Get Off Me Cheese!

Probably not as well executed as the elephants or the pigs but technically more challenging. They involve four different colours; I had to get away from just pink icing!

Pinky and Perky

As promised, after the elephants came pigs.

Thanks again to Helen, Ian and Linda for the birthday presents which led to me making these. I'm not sure what I'm going to make next but I'm sure I'll let you know.

Missing Pips

Over the years I've cut up an awful lot of oranges and lemons and you can guarantee that you'll find at least one pip in each.

Over the last few years I've started cooking Mexican food quite a bit and this, in turn, has led me to cut up quite a few limes. I must have cut into at least a hundred or so limes and I'm yet to encounter a single pip. Do limes not have pips? I'd always assumed they were reproductively similar to oranges and lemons. Am I missing something obvious?

Dismemberment

Dismemberment: the act of cutting, tearing, pulling, wrenching or otherwise removing, the limbs of a living thing.

Turns out I quite like fresh elephant meat. The ears were especially tasty!

Pink Elephants

As some of you will know I recently had a birthday (if I haven't already said thank you for a card or present then... THANK YOU!), and yesterday after a) fixing Blogger's mistakes and b) a full working day I decided to relax by having a play in the kitchen using two of my birthday presents.

Helen and Ian had kindly bought me a book from my Amazon wishlist about making sugarpaste characters for decorating cakes. Even after just a quick flick through I knew I was going to be making the second character in the book, a pink elephant (if you go to Amazon you can look inside the book and see the instructions for making the elephant yourself). So I spent some of the money Linda had given me as a present on buying pink icing, black gel colouring and a modeling tool. These arrived in the post yesterday so once work was over I set about making some elephants.

While I've decorated cakes before the closest I've got to making fancy decorations were my iced bees which were recognizable as bees (or possibly wasps) but which wouldn't really have won any awards for artistic merit. So while I'm unlikely to be offered a job making models for the next Wallace and Gromit adventure I'm still more than happy with the results (and I haven't even tasted them yet). I'll definitely be making more elephants in the future and as I've still got plenty of pink icing left I might branch out into making pigs as well.

Being Experimented Upon

Just a quick note to say that Blogger seem to be conducting random experiments on random blogs. Unfortunately this is affect this blog (in fact it seems to be affecting all my blogs). In this specific experiment Blogger have added support for their own clever image popup effect. Unfortunately this is interfering with the code I was already using for this. So now if you click on any photo on this blog you actually get two copies popping up one on top of the other.

It's being discussed as we speak so hopefully there should be a fix or work around soon, but until then sorry if it looks a bit of a mess. For once it's not my fault!

UPDATE: While Blogger haven't fixed this yet I have managed to figure out a work around so hopefully things are back to normal.

Bird Food

We have quite a few sources of bird food in the garden: there are five feeders as well as lots of wild flowers (the Goldfinches especially love the ragwort seed heads). I assume this means that we have quite a few small birds regularly visiting the garden. In turn this means that we are indirectly feeding this female Sparrowhawk.

She sat on top of the bird feeder for a good ten minutes happily surveying the garden. Of course any bird with any sense had buried itself so far into the undergrowth there was nothing else moving anywhere I could see. This is the third time I've seen the Sparrowhawk in the garden but the first time I've seen it sat and been able to photograph it at my leisure. Unfortunately the light was fading and I was shooting through a window which is in serious need of a wash so the photos could be better, but still a pleasant end to the day.

Back For The Future

Well if I had more money than sense I know what I'd be spending some of it on!