Daughter A's Philly Digs

My daughter is moving into her fabulous Philadelphia flat this weekend! Just thought I'd share a few pictures. I want to live here!

The first image is the spacious L-shaped living room with twelve foot ceilings and wrap-around windows!


The second image is her second floor bedroom! This is a huge room and she will be sharing it with her friend.


The third photo is a view of the kitchen from beneath the open staircase! The appliances are three years old. The neighborhood is in a wonderful center city location. The girl looking out the window is facing an old cobblestone alley. There is a beautiful garden directly across the street. Most of the buildings are brick townhouses.

I am ready to move in. We have secured a two-year lease and if the girls decide to move home for the summer, you had better believe we will be Philadelphians again!

Mohawk Baby Carrot Jockeys

My first daughter turned nineteen today. When I asked her what type of cake she would like me to make, I was not expecting to do anything like this. First of all, my cake decorating talents are nonexistent. Just because I can paint a little does not translate into cake decorating ability and here's proof!

I must admit this doesn't look too bad from an aerial perspective.



From the side view you can see how crooked my little cake turned out! The bottom layer stuck to the pan a bit. I tried to cover it up with the cream cheese frosting, but...oh well!

Annelise is a huge fan of the Cake Wrecks blog. Anyway that was the inspiration for the Mohawk Baby Carrot Jockeys! First I was going to mount the little babies on baby carrots, but then thought the frosting would be more fun! Please note I do not have proper cake decorating tools. I do not own a pastry bag, I did not go out and buy squeezy tubes. I tried to improvise. First I attempted to make a little funnel, but after that failed I resorted to "shaping" the little carrots with a butter knife! I did buy the babies and I was able to squeeze a little icing gel on the heads in order to give them their little mohawks. I did not give the black babies mohawks because they looked like they already had them.

After I added the candles it gave my carrot jockeys the opportunity to pole dance!

Anyway the cake tasted much better than it looked! I grated fresh carrots, chopped pecans and substituted crushed pineapple for one cup of the vegetable oil. The result was an extremely rich and moist carrot cake. (Perhaps that's why the bottom layer stuck a bit. The frosting was also homemade, cream cheese, butter, vanilla and sugar. Yum!

Little Hip Hop

Here is a fun little painting that I created in response to the Degas Project back in April.

I actually created two paintings. The first I posted was of three little ballet dancers. This second painting was intended as a quickie fun painting. I was trying to capture the dancer's long blond hair that appeared as alive as she was! It was quite refreshing as most of the paintings exhibited were "oh so serious" and photo-realistically representational.

I photographed it with an intentional blur and then wondered if I could paint it!

Well I had some fun with the hip hop theme and tried to throw in a little sgraffito and grafitti action! The painting was photographed as in progress. I did touch up a few things, but I can't show you as the painting is SOLD!

I was inspired by Dive's wonderful boy band photos and think she'd be quite the match for his blond boy rocker! I couldn't find the photo with my other dancer images and just found that I loaded it on hubby's computer!