The City of Lights

It is sooooo pretty in Lyon at night, and with the warm summer air, I loved to stroll down by the riverside just admiring the great floodlighting. It's interesting that although Paris is known to be "The City of Lights", floodlighting actually originated from Lyon in the 19th century, when people would put candles in their windowsill on December 8 to pay hommage to Mary, for sparing their city of a plague that passed by a couple centuries earlier.






July 14th is Bastille day, a.k.a. La Fete Nationale, I got to watch an amazingly long fireworks display on. It's the biggest holiday of the year in France as it commemorates when the people of France took down the Bastille fortress-prison. This act marked "the reconciliation of all the French inside the constitutional monarchy... and what people considered the happy conclusion of the French Revolution" (according to Wikipedia). Basically in a nutshell, it's what's Canada Day is to us, as is Independence Day is to Americans. Everyone took to the streets and set up lawn chairs or blankets by the river to watch the fireworks and enjoy the street festivities.




On my way back to the hostel, I stopped by a little crepe cart. Gotta love the crepes in France. Paper thin, more fragrant, and deliciously chewier than what those that I've had back in Toronto. I usually go for the Nutella crepe, but that night I enjoyed a simple cinnamon sugar one. Yum! :)

I miss macarons

So until my trip to France, I'd never understood what the whole deal with macrons was. First off, I'd always get confused between the macaron and the macroon, not really knowing the difference until recently when I looked it up. The macaron (mah-ka-rohn) is a French pastry cookie made of two almond meringue cookies that sandwich a cream filling, usually either a swiss meringue buttercream, ganache, or jam. I like to think of it as being the fancy French version of a gourmet Oreo (maybe because I just really liked Oreos). They come in all different flavours and colours and are very delicate, giving off a smooth, crackly texture when you bite into it.

The macroon on the other hand, is an American cookie that is kinda like a ball of baked coconut shreds, sometimes drizzled with chocolate. I don't really find them particularly tasty



As I was saying, I'd never really bought into the hype of the macarons because first off, I'd thought they looked kind of odd and not extremely appetizing. Compared to the visual appearance and tantalizing allure of a chocolate chip cookie, the macron looks like a pretty plastic toy. And the bright, pastel colours always threw me off a bit: pink, blue, green and.... purple cookies?

Then there was the issue of the neat little price tag: averaging at about $1.50 to $2.50 each, the macron is hardly an everyday indulgence. I had subconsciously come to the conclusion that these were some fancy, all-for-show, rich cookies that only fancy, all-for-show, rich folks eat, and thus, never bothered with them.





Enter Lyon. The culinary capital of France. This little metropolitan city is actually more renown its food scene than Paris - one walk down it's restaurant districts and you'll see why. There're barely any tourists here, which means that there aren't any gimmicky tourist cafes and food stands that churn out mediocre food to hungry tourists who'll eat anything. lnstead, it's the locals who are out enjoying themselves on the patios, with two or three course meals featuring the plat du jour. And I love the fabulous farmers market that stretches all the way down the river three times a week (the other two days it's a market for woven goods and pottery).



One day, I decided to pick up a boxful at the daily market where a lady was selling for half price because they were broken. Actually, it was more like the lady convinced me to buy them because she spot me lingering by her stand... and I'm the worst person ever when it comes to saying "no" to anyone. So I handed over 3.50 euros for half a dozen broken macarons and thanked the lady, "Merci beaucoup" (who replied back to me in English. Sigh. And I had thought my accent was improving).

I thought I should wait to eat it because it was about 10 in the morning and far too early to have a cookie... and then I remembered that I was on vacation, so I dove in. One bite and I was in pastry heaven. Literally swooning and unable to think, I sat down on the steps of a post office thinking, "Oh. My. God". It was, quite possibly, the best pastry/dessert/anything sweet that I have ever had in my entire life. They were everything and more. They were.... perfect.



Although not overly sweet, they were very rich so I couldn't eat them all at once... even though I tried to. Anyways, lucky for me I had had the best macrons on my first try... because when I got to Paris, I visited four different pastry shops to find a macaron that could match my first experience, but all were subpar. I think I became somewhat of a macaron snob, because everytime I would try a new shop and be disappointed, I'd be all like "Psh! You call THIS a macron? Blasphemous! Disgrace!" and storm out in fury with my arms flailing in the air. Who knew that the best would be found in some ghetto-looking trailer at a farmer's market that wasn't even in the capital of France? I would visit Lyon again just so I could have another taste of those ethereal cookies.


