Cookies and More Roses

This week I continued making roses for my flower crown, but I decided that plain solid color roses were a little boring.  After all, real roses come in many colors and patterns.  I decided to take matters into my own hands and use watercolors to paint a beautiful two-toned rose.  Yellow roses that fade to orange are my personal favorite color, so why not start with those?

In the process of painting

I started by painting a colored band around the outer edge of the petals and then blending inward with only water.  I went around and did one side of every section, let those sides dry, then turned them over and painted the other sides.  Not every petal was just alike, but in nature is anything really perfect?  I feel like the unevenness added a layer of reality to the rose.

 I went ahead and made a solid red rose while the paint was drying.

Once the paint was dry, I had to decide which side I wanted to be on the outside and which side I wanted to be on the inside before curling.  I chose to have whichever side had more color further to the center of the section to be the outside.  This way, a hint of orange color could still be seen under the curl.  Even though this paper was much thinner and easier to work with than last week's, I still used a paintbrush barrel to curl the corners of the petals over.  I like how that method made them look.

All done

For some reason, this one gave me a harder time with the first three petals, and I had to make a series of tears to get them to fold at all.  I'll investigate more into this next week.  The watercolor palette I have is iridescent, so I ended up with a really pretty sparkly edge to the rose.

The two roses I made today.  I'll try to continue the exponential growth into next week, but after that it'll just be ridiculous.

A few weeks ago, I found a pin leading to this recipe for Thin Mint truffles.  Those cookie balls have been central in my thoughts for a long time, and last night, I finally decided that I needed to make them.  I used dark chocolate Ghiradelli melting wafers, since I don't particularly care for almond bark.  However, I found myself in a bit of a dilemma.  I went to my boyfriend's apartment to make them, and since he lacked both a food processor and Ziplock bags, I was worried I wouldn't be able to crush the cookies.  Thanks to his ingenuity, he found two stackable bowls and I was able to crush them by putting the cookies in the larger bowl and using the bottom of the other one to pummel them.  I let the balls freeze overnight before dipping them in chocolate to keep them from falling apart in the warm chocolate.  That has happened before, so be warned.

Complete with a decorative drizzle

I even had a little chocolate left over, so I dipped some cookies we also baked the night before in it.

The final chocolaty spread

Personally, I preferred my Oreo balls better, but these turned out to be exceptionally delicious.  The leftovers are currently in my freezer, hoping to survive the night so I can bring them to rehearsal tomorrow.

Oh baby

Even though I ended up not doing a lot of the things I wanted to over fall break, I managed to both catch up on a lot of sleep and make some pretty cool stuff.  These mint cookie truffles are definitely getting filed away for future reference.