coconut ice cream, coconut whipped cream, tons of sauces, etc)! One of my favourite recipes with coconut milk though is coconut rice. This one I do have a recipe for too!

Ingredients:
- 1 1/2 cups long grain rice (I used basmati)
- vegetable oil
- 1 can coconut milk (you can use low fat for this one)
- Approx. 2 cups water
- Salt, cumin, coriander

Instructions:
- Rinse the rice and put it in a tall pot
- Add a small drizzle of oil and toast the rice at a very low heat for a few minutes, stirring so nothing burns
- Add the can of coconut milk and enough water that the total liquid equals 3 cups
- Add a pinch of salt, cumin and coriander to the pot, cover and bring to a boil
- Once boiling, immediately reduce to a low simmer keeping the lid on the pot
- Simmer for about 15 minutes until there is no liquid left

This recipe does make a lot of rice, so make sure you use a big enough and tall enough pot!

Now for the curry that I made! This is a chickpea and vegetable curry that also uses coconut cream so even vegans can enjoy this one!

Getting everything ready to cook! I added a few things later as I went like eggplant. (haha, you can see my Sodastream stuff in the background, thanks tiny kitchen!)

Ingredients:
- 1 can chick peas
- 1 onion, diced
- 1 sweet potato, diced
- about 1/3 of a cauliflower, cut into small florets
- 1/2 eggplant, diced
- vegetable stock
- 1 can full fat coconut milk
- About 4 large garlic cloves
- Fresh ginger
- Chili paste
- Yellow curry powder
- Ground Cumin
- Ground Coriander
- Lemon juice
- salt, pepper - Couple tablespoons or so of a really lean, blonde roux (Google it if you have to! I just hate putting straight flour into a sauce to thicken it, I can taste the flour that way, yuck!)

Like I said, I am really bad at measuring things, so you can just guess all that!

I browned all the veggies slightly in a pot with some oil, added all the spices and let it cook another minute so the spices got all toasty, then added the liquids and let it cook until everything was tender. It should look kinda like this:

Once everything is cooked through, simply put some rice in a bowl and top it with the curry mixture!

That's it for the pseudo-recipe!

If you think I should make this a regular thing, let me know. Or alternately, if you see no point in me doing this if I can't provide a proper recipe also let me know. I could just post a lot of food pictures and not bother doing this half recipe stuff too. Any input would be really helpful!

Superbowl Sunday

On Sunday, my parents had a Superbowl party for their neighbours and I decided to join them as well. As I mentioned in the chicken wing post, no one around here is that into the Superbowl, we just all wanted an excuse to eat a bunch of food! I thought I would post a few pictures from the party (of the food)!

Started the party off with one of my favourite beers! I love supporting local and kinda local breweries. Steamwhistle is from Toronto, so that's still the same province anyways. I had some Mill Street beer later and that is some great Ottawa beer!

I also started the party off with my puppy, Theia, sitting in a room with the door closed. My parents and their friends had a meeting of sorts to discuss where they were all going to vacation together before the party started to I sat and watched some TV with her. It was also to keep her calm until the door bell stopped ringing. :P

Chicken wings!!! Here are the pictures, for those who read my last post about them and wondered just how delicious they looked. Don't worry, this was just the first of many I ate! Mmmmmmm!

They didn't last long. :) There was tons of other food, but I forgot to photograph a lot of it. One of the neighbours brought delicious almond cheesecake squares that I have the recipe now. I will be trying those and posting about them soon!

Finally, here are a couple of snaps of the makeup I wore that day. It was pretty plain. I was going to do blue lips again, but then I remembered the chicken wings and decided that was a bad idea.

The eyeshadow is Kompanion No.9 by Notoriously Morbid Cosmetics. I did a really thick wing with it and that was about it. This eyeshadow is barely noticeable in the pictures, but I actually really like it. It is a subtle grey colour with some lovely sparkle to it.

Well, that's it! I mostly put this up so you could all ogle the chicken wings. :P Did you watch the Superbowl? Were you glad that Seattle won, or did you even care? (I didn't even care, I had to look up who won again even though I saw the other day...)

More Food: Vegetarian Chicken Wings (Among Other Things)!

