Megan's Art Days

Nicely Sticky Blueberry Cake

2011-06-27T21:21:00.001-04:00

I'm making things again and today it was cake.

It is very hard to find a decent blueberry cake recipe. It seems so simple but a bunch of the recipes I found included whipping separated egg whites or using vegetable oil instead of butter. Neither of those options suit me since I need it to be simple and made with real food like butter and piles of fruit.

This cake was amazing warm. Serve it warm with coffee before Sunday breakfast, warm for dessert with a little puddle of cream or ice cream. Have it the next day with afternoon coffee or tea.

2 1/2 c. all-purpose flour
1 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. baking soda

1/4 tsp. salt
1 c. unsalted butter, soft
1 1/4 c. sugar
1 tsp. vanilla
1+ tsp. grated lemon zest
2 lg. eggs room temp.
1 c. plain yogurt
2 c. Blueberries tossed in 1 tsp. sugar

Mix dry ingredients and set aside. Cream butter, sugar, vanilla and lemon rind in your mixer or by hand. Beat in eggs, one at a time then add the yogurt.

Stir in all of the flour mixture. The batter should be kind of thick and it should smell really good with all of that lemon zest. You could used orange too.

Take 1/3 of the batter and pour it into a greased bundt or tube pan.*

Sprinkle evenly with half of the blueberry filling. Then repeat.

Bake at 350 for about 45 minutes or until your tester comes out clean. You know the deal, bake it until it's done.

For a pretty one just let it cool and dust with powdered sugar maybe sprinkle a tiny bit of zest on there too. Or you could all fancy and do a glaze...eh.

*This cake is very moist and puffs up to about 4-5 inches tall that's why you want to us the bundt or tube pan. I made one in a casserole dish and it was a little tricky to get the middle cooked. In the end it was still very good and we just served it straight out of the dish like a cobbler.

Here's the original for reference but I changed a few things.

A Small Farewell to Wedding Planning

2010-10-13T12:59:00.006-04:00

There is nothing nobler or more admirable than when two people who see eye to eye keep house as man and wife, confounding their enemies and delighting their friends. -Homer

An egg smaller than your fingertip

2010-07-27T15:00:00.004-04:00

Summer in New York II

2010-07-20T13:27:00.003-04:00

Summer In New York I

2010-07-20T13:20:00.001-04:00

July is for Hot Dogs

2010-07-14T10:45:00.004-04:00

It's fun to be more grown up. I used to care a lot about ketchup. Now I care a lot more about mustard but know what it's like to care about ketchup.

Weekend Chicken

2010-07-09T16:32:00.003-04:00

The weekend chicken went home yesterday. For a chicken she seemed pretty pleased to see her not-a-chicken chicken mother. I hope her little leg gets better.

2010-07-09T14:03:00.003-04:00

Through observation I learned something really cool about daddy long legs that I never knew before. They actually take bites of bugs and sort of chew 'em up. The cabin is full of these guys and I watched one climb into another spider's web and tear little chunks off a dried out old moth and chew it up. Amazing!

GeneralFancy

2009-07-23T09:11:00.007-04:00

My Etsy store, GeneralFancy launched last year, um, some time before I packed up and moved to Asia for 7+ months.

Anyway, it's my project to get some smaller paintings out into the world. They are all about the price of a pair of covet-able shoes or a Summer dress but they don't hurt your feet or turn out to be too small next year.

So head to Etsy and check out a slew of my tiniest and most precious paintings. Drawings coming soooooooon!

2009-05-28T17:08:00.004-04:00

Artomatic opens tomorrow.

Yesterday

2009-04-25T22:24:00.002-04:00

Penelope

2009-04-25T22:04:00.004-04:00

This painting was going swimmingly, it even had a title right out of the gate. Then all of a sudden I must have been hit with the "pay attention rock" and I looked down. NO!

It broke a major rule. Here I was thinking it was nearly complete - a rare 2 day painting, what are the odds - but NO. Nope. It completely failed to become it's own place. It's just a thing and that thing is a painting. It's a goddamn pretty painting but not a place. If someone else painted it, well I would reject it. Tomorrow I'll see if I can coax it into transcending it's own stupid objecthood.

Encaustic Painting Workshop

2009-04-03T15:55:00.007-04:00

It's all business these days with me: full-time employment, passport applications, and failed canvases leading only to failed supply orders. The up side is that I will be going to Thailand in just under 5 months and I just finished a productive meeting with a good friend and WPA-DC staff member. We're in the planning stages of hosting a short encaustic workshop, hopefuly in June which will be free for their members. I will be volunteering 4 hours of instruction for 15-20 memebers. WPA is a great arts organization in DC, of which I am a member and it's the least I can do to help them provide a fun event for other members to enjoy. 4 hours is not even close to enough time to get a good grasp of painting with encaustic but at least I can answer some questions they may have, get tham started and lay the ground work for a potential follow-up session with more involved instruction and advanced techniques. Plus this is a great opportunity to excerise one of by favorite and most fun skills.

Topics covered will be: What a painter needs for a basic set up of encaustic painting in the studio, including safety and ventilation, techniques to get started, plus some info on collage/works on paper, sculptural applications, and other mixed media techniques.

Steps along the way

2009-03-01T13:37:00.003-05:00

3 Cities & 4 Studios

2009-03-01T13:28:00.002-05:00

2 Days After the Fur Arrived

2009-02-20T14:34:00.010-05:00

Day 2 is as good as Day 1 when you get a box full of fur scraps in the mail. It's true a lovely box full of various trimmings, strips, and pieced together little bits of gorgeous animal fur arrived at my house on Valentine's day. Ecstasy for someone who has been trying in vain to find real animal fur suitable for use in paintings. Suitable means that it isn't skinned and tanned just for me and preferably it served some other, previous purpose or was otherwise salvaged. At a time when fur is actually stylish this has not been so easy to do. In this case these are sewing scraps from a nearby furrier which were too small for much of anything in the way of fashion items and he was kind of enough to pass them along for other uses. I couldn't be happier.