I have no idea why Colleen loves me but I’m sure glad she does.
Today was a bit of a weird day. It started out very well with me doing some gardening while it was nice outside and Colleen creating some cards out of the crafty stuff she received for Christmas. I just couldn’t leave well enough alone though and I decided to venture out, on my own, for some geocaching while I picked up a few things from the store. I won’t go into much detail since I want to write a post specifically about geocaching but let’s just say I wasn’t in a very good mood when I got back home. Colleen did her best to cheer me up but I’m nearly impossible to deal with when I get in a “funk.”
Nevertheless, my spirits did rise after a yummy meal of “meatball” subs and roasted Brussels sprouts. The meatball subs are an old favorite of ours (we buy “Nate’s Meatless Meatballs”) but the sprouts were a different story. Colleen’s resolution this year is to eat more healthy vegetables, which I am totally on board for. For some reason we’ve both been itching to try out Brussels sprouts though. Colleen didn’t have fond memories of them as a kid—then again, who does have good childhood memories of Brussels sprouts?—but her memories involve canned spouts that were overcooked. Yuck! I cannot remember ever having them so my mind was a blank slate. After consulting “Veganomicon,” we learned how to roast them in the oven so that is the way we prepared them. The result? Yummiliciousness! (I think I am starting to sound a bit like Rachel Ray… uh oh!)
Later in the evening I decided to quit putting off my cooking icing duties and to put the final touches on the cut-out cookies I made about a week ago. That’s when things started going South again. I halved an icing recipe I found online but screwed up and didn’t half the milk so I ended up having to make the whole 3 cups worth of it. It wouldn’t have been that big of a deal had our sifter not decided to start sucking. It seemed to keep getting clogged and my arm was about to fall off from trying to sift all of the powdered sugar through. I finally gave up in the end and didn’t sift the final 3/4 cups. Luckily it still turned out fairly well and I was on my way.
Growing up, my mom always fixed a ton of cut-out cookies during the holidays. I always enjoyed helping make the cookies, which is the main reason I carried on the tradition (stealing her recipe in the process). The part that wasn’t enjoyable was the actual frosting of the cookies. We would gather everyone together (at least we would try) and spend one whole night doing all the icing. I think we got high more than once on the sugar dust but what the hell, it was worth it to have the yummy cookies in the end. The moral of the story (if there is one) is a detail that I neglected to mention: we always used our butter knives to do slather on the frosting. When I was looking up the icing recipe tonight though, I found something that my change my life forever: alternate ways of putting on the icing. Dipping and “sponging” them were mentioned in a few places so I decided to try one of them for this set of cookies. Since I didn’t have a sponge handy, I decided to try the dipping method. It was definitely easier then trying than doing it with a knife but I’m not sure how much faster it was. The results were good though, probably a bit better than the knife way though. Things were definitely looking good so I decided to take some photos of my newly-icinged cookies. Madness ensued.
Part of the reason that I wanted an Ultrapod Digital (UD, for short) for Christmas was so that I could take better food pictures. It seemed like all of my food pictures would turn out blurry if I didn’t turn the flash on. Unfortunately, using the flash left me with ugly photos. I broke out the UD and started snapping away. There was just one problem. A big problem. The photos were still blurry. My mood quickly soured and Colleen was back into “try to make Sat happy” mode. As I mentioned earlier though, I’m nearly impossible to deal with in those situations though and finally she got exasperated and gave up. (Well, she didn’t just give up. We had a nice little talk about it, which I think helped out.)
Anyway, not wanting to give up on the photos, I decided to employ the power of teh Internets to help solve my food photography problem. There were quite a few good results but they were all focused on people who have $500 SLR cameras with other fancy photo setups. I am definitely not in that group. Luckily, I stumbled upon this blog post which really helped me out. As it turns out, I needed to get down and dirty with my camera’s “Macro” mode. This pretty much solved the blurriness issue. I also learned that I should be setting my white balance accordingly, something which I didn’t even know how to do with our Canon Powershot A560.
I actually did a bit of experimenting to see which white balance setting would produce the best looking photos. The picture displayed in this post is from the “Tungsten” setting which is supposed to be for traditional light bulbs. Since I have been converting all our lights to compact fluorescents, I thought maybe the “Fluorescent” setting would be better suited. It wasn’t. Just for reference, I also took one with the “Auto” setting to see how that turned out. You can check out my Flickr page (see the link on the left) to compare and contrast the three versions. Personally I thought the Tungsten photos looked the best but the Auto were also nice. Leave us a comment and let us know what you think though. I didn’t realize I could do “Custom” white balance (which you can set by aiming your camera at any white object) so I didn’t get a chance to test that setting out.
Now that I have a better grasp of food photography (and therefore better cookie photos), I am in a better mood. Too bad Colleen is already in bed. She would be so proud.
- Sat
