Thursday, April 21

A slight re-branding of nafftastic

You may have noticed that the look of this blog has changed recently, as well as my website and Etsy shop

I decided (rather off the cuff) to re-brand myself and give Nafftastic a bit of a fresher look for the benefit of myself as well as for any visitors to my various "outlets".
You may recall a number of months ago, all the way back in October; I took part in Thunder Chunky's Back to Draw the Future event in which I drew a couple of characters from Back to the Future 2 (Blog post here) using a limited colour palette.


Well I liked the style/colour palette so much I decided to re-brand myself using the same style!
I did a couple of biro sketches just to get an idea of how I wanted things to look.


And then I just dived right in and made them up using Illustrator...


I've only managed to make up a couple of elements implementing this new style but I'm hoping to make up some full on illustrations over the next few months. I like the cutesy-ness of the style and it certainly feels like a breath of fresh air after the previous style I was using - this style is much more brighter and cleaner. So I'm looking forward to whipping up more pictures with it!

Wednesday, April 13

Clandestine Cake Club and Confetti Ice Cream Sandwiches

I have been baking away the past few weeks, using a new recipe book I was bought - The Clandestine Cake Club Cookbook

The Clandestine Cake Club Cookbook by Lynn Hill
Its an awesome recipe book filled with lots of fun, unique and easy-to-follow cake recipes! Now I do like challenging myself with the more fancy pants recipes, the likes you'll find in The Great British Bake Off: How to turn everyday bakes into showstoppers (which is a good book too)! But I have recently come to realise that baking isn't all about doing the most complex recipes or intricate bakes, you want something that tastes lovely and magical - and you can achieve this in very simple recipes, which can still 'wow' a group of people! (Plus, we are only blessed with 48 hours for the weekend and theres only so much baking you can squeeze into that time sometimes)!

ANYWAY, I loved the look of the Caramel Cake, so thats what I made.

All the good things in life right in that bowl
And mix!

The recipe used canned caramel, which was a relief. I don't have the greatest luck with making my own caramel! So it was just a case of beating, sifting and folding the ingredients to get these bad boys:

Woo, mama!

I whipped up some caramel buttercream whilst the cakes cooked and ended up with the glory you see before you!

The layout of the book is clear and concise with a big photo featuring the cake for
each recipe - which is always useful to see!
Grated milk chocolate on top - used a regular peeler (like you'd use for an apple)
to get the chocolate - so much easy then using a grater!
(Thanks Barefoot Contessa)!


The cake was delicious and a pinch of ginger and ground cloves (I had no cloves so used a bit of nutmeg instead) gave the cake a subtle spice flavour.
I also used my new recipe book to attempt my first ever Swiss Roll:

Strawberry and Cream Swiss Roll

And it was a success, hooray! I stupidly didn't read ahead in the recipe to realise you need to leave the swiss roll sponge rolled up whilst its cooling (I just rolled it up and out again several times during the cooling phase) but the sponge still rolled up great with the filling in it! You whip up a super fast strawberry syrup to layer into the roll - which was delicious and wish I had made more of!

So I fully recommend The Clandestine Cake Club Cookbook to any keen baker out there! There is a large variety of recipes, the book is well-designed and features some beautiful close-up photos of all the cakes involved and is very easy to follow! Apart from one or two recipes, all the ingredients for the cakes are easily found in your local shops - which is always a plus!

Now, just to finish, a quick glimpse of some ice cream sandwiches I made for my boyfriend's birthday last week:

Assembly line to make the ice cream sandwiches - that ice cream was
melting fast!

Covered in hundreds and thousands

Chocolate chips and M&M's are in the cookie dough 

I watch a lot of the Food Network channel on Freeview and this is a recipe that gets repeated a lot in the ad breaks: Confetti Ice Cream Sandwiches. So I thought I would give it a shot! The cookies were quick and fun to make - who doesn't want M&M's in their cookie dough? Although I would say take those cookies out of the oven when the recipe tells you to cause I was over cautious and left them in longer - which I think resulted in them being a bit too crunchy for an ice cream sandwich - the cookies were too hard to bite into when taken out of the freezer (making them impossible to eat if you wear braces like myself)! So you have been warned! Take those cookies out of the oven when the recipe tells you too! They will harden up once cool.

So thats all my baking for the past two weeks! I'm aiming to do Macarons from my Nerdy Nummies recipe book next week, I'm excited!



Monday, April 4

Step Aside, Pops by Kate Beaton

I treated myself to the latest Kate Beaton collection the other day.


And it doesn't disappoint!
I dipped in and out of the book all over the weekend and finished it last night.
My particular favourite strips were the Strong Female Characters, Wuthering Heights, Muscle-y Cinderella and the Straw Feminists - although all the shorts gave me a good chuckle.

Strong Female Characters
Close-up of a Wuthering Heights strip
The Tale of a Muscle-y Cinderella
Cinderella and the Prince working out together
The Straw Feminists

As I have probably mentioned before, I love Beaton's facial expressions and body postures. She has a lovely loose style which makes achieving these expressions look effortless and adds to the humour of a strip. Mixing comic quips with famous historic events or literary works is a stroke of genius and I think Kate Beaton books should be introduced to the school curriculum! I can only imagine how much more fun history and english would have been having a few of Beaton's strips dotted throughout a textbook!

So, to get straight to the point, another great Hark! A Vagrant Collection from Kate Beaton! You should go get it, it would look awesome on your book shelf and is actually a great read too! Hooray!