A few days ago I went to my parents house to taste test a few things they are hoping to serve at their Superbowl party on the weekend! Now, no one in my family is actually that into football, but an excuse to have people over and cook food is always a good thing. I'm a CFL fan now thanks to my boyfriend anyways, but I'll be there on Sunday to eat more food!

We made piles of chicken wings and tested out a few different sauces, and we also made vegetarian chicken wings! Unfortunately I didn't manage to get any chicken wing photos, since I kind of forgot about the camera and just started eating at that point but I'l give you a quick run down of what my parents did to them anyways, because these were honestly some of the best wings ever!

They started by brining the wings for a few hours in a saltwater brine that had some red pepper flakes and spices in it as well. After that they were rinsed and dried off, coated in oil and baked in the oven for about 40 minutes, flipping them once. The brining helps them from getting dry in the oven, so they came out moist and perfect!

We then made a buffalo sauce, which was 1 cup of Frank's Red Hot and a few tablespoons of butter melted together. This is sort of where the experimentation began. We coated some wings with just this sauce first and it was great. We also made a blue cheese sour cream dip and the buffalo wings are amazing in that! We also tried dipping them in ranch dip, which is good for people who don't like blue cheese (my dad). Finally, we mixed some buffalo sauce with a tiny bit of ranch dip and coated the rest of the wings with that. Those wings we also put under the broiler for a few minutes to make the sauce less runny. This was a good way of taking the spiciness out of the buffalo sauce, for those who don't like too much heat (my mom). Sorry about the lack of pictures for this part, but trust me they were good!

My parents also wanted to make a vegetarian version of the chicken wings, and I think what my dad came up with is pretty awesome!

Can you guess what they are? Cauliflowers!!!

We battered the cauliflower in a batter that had equal parts flour, cornstarch, cold water and vodka and then deep fried them until they were golden brown. The batter gave them an extra crispy outside, and when they were dipped in the buffalo sauce, I thought they were pretty convincing! You can't coat these in sauce beforehand like the wings or they will lose their crispiness, but they are great for dipping.

And, since we had the deep fryer out already, we decided to finish the night off with some deep fried bananas!

We dipped these in maple syrup!

Well, that's it for this crazy food post! I'm sorry there are no actual recipes, since my parents have all those. I am writing this from my place right now, but if you want any of them let me know and I can get them for you!

Fresh Semolina Pasta

This isn't makeup related, but no one had any complaints last time I posted about food so today I have another! For Christmas my parents bought me a pasta roller and cutter attachment for my big 5qt Kitchenaid stand mixer. The other day my parents also decided to clean out their freezer and found several large bags of red fife and semolina flour, which they didn't want so I took home. I knew fresh semolina pasta was destined to be made! My boyfriend and I had some free time last night so we decided it was pasta making time.

I will give you a quick recipe and a rundown of how we did it, in case anyone else wants to try this. It really is worth it, the pasta you get is so much fresher and tastier and the texture is amazing!

Here is a link to the recipe I used. It was from Allrecipes and looked like the best recipe that incorporated semolina. I have made tons of pasta before but never with semolina flour. For those of you that don't know, My boyfriend and I both took a year of culinary school and hope to be chefs some day. Well I hope to run my own bakery but he wants to be a chef. One class I took was teaching us to make large volumes of food for catering and whatnot, and I spent many days in that class making piles and piles of fresh pasta to sell in the school restaurant as lasagna. Anyways, on to the recipe.

Ingredients:
2cup semolina flour
2cups all purpose flour
6 large eggs
2tbsp oil
Pasta roller/cutter (optional use rolling pin and knif e otherwise)
Stand mixer with dough hook attachment (also optional, but makes 10 minutes of kneading way easier!)

Now for the instructions. I took a lot of pictures of this for you guys, but please be kind since my kitchen is extremely small and kind of messy. I did my best to keep clutter out of the pictures, but it was hard!

The first thing to do is put all of the flour and salt in your mixing bowl and make a well in the centre of it. If not using a stand mixer to this on a lat clean surface with no bowl, just pile on the flour and make a well for the wet ingredients in the middle. Next crack the eggs into the middle and add the oil.

