Beautiful musings of flora and fare.
This post is a not for profit collaboration with Mealshare. All thoughts and opinions are my own.
I could sit here and lecture you all about sharing, giving and ending youth hunger but lets be frank. The reality is most of us want to enjoy our first world lives…dinner out with friends and family. But I know We ALL Want to make a DIFFERENCE. Which is why the concept behind Mealshare is brilliant.
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SOLD OUT
POUR LE FRANÇAIS 🇫🇷, VOIR CI-DESSOUS
Elise Dumas from @thepineapplechef and I are thrilled to announce that we’ll be joining forces again to offer an intense full day workshop from the city of love, Paris France.
Join us for a full day of intensive learning – whether you’re a hobby photographer or an established influencer, you’ll get tons of styling and photography advice and inspiration to thrust you to the next level. We’ll have step-by-step demos, hands-on practice breakouts with Elise and I guiding each participant individually. All our tips and tricks will be shared so come armed with questions. We’ll also have a practical session on how to navigate social media and treat your blog/social media like a business. We’ll have available food props, boards, fresh botanicals and of course food to style and shoot.
Spaces are limited so book soon.
Food Styling and Photography Master Class:
When:
Saturday, February 2nd 2019
9:00 AM – 5:00 PM
Where:
Gorgeous classic Parisian Studio in the trendy 7th Arrondissement, Paris, France
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This post was sponsored by Woodbridge by Robert Mondavi Wines. All thoughts and opinions are my own. Please enjoy wine responsibly.
Wine, chocolate and cake. My three Achilles heel, my guilty pleasures, my three best amigos. These three are my food soulmates. I know it sounds extreme but that’s how much I love wine, chocolate and cake. And interestingly all three came at different points in my life.
Cake.
As a child, I’d remember attending birthday parties and seeing my friends crowd around the gift table ogling all the colourfully wrapped gifts shaking, sniffing and guessing what was in each package. I however, would be in the kitchen ogling the cake. Wondering what flavour was inside. Praying the icing wasn’t that flavourless saccharin drenched grease from a can but a fluffy home made butter cream or cream cheese icing. I’d then cue myself up in the line of kids just so, to make sure I got the right piece. That is, the largest piece and the piece from the moist centre. And of course, I always had seconds and occasionally thirds.
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Koreans can’t bake.
That’s been my insecurity since starting this baking journey. That I’m Korean. And unlike my fellow caucasian friends, I have no family pie recipe or a mom that baked chocolate chip cookies with me on Saturday mornings. The only things I baked as a child were Pillsbury crescents from a tin or boxed Duncan Hines. Baking from scratch was never a part of my family growing up.
Instead, my Saturdays consisted of Korean language classes followed by math drills with Sargent Shin… and his chopstick wand. After math, my sisters and I would get to watch some TV whilst stuffing thousands of Korean dumplings called “mandu”. Okay. Maybe not thousands but god did it ever feel like thousands! Only after all the mandus were stuffed and our math drills were done correctly, were my sisters and I allowed to bake Duncan Hines Classic Yellow Cake. And if we were really lucky, my mom would have bought the chocolate icing in a carton for us to ice the yellow cake with. As a child, baking this cake and devouring it was my escape, my utopia, my moment of being unkorean.
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This is a sponsored post in collaboration with SweeTango. All thoughts and opinions are my own.
Apples are the most cultivated and universally recognized fruit and perhaps one of the oldest that has existed on earth. It’s also arguably the most written about fruit in fables, religion and myths. It has been symbolized as both good and evil.
In the western world, we know the story of Adam and Eve in the Old Testament, where the serpent tempts man to eat the forbidden fruit thereby starting the fall of man and the Christian definition of sin. Irish folklore has it that if a woman peels the skin of the apple in one continuous ribbon and tosses it over her shoulder then the initials of her future husband will appear. And the Trojan War? Well, the idea of Troy tossing the golden apple to the chosen goddess soon evolved to an ancient Greek tradition of throwing an apple to the one you love.
