I've Moved!

Follow me over to a new home!

(Forgive the funny drawing. For lack of a better visual I tried to make one myself with good 'ol pencil 'n paper. She's pulling along her KitchenAid stand mixer on a cart! Haha.)

My new address: www.thegirlwithacurl.com

Thank you to Noel for helping with Moving Day and for bearing with all of my Wordpress wonderings.

I love how April's starting off bright, shiny and new. :)

April, Fool!

Tomorrow is April 1st. I thought it would be fun to share these Fruit Fool ideas so you can celebrate your own pun-y, foolish Tuesday.

The Fool is a classic British dessert that’s genius in its simplicity. You puree fresh fruit, sweeten it and fold it into whipped cream. (At least that’s what my memory tells me). The end product is a lovely bowl of fruited cream that’s simple and easy to make. I think this would be great with frozen or canned fruit too, as long as the juices are thoroughly drained. You don’t want the cream to run, and fold the fruit ever so gently, so that there are delicate swirls of it among the heavenly clouds of cream.

This makes me think about how wonderful this would be back home with Manila mangoes!

Top your fool off with a pretty wafer or stick, barquilllos, broas or even layer with some slices of pound or yellow cake. Add a sprig of mint or two.Yum.

Here’s an elaborate version:










And for Fruit Fool recipes, click HERE.

I also think these are great ideas for an April Fool’s mid-week dessert. Wouldn’t it be funny to serve cakes/sweets that looked like some other type of food, so you can tell your guests, “Fooled ya!”?

Hamburger Cake With Fries









Hotdog & Fries Cake











Cake And Donut Sushi With Gummies














I could make a Curlified, Fruitified Fool myself (and really wanted to-–I even have the strawberries and cream ready to go), but I am currently in the dregs of migrating GWAC to Wordpress (hands and eyes and BRAIN too busy!). I hope to start posting there very soon. In the meantime, hope you enjoy making fools for yourselves!

If I Could Eat A Book

I would eat this.
















Many chefs and foodies consider Larousse Gastronomique the definitive compendium of the many mouthwatering aspects of French cuisine. It includes recipes, ingredients and cooking techniques. It must have many yummy things mentioned in it, like full cream milk and European butter. Oh, heaven.

I love reading cookbooks. I’ll sometimes pick one out to read in bed when I can’t sleep. (Hence, my level of insomnia is often directly related to the height of the stack of cookbooks beside my bed.) The language of food is just so…deliciously satisfying. And there’s nothing like images of a ruby-red strawberry being dipped in dark melted chocolate or a simple sugar glaze falling gracefully over the sides of a lemon pound cake to lull you to sweet slumber.

I’ve never read the Larousse myself, but I am happily imagining drifting off to sleep with it and delectable macaron dreams.














On a somewhat disturbing, but admittedly interesting, note about the Larousse. Hannibal of Silence Of The Lambs fame uses the book in his own, er, culinary explorations. This is actually how I came to know about the book myself—as a fan of the Thomas Harris novels. The book leads to his downfall in Red Dragon; I will not mention which specific entry in the book, lest you change your mind about it. Haha.

The Larousse is now on my birthday wish list.:)

EDIT: Mama reminded me today of the often-told anecdote about how one day when I was three years old, she suddenly noticed how quiet the house was; I was usually noisy. She found me in a corner with a magazine, pretending to grab pictures of food from the pagaes and making the motions of shoving them into my mouth and chewing them. All she heard was me going, "Nyam! Nyam! Nyaaaaahhhmmm!" and saw me hunched over the magazine, pretend-munching the afternoon away. I guess I started early!

Know When To Fold 'Em*

When I discovered these new ways of folding everyday items, I knew I had to share them. They’re the neatest things.

A TEE IN TWO
How to fold a t-shirt in under two minutes (or is it two seconds?), from the ingenious Japanese. They invented Origami after all. After you watch this, you’ll say, “Why didn’t I think of that?”



FINELY FITTED
This is something I learned from cousins on my dad’s side. (They’re the scary ones who cross-stitch in their sleep and give Martha Stewart a run for her money.) It’s a way to fold fitted sheets so that they come out to perfect rectangles, cutting down on bulk for neater storage in the linen closet.



