Cake decorating course!

I had my first "advanced" cake decorating course yesterday. It was with Learn2Craft, I've done both of her beginners' courses as well. New for the advanced course were two important aspects: tiered cakes and modelling chocolate. I'm going to show off shamelessly here:

 The most time went into the three-tiered one at the back, obviously. We made all the flowers by hand, and the second layer was my first chance to use an impression mat - I love it but it's going to take a while to do it perfectly! Here's a closer look:

 Look how the bottom piping on the right melted when I put it in the car! It was literally in the boot for about 2 minutes while I went back inside to fetch the other container with the other two cakes, but in that small time the icing melted and many of the flowers fell off - so I had to reattach them at home. Clearly the car was too hot! My friend Lee held her and my three-tiered cakes on her lap on the way home, otherwise I think I would have had real trouble.

A closer look. I'm proud of how the flowers turned out!

The second cake was my first attempt at making arum lilies, and I think it's the prettiest flower I've made to date:

The stamen in the middle is dipped in egg white and then in semolina that has been coloured yellow, to give it that authentic look. Isn't it beautiful!

Then the last little cake, which arguably isn't as pretty as the other two, was covered in modelling chocolate with a chocolate rose on top. I found the dark modelling chocolate quite hard to work with, you'll see my rose is not perfect by any definition. But the discovery of the day was the white modelling chocolate - it tastes SOOO much better than fondant, you can roll it thinner and other than that you can do pretty much anything with it that you would normally do with fondant. I'm excited to do more modelling chocolate work!

For some reason I can't upload the picture I want to show you - just a close-up of the small cake. I'll try to edit after I've posted this. I'm still too new to blogging to be able to troubleshoot effectively.

A parent's prayer

My friend Crystal posted this poem on Gentle Christian Mothers, from a book called "The Gentle Weapon". I think it's awesome:




Dear God,
Teach me to embody those ideals
I would want my children
to learn from me.
Let me communicate
with my children wisely--
in ways
that will draw their hearts
to kindness, to decency
and to true wisdom.
Dear God,
let me pass on to my children
only the good;
let them find in me
the values
and the behavior
I hope to see in them.

Week 4, day 3

So yesterday morning I did 5k on the treadmill. I only ran 3k of the 5, but I managed to get through the 5k without dying, which was pretty much impossible not too long ago. So on the one hand I'm very nervous about the 10k run coming up (only 2 months left to train, eek!), but on the other I really do feel I'm making a lot of progress.

I hope to add in a road run tomorrow morning before church - haven't been running on the road for a while, it might be a bit of a reality check.

Week 4, day 2

Today's running program was as follows:

10 minutes of warm up walking
7 minutes run, 2 minutes walk
4 minutes run, 2 minutes walk
repeat the run sequence
then 5 minutes cool down walk

It went OK, I guess, but it was my most difficult run to date. Which is obvious, I suppose, since it was the furthest I've run in more than a decade. I'm a little worried about my 10k race goal... but for the moment, I'm taking it one day at a time, and while I'm running I'm pretty much taking it a minute at a time. I just get through one minute, then one minute more, and more and more.

What I'm really really proud of is that I've managed to stick to the 2 minute walks in between run times, instead of going longer. It happens quite often that I end a running sequence and feel convinced that I'll need to do more than 2 minutes of walking before I can run again, but until now I've managed each time to pull myself together by the end of the 2 minutes.

Tomorrow I plan to do some cross-training. I haven't decided what - maybe a bicycle and the circuit strength training. I want to get my heartrate going so I will do something cardio-related. We'll see.

Road runner

Those of you who have seen me in real life probably won't believe this, but I used to be a runner. Not the long-distance marathon super-fit type, but the run a few times a week and enjoy it type. I remember an 8k run that I did in Nature's Valley when I was 20 or so - on holiday. So I wasn't super-serious about the whole thing but I liked it, and did enough of it to stay fit and healthy. 

But of course, since then, marriage and kids and working life happened, and if you're lazy busy like me exercise can be the first thing to disappear off the schedule. Plus running and cake baking/decorating don't really go hand in hand as hobbies, and you know which one I tend to choose.

