I’ve decided to do April Photo A Day.
Photography
Red Velvet Cake.
I’ve been wanting to try making some red velvet cupcakes for ages. Then I bought a giant cupcake tin. It also happened to be my birthday and I had to take something to work to share.
Enter giant red velvet cupcake.
As New Zealand is not know for it’s red velvety goodness, I turned to my favourite American baking blog, Bakerella.
It is an amazing blog by a wonderful lady and her recipes are absolutely to die for.
I decided to use her red velvet cupcake recipe from Valentine’s day and adjust the cooking time for a cake. The quantities didn’t need changing at all. It fit perfectly in my giant cupcake tin.
In cooking a cake though, you need to turn the temperature down slightly and cook for longer. I ended up being quite pressed for time and cooking if for 40 minutes, but then having to go out when it wasn’t quite cooked in the middle. I just turned the oven off and left it in there. Upon my return it was perfect, albeit a bit crispy around the edges. Charred as well.
Although this did not worry me as I needed to cut the top off both the cakes to make them flat in order to put them back together again. Just like Humpty Dumpty.
Now you can ogle the food porn:
Mix all wet ingredients together.
Beautiful red.
Mix dry ingredients together.
Pour wet ingredients into dry and mix.
Pour into cake pan.
I may or may not have skipped a few photograph steps here (by accident I swear!)
What you need to do, once the cakes are cooked, have been tipped out, and cooled. Make the icing. I used Bakerella’s cream cheese icing as well, but instead of the 6 cups of icing sugar it called for, I actually only had three left in my cupboard so that’s all I put in there. It still tasted amazing though. I don’t think three cups is really necessary. It would have been super sweet and I had excess anyway.
Which I may or may not have eaten.
Anyway, with the giant cupcake, you spread some icing on the top of the base and plop the top on it – this is so they stick together.
Once all together – ice!
Tada!
On the inside. It was delicious too.
Current desktop
I thought I might start doing a few more random postings on this here blog of mine. Some photos, some rants, hopefully more recipes (I have the amazing cranberry and white chocolate that I made for Christmas to put up).
For today, you get to see my current desktop – thanks for the idea @thatjohn!
Taken just a short 15 minute walk from the apartment down at Takapuna Beach – behold the pohutakawas! Aren’t they so purdy?
Yes, I took this picture.
Photography be my bridge! (See what I did there?)
I’ve been really getting into my photography this long weekend and I think I have produced some pretty cool results.
I also have to praise how awesome it is to have an SD card slot on my laptop. Actually amazing. That is going to be a prerequisite for me buying a laptop from now on. I don’t know what took me so long to realise this awesomeness.
I also need to praise Adobe Bridge. Without it, I’d probably be flailing like a beached whale. I’m starting to shoot a lot in RAW format and Windows Explorer can’t provide images of these. So you have to view them in a different programme. I’ve obviously chosen Bridge. And it opens up directly into Photoshop.
I don’t know whether it is because I have been taught InDesign and a little bit of Photoshop that I seem to pick up any Adobe programmes a lot quicker these days, but the Canon software that came with my camera is just plain confusing to me and I can’t seem to find the things that I want to do in there. But in photoshop I can.
If you want to see some of my photography it is up on my flikr. I’ll be uploading more over the next week or so and hopefully continuously as I branch out in to this new found love.
Photography, sickness, and some form of work makes me not so poor.
Today has been a fairly relaxed day, just sitting on the computer doing odd bits and pieces (mostly twitter).
Although I have been trying to do a bit of photography today. The hard part is that the weather doesn’t seem to want to cooperate with me.
Today I needed blue sky, I got an overcast day.
Then I needed some contrast – highlights and shadows. I got uniform light.
Hopefully tomorrow will give me something to work with. I’d hate to try and figure out this assignment indoors with artificial light. It just doesn’t look right.
I did manage to do the first part by finding a photo from my random explorations in to the outside world, when trying to get to know my camera, that fitted exactly what I needed. The first part was mostly just photoshop stuff. But tomorrow I really need some good light! Fingers crossed.
I had a couple days worth of work this week. Just a bit of data entry type stuff. But it at least fills a little hole on my CV and adds some more skills, I guess.
Also money! Yay!
Bitch gets paid.
I’m also sick. It’s horrible. I feel I haven’t been sick in ages and now I can’t breathe properly and my nose is blocked and I just really feel like death warmed up. Horrible. So I’m chugging back the lemsip drinks.
Blerg.
Not much else to write about. This is a pretty blah post. My life is unexciting, unless you want to see the massive oozing blister on the side of my big toe.
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