NAPKINS? NEAT-O!
I have a secret desire to learn how to fold dinner napkins into elaborate shapes. I think it comes from memories of fashioning stuff from those ubiquitous hankies we used to have growing up. I remember how, out of sheer boredom during recess, we would use hankies to fold everything from bras to babies in hammocks!

Here’s how to fold a pocket from a table napkin to tuck your cutlery into. I’m sure this would work with chopsticks too. Add a small flower or slim leaf for effortless elegance at the dinner table.



There are many more ways to play around with napkin-folding HERE. Like these:

The Classic Three-Point Fold









The Lover's Knot









Have fun folding, everyone!

* Did anyone get my Kenny Rogers reference, I wonder?

Good Golly, My Lolly

So, I was actually intrigued when I found out about these Absinthe Lollipops.


And then, I became slightly disgusted by these Maple-Bacon ones, though I think I’d try them at least once.

And, however fascinated I am by the strange tastes that people’s palettes demand, I am too grossed out by this Tequilalix Lollipop to even consider it.

First two lollipops from lollyphile.com, the rest are from edible.com. Edible, by the way, also sells Hornet's Honey:


And Chocolate-Covered Giant Ants.

Dessert, anyone?

Someone Bit My Head Off!

These ABC (Already Been Chewed) Cookie Cutters by Fred are morbidly cute. I think these would work great with your standard Gingerbread, Sugar or Snickerdoodle recipe!

Cut-outs can actually be a bit laborious, but I’ve found that chilling the dough makes for more defined and easier-to-handle cookies.

Here are some sugar cookie ones with royal icing that I made for a godson’s birthday last year. I had never worked with royal icing before and had a challenging time making sure all the cookies were equally thick. It got easier after the second batch. Plus, I couldn’t find any surfboard cookie cutters, so the lady at the baking supplies shop showed me a cool trick--you can actually bend some existing cutters into other shapes. She showed me how to modify an egg-shaped one by elongating it to look like a surfboard. Cowabunga!



Another cookie-cutter tip: try to find ones that don’t have seams (like the ones above.) These make the cookies’ edges look cleaner. The seamed ones are more readily available, though, so just check that they’re well-made and that the seams won’t leave any obvious marks in the dough.

Cookies are, for me, literally bites of joy. Here's hoping you make your own joyous bites soon!

Huli Ka! (The Luxe: A Guilty Confession)

Anna Godbersen's Young Adult (YA) offering, The Luxe, is a fun read that I admittedly couldn't put down. I say admittedly because it's a YA book and my choice of it was partly driven by the book cover. (Aren’t those colors scrumptious? That dress looks like she’s been swallowed by a big pink cupcake, but I actually like it!) My brother went on and on about how the cover may be appealing to me because of something called the Golden Mean, a math/design concept whose definition is too long and profound for me to describe in full here. (It’s really interesting though, despite the math, so if you want to read up on how the Golden Mean figures in everyday design and even music, click HERE.)

The Luxe is “Gossip Girl in 1899 Manhattan.” Even if it has an ending you can see coming from a mile away, I still loved reading it. Maybe because it has all the elements of the classic Pinoy teledrama that I grew up with: the covetous best friend, the love affair with a boy from the “other side of town,” the girl torn between love and duty to her family. All fluff, but I think fluff is good in small doses (like 448 pages!)

Here's the book's website, with fun quizzes and downloads.

But, back to the cover. That dress revived my interest in learning how to bubble-hem, sometimes called a “blouson hem”. I found this at Kingdom Of Style -- a fairly simple tutorial for turning an A-line dress into one with an elasticized bubble hem. It seems easy enough and this can absolutely be done by hand (with some patience). I hope to experiment on an old dress and maybe post the results. (I don’t know how I’m going to find the time to do it, but maybe if I wrote about it, it’ll actually happen!)

Here’s an illustrated guide on how to do a bubble hem in four steps. Complete instructions HERE.




On a further Luxe note, I found out from Amazon that a sequel is soon to come! Hay naku, look at how pretty the cover for THAT is. (It’s inspiring me to make Strawberry Cheesecake!)

How Much Is A Cupcake Worth?

Flour prices in the US more than doubled in the past month. This means that all types of baked goods—from cupcakes to pizza—are going to cost you more per bite.

Heard this all on CNN yesterday and was quite dismayed by the news. This impacts home bakers like me who will find pricier flour on grocery shelves.

