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King Cake Recipe

/ Sarah Collins / 1 Comment

When you are from Louisiana, but don’t currently live in Louisiana, and King Cake Season rolls around you need a King Cake. You have two options available for your King Cake need: 1) Spend $50 to have one ship to you. Oh, they are so good, it may be worth it. Or, 2) Make your own King Cake. I decided to make my own.

Below is my recipe for a King Cake:

Ingredients:

  • A large cookie sheet
  • A heavy stand mixer with a dough hook. (A hand mixture will work but will take a lot more work.)
  • A serving platter large enough to hold the King Cake. (I buy the 14″ round cake boards made from cardboard)
  • Candy Thermometer
  • All Purpose Flour
  • 1 cup of Butter – room temperature; 1/4 cup of butter melted
  • Egg – room temperature
  • Hot Water (that is why you need the Candy Thermometer)
  • Powder Sugar (just in case)
  • Mam Papaul’s King Cake Mix – Yes, I just buy the mix directly from the company. It comes with everything you need; cake mix, filing, icing, colored sugar, and plastic baby.

Instructions:

Follow the directions on the back of the box. You could try just using the bag method, but I had the bag break during the kneading process and had to switch to the hand mixer. That was a lot of work. I now use my stand mixer.

The extra flour is for light dusting during the rolling and shaping stage. If you add too much water to the icing, you can thicken it up by adding some extra powder sugar and stirring well.

Let cool and decorate.

Polymer Clay Crosses

/ Sarah Collins / 1 Comment

I spent some time creating crosses from polymer clay, which was left over from all of the other polymer clay projects.

First the pretty crosses:

IMG_0925 (2)IMG_0926 (2)IMG_0929 (2)IMG_0930 (2)IMG_0947 (2)

The difficult cross:

Folding clay and braiding clay is a little bit challenging.

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Interesting Crosses:

IMG_0934 (2)IMG_0935 (2)IMG_0932 (2)

The weird ones:

IMG_0933 (2)IMG_0937 (2)IMG_0939 (2)

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Do You See the Butterflies?

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Art of Concentration: Day 13

/ Sarah Collins / Leave a comment

Today’s line drawing is made up of hearts.

AofC hearts

The Art of Concentration rules are:

  1. Draw lines on a page.  Straight line, squiggly lines, circles, squares, triangles, stars, it does not matter.
  2. Color every other section a different color.  Start anywhere.  Use any color.  Typical you will only have a black pen, or a pencil, those are fine.
  3. If you desire, use multiple colors.  Sections of the same color can not touch.

My first color choice:

AofC hearts color 1

My second color choice:

AofC hearts color 2

Today’s hand drawing:

20180413_155734.jpg

Hearts Apart

You can download a PDF version of the line drawing on the Coloring Page, or click here.

Art of Concentration: Day 12

/ Sarah Collins / Leave a comment

Another spiral!  Why?  Because figuring things out, what works and doesn’t work is fun.  I have fun drawing spirals and making something of them.

Below is today’s line drawing:

AofC another spiral

I learned that using two colors with at line drawing was impossible.  Three colors would be difficult, not impossible, but fun. The first approach to coloring the line drawing was to color the individual square (or four point stars) with a different set of colors, but still following the rules.

The Art of Concentration rules are:

  1. Draw lines on a page.  Straight line, squiggly lines, circles, squares, triangles, stars, it does not matter.
  2. Color every other section.  Start anywhere.  Use any color.  Typical you will only have a black pen, or a pencil, those are fine.
  3. If you desire, use multiple colors.  Sections of the same color can not touch.

AocC another spiral color 2

You probably did not notice, but I tried to use a pattern for the colors.  Here is the pattern I choose for the second color drawing.  It is easier to show you than explain.

AofC color example one

The vertical and horizontal pattern was: pink, blue, and white.  Picking a pattern, made it easier to color without having the same color sections touching.

