Let Them Make Cake

Here's one of my guilty pleasures: watching Is It Cake?, a competition for hyper realistic cake artists who try to fool the judges with their art. It's a guilty pleasure because while I love to bake I can't eat cake because of all the sugar that's usually involved. All three seasons are presently available on Netflix, but I think season three is my favorite.

It's a fun show, and the usual cut-throat nastiness of competition productions is completely missing. I don't know if it's just the nature of cake artists, but the contestants are all supportive of each other and cheer each other on. Trying to guess what is cake and what isn't is insanely hard, too. I'm right only about half of the time. The combinations of cake, filling and icing are also amazing. In this season one of the contestants made a strawberry and fennel cake -- I would never have put those two flavors together, but everyone seemed to love it.

What I like most about the show is the inclusiveness; there are all shapes, sizes and colors of contestants, each with their own backstory. This season's cast included a Sikh young man from Canada and a Venezuelan native who immigrated to the US, and both were enormously talented and wonderful guys. Also, the winner is special to me for reasons I won't say because it will spoil the grand finale, but I was super happy about them winning. Anyway, if you want to watch something fun, try an episode.

Comments

In Progress

I promised myself I would show you the good, bad and ugly of my cleaning this year. This is what it looks like when you dump thirty years' worth of stashed fabric on the floor -- and oy, what a pain in the butt to pick up again! This is what it looks like after it's been sorted, folded and placed in containers, which took me about a week. Now the hard part is to downsize my stash by at least half, I think (that's my goal, anyway.) I've already e-mailed the president of the local quilting guild, a local friend who is a quilter, and a public school art teacher I know to see if I can donate some of the excess to them. The rest will go to Goodwill. Already I've reduced my vintage textiles from two bins to one, and my scraps from three bins to one. It's probably the hardest clean-out I've done, which is why I saved it until last. I know I have too much fabric, more than I can use in my lifetime -- but at the same time, I love it. So I have to

Downsizing

This was my fabric stash once I sorted everything -- 22 full bins. I spent a day taking out and boxing up what I could part with, with the goal of trying to reduce it by half, so I'd have 11 bins. I was very strict with myself, and removed everything that for one reason or another I was sure I wouldn't be able to use. This is what I ended up with -- 12 bins of fabric that I'm keeping. It's not quite half, but close enough. Half of what I took out went to a local quilter friend, a school and Goodwill. These four tightly-packed bins will be going to the local quilting guild once I make arrangements with them for a drop-off place. I am relieved and a little sad and now determined to control my impulses to thrift more fabric. I don't want to do this again, so until I use up six bins, I can't for any reason bring any new fabric into the house.

Other Stashes

Along with clearing out the spare bedroom and tidying my office and our guest bedroom, I decided to reorganize some of my stashes. This is all the yarn I have on hand, sorted by color. It looks like a lot, but lately I've been using up a minimum of half a bin every month, so this is approximately a year's supply. All of my solid color cotton perle thread. I go through a lot of this every year, too. I need a container in which I can fit all of it together, but I haven't found the right one yet. I won't show you all of my fabric -- I'm still reorganizing this stash -- but I went through everything and donated two bins of fabric I won't need to the local quilter's guild.

Valerean

Search This Blog