This is all because of rising wheat prices in the US, owing partly to the increased demand for ethanol. (Ethanol is a substance derived from corn that has a myriad of uses, but mostly as a fuel.) Farmers are now planting more corn than wheat. And with the dollar’s poor showing in recent months, foreigners are turning to the US for their wheat needs. I couldn’t believe my ears when I heard that 59% of wheat produced in the US is EXPORTED, dwindling the supply here and puffing up prices like a properly made soufflé!

Globally, poor weather conditions didn’t help the growth of wheat crops around the world either. There was a winter freeze in the US and droughts in Australia and France.

A 50-pound bag of flour is now $37, up from $16 just four weeks ago. CNN tells the story of how such a jump in prices is affecting Manhattan pizzeria owner Joe Vicari, who feels bad for charging his “working people” customers $5 for two slices. I understand how Joe feels. If baking was where I got my dough (oh, the puns just keep coming), I would feel bad as well for making customers pay more for a cupcake or two. Someone who’s in the business of making money from baking/cooking has to love it fiercely. If their life’s purpose becomes less affordable for patrons to enjoy, then it just becomes, well, less purposeful.

I’m due for my next bag of flour and plan to monitor the prices over the next few weeks. Hunker down, bakers, we’ll pull through somehow!

When flour prices turn ridiculous, I’m just going to vent all this frustration into sewing projects. I have a lot cloth to work with from years of collecting a yard or two here and there. Oh, and some pretty Japanese paper! And yarn too! Ok, getting ahead of myself. Pulling back now. Haha.

For the CNN article on the flour fiasco, click HERE.

By the way, the poster above was an ad for Gold Medal brand flour in 1941 (I just love retro food packaging, don't you?), the year when the company started enriching their flour, upping the thiamine content and adding calcium and iron to it. This was because studies at that time showed that millions of Americans were suffering from inadequate diets. Flour is such an integral part of nutrition and, on a deeper level, our palate's memories the world over. I hope this whole thing blows over soon.

So That's Where All The Peeps Go

Apparently, The Washington Post has an annual Peeps Show (how I love puns) where readers send in dioramas using marshmallow Peeps. I've always wondered what happened to all of those. I, for one, don't eat the pink bunny ones because they taste like sugar-crusted plastic puffs. I would eat the yellow chick ones, except I think they're too cute and worry that I'm crushing their little peep lives as I chomp down on their tiny heads.

Read more about the Peeps Show HERE, including a gallery of all the best entries. There's even a diorama recreating that Thriller dance number by those inmates in Cebu!

This one's my favorite:

Peach Be With You Cupcakes

I've been lurking on Wifely Steps for over three months now. Toni used to be my blockmate in college and I found her blog through Via. I like reading her blog because it reminds me that the quest for good homemaking is alive in Manila. I know that sounds corny, but I'd like to think that if I still lived there, I would be taking the steps to carve my own corner in that pocket of the world with adventures in housekeeping, experiments with recipes, Twilight movie updates and all that good stuff.

I made these to participate in her Blog Carnival for the ingredients PEACHES and CREAM, but seeing how her deadline is March 22, I'm not sure if this is going to make it! I just made these today.





These are called PEACH BE WITH YOU CUPCAKES, because I made them this morning at the crack of dawn when I got off the phone after an argument with my friend Ross. (We argue about 2 million times a year, don't be alarmed.) I decided to make these to de-stress, which is partly the reason why I bake all the time. Nothing soothes like flour, milk and sugar, and in this case, peaches and cream!

Peach Cupcakes
1-1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp ground nutmeg
1/4 tsp salt
1-1/4 cups sugar
1/2 cup unsalted butter, at room temperature
3 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
2 tsp grated orange zest
3/4 cup milk
8 slices canned peaches, diced

1. In a small bowl, mix together flour, baking powder, nutmeg and salt.

2. In a large bowl, using an electric mixer, beat together sugar and butter until well combined. Add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition until light and fluffy. Add vanilla and orange zest, beating well. Alternately beat in flour mixture and milk, making three additions of flour mixture and two of milk, beating until smooth. Fold in peaches or nectarines.

3. Scoop batter into prepared pan. Bake in preheated over for 23-28 minutes or until golden brown and tops of cupcakes spring back when lightly touched.

Let cool in pan on rack for 10 minutes. Remove from pan and let cool completely on rack.

By the way, these cupcakes don't rise very much, so if you make them, make sure to fill the cupcake pans almost all the way to the top of the liner.

