Happy cakes

One of my favourite 'recovery' activities, activities I have when I feel I need to take it slow for a day, would be baking. And since I really needed to take it slow after the 'Noche de Tuna' this weekend, I started baking some mini chocolate cakes. With extra chocolate on top. And sprinkles. I love sprinkles. They make me happy.

The recipe:
Mix 100 g butter
with 100 g sugar.
Add 2 eggs and mix everything.
Mix 100 g of flower
and 2 teaspoons of cocoa powder through, don't mix for too long.

Pour into muffin tins or papers, bake in an oven at 170 degrees Celsius until done (you can check this with a knitting needle or something like that: when it comes out clean, the cake is done). When they had cooled off, I dipped the cakes in molten chocolate and then in chocolate sprinkles. And voila!

Oh yeah, and as promised: pics of my second batch of designs and my business cards!

This item is called 'Day & Night'. An egg cup at day and a candlestick at night if you turn it upside down. Not yet for sale, because I managed to send in the wrong file for my second batch, which was a version that wasn't exactly round.

Whoops... I sent the right file with the third batch, so hopefully that one will turn out right. And the 'wrong' egg cup/candlestick can still be used in the product pictures, to show both functions (egg cup and candlestick) in the same picture without having to resort to Photoshop.

This ring is called Sydney. I make it a habit of giving my jewelry designs names that are personal names, and at the same time have a connection (sometimes somewhat cryptic) about how the design looks or what it is based on. Can you guess the link between this design and it's name? I ordered it in stainless steel for my third batch, but since it doesn't meet the design requirements 100% I just hope it'll turn out all right!
I also made a little ceramic cake-mold of my logo. It's not for sale and I'm not going to use it just yet, but I plan to make some cakes with it later on this year, just for fun.

And here, they are, my business cards. Whaddayathink?

And the last pictures of this week: the tomato soup I ate for lunch. I don't like store-bought tomato soup, it tastes too artificial. But making it yourself is actually pretty easy. It can be much healthier as well, since you can add plenty of veggies. I played around a bit with Photoshop (well, the open source alternative GIMP) to create the absolutely white background. A bit difficult because some settings also made the bowl dissappear, since it was almost white as well. I ended up altering some parts manually. These are the results:

Third batch of items: check check double check!

And I'm almost done with my collection for this year! It is going really fast now.
This batch of designed products consisted of pendants and one business card holder, making the total count of finished items (assuming they will all come out the way I planned) at 11 jewelry designs and 2 product designs. That means I've already hit my target collection for this year, which was 10 to 12 jewelry designs. Ánd I still have time to design maybe one or two extra items in my fourth and final batch this year. Whoohoo!

Aaaaaand... my business cards arrived! I designed them myself and am quite happy with the result, especially because I'm not that big on graphic design. Meaning I usually hate designing graphic things, and that I'm just no good at it. But the cards came out nicely so I'm really glad. Like the pics of my second batch of designs, I'll post a picture of them soon, I promise ;).

These days I've been grossly neglecting my challenges, because I was just too busy with my product designs. They were already late and I had to order them before the weekend, or my whole year schedule would fall apart. I want to order a fourth batch right after I've received the third batch, but the fourth batch has to arrive at least a month before the holiday season, so, considering that it takes 3 to 4 weeks before an ordered batch arrives, my schedule is quite tight.

But I made up a bit of the neglect by going to a falconry show at Falconcrest and shooting some niiiiice pics. Not that it was difficult with that kind of models. Those birds are so beautiful!

I also loved the interaction between the birds and the falconers.

It's too bad the birds were moving too fast for me to capture them mid-flight. I'm not that good a photographer yet, trying to take pics of their flight resulted in these kind of pictures.

See the white blur? Yes, that's a bird :p. Speedsters, I tell you.

This weekend, there has been a small-scale Tuna festival, Noche de Tuna (not "tuna" as in fish, but "Tuna" as in Spanish student troubadour music group) in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. Several groups were here from Spain and Mexico, together with the Eindhoven groups (one male and one female group). Since I'm in the female group, La Tuniña, of course I participated as well, and right now I'm still recovering from fatigue. It was a lot of fun, and there will be another 'Noche de Tuna' next year. But now, back to work!