SweeTango apples available early October to mid November. See SweeTango.com for a retailer near you
It’s no wonder this beloved fruit has been developed and bred into such amazing varieties. One favourite variety of mine is SweeTango. Grown in Canada exclusively for the Canadian market, SweetTango is a premium apple variety famed for its crisp, sweet, tangy and juicy bite. SweeTango also holds the Guinness World Record for “Loudest Crunch of an Apple” (March 2016) The bite registered at an impressive 79.1 decibels. To put things in perspective, a normal conversation clocks in at 60 decibels and a vacuum or kitchen blender 70-80 decibels (according to American Speech-Language Hearing Association)
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One Day Intensive Workshop
This workshop will demonstrate how to style food to tell the best and most appropriate visual story for your food or subject. Through elements such as props, natural light, angles, botanicals and editing, the simplest food or subject can be transformed into an opulent visual story. Learn how to achieve a bright and vibrant scene or a dark and moody painterly capture.
There will be a hands on style sessions where you can create a still life scene with cake, food and props. As well as an opportunity to work with a model to learn the art of Rembrandt’s chiaroscuro/lighting and triangle technique in portraits. All this will be followed up with a tutorial on editing your work in Adobe Lightroom.
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FOOD STYLING AND PHOTOGRAPHY WORKSHOPOne Day Intensive Workshop
This workshop will demonstrate how to style food to tell the best and most appropriate visual story for your food or subject. Through elements such as props, natural light, angles, botanicals and editing, the simplest food or subject can be transformed into an opulent visual story. Learn how to achieve a bright and vibrant scene or a dark and moody painterly capture.
There will be a hands on style sessions where you can create a still life scene with cake, food and props. As well as an opportunity to work with a model to learn the art of Rembrandt’s chiaroscuro/lighting and triangle technique in portraits. All this will be followed up with a tutorial on editing your work in Adobe Lightroom.
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I hadn’t planned on posting this recipe but you asked, so here it is.
I recently had a friend over that was lactose and gluten intolerant that was itching to try one of my cakes. I was also asked by fellow food blogger Andrey Tulsky to collaborate on posting a photograph on Instagram with carrots and one’s pet. And so was born this gluten free and dairy free almond and carrot cake. I love it when I kill two birds with one stone!
This uber moist, high fibre, vitamin rich cake alone was a bit too “healthy”. Initially I thought roll cake with orange marmalade to fill. But as I was cutting the cake into mini bite sizes and sampling the cutaway pieces, I realized it needed something fluffy, soft, sweet and naughty. It needed toasted meringue.
And in all fairness, meringue isn’t really “naughty” is it. Its simply egg whites and sugar. It’s the torching part that’s naughty I suppose. Firing up pure white fluffs into a light brown caramelized skin. Totally naughty. But if you’d rather “nice”, feel free to simply dust the sheet cake with some icing sugar.
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PRIVATE 1:1 FLORAL MASTERCLASS: DUTCH INSPIRED URN ARRANGEMENT
Private One Day Workshops:
In the spirit of the Dutch Golden Age floral still life paintings, we will be creating beauty “vanitas” style. The idea that life is transient. As fragile as a large blossom standing tall from a thin stem. As futile as a tulip, blooming to a magnificent bloom only to drop its petals and bear seeds showing a new phase of life that is equally beguiling. The certainty of death, the reality of life for both flower and man is ephemeral. All captured in an unruly yet structured arrangement where every stem and bloom is purposeful.
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Arc De Triomphe, formerly Place de l’Étoile, honours those who served in French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars
Paris…the city of lights and romance. The first time I went to Paris I was in my mid-twenties – almost two decades ago! It was my second time in Europe but the first time I was awestruck by the sheer overload of beauty. The fashion forward people, architecture (particularly Haussmann’s architectural renovation in the “everyday” structures), the symmetrical gardens, galleries, luxury brand names and food overwhelmed me. It was such an extreme contrast to Toronto. Everything in Paris was made with such artistic detail. At twenty-something years old, I felt I had found my soulmate.
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