The results:

AocC another spiral color 1

With the hand drawing, I used the four colors: pink, blue, purple and gray, and changed to a darker color as it got closer to the center.

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Around the Spiral

You can download a PDF version of the line drawing from the Coloring Page, or click here.

Art of Concentration: Day 11

/ Sarah Collins / Leave a comment

Today’s Art of Concentration experiment did not go well.  Not well at all.  Below is the line drawing.  It is a nice line drawing made up of spirals, or swirls, or curls, whatever you would like to call them.

AofC swirls and curls

It is impossible to use only two colors in the drawing and still follow the rules.  Using three colors is possible, but difficult.  Spiral are meant to be continuous.

The Art of Concentration rules are:

  1. Draw lines on a page.  Straight line, squiggly lines, circles, squares, triangles, stars, it does not matter.
  2. Color every other section.  Start anywhere.  Use any color.  Typical you will only have a black pen, or a pencil, those are fine.
  3. If you desire, use multiple colors.  Sections of the same color can not touch.

The colored drawing came out nice, but there were several restarts.  That is what is good with coloring on the computer.

AofC swirls and curls color 1

PDF version of the line drawing created in Corel Draw is available for download on the Coloring Page or you can click here.

Art of Concentration: Day 8

/ Sarah Collins / 2 Comments

I must be crazy for drawing so many lines on a page and than coloring them.  And, on top of it all, doing two drawings.  I must be crazy.  However, they were so much fun.

That is probably another rule of Art of Concentration – have fun.  Enjoy what you are doing.

The Art of Concentration rules are:

  1. Draw lines on a page.  Circles, squares, squiggly lines, it does not matter.
  2. Color every other section.  Start anywhere.  Use any color.
  3. If you desire, use multiple colors.  Sections of the same color can not touch.

The first drawing was a small drawing.  It has a simple flower in the middle with a bunch of lines going through it.

AofC flower x-treme

There are some many colors that could be added to this line drawing.  The first example started out as a simple black and white, but I could not leave it as that.  The gray background the flower jump off the page.

flower x-treme color 1

The colored version is very busy, it draws your eye all around the drawing.  It reminds me of a out country kitchen pattern.

flower x-treme color 2

Below is the hand drawing of the x-treme flower.  It was done on a Studio Series Artist tile with Faber Castell Pitt Pens and Crayola markers.

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Boxed Flower

Even though this Mandala started out as a sketch, I thought I could not do it justice on paper, so I put it in Corel Draw, increase the size to 8.5″ squared, and drew circles to the extreme.

AofC Mandala

From the center, a beautiful flower appeared.  There are so many way this could be colored, so many possibilities.  After creating a bitmap and using Microsoft Paint to color it, below is the results at my first attempt to color the Mandala.  The black background made the color more vibrant.

AofC Mandala color 1

AofC Mandala

PDF versions of the today’s line drawings are available on the Coloring Page for downloading.  Starting with today, I will put the newest drawings at the top of the page.

Art of Concentration: Day 6

/ Sarah Collins / 2 Comments

The ability to create something beautiful is a wonderful experience.

The Art of Concentration rules are:

  1. Draw lines on a page.  Circles, squares, squiggly lines, it does not matter.
  2. Color every other section.  Start anywhere.  Use any color.
  3. If you desire, use multiple colors.  Sections of the same color can not touch.

What started out as a page with a mess of lines, can turn into something beautiful.  Here is the line drawing from today.  If you look closely, you will see some circles.

AofC circle mess

First, the line drawing was colored using just black.

circle mess color 1

Next, I colored the line drawing using four colors.  Remember the rule, the same color can not touch each other.  If the colors were placed differently, it could had a completely different look.  See how different it looks from the black and white version.

circle mess color 2

Here is the hand drawn version:

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Circle Mess

Sometimes, when the black lines gets close, you will need to assume the blank space between the lines, e.g. lower right corner.

Click here for to download a PDF version of the line drawing.  PDF copies of the line drawings are available on the Coloring Page.