Thank You Bo Yin!

I have the most delightful, precious friend in Taiwan named Bo Yin. We met online over a year ago, I think, and have been email pals ever since. She's a college student, an artist, a seamstress, and she has bunnies for pets (they're so cute!). She made me some blog awards for my birthday! One for this blog and one for my Photographer In Training blog. I love them. Thank you Bo Yin!

I have no idea how to create gifs, but Bo Yin had this to say about her creations: An amazing thing is I drew them merely using Microsoft Word and Window’s Painter (not Adobe Painter). I didn’t know Word can be so powerful in drawing before. I drew your camera by Word which was too amazing for me............ how’s your birthday cake?



Well, Bo Yin, my birthday cake came out as good as can be expected from a girl who, even though she worked in a bakery for a year, never learned to decorate cakes with any skill at all.

It's just a Duncan Hines cake mix with some coffee extract added. It's frosted with a grocery store brand of icing (I recently discovered that HEB's Hill Country Fare chocolate icing is REALLY good!) but I turned it into a tort by cutting each of the two layers in half to make a four layer cake (best done if the cake layers are first frozen or, at least, partially frozen) and putting icing and ground walnuts in between each layer. I wish I'd had some gold sprinkles to add to the ground walnuts I scattered on the cake, I think gold sprinkles would have been really pretty. Nigella Lawson combines ground nuts and gold sprinkles and the effect is really beautiful. I used almost three cans of icing!