mug

Food, Tutorials

Boozy Beer Mug Fudge

Saint Patrick's day is next week so I came up with a recipe for some boozy fudge that you can decorate to look like cute little mugs of beer. These would be great as a St. Patrick's day party snack. There is alcohol in this fudge, so it's adults only, sorry kids! Supplies

Green icing is optional.

A normal cookie cutter probably wouldn't work for this fudge, because they'd be too short to cut all the way through the fudge, but a petit four cutter would be perfect. Here's an affiliate link where you can get your own circular petit four cutter(make sure to select the circle).

Here's how to make the fudge!

Guiness fudge

Irish cream fudge

Once the fudge has set for at least 2 hours, it should be ready to be cut up!

Remove fudge from the fridge and use your circle cutter to cut cylinders from the fudge. My crappy handmade circle cutter couldn't deal with this fudge and broke after three cuts, so I ended up just cutting  the rest into squares.

Cut the top loops off of a pretzel like so.

Squish the cut pretzel into the fudge cylinder. Repeat for all of the fudge.

For some St. Paddy's flair, pipe a little four leaf clover on the little mugs.

All done! Here are two of the mugs with all of the extra fudge I cut into squares.

I think these turned out so cute. They look like little mugs of a dark stout with a nice, thick head. Oh, and they taste pretty great too!

I wish I had bought the petit four circle cutter instead of being stubborn and trying to make my own. Then I could have made more little mugs instead of just cutting the rest of the fudge into squares. Oh well, next time!

Bedroom, For the Home, Kitchen

Drawing on mugs is fun!

So this post today is for two reasons.  First and foremost, I made some kickin' rad one of a kind mugs.  I got this idea thanks to craftster, roboarsonist.  She used a ceramic paint pen by Pebeo called Porcelaine 150 and used it to draw some designs on a few mugs.  Once I saw that I knew I had to try it.  I went to Michaels and grabbed myself one pen and then to Goodwill to grab up some mugs and then went to town on them.  Well, actually only two of them so far... and here they are!

I really like doing this, although I think next time I'll get the actual paint instead of the paint pen.. The pen kept getting clogged and it was harder to get a nice consistent line with it.  I'll post more about the paint after I get myself some.

So the second thing this post is about is that I finally started an Etsy store.  It's kind of baren right now because I've been busy with school and stuff, but stuff will slowly trickle in as I have spare time to make stuff.  I'm going to add these two mugs on it as well. :)

Here's a link to my little store:

chezlin.etsy.com

UPDATE: I moved my store from Etsy over to Storenvy! The new store is located at: http://chezlin.storenvy.com/

I still have a lot of work to do on it, but I thought it was time to show you all!

Art

Ceramics!

The semester is wrapping up so we finally were able to take our ceramic pieces home! Here are mine.

Stoneware. Pinch method. Raku. The assignment was to mix organic with something man-made. I did a water drop mixed with the grid pattern in the ceiling of our class.

Stoneware. Coil method. Low-fire. It's old Japan(Jomon) and new Japan mixed together.

Stoneware. Slab method. Low-fire. A family of abstract objects.

Stoneware. Thrown. Reduction fire.

Closeup. It's too dark in the two right cups unfortunately. The top one is a teal color and the bottom is bronze.

Stoneware. Thrown. Reduction fire.

A peek inside.

Stoneware. Thrown. Reduction fire.

Another closeup.

Porcelain. Thrown. Reduction fire.

Another angle.

Left: Stoneware. Thrown. Reduction. Right: Porcelain. Thrown. Reduction. My little sister threw these :)

A little blue inside!

Porcelain. Thrown. Reduction.

Bronze glaze on the outside and clear on the inside.

Stoneware. Thrown. Reduction.

Inside. This is one of the pieces in a three piece set I made for my final project.

Stoneware. Thrown. Reduction.

Inside. Another piece of the set.

And to the piece that pissed me off:

Stoneware. Thrown. Reduction.

Notice this mug in the middle of this bowl? Yeah, well whoever loaded the kiln stacked them like this, so now they're permanently fused together. Bitch. So now my last piece to the set is ruined. My professor said it won't effect my grade because it was out of my hands. It still makes me mad though.

Anyway, back to the ceramics.

Porcelain. Bisque-ware.

Porcelain. Bisque-ware. I can't glaze these ones yet, I have to wait until next semester to get these ones fired.

I ended up loving this class. I want to take more ceramic classes, but it doesn't really work with my major.. I kind of decided to major in painting. That means I need to take more painting classes rather than ceramics unfortunately.

I hope you guys like these!