Unfortunately I didn’t get to take a photo of it open (in between cutting slices and serving it the cake was almost gone before I even realized I hadn’t taken a photo yet). The cake is full of mango goodness, moist and sweet from the macapuno and topped with a sweet cream cheese frosting. YUM!

I had a few requests for the recipe so here it is. I changed it by making two cakes, cutting the tops off to level them out then stacking them on top of each other with a layer of macapuno (sweet coconut strings) in between. Smother the cake with the cream cheese frosting then top with fresh mangoes. Enjoy!

Prep time: 15 minutes
Cook time: 40 minutes
Total time: 55 minutes
Yield: 12 servings

Ripe juicy mangoes baked in a sumptuous cake. covered in sweet cream cheese frosting.

INGREDIENTS:

CAKE:
2 1/2 cups mashed mangoes
2 cups flour
2 cups sugar
2 teaspoons baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 eggs
1teaspoon vanilla
1 cup chopped walnuts, (optional)

FROSTING:
8 ounces cream cheese, softened
1/2 cup butter or margarine, softened
2 teaspoons vanilla
3/4 cup confectioners’ sugar

Preheat oven to 350°F. Beat sugar and eggs until creamy. Add vanilla. Gradually add mangoes, beating well. Sift flour together with baking soda and salt. Add flour mixture to sugar/egg mixture gradually. Beat until smooth. Stir in walnuts.

Spoon into a greased 9×13 baking pan. Bake in preheated 350 degrees oven for 40 minutes. Check cake for doneness (an inserted toothpick comes out clean) as oven temperatures and cooking times may vary. Cool.

Frosting:
Beat the cream cheese, butter and vanilla in a mixer bowl until light. Add the confectioners’ sugar, beating until smooth. Spread over the cake.

(original recipe from here)

I’m pretty happy with the outcome. I think next time I’ll add more white around the edges but for a first pass attempt this will do. I plan to add these onto anything that is a little more complex in the future (if I ever get around to it!)

Next I’d like to show you my first attempt at paper quilling. Remember this post? This is the fruit of a new-found hobby/obsession – papercraft; card making and paper quilling. I’m quite proud of the end result and the best part is that it’s so therapeutic because paper quilling is such a no-brainer! I can easily make stuff in front of the TV even after a hard day’s work in the office (unlike lampworking which takes much more energy). I found that the hardest part is the final composition of a card i.e. where to place all the flowers.

I don’t have plans to sell these although we all know plans can quickly change. For the moment it’s more of a past time, and I need to build up my greeting card collection (in an attempt to save on spending $7-10 per greeting card at the shops!), although I will share what I make with you and if you see anything you like you please do let me know

Truth be told I’ve already constructed the full butterfly and she is just damn beautiful. The only unfortunate thing is that I can’t share her full detailed beauty because my glass nippers suck and it’s just shattering the thick diameter cane instead of making clean cuts, so in essence it’s wasting a chunk of good murrini cane. I really need to buy myself a good lapidary saw before I attempt to cut anymore slices off the large diameter cane. The good thing though is that I can always pull it down to a smaller diameter if needed. But anyway here’s a photo of the smaller chips (I know you’ve been hanging for it).

It’s times like this I find myself becoming addicted to making murrini. I’ve just got so many ideas floating around in my head of what I can make next! My notebook is filling up with ideas fast but my life schedule doesn’t seem to have enough spare time for me to try everything out fast enough.

Sometimes I have different ideas pop into my head, like trying a different metal other than the suggested copper or sterling/fine silver wire to make bell flowers on…

… And boy were these addictive or what! Since the price of sterling had started rising I found a new love in antiqued bronze (evident in my Tea Garden series) so the ah-hah moment was, why not try melting glass on the end of an antiqued bronze headpin?!

The results are great if you ask me! The good thing is that the headpins kept their colour and are still relatively easy to bend. I also had a go at making leaves but I’m not so sure what to do with them yet. I road-tested the bell flower head pins and this is what I came up with, and I love it. (now available on Etsy here)

I also found a new impulsive love on the weekend called Craftsy. Love love love. Especially the papercraft section. But I won’t talk about the impulse shopping on card blanks and paper supplies that I did last Sunday… Let’s save that for another day

I thought I’d work on a new butterfly cane. I’d made butterflies before but I’d been working so small because I was so scared of working ‘big’ so this time I pushed the boundaries and went beyond my comfort zone working ‘big’ in my own studio, on my own torch. And boy was it something…

I set the table on fire for the first time (nothing major, just burnt enough that the wood varnish set alight) and also had molten glass fall in my lap for the first time too… ahh, woops.

