Sassify! Zine Vol. 2

Well well well, it has been a long time! It appears I have a love/hate relationship with the tumultuous ocean that is the internet/social media, so I had a a bit of a break on the beach and now I'm having a bit of a paddle again. I love paddling.

Anyway, I have been up to a few things whilst I've been away. The main thing being the completion of a big Twin Peaks project which has been the best part of a years work! But I'll do a big old stodgy blog post about that in the next week or so. For now, lets start easy. I was invited by Black Eyed Jack to contribute an illustration to his 'Sassify!' Zine, the theme of which was 'Killin' It' - showing someone or something 'doing shit' well
in his or her own way, and not caring about what people think.

And this is what I came up with:

Basically I knew I wanted to draw a unicorn, and I got the FatBoy Slim song Eat Sleep Rave Repeat stuck in my head AND I wanted to use fluorescent colours like in the Back to the Future pic I did a while back. So this is what happened! I really enjoyed using these particular colours and it looks much better than I thought it would in the printed zine! You can see the whole of the Sassify! zine by clicking HERE. A total of 35 artists were asked to contribute work to the magazine and you can see them all in there!

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!

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!

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!

Pineapple/Malibu & Creme Egg Cupcakes

I recently had a quick visit to Llanberis in North Wales, where I came across the Snowdon Honey Farm and Winery. It was an old little shop filled to the brim with all sorts of honey, but also jams, chutneys and curds. And thats were I discovered a jar of Pineapple Curd with Malibu, so I bought it!
I wasn't exactly sure what I was going to do with it (not being a curd-on-toast kind of gal) until I decided to pair it with another recent find (in the humble Tescos) of, Bounty spread (which is delicious - try it on a chocolate digestive, its like eating a deconstructed Bounty bar - with a biscuit)!

So I decided to make vanilla cupcakes, using a large amount of Bounty spread to form part of the buttercream frosting (sprinkled with desiccated coconut). And then I filled each cupcake with a glob of Pineapple with Malibu curd! I was pretty chuffed with the results - and I got the thumbs up from my testers!

I used an apple peeler to core out a hole in each cupcake (I've kept the cake remnants and froze them as I read you can add them to a trifle or milkshakes), and piped the curd into the hole (rather than attempting smushing it in with a spoon)! All in all, a success! Hooray!

And as it was Easter last weekend, I made some Creme Egg Cupcakes for my family!

A mini Creme Egg was hidden in each cupcake and it was my first attempt at doing a two-toned frosting, which worked pretty well apart from not making enough! (You make your buttercream, separate them out and colour them as you wish, you then put each colour in a separate piping bag and pipe each colour into ANOTHER piping bag, you then have your two-toned frosting to top whatever cake you desire)!

So its been a very cupcake-y couple of weeks, on to pastures new this week with Ice Cream Sandwiches! Whee!

Princess Slug celebrates Valentines Day 2016

I'm rather a bit late for Valentines Day, but I made another gross and 'Why do you even bother making a card?' card for my partner this year!





Princess Slug is pink and adorable. She loves all things cute and fluffy and also candy floss. Unfortunately whenever she gets candy floss she vomits... MORE CANDY FLOSS!! Best Princess Slug ever in my opinion. I thought a barfing slug would be the perfect expression of my love for my partner this year so this card was made.

I used a nib pen with black indian ink to do the drawing and watercolour paints to colour. I had to paint the card in the bathroom whilst having a shower so as to hide what I was doing. Crafty and impossible I hear you think! But I managed it.
Anyway, as per usual, a lot of fun to paint and bring to life. I have a lot more characters like this I should try drawing up really.

Nerdy Nummies - Unicorn Poop Cookies

I discovered Nerdy Nummies in rather a long way round route. This was by watching an episode of Will Wheaton's TableTop, which is a pretty awesome show if you're into your board games and want to discover some new ones to play so I thoroughly recommend you give it a watch if thats your bag, baby (I doff my cap to anyone who gets my Austin Powers joke there). ANYWAY, the reason I found Nerdy Nummies was because the wonderful lady behind it all, Rosanna Pasino was on an episode of TableTop! Her channel is pretty cool, with a lot of geeky bakes that is bound to impress you at some point (she covers a lot of TV shows, games, films, as well as some actual science-y things)!

I was fortunate enough to receive Pansino's new book, Nerdy Nummies as a Christmas present, which is chock full of geeky recipes such as Phases of the Moon Macarons, Legend of Zelda Rupee sweets, and Gameboy Controller biscuits!
There was one recipe that really jumped out to me, which was the Unicorn Poop Cookies. They looked so magical and filled with rainbows that they HAD to be made. The simple but colourful layout of Nerdy Nummies makes it a fun book to flip through, but the clear instructions also make it easy to follow! (Apologies for the amateur photos clearly taken haphazardly in my kitchen)...

My Unicorn Poop Cookies didn't come out exactly like those in the book (lacking the graceful skill of Pansino in this instance) but I was still pretty chuffed with one they came out - plus they were massive!

Ta-dah! I'm overall really happy and rather excited to make more recipes from my Nerdy Nummies book and hope to in the near future - I have my eye on a delicious-looking dinosaur fossil cake covered in crumbly biscuit crumbs... oh yeah.

Note: I'm aware I took a rather large break from my blog last month, but I hope to now start blogging more regularly on the projects (baking or illustrative) that I'm working on!

Tokyo Cult Recipes

It has indeed been a while since I last posted here. The hoo-hah of Christmas and the hectic-ness of work pushed me into a sort of slump, so I decided to give myself a bit of a rest and let myself contemplate things. So I've had a good old think and baked. I attempted to bake some Japanese style pancakes from this book:

I have rather a keen interest in all things Japanese, and this book is very nicely designed.

A few weeks ago I decided to make some Dorayaki.

But rather than filling them with bean paste I wanted to make a victoria sponge style of filling (inspired by an amazing pancake snack I saw in a Japanese supermarket a few years ago), so I sandwiched the pancakes together using a meringue butter cream and strawberry jam. Now, before you go judging my pancakes (and photography) skills, I have little to no experience making pancakes and I think I had the heat on too high on the frying pan PLUS I am an impatient person and generally flipped the pancakes before they were ready to be flipped resulting in the misshapen and burnt-looking pancakes you're about to see.

BUT, I can assure you that these pancakes were delicious. The pancake batter made these lovely sweet and fluffy pancakes that were almost like cake! I will definitely be attempting these pancakes again. And hopefully with enough practice I can make them look almost as good as in the book. Maybe...

Tokyo Cult Recipes was written by Maori Murota and published by Murdoch Books.