Bread and Badgers

 
Hugh: Daddy, I'm bored. Are we there yet? Where are we going anyway?  
 
Benjamin: There's no earthly way of knowing 
Which direction we are going. 
There's no knowing where we're rowing 
Or which way the river's flowing. 
Is it raining? 
Is it snowing? 
Is a hurricane a blowing? 
 
Hugh: Dad...  
 
Benjamin: Not a speck of light is showing 
so the danger must be growing. 
Are the fires of hell a glowing? 
Is the grisly reaper mowing? 
Yes! The danger must be growing-- 
 
Hugh: DADDY! Stop being scary! We're not even near the river!  
 
 
Bramble: Pfft, crazy badgers.  
---  
 
I've been working on some bread, both for my bakery and for Okasaneko. It's giving me a good practice so far. I'm also hoping that this project will start to give me enough incentive to get off my ass and start making things more often. I've wanted to make things for friends for a while now, but I've always procrastinated too much. Bad, bad, bad Pei. Bad. Here are the loaves that I've made; they're really basic items from Betsy's tutorial that I've made before, with a few modifications to the way the cuts on the short loaves look.  
 
 
 
Since I've made these before and know the colour mixes you'd think it would taken less time than almost three hours to just make the basic shape and texture the bread! I think sometimes that I'm too picky and I keep redoing the bread if the cuts don't look right. They still don't look 100% right, but I think I should leave it as it is lest I knead more dust into them... Ugh dust! The bane of any clay miniaturist!  
 
My previous project has not gone so well. I lack piping skills and these are the result.  
 
 
 
Look at all those horrible smears! I kept wiping the icing off the cupcakes because they were the wrong size, off center or the swirl I was trying to do didn't work out. Modelling paste is so messy to wipe off. I think I only got one good one out of all of these. On the bright side, I like my new modelling paste a lot more than my old paste. It's not translucent for one and definitely more icing-like. I'll try to do a comparison tomorrow.  
 
I haven't done anything to the orange slices and I've only given the cake a few coats of varnish. I've been trying to figure out the best way to decorate it--the way I had meant to do it looks kinda strange. As for the biscuits...  
 
 
 
The cats didn't turn out as well as I had hoped, but with a little more practice and a few more experiments I hope to have some really cute critters soon. I went with brown acrylic paint for the biscuits, but paint is so thin that you can still see all the texturing. The biscuits look more like they are really half chocolate biscuits than cream-coloured biscuits dipped in chocolate.

Cakes and cupcakes

I actually made these about two weeks ago but haven't been able to get good pictures. I still haven't but I'm kinda fed up now so I'm just sticking with these pictures.



A chocolate cake with strawberries and whipped cream and a black forest cake. I'm not happy with the strawberries, I think they don't look realistic enough. Another problem I'm having is with the piped cream bits on the black forest cake. I used acrylic texture paste as I felt that liquid polymer clay was too sticky and while the texture paste held the piped cream shape wonderfully the colour was wrong. I used liquid clay to ice the rest of the cake and the piped cream bits are more of an off white. I'm going to try a trick I learned from another blog with some air dry clay and pva glue next, so we'll see how it goes. I've tried piping with this air dry clay before but only used water and it wouldn't stick to anything! I'm hoping that glue trick will work.

Another thing that bothers me is the cherries. They don't look real at all to me, and I think that partly that has to do with how round they are :P I'll put some indentations next time where the stalks are supposed to go. I bet that'll also help with the whole tiny balls rolling off and everywhere when I tried to get them in the oven.

I also made cupcakes for the first time.



I need to find something that will make a cupcake mold with those indentations to emulate cupcake cases. I used the end of a sushi soy sauce bottle, those cute ones that are shaped like fish. It was the only thing I had that satisfied me size wise. I also need more piping practice, I can't tell you how many times I wiped off the icing from those things! Or how much texture paste I wasted.I also ended up smearing texture paste all over the cupcake in the process btw.

Also, I took this pic for this thread: http://bsfforum.runboard.com/t2411