Lessons learnt:
- Cover the table with the fibre cement board currently sitting in the garage (just need to figure out how to cut the thing without access to a saw?)
- Buy a welder’s apron
- It’s okay to up the oxygen flow on the oxygen concentrator to beyond 4LPM and up to 7.5LPM. Really, it is. It just gets a bit… hot.
- Your arms and shoulders will KILL afterwards. But that’s okay, coz I can do with sexier arms.

While I was making the components all I could hear was Loren’s voice in my head going ‘…wash wash wash…’, ‘get it hot… get it really really really really really hot… heat it good…’, but it worked, and here’s the result of my half-a-butterfly-wing cut in 2, held in the hand.

Next step is to join the two halves, add a body and antenna to form half a butterfly… we’re almost there.

During the course we learnt how to form a large complex fish murrini, starting with a single fish scale component then pulling the cane and cutting in to fours to stack into a 4-scale component. We had to do this 4 times to build a total of 64 scales.

Next was to create the eye and the lips of the fish to create the fish face. It looked a little like an angry birds fish face to me.

We had to make the fins and tail as separate components too then assemble everything to form into a final fish.

My scales were being temperamental and I have a feeling it may have been the choice of colours so putting the completed fish into the paperweight was a bit of a risk too.

…and then we got to play with a flat lap grinder to shape and contour the fish – this was loads of fun! Wish I had one of those machines.

I have to say, this darn fish was one of the hardest things I’ve been challenged to do but the end result was truly worth it.

We also learnt how to make other sea-like components such as sea urchins, 3D starfish, simple fish murrini such as clownfishes, barnacles, seashells, kelp, jellyfish, and sea ferns which we had to assemble in a 3D construction before putting together in a paperweight. Mine was a beauty!

…and then the fun began!

Loren Stump with me and Natalie preheating my construction. She did a perfect job!

This was the final result:

I did the Loren Stump I class last year and I have to admit, I attended this year’s workshop with less expectations and wasn’t so hard on myself to perfect everything I learn and so this year was much more fun! I’ve come away from the class with loads of ideas and wanting to give everything a fair go at home. Next on my agenda is a signature murrini cane and then marbles! Hopeully I can pull this off without Loren around

OH and here’s the photo I promised from this post of me enjoying and expressing delight at the doctor fish nibbling away at my dead skin – haha EWWW I hear you say!

I PROMISE that I’ll keep you guys updated. I’ll keep this blog updated. Oops. There I go again…

I hadn’t realised that I the last time I updated was back in July, early July. Wow, winter has come and gone and we’re into the warmer days of Spring. It looks like I’d gone into winter hibernation by accident.

I’ve been really good at keeping facebook updated so please be my fan if you’re not already and I promise you’ll be amongst the first to hear of anything new.

To make up for my lack of updates here, get ready for this one, coz it’s gonna be a long one!

*****

…Change of focus (again)

Remember this post?

I had the best of intentions when I thought I’d venture in fabric accessories, but being a woman I did the best thing a woman could do and that was to impulse spend… HEAPS… Not that it’s a problem or anything, but it can be if you get too excited over something without doing the research first. Alright, the right amount of research first. Silly me, if I had just spent a little more time thinking it over I would have realised that it a.) it really isn’t my thing (constant hot-glue burns are worse than the occassional glass burn in my opinion) and b.) there is so much competition out there for this type of thing that it makes it so hard to stand out of the crowd. In the end I decided that it was a better idea to pack everything away (note, a whole large plastic tubs worth of stuff) and revisit it on a when-I-feel-like-it-basis.

I did however fall in love with making my own soy candles and soy wax tarts. I constantly find myself drooling over fragrance oils labeled with food-type scents and I need to remind myself that these oils are NOT edible. Think salted caramels, sage & pomegranate, orange vanilla, vanilla tootsie rolls, and rum ripened raisins just to name a few… see, I’ve got you drooling now too don’t I?