Next mix the ingredients together with the paddle attachment slowly until it starts to form a ball. If using the tabletop method, use a fork and slowly start mixing from the centre occasionally pulling in flour from the edges. If you are doing it this way you will eventually have to switch to using your hands. This is what it should look like:

Ok now it is time to knead! If your dough looks any drier than mine at this point add a few extra drops of oil. Next add the dough hook arm to your mixer, or get ready for a serious workout! You need to knead this for about 8-10 minutes on a medium low setting. As you knead it it should start to soften up and get somewhat elastic feeling. It should look like this:

Then, wrap it tightly in plastic wrap and let sit at room temperature for 30 minutes. If it is still feeling hard after the 30 minutes leave it a bit longer. You want it to soften up a lot while it sits.

At this point we normally start making our pasta sauce while we wait. I completely forgot to take pictures of this part. I have a really easy from scratch recipe for a spaghetti meat sauce that I have made and I will include it at the end since that is what we made.

Ok once the dough is ready it is time to start rolling it out. You want to break off smaller hand sized pieces from your big dough ball to work with and keep the rest tightly wrapped so it doesn't dry out. Set up the pasta roller and dust the top of it with a little bit of semolina flour to keep the pasta from sticking in it.

To start set the pasta roller to the largest setting, which should be number 1. flatten your hunk of dough slightly and feed it through the machine. Fold in half and feed it through on the same setting for a few times. Now change the setting to 2 and feed it through once, each time making the size 1 number smaller. Eventually it should start looking like this:

Once you have reached the thickness that you want cut the pasta sheet to the lengths you want and feed it through your pasta cutter attachment. We stopped at #6, which is still quite thin. We decided to try the linguini cutter. I also got a spaghetti cutter but we thought we had made it too thin for that. After cutting it we laid it all out on a clean broom handle that was across 2 chairs.

We cooked some of this pasta almost immediately for dinner, which only took about 1 minute dropped into boiling water. The rest we left to dry until they were less sticky but still bendy. Then we formed them into little nests for storing and left them on a plate to dry completely.

Now for a really simple pasta sauce!

Ingredients:
1 can crushed tomatoes, 1 can diced tomatoes (I prefer no salt added varieties)
1 onion, diced
3 cloves of garlic, minced
1lb ground beef
2 Bay leaves
Oregano, Rosemary, Thyme, red chili flakes
Salt, pepper
If you are looking for a vegetarian version add more onion, as well as carrot and red pepper instead of the beef.

Fry the onion and garlic in a frying pan until lightly browned then add the ground beef. While that is cooking pour the cans of tomatoes into a big pot and add all the spices. When ground beef looks mostly cooked add the contents of the frying pan into the tomatoes. Bring to a boil and then turn down to low heat and let simmer for 30 minutes. That is it, a very easy meat sauce!

So, that was it for my recipe! I hope you enjoyed it and will maybe give it a try!

Sick Day... I Need My Tea! What To Keep In Mind When Buying Tea.

Today's post isn't really going to be beauty related at all, but I think it's fairly important. The past few days I have been a bit under the weather. Nothing major, but today I didn't go in to work either. The weather recently turned freezing and a lot of people are getting sick, so I thought I'd share with you my favourite way to get through a cold or flu, and also bring to light something I found out recently about it.

So tea is what I am talking about of course. The title sort of gave it away... I love tea. I think I get it from my mom. She drinks tea morning, noon and night whether it is the dead of winter or the heat of summer. I won't say I'm that addicted to it, but I still love it, especially when I am sick. There is nothing like a hot cup of tea when you have chills.

Unfortunately I read something recently that made me worry a lot. In fact, it even made me throw out a lot of my teas! Apparently, there was a study done into many popular American tea brands that showed that a lot of them contain high levels of pesticides. Higher levels than the US federal limit allows! If you want to read the article here it is. It does a much better job of explaining it than I possibly could. It also contains a lovely chart showing what exactly they found in some teas. The article also talks about GMOs, which I am against only for the socio-economic problems they cause, not health problems. I honestly haven't seen enough research into the health detriments of GMOs yet, but they are definitely not good overall because of the big corporations running them.

