Mother’s Day: Paper-Art Card and Sweet Treats

I constructed this card for Mum for Mother’s Day. Tiny red hand-punched flowers are arranged in a heart shape on a backing of chocolate-brown coloured card. Some flowers are given definition with squares of foam placed underneath to give them height. White diamantés dotted in the centres of some flowers, add ‘bling’. To finish, the card is wrapped in an apricot-coloured ribbon.

The completed card wrapped in ribbon and to finish, tied with a loose knot, (so the card can be opened to reveal the message inside):

Now for the good stuff…..here is a sample of some sweet treats that Mum and I made over Mother’s Day weekend:

On the left is a Raspberry Meringue containing freeze-dried raspberry powder. The powder provides a huge flavour enhancement and also provides the beautiful delicate shade of pink. The great thing is that the colour and flavour is derived from all natural ingredients – just powdered raspberries.

Next to the Raspberry Meringue sits a bright yellow ‘Pineapple Flower’. The shade of yellow is beautiful: when held up to the sun the light shining through it sets off a luminescent yellow glow. In the picture, the pineapple flower’s basket-like shape contains whipped cream with chopped mint and crystallised ginger sprinkled on top.

Making these sweet treats meant the oven was on for much of the weekend. The Raspberry Meringues needed to be on a low temperature in the oven overnight, (according to the recipe), but we cut this back to 6 hours, but even then, we still we had these in the oven late into the night and were checking them into the small hours of the morning!

The Pineapple Flowers needed to dry out in the oven for one and a half hours – and we made two batches of these. With the oven going for most of the weekend, the house was filled with raspberry and pineapple aromas, which was very cheering and I regret that I cannot bring you the rich fruit aromas here, but you can try the recipes out – please see my following blogs for the recipes. Enjoy.