The whole process is actually quite therapeutic and the end result is so yummy smelly good. I have yet to experiment some more but I’m loving the soy tarts. I make them in sauce containers with lids so it’s easy to pop them out, warm and melt in your favourite oil burner and pour the wax back in when you’re done for later use – no waste! I’m introducing the soy wax tarts and candles as a regular part of my products along with my beads and jewellery in my etsy store so you’ll definitely see some more on those.

… What else have I been up to?

I’ve been busy making more of the lotus pendants and I just adore making these. A lot of work goes into them but it’s all worth it in the end.

You’ll be glad to know that I’ve also revisited an old but very popular style… but unfortunately this one was snapped up almost as soon as I offered it for sale

I loved making this set and I’d forgotten why I stopped making them in the first place. I think it could have been because I’m time poor these days, but I hope to get at least 1 set out like this a week or fortnight max.

I’ve also started working on a new range of jewellery called the ‘Tea Garden Series’ and it features my lampwork beads (primarily with the floral theme) with beautiful antiqued bronze settings and findings. I’m hoping to release more jewellery in this range very soon.

I had a short trip to Singapore and Kuala Lumpur last month, spent way too much money but had loads of fun. Singapore is definitely the place to shop, but I was quite disappointed at the lack of bead or craft shops around in both cities. Singapore had a nice number of papercraft shops but was lacking in the general craft stuff. Neither city had an open market for the stuff too. I think I was expecting something similar to Manila’s Divisoria (cheap-as-chips marketplace which has EVERYTHING you can think of… craft supplies, text tiles, stationary, clothes, shoes, food… EVERYTHING!) but unfortunately neither city delivered, unless of course I was looking in the wrong places. I did however, find a ‘fish spa’ where small ‘gurra ruffa’ or ‘doctor fish’ suck on your skin and remove your dead skin. They don’t have teeth so the whole thing was painless, just ticklish. I’ll post a photo up as soon as I get a copy.

Unfortunately the doctor fish are banned imports for therapeutic use here in Australia, but if they weren’t I would have imported a few in a hurry and opened my own fish spa. It would have been so cool! Fish spa in one corner, boutique of beads, candles and jewellery in the other… what bliss! A girl sure can dream

KL also introduced me to the super delicious nasi lemak, and ever since I’ve been on a quest to find Sydney’s best nasi lemak. If you’ve got any recommendations please let me know! So far the findings haven’t been too great, but there is one stand out and the nasi lemak at Mamak is pretty damn good.

…To conclude

I’m packing for round 2 of Loren Stump’s workshop which starts tomorrow. I’m heading off to GoGlass studio this afternoon for another round of 6-days-with-sleep-deprivation. It’s not a good time to be off coffee or sugar!

The winner's trophy

Victory was sweet winning the work bake off! I was awarded with a cute little trophy, but I have vowed to everyone else that I will no longer bake in future bake offs to give someone else a go. To date, every bake off I’ve entered I’ve won, so it’s only fair that someone else tastes sweet victory (*insert beaming glow here*)

Now to give you a cyber-taste of what I made. Red velvet cupcakes with vanilla cream cheese frosting, topped with a mini passionfruit macaron (yes, I made the macarons too!). They tasted soooo good if I say so myself, and carrying the platter full of sugary goodness was definitely a glory moment. If only I could share with you all the yummy goodness!

Red velvet cupcakes ready for frosting

Yellow macaron shells fresh out of the oven

Red velvet cupcakes now frosted with vanilla cream cheese frosting... mmm....

Piping the macaron shells once they have been matched and paired for size with passionfruit-chocolate ganache

TA DA! The end result - 'Double Delight'

yum... yum... YUM!

And of course, I’m a legend at making a mess in the kitchen while I’m at it. Here’s the proof:

Attempting too many things at a time!

Over the past couple of months I decided that I would be extending my range of products to incorporate my love of textiles and so very soon you’ll be seeing a new range of bridal and fashion accessories. I still plan to create little works of glass art but lately I’ve been feeling that my love of fabrics has grown for their limitless texture and colours. I’m feeling very passionate about this and I’m going to do my best to make it work.

It’s all very exciting for me as I take on this new adventure, but I hope that you’ll continue to support me.

Pics to come very soon, I promise.