Playing with my food

My friend Jodi and I played with our food a couple of weeks ago. That’s right; I skipped clay that day and went straight for the food.
Jodi is a dear friend and quite a artisan herself. She has a good eye, is quite intuitive, and a quick learner. She likes to play with food, beads, and scrap booking. When she gets in to something she goes all the way. She will take classes, peruses the stores looking for unusual items, and does this with a vengeance. She gathers many things to her, inquires about a lot of others, and then starts to experiment with all of the goodies she has stock piled.
Needless to say when I go to see her, I love to go through all of her stuff. It is organized, categorized, and itemized. She knows exactly where everything is. This in itself is an unusual experience for me. My space is a collage of everything. If I put things away I can’t find them. Having never been trained in filing or categorizing, I don’t even know where or how to start. So going to her house and playing with her toys is fun. I put things back too, it is easy, it is all ready figured out for me.

She had just bought this fun book...
Hello, Cupcake! By Karen Tack and Alan Richardson

They even have a blog.
We looked through it and Jodi said “Let’s make something”.
OMG!!! Those words get me every time.

Here is this cute book; it is a New York Times Bestseller, with irresistibly playful creations, and then it said...





“That ANYONE can make”.

<--samples from the book.

Jodi basically has her own cake decorating store, because Jodi is in to it. Almost everything you could ever want. She just so happens to have a cake mix and frosting in the color we need, but we need a few things from the store, we send the “boys” as we call them, Howard and Jimmy to the store with a list. Howard dislikes shopping strongly. Jimmy will go to every store in their city to find what Jodi needs, and he is like a blood hound on the trail. With many calls and conferencing we finally get all of the ingredients that we need to do a pretty good job of making Garden Party Cupcakes. Well ,sort of. The stores don’t have the candy that comes apart in strings for the peas (see how nice the vines look on those peas in the picture on the left) and they don’t have the right Jolly Rancher soft chewy things for right color of green and the right color of orange that we need for the carrots and peas.

I say “hey let’s fake it”, because that is what I do well and I am feeling just a little sorry for “the boys”, because this is the 10th call and the 3rd store. I can feel Howard sizzling. LOL!!!

So we tell them “never mind come home!”

And then we start. We do work well together in the kitchen, it is like a dance of friendship and sharing and it gives me a warm feeling in my heart, that I have a wonderful friend like her. I enjoy it; it takes my mind off of the turmoil and everyday bull sh*t of life.

This is something that I dream regularly about doing, I know that I can cake decorate and I have dreams where I make cakes and cookies and desserts. Silly, I know, but I do. So here is chance for me to do it. FUN! And a dream come true, how many times can one really say that? We had to make some changes to the great instructions and they still worked. These really are fairly easy and if you can find all of the stuff and candies to do this right, I bet they'll look a lot better, but you know what? I am proud of those little cakes, my friend and I made, they look like a garden and it was big fun.

These are mine and Jodi’s, not bad right???

And would you look at that lettuce?It called for several cornflakes covered with green chocolate and put together around a M (that is what my family calls M&M’s, after all there is only one M on them… M’s). I rolled up that fruit roll up in variegated green color and started kneading it. It worked and then I made flat petals to put around the green M. See all this playing with clay is paying off in playing with my food. TA DAH! Garden Party Cupcakes…perfect for Earth day!