So that's my story. I am officially a macron convert. I was thinking of doing an attempt at making them myself, but everytime I've tried to make swiss meringue buttercream in the past, I've failed miserably. In the meantime, I did find a French bakery ( petitethuet.com) in Toronto that does macarons pretty darn good. I'm still all hung up over my Lyon ones... but for now, these will do. (Yes, I'm aware that I still sound like a macron snob). They come at $1.50/ea and are a delightful little treat if you need a mid-week pick me up. There are four locations, one at Rosedale, two on King street, and one on Eglinton.

Van Gogh Water Lilies

Pretty in Pink

When it comes to cakes, frosting, and decorating, I, hands-down, always prefer piped decorations over gumpaste or sugarcraft work. Why? While I do think you can make extraordinary, beautiful things with sugarcraft, it's more just for the aesthetics than anything else. Well, I mean you CAN eat the layer of fondant and the sugar flowers if you really wanted to.....but really, anything buttercream is going be much tastier. In the world of food, taste > looks.



I'm all for trying to strike a balance between both the pretty and the practical, and buttercream allows me to find that. I also like the imperfect look of piped, buttercream cake - it feels more homemade... and looks more edible too.




I made these cupcakes for my boss' daughter on her birthday and decided to try something new with the buttercream, instead of doing the same ol' swirls. So I search around the ol' faithful internet and found a great video tutorial on how to make these flower designs on cupcakes using just a regular piping bag and two different petal tips (sigh...I really am a huge fan of YouTube). Anyways, a couple of practice cupcakes later and I had a whole mess of flowers crowding me in the kitchen!



It's a really easy technique to get down, and I recommend it if you're tired of doing swirls but want something that isn't too fancy. The only thing I couldn't really do is to get that two-tone colour going the whole time (the petals are supposed to fade from white to pink, or white to purple), and it's probably because my frosting was way softer than what they use in the tutorial so it all got mushed together in the bag. Check out the vid below! :)

Meg + Will's Wedding

Okay, okay, so I know I said I was going to post up all these wonderful pictures of France, but man, I got lazy in trying to sort through edit them all. You know when you have a huge pile of work you need to go through, and it just seems so daunting so you just procrastinate (which of course, makes everything worse...). In the meantime I've been wanting to show you all some other stuff I've been up to since France, but of course, being the perfectionist that I am, I wanted everything to be in perfect, chronological order so it made sense, but then everything keeps getting pushed back.... and back... and back..........

Well, bah! France posts are just gonna have to take a back seat for now, 'cause I'm moving on. Seriously, I must, otherwise I feel as if my blog is going to wither away again. I'll come back to France here and there, though.



Alrighty! So a couple weeks back I worked on a wedding project for Meghann and Will which was a lot of fun. While Will is from here, Meg's from the Big Apple, so they had this cool "NY-meets-Canada" theme going on. And can I just say here that I was so happy to work with their colour of RED? Whoo!!! It's such a refreshing change from all those pale, pastel girly colours that most weddings use.



So this wedding was also tres cool because I got the chance to integrate some 3D decor elements into the usual stationery design. I combined a floral centerpiece into the seating card display which I thought would have a great "wow" factor.




There's a ravine in my backyard, which is where I found the branches I would need. James helped me to cut them down to size and spray paint them black. We ended up using a whole can of spray paint, even though there was barely any surface area to cover (this was also my first time spraying, and boy... does it smell like TOXIC. phew!!)



To hold the actual seating cards, I got four black box picture frames from Ikea and removed the glass. Originally I was going to have little tent cards, but I didn't have enough space in the frames to hold 130 cards total, so after a bit of brainstorming, I got the idea to use an accordian fold to prop up the cards instead.



I wanted to have crystal jewels strung and hung down from the branches (so they would shimmer in the light), but the only ones I could find sold in bulk at the craft store were those cheap, plastic looking ones. So I veto-ed that and made a last-minute decision and go with adding some tiny white blossoms to the branches instead.






The wedding was to be held at a museum in Ottawa, and being unable to attend, Nancy (the groom's sis) and Joe swung by my place to pick everything up. I set up the whole sha-bang in my kitchen so they would see what it should look like, and took pics to email as well. And while I'm pretty sure I looked like a sleep-deprived, half-dead zombie when it was done, I was SO psyched to see it all put together. Yay!! I thought the branches turned out particularly nice. I mean, even without the white flowers and the tulle it looked quite nice - so nice in fact that I went out and bought the exact same vase again so I could make it again and decorate my room. :)

Chicken run

June had five chickens at her place, so I got to eat fresh eggs daily. They were so cute! They come scurrying around your feet whenever you come out because they think you have food. And at night, they all cuddle together side-by-side in the coop to stay warm :)

Natural Beauty

June's place, Charolles (central France)