Pretty much the only exercise I've had in the last few  years (apart from running after 2 kids, which I suppose is a good start) was a 10k walk that I did at the Soweto marathon in November last year. And I would probably have chickened out from that one too if my friend Simon wasn't doing it with me. It was great fun though, and Simon and I promised each other that this year we'd run 10k instead of walking it. Easy enough when it's still a year away, right?

So around March this year I renounced my couch potato status and started doing the couch to 5k running program. It went great for the first 3 weeks, I made good progress, enjoyed running and felt good about myself. Then week 4, day 1 of couch to 5k was just too much for my system (going from running either 90 seconds or 3 minutes at a time, to running 3 or 5 minutes at a time was too big a jump!) So the rest of the week I didn't feel up to running, and the next week I got sick, and then the kids were sick, and so on. I'm sure I don't need to tell you the rest.

About 2 months later I went running once, and repeated the 90 seconds / 3 minutes running program with no issues. That surprised me - I thought I would have to go back a week further, but I handled it fine. And yet, I didn't find the time or energy to keep at it.

Then 2 weeks ago, I received an e-mail reminder that the Soweto marathon is coming up. At the same time, my gym membership (which I haven't really used for the last 6 months) was up for renewal. Decision time.

So I unearthed my running shoes from the back of the closet, dug up my exercise clothes (which only fit because I've been doing Weight Watchers, otherwise a shopping trip would have been necessary) and went back to gym.

Here's the pick-my-jaw-up-off-the-floor bit: I got on the treadmill, and ran the program for week 4, day 1 of couch to 5k with no problems whatsoever. After pinching myself a few times, I got very excited, and found a 10k running program. Now I'm back on track, in week 4 of a 12 week program to get me to a 10k race. I even took the stairs instead of the lift at work today!

The big news out of all of this is that I've just thrown my hat over the wall and entered a 10k race on 9 October. That's the end of week 12 of my training program. I'm nervous, and excited, and feeling phenomenal about the whole thing. I'll keep you updated.

Granola and all that is crunchy

Like I've said before I tend towards the natural, crunchy end of the spectrum. I just took this test and scored in the second highest category. It always surprises me what behaviors end up on these tests though.

For example: The test I've linked before seems to score you as crunchier if you homeschool than if you don't. Now as I would define it, crunchiness is about sustainable living, eco-friendly choices, taking your impact on the earth into account when you make lifestyle choices. By that definition, the "most crunchy" personwould be one who makes significant personal sacrifices in order to have less impact on the planet - for example selling your car and using public transport. Unless a family chooses homeschooling so that they won't have to drive kids to school, I honestly don't see the impact on the planet. I know a few friends who read this are very pro-homeschooling, so maybe you'd enlighten me in the comments?

Don't get me wrong, I don't oppose homeschooling in the least. It's not a choice that we've made for our family for a variety of reasons, but I could see a different life for us where it would be a natural choice, and I support my homeschooling friends (and sister) 100%. I just don't see how it fits into the definition of crunchy. It's certainly in line with the parenting paradigm that I subscribe to, but just like my choice not to hit my kids has nothing to do with eco-friendly living, I don't see how schooling choices are better or worse for the planet.

Same goes for co-sleeping, selectively/delaying vaccinating and extended breastfeeding, all of which I do myself. It just seems to me like these crunchy lists end up being a list of alternative lifestyles that often go together, but doesn't necessarily mean they're all for the same purpose.

Other things on the crunchy list are decidedly eco-friendly (cloth diapering, re-usable menstrual products, breastfeeding) but my choice to do it has less to do with the planet and more to do with common sense. Sustainable living is very important to me - for example for our home renovation I'm planning to use products manufactured in South Africa as far as possible, because the carbon footprint of imported tiles from Italy and an imported stove from Germany can be pretty big. But I don't cloth diaper in the first place because it's more eco-friendly. It was part of the choice, but the much bigger factor is that it's cheaper - and cuter.

The one factor that these tests often ignore (the one I linked to has one question on it) is the food you choose to eat. It's been proved many times that a vegetarian or vegan diet has a lower carbon footprint - just under half a square kilometer of land can produce enough beef to feed 20 people but enough wheat to feed 400. It takes between 3 and 15 times more water to produce animal protein than plant protein. And of course simply taking a stance against factory farming of meat can play a major role in deciding to decrease your meat intake.

I'm reading a lot about vegetarianism at the moment. Some of it has immense appeal to me - so I may be in for an interesting time ahead.