Craft party

As I'm writing this I'm waiting for a phone call from an Antwerp radio station. They want to interview someone who participates in this Sundays fair 'bepArkte oplage'. And since I'm participating I qualify. If you can come; do! It's a nice fair and located in a park with a bar, so you can enjoy the sun and a drink before, during or after shopping. Once the interview is over I'm off to the craft party in honor of the 5th anniversary of etsy, at Artmind's place.
Yesterday evening I made muffins for todays party, 4 variations, one I tried before, 3 are new, inspired by tweets on muffins or just inspiration of the moment in the supermarket. So the guest at the party will be guinea pigs :-) If they react positive I'll finish this blog later by sharing the recipes. I also bought some sweets called Truly Party Animals, thought they suited the theme just fine :-) Some mead, juice and nuts will top it off, if everyone has this much with them, Mitsy can send us rolling when we have to go home.
Well still no phone, so I'm off....

...and back. Had a wonderful day, meeting fellow etsians in real life, eating, crafting and chatting. Mitsy had prepared for us to work with porcelain and color it with stains, pigments and oxides and lots of textures. Great to see what everyone made and even more curious to see what will be done with the pieces after firing.

This afternoon inspired me (for a start, more will follow subconsciously I'm sure) to make brooches with mouse(s) after a piece of cheese. Thanks to Mitsy for supplying the texture-stamp for the cheese and having yellow stain around. I would never buy yellow myself, since its not really my color.

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The muffins were a great success, so here the promised recipes.

I started by making it myself a little easy and buying the muffin mix (400gr) from AVEVE (If you're not in Belgium I'm sure there will be other muffin mixes available). I add 100 gr of vegatable oil and 200 ml water and mix all until smooth. Than the extra ingedients for each variation, see below. This will make 12-14 muffins. You need to bake them at 180°C-200°C for 18-20min.

For raspberry and lemon muffins add approx 150 gr frozen raspberries and the zest of 1 lemon.

For speculaas muffins add 8-10 speculaas cookies in chunks.
Speculaas is a typical Dutch/Belgian, but ginger type cookies will make an excellent replacement.

For rhubarb muffins, add 20gr of vanilla sugar and approx 150gr of rhubarb in thin slices (1/2 cm max). Sprinkle with a little cinnamon.

For cherries and chocolate muffins, add  approx 100 gr of cherries (bought a bottle and drained of the syrup) and chocolate buttons to taste.

Enjoy! Bon Apetit! Eet Smakelijk!