Macaron Marathon!

I made these macarons for my friends at work on my last day :)

Pink -  white vanilla filling

Green -  pink strawberry filling

White - brown mint chocolate filling

Yummmm!

Thank goodness my sis came to help me with the filling (there were sooo many!)

I also made some extra special ones with ♥ for my darling hubby :)

I used the macaron recipe which I have used before :) The fillings were cream cheese with vanilla extract, cream cheese with strawberry sugar and for the brown one I used Betty Crocker - Rich and Creamy Icing Chocolate Fudge - and added some mint extract in it.

♥LiLoPe

What have I been up to ^__^

Loong time no posting! So much has been going on with my studies, life...etc. I have been doing some art studies during this school year and it has been great. The only con is that the teaching takes part over 300 km (over186 miles!) away from where I live...soo much driving. But it has been worth it! Here are some pics from one of the courses where we made a plaster head :)

We all got a 10 kg lump of clay each. There was a model in the middle of the classroom and we tried to capture her facial features (with the hair we were allowed to use our own intuition)

Here I'm preparing the clay head for the mold making process (making a seam) you see a mold that is drying in the background (white alien eggy thing) 

Here the is the mold in making (clay head inside)

Opening the mold. This was very exiting!!! The mold opened up into three pieces.

Here the mold pieces have been first brushed with an emulsion and the filled with plaster and some sackcloth. After this the mold pieces were put together and we let them dry over night.

Chisel in action! Discovering the plaster head from the plaster mold (for me it was very hard to see where the mold ended and the head begun...I chipped of a bit too much here and there...-_-')

And here is the final plaster head :) During the process the clay head and the plaster mold were destroyed (so sad :(....)

LiLoPe

Rhubarb vol. 2

It has been quite warm the past few days here in Finland. Sunshine, rain, thunder..quite like living in a green house – hot and humid. Now what would be a better way to cool yourself than with a icy rhubarb soda. Well there’re lots of rhubarb growing outside in our garden and the freezer is full of ice! Only thing I needed was a recipe since I had only made juice of red and blackcurrant and I guess it works a bit differently with rhubarb. This is what I found from Culinate.

Rhubarb Soda

1½ cups rhubarb, roughly chopped

1 cup sugar

1½ cups water

Sparkling water

Ice

Place rhubarb, sugar, and 1½ cups of water in a saucepan. Bring to a boil, then turn down to a simmer. Cook for about 15 minutes, until the syrup is bright pink.

Turn off the heat and allow to cool. Strain syrup into a large jar.

To make each soda, measure ¼ cup rhubarb syrup into a glass. Add enough sparkling water to fill the glass ⅔ full. Stir to mix, then add ice.

I also made this so that I replaced the sugar with syrup. The color changed quite much..I did use dark syrup so...hmmm well I think I prefer the sugar version-> PINK! The soda can taste a bit sweet (not too sweet in my opinion) but you can easily adjust the sweetness level by changing the amount of sugar/syrup to match your taste. Some like it sweeter than others ;)

Happy times...

LiLoPe