The nutmeg in these really make a big difference in the flavor! These are perhaps the yummiest cupcakes I've made in a long time. The peaches really help keep the cupcakes moist.

And here's the frosting, which is a basic cream cheese one but with a cup of whipped cream folded in. Airy and sweet! Paired with the cupcakes, it's really like a portable version of the good old peaches and cream.

Whipped Cream Cream Cheese Frosting
1 8 oz package cream cheese
1 cup sugar
1/8 teaspoon salt
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 1/2 cups heavy whipping cream

1. In a small bowl, beat whipping cream until stiff peaks form. Set aside.

2. In a large bowl, combine cream cheese, sugar, salt and vanilla. Beat until smooth, then fold in whipped cream.

I got both these ideas from the web and have been wanting to try these out. The decorating idea was all mine though. I used a gummy peach ring to top each cupcake. Whether or not this makes it to the Wifely Steps deadline, these were fun to make.

And yeah, Ross and I are going to talk eventually, like we end up doing 2 million times a year. Ross, this is a peace offering. Even if you can't really eat them. I will eat one for you.

I was thinking, if I had to write an ad to sell these, the copy may include: "They're peachy cupcakes you'll be keen on!"

Ok, well, maybe not. Haha.

Pop(s) Goes My Heart

These Red Velvet Cake Lollipops took a lot of time to make, but they were a fun project.

Cakes on a stick, covered with white chocolate, tinted with different spring colors, in celebration of Easter.

Dondie's Turtle Pull-Apart Cupcake Cake

That was a mouthful!

Made this cake last weekend for a nephew. The thing is, I was told his younger brother was the one celebrating a birthday--turns out Dondie is actually, well, 16 years old now. If I was 16, I wouldn't really appreciate a turtle cake, but he's a sweet kid and didn't seem to mind.

Made with cupcakes frosted as one to look like a happy Mr. Turtle. Who would eventually be eaten.

A Commentary On Color

I've never been good with colors. For the longest time, I was stuck in the whole matchy-matchy color mode, where I was on the eternal quest to match my shoes with my purse. Hence, I could only make quilts that were the standard white and pink, blue and white, red and white, etc. Orange and blue? WHY?!?!

But over the past three years or so, I actually started discovering colors I never considered before. I really don't know how it happened. I guess it could be my age, or maybe by the simple scientific process of osmosis--my brother's studying art and there's talk of color and the fascination with it everyday.

I still have problems figuring out color value, especially for quilts, but I'm finding out that as much as anything, color is a practice. You keep at it, you get better.

I continue to be fascinated by how visual artists see color and design, which is why they're my muses. I need to borrow their eyes, because mine are, frankly, color blind. Or maybe color deaf. Whatever this affliction is, I realize that my eyes just weren't built to process color the way theirs do.

That's why my blog is this strange--though wonderfully new for me--palette. It's my way of celebrating this stunning ad for Bassetti Tessutti, the almost-mythical, labyrinthine fabric store in Rome:


And Maison Martin Margiela, whose creative genius continues to awe me with every new season.

Hello There

The crafting and cooking life is a crazy life if you don't have an outlet for it. Ideas crowd your brain like the mosh pit at a Pearl Jam concert. The more obvious thing to do is to MAKE all of these ideas but there are only 24 hours in a day, and you only have two hands.

So you bide your time. You let the ideas pile up into big mounds of colored silk in your brain. You get by. But then you find yourself awake at 2 am in a foreign city (not good, because you don't even know where you ARE when it happens.) What was that, you ask in the dark. The answer is an idea for a skirt, appearing to you from the ether, floating through the wispy levels of your sleep. On the way back home, you start seeing quilt patterns on the bathroom tiles in the airport. Finally, when you find yourself studying Japanese fabric patterns online at 6:30 am before you head off to work the day after your flight gets in, you realize you're turning into a freak. A crafts freak.

So you decide to do something about it. Buy a notebook, write down all your ideas, flesh them out one by one. Sketch them out, even if you could never draw to save your life. And write about them, as much as you can.

You stop fighting your craftster self. You realize that you are, after all, the granddaughter of two amazing craftsters: one who could whip Swiss meringue into airy peaks by hand, and another who lived until she was 102 years old, quilting on a manual sewing machine up until she was 98.

So hello there, my craftster self. And hello to you. :)