#whimsygoth

[sistersbyfreya]

things i want in my home

[bearsandswears]

Baking hubris pt. 2!

Lavender cake with lavender cream cheese frosting and buttercream, filled with lemon cream and a blackberry jam(?).

I bought a giant bag of lavender to make cookies for Easter so I put it in everything. It got ground with the sugar and infused in the milk for the sponge, ground with the powdered sugar for the buttercream, and I even made lavender water which ended up in the blackberry filling and marzipan decorations.

I took a cake decorating class for my birthday last year, and this year I decided I wanted to make a sun & moon cake after realizing it’s just a circle cut out of a regular round cake. I did a practice cake with a box mix a few weeks in advance, then I ended up remaking the sponge like 3 times because I felt like it kept coming out too dense—even cut, stacked, and crumb coated a different recipe (lemon cake with store bought raspberry jam, the cake was too dense and the jam too sweet imo) before deciding to redo the original recipe a final time with cake flour.

I tried really hard to manage my time and still ended up finishing less than 2 hours from the start of the party 🤣 and with a ton of extra buttercream because I was indecisive about color and had wanted to do more piping on the sides. But I really like how it turned out with throwing all the stars on there instead! I do wish I had tinted the white slightly so it wasn’t so stark.

[bearsandswears]

Went mad with power and made TWO cakes for my birthday, because I couldn’t decide on a flavor combo and also I have friends with dietary restrictions.

This one is gluten free chocolate orange cake with orange buttercream, filled with chocolate orange ganache and marmalade.

I bought candied orange slices and dipped them in chocolate to make phases of the moon, and the little sun is made of marzipan!

The vegan ‘buttercream’ actually ended up being my favorite both to pipe and flavor-wise.

[pollyssecretlibrary]

"The Sourdough Compendium", by AG Slatter

𝐈 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐛𝐨𝐨𝐤 𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐍𝐞𝐭𝐆𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐞𝐲 𝐢𝐧 𝐞𝐱𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐞 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐚 𝐟𝐚𝐢𝐫 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐡𝐨𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐭 𝐫𝐞𝐯𝐢𝐞𝐰 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️.5

I find it quite difficult to rate a book that is a collection of short stories. Each story deserves its own rating, after all. In the case of “The Sourdough Compendium” the task gets more complicated because it is actually a book comprising three collections of short stories. It’s a collection of collections and all of them, more than twenty in total, are linked. Every story is just the beginning of every other story in this book. Characters that come and go, that have past stories, side stories, relatives with their own stories… it’s like having a bunch of seeds in the hand, planting them and then, there’s a magical but disturbing forest full of trees whose branches touch the next tree. The beginning is not the beginning and the end is never the end, Slatter manages to draw the infinitum symbol with her writing. That’s how I understand this collection as a whole.

There are stories about shapeshifters, curses, witches, vampires, dark towers, secret passages, candy cane houses, prophecies, gigants, monsters, fairies, gods, queens, evil stepsisters, orphans… but the common ground in each and every tale is women in all their glory. Not necessarily heroines, no. There are good and bad women, tricky and innocent, saints and devils… but they all are survivors and they will do everything in their power (or in other people’s powers) to survive. There is so much darkness as there is light and, sometimes, there are even happy endings, but not too many.

I cannot say that I’ve loved all the stories, that would be ilogical, but I can say that I have not disliked any of them. There are some that I’ve enjoyed more than others but I also don’t think that says anything, it would be more useful to say that some stories made me sad, some made me angry, some left me shocked, some are more disturbing and some are more lighthearted. Many have consequences that I could not foresee and I enjoy that so much when reading, ramifications that you never know where they will end or if they will have an ending at all… that would be more accurate and more fair to the book and the writers than saying “I loved this or that”. Also, be sure that all of the stories are quite disturbing one way or another. As for the writing, AG Slatter falls in the category of writers that I love and enjoy the most. Those that with their words, their worlbuilding, their honesty and their general understanding of the human psyche create an environment so absolutely atpmospheric that they manage to make the reader participate and live in the book. No matter how late it gets, there’s always just another page to read.

[littlmoonbeam]

[groovygrlstar]

A finished product!! Tutorial - I used Jo-Ann's Sensations Purple Angel Hair Yarn Color 231 💜

[pvmpkin-pvmpkin]

new haircuttttt ahhhhhh !!!! .°•*

fucked around with it a lil too much after the fact, but that’s okay :> (it has to be.)

[blacklaceoracle]

need more alt and whimsical girls in my life. come be strange with me