les macarons!

everyone gets baking urges once in a while. my sister is the baker in the family. she makes cookies or pies, or a cheesecake for a special occasion. i get a baking urge now and then, but i'm never satisfied with chocolate chip cookies or an apple pie. no, i make the complicated things.

that's why tonight, i had an urge to try macarons.

after i got over the initial disappointment that it was not possible to make one in each flavour (i tried that with icing on cookies once, it was much more time-consuming than it was worth), i settled on a nice, easy chocolate-mint. the pastel colours are, after all, the thing that attracts me most to the art of macaron-making. i was too impatient to pay attention to the finer details (measuring by weight rather than volume because i don't have a scale, sifting twice because i don't have a sifter, aging the egg white for three days because i wanted macarons NOW), but they still turned out okay.


a little brown around the edges, but my oven does that to everything. they also baked up taller, but flattened a lot when they cooled. this could be a result of my using fresh egg whites, or too-coarse almonds, or simply not being careful enough while taking them out of the oven. i've left out some eggs and i'm going to try to find some almond flour, so i'll try again in a few days. i think i'll try lemon next time. mmm.

other than baking, here's what i've been doing for the past few days:
that's my baby-painting setup, horrible lighting included. there's not much open space in my house, so i've taken over the living room. which has lots of good window-light in the daytime, but only one lamp at night, which is when i do most of my work. but the babies are coming along nicely. i have two dresses pretty much done, one about halfway, and one that i have yet to start (i need to get the measurements of the guy who will be wearing it). in addition to that, i have a scarf, a tie, a pair of shorts, a bedspread, and a bassinet to make. this is turning out to be quite the commitment.

costumes.

i'm now unemployed. i have three weeks or so before going back to school. i have found one thing to do to amuse myself until then.

a friend is directing a play, "baby with the bathwater" by christopher durang. a very absurd piece of theatre, and it needs costumes to match.


yes, i'll be painting the babies on the fabric. it looks like in addition to those two dresses and the tie, i'll be making one more dress, a pair of shorts, and a bassinet that can hold a teenage boy. and maybe one more dress and a few aprons. i'm quite excited for it, really. i just need to get some fabric and paint.

also, i still do that knitting thing every once in a while. i stopped at a couple of yarn shops last week while we were in cape breton. i got a book i've been eyeing for a while, "boutique knits", which features a lovely cloche-like hat pattern, for which i picked up some teal alpaca. i also experienced, for the first time, malabrigo. i got two skeins of lace in "water green". i've been loving this colour lately.

and a few things from my sketchbook lately:

one week at work, i only had one kid sign up for class, so we did some more involved things, like making dolls. that's what i made. no, the kid didn't know who liza minnelli is.

and a little stamp i carved from a piece of linoleum:

i'm going to do a series of posts of things that make me happy. i'm really a pretty materialistic person deep down, in a way, and i love buying things. i'll be posting some things i own that make me happy.