A prop cake, bad hair and faulty recipes

Morning!

If you looked at this photo and thought, ooooh yum, you are sadly mistaken. It was not yum at all. But the fun part was that it was never intended to be good.  I made this cake purposely bad last Winter for photos of my new blog at the time.

And then I thought it would be fun to take pictures of me holding an apple in one hand and a delectable cake in the other while making different faces.

Truly, what was I thinking?

These were taken right before a double date to a seafood restaurant.  I mean, look at that cake.  blech.  It doesn't even go well with the platter!

But then, I can see some glimmers of cuteness, too.  Hey, I wanted to start a food blog and promote it.  No need to hire a professional photographer or anything right?

Also, I was growing out my bangs at this point. It was January and I had straightened my hair.  Why is it so darn puffy?!   I blame this hideous looking cake.


And this photo...

Librarian meets Evil Queen in Snow White?

My hair...I can't.  Come to think of it, it almost has that witch-like feel to it.

At least I tried though, right?  I tried to promote my blog, have fun with taking photos all while trying to show my "moderation/balance" philosophy which is still very important to me to this day. Hint: an apple {healthy} and cake {not so healthy}; especially that cake which I believe would have poisoned someone to death if they snuck a bite.

As soon as we got home from dinner I tossed it.  And if I remember correctly, the rest of the night we chewed away on soft caramel candies.

I adore a good food prop, however! I own a couple of cute random mugs and plates, but when I look back at my photos from early last year, it's cute and funny to see what I used.

What's something that you made that you thought at the time looked great, but you really knew it wasn't even close to being slightly good?

Here are a few of mine:

I think these cookies were made from a boxed spiced cake mix and I added chocolate chips.  Good, but not great. And then I put a giant dollop of Fluff in the middle and made a sandwich.  Chocolate chip cookies, good. Fluff, good. A massive ball of stickiness forever on your fingers and way too sweet to take more than two bites of?  That was these.  I could live without them. 

Holy gaudy props!  ha!

These were white chocolate-cranberry cookies.  I actually adore this combo. However, I did not bake these long enough.  I then chose cookies that resembled close to 'doneness' and snapped a photo.  That pot holder....oh man.  I'll just let Claire play with those when she has a play kitchen one day.  This looks cute for V-day but I really tried too hard on this one.

When I was on a healthy kick trying to come up with simple yet filling snacks that were decently healthy, I had some pretty good ideas.  Cottage cheese and pumpkin puree sitting in a bowl of maple syrup was not one of them.  What was I thinking??

Diabetes called.  They want their syrup back.

And awful photo.  So funny how I thought this was a kick-ass recipe over a year ago. 

Mini Key lime Graham cracker cups.  Cute, tasty, but lumpy.  Oh, the lumps.  And I used a yellow napkin. A small, yellow party napkin from who knows where, for some color.  I mean, Key lime/yellow/Florida-ish.  It makes sense.  Until you see this bad photo with that lovely lump in the center of the cup. 

I love key lime pie.  I think I'll strive to make that next time and never these again.

Way too much going on in this photo. Though I have to admit, I had fun putting this together. At the time, I loooooved food styling. But as you can see, I'm a bit rusty.  I literally am showing all of the ingredients that are these Peanut butter-chocolate chip pancakes-Homemade.

It's a cute and fun photo, but not attractive in the slightest.  Also, these pancakes were meh.  I recently came across a simple and fantastic scratch-made pancake recipe that I'll share at a later date.

Ahhh, I loved these cookies!  Chocolate-cranberry iced cookies.  Fun to make as they were from a box mix and really tasty cold from the fridge.  But not pretty...look at that mess! .and wayyy too sweet.  Next time I make these, I won't completely drown the cookies in the icing.

I do wish I remembered where I got that polka dot construction paper that I placed them on.

Thanks for joining me on this bashing session of my photography skills and recipe flaws.  It was truly fun!  I'm not being sarcastic either.  I think sometimes it's fun to look back at what we did, remember all the little details and learn from our mistakes or also become inspired all over again. 

I'd love to recreate all of these recipes again, but in a much better way.  That excludes the cottage cheese creation.  That was just wrong , wrong, wrong.

Have a beautiful day!