I'll get back on topic before I go on a ridiculous rant about GMOs. The article also mentions that a lot of these teas come with artificial flavours or colours. One of the most disturbing things it mentioned (besides the pesticides) is that a lot of tea bags now are not very good, either for you or the environment! Some teas now come in mesh-like bags made of plastics that are not meant to be put in very hot water, among other things. For more information I definitely suggest you go read the article. It does talk mainly about American brands, but a lot of those same brands are found here in Canada and I'm sure many other places in the world. This also doesn't mean that only the teas in this list have them. I would be more wary of any tea I buy in any country in the future. I decided to put together a short list of things I like to keep in mind now when picking out tea.

1. Buy organic teas whenever possible: "Organic" foods are still a bit of a grey area. There aren't a ton of regulations yet on what organic means, so often things can say organic and still contain certain levels of chemicals you don't want in them. Organic regulations also vary a lot from place to place. Regardless of this, buying organic is often still a better choice for many things. At least there will be considerably fewer harmful things in your tea if it is in some way certified as organic.

2. Buy loose-leaf tea: This way you don't have to worry over whether or not your tea bag is killing you and every furry little woodland creature around you too. An added bonus: Making loose leaf tea always seems like a fancier endeavour (to me anyways). I have a couple of adorable tea infusers and I love seeing them sitting in my mug steeping. Doesn't it just look better this way?:

3. Buy locally whenever possible: I think this rule should be for most things in life too. Whenever you can, you should buy locally. It keeps the money in your community and it helps save the environment by using less gas - Awesome! Buying locally also gives you the added bonus of having a much easier time connecting with the person actually growing the products. This means if you have any concerns about what is in your tea, you are often able to ask them personally what is in it. I also find that a lot of smaller more local growers and makers of things naturally do their best to keep pesticides and whatnot out of their plants anyways.

The tea I'm drinking tonight is kind of locally bought from a guy in Quebec with an awesome tea company called Cha Yi. I do live in Ontario, but the drive across to Quebec is only about 20 minutes long. Now, the tea wasn't actually grown locally. I believe they travel to other countries and hand pick which teas to bring back with them. This tea is called Chai Cha Yi and it is a really nice strong spicy chai tea. I love chai, especially when it is cold out, and this is one of the best chais I have tried. I made it in a giant beer mug because I wanted a lot and didn't want to have to make it twice. It's a lazy day. I of course topped my tea off with a bit of milk and sugar and now it is all ready to go!

Well, that's it for my tea post! I hope it didn't freak any of you tea drinkers out too much. Let me know what you think about this in the comments. I'm going to go enjoy my awesome chai tea now!

Cousin's 4th Birthday And The Cake I Made!

I won't do this very often, but this is a non-makeup related post. I doubt I have mentioned this before, but makeup is not my first passion. I love all things food. I took a culinary program last year at college and am hoping to take a baking course soon as well. My ultimate goal is to open my own dessert place with a bar, where people can go for after dinner food and drinks. Anyways, that's enough about my personal life, on to the fun cake!

Today was my cousin's son's 4th birthday. She has two adorable kids who I babysit quite often. I love those little guys, they are so much fun! Every year for each of their birthdays my dad and I get together and bake them a fun cake! This year my little cousin wanted a Ratatouille themed cake.

We decided we wanted a cake that looked like a plate pied high with pasta that had the main character, Remy the rat, sitting on top. This is what we came up with:

The cake is a golden cake baked in a bundt pan for a domed shape. We then shaved some off the top to stuff in the hole. A crumb coat of orange flavoured buttercream went on next.

The pasta is yellow fondant that we ran through a pasta maker and the sauce is buttercream mixed with strawberry jam and red, orange and brown food colouring. The character and spoon sticking out of the left side I molded out of fondant and the meatballs are chocolate ganache truffles rolled in crushed chocolate cheerios.

This was a lot of fun to make. I don't often bake things where I get to mold stuff or go to crazy on the decorating. That's it for the cake! Sorry there were no makeup pictures. I might occasionally throw in something I have made if it looks particularly delicious in the future.

What do you think? Would you be alright with occasionally seeing food related posts?