Lego Cake

For my youngest boy's birthday, I made a Lego cake since the theme he picked out was "Star Wars Lego"  I looked online and found a cake that someone made with Boba fett and Han Solo (frozen state) and looked really cool and easier than say make a starfighter cake. During my search, I also found a silicone mold to make little lego guys and leggo blocks!! so this is what I came up with.

 

here are the mold I found on Amazon.com.  I used candy melts to make the lego blocks and used rolled and colored fondant to make the lego guys, much easier and faster to use the fondant then the chocolate since you need to wait for the candy melt to set before removing them from the mold VS mold and remove the fondant

 I used skin color fort the head and placed it in the head cavity and then placed other color to the body push in real good and remove, let dry. easy peasy.

Boba was made using a real lego as a model so its not quite to scale but made it easier to get the shape right.  here he sits in my china cabinet with Hans Solo safe away from the giant cats and fingers of doom.








I don't think you can see it that well but I also found a lego block shaped candles from Target.

Can you say Chocolate?

I try my best to make a birthday cake for my basket weaving group on their birthday week because nothing is better and tastier to celebrate then to enjoy a cake with friends.  This week I made a chocolate cake with chocolate mousse filling and chocolate ganache glaze.   I wanted to make a chocolate cake with chocolate mousse filling so I Googled and found this recipe from food network.  No picture on their site so I was a bit worried what it was going to look like but I think it turned out pretty well. 
this is what the inside looks like cake uses no flour so I guess if you don't use the cookie crumbs on the outside it would be gluten free?? its not advertised as gluten free so I can't be for sure since I'm not totally sure if chocolate has gluten?? I don't know.    Only thing I changed on the recipe is changed the ganache chocolate, it said to use semisweet but I used bittersweet chocolate and semisweet chocolate mix.  It wasn't that hard to make and it was super yummy!
 

So last week I told you to come back this week to find out why I made the outside

 rim with flat Oval but inside was done with flat flat..   Here is the reason why!!!

I wanted to put a lid on it!!  isn't it cool?? so you may be wondering how did I do that?? Its not hard and not only that here is a link to the instruction from a blog I follow  hand woven life  she makes it very simple and easy to follow! I visit her blog often Thanks Juliana!
I used wooden plaque from my local craft store, it was like $1.50 and a $1 drawer pull knob from a hardware store.. I thought the knob was perfect for basket since it looks like a fancy weave.  I also stained the lid to give it a little more finished look. 


 

Herringbone twill weave tutorial

There are so many different weaving style so I figured to do a simple tutorial for some of you who are novice and for some of you who wants a quick refresher on other weaving style.

Today we are going to work on Herringbone twill weave.  Its simple, but you do need to pay good attention to detail to make sure you don't skip or not skip a spoke/stake or forget to move the starting stake/spoke marker (clothes pin) as you go around.  if you notice that you did make a mistake do go back, its well worth going back to fix the mistake!!  But best way to avoid going  back to fix your mistake is to pay attention to each round so you'll catch the mistake right away and not wait until when you are just about done.

1. Make a basket base, it can be any shape, for the tutorial I just made a small base using 14 -1/2" flat  cut all at 22"  made a base 6inch X 6 inch. 

 

2. make sure to twine around once with a round reed to keep the base in place! 

start with 3rd stake from the left, if you are working on the round then obviously start anywhere. 

attach a clothes pin that is special from any other one and remember that its the starting stake, place a weaver behind the starting stake use clothes pins to hold in place for 3-4 rounds.

3. weave over two stake, behind two and continue this pattern over two under two all the way around until you reach one stake before the start.

4. now instead of going behind two just go behind one, move the special clothes pin one over to the left to mark it as the start of round 2 and continue over two behind two until you reach the stake/spoke next to the starting stake of that round.

so since this weaving style is continue weave, what do you do when you run out of weaver?  you obviously need to add more.  you can add it how ever you like it but this is how I do it and it may not be the way you do do it but this is my way.

 cut the reed at the end of over two

 scarf off the rounded area from behind two all the way to the end (if you are using flat oval)











really bad picture but place a new weaver over the scarfed reed and continue on.

Starting Stake

Over Two

under two

all the way around until you reach the height you desired.

to end the weave, simply end behind the very first starting stake.  leave couple of inches of weaver to tuck the end.
Pack down evenly !!
 my advise for you if you are using dyed reed, make sure you have extra dyed reed  sometimes you'll need more then you expect due to breakage and miscalculation.  You don't want to try to dye reeds and end up with it being off color.  make sure your reeds are thick and strong! don't use the think weak reeds to weave.

now you need to figure out what kind of rim you want to do.  if you want to do traditional rim, you need to do a rim row, a size smaller then the rim you want to put on cut and tuck and put on a rim.
   if you want to do a braid rim, then you need to twine at least twice with no2 or no3 round reed and then tuck all stake/spokes and braid your favorite rim.

I did a traditional rim with flat oval on the outside and flat flat on the inside why? we'll you'll need to come back again next week to see why!