More Summer food inspirations from Foodwhirl.com:

Tres Leches Pancakes

“My awesomely cool friend Rachel pointed out these on her Facebook, and I had to link them here.  We’ve featured Tres Leches Cake here before (yay, Niki!)  but I know some of you won’t go bake a cake.  But everyone makes pancakes, right?  They aren’t scary.  So check out these Tres Leches Pancakes at Givers Log.”

Lunch Ideas: Salmon Cucumber Sandwich

“Need a nice, healthy lunch, or a light dinner?  I adore fish sandwiches in the summer, and salmon and cucumber are always a nice mix! I love to cook an extra salmon filet or two (to medium rare) when doing salmon for dinner (maybe Chili Garlic Salmon?), then heating it up the next day for a quick lunch.”

Birthday Party Brunch

“With the summer so hot, when I recently planned my son’s birthday party, I decided to do it as early in the day as possible to beat the heat a bit. And since we were inviting both kids and adults, we needed ‘real food’ for everyone to munch on. A brunch was a relatively easy and cost effective way to feed everyone and have a great gathering…”

Cooling off for the Summer

“I hope everyone is gearing up for a lovely Weekend!  Here in Atlanta it’s going to be beautiful, but HOT… So, here are some ideas for cooling off! ” Including: Make a Cucumber Gimlet at Crumpets and Cakes!  Or maybe some Homemade Herbal Lemonade. Pictured: Star Shaped Fruit salad from Chica & Jo.

Spotlight: Sushi / Ceviche

“I spotted this gorgeous idea this morning, at Cristina – from Buenos Aires to Paris, and thought “wow, 2 of my favorite foods – why didn’t I think of this combination?”  Needless to say, this looks divine! Dreaming about vacations by the sea? Late summer nights sharing dinner with friends?”

Basil Chicken (Gai Pad Krapow)

“I’ve been on a kick of Asian inspired food lately (like this Easy Pad Thai!) and this one looks like an excellent choice… A simple Thai meal! Basil Chicken (Gai Pad Krapow) at No Recipes. Thai Basil Chicken is one of those dishes that fits squarely in the category of best-bang-for-your-buck.”

Penne Pasta with Cream, Pesto and Tomatoes

“I’ve been experimenting with selling herbs at the local farmers market recently and the one that seems to sell the best is basil.  I always seem to sell out early.  So this last market, I took double what I normally take and guess what….. I didn’t sell it all.  …”

Greek turkey burgers with yogurt and feta

“This sounds like a delicious application for ground turkey, from the very helpful The Perfect Pantry! Why does a whole chicken taste better than a whole turkey, but ground turkey tastes better than ground chicken? I don’t have the answer, but I always have ground turkey in my freezer.”

Cajun Shrimp & Okra

“I had the urge the other night to make some sort of dish with shrimp, to use up some shrimp broth in my freezer. I had a pound of shrimp, and also some frozen okra on hand, so I figured that was just screaming to go Cajun or Creole (Let the good times roll with Shrimp Creole!).”

And if you’re not reading Foodwhirl, why not?  It is yummy tasty good over there…!   Here’s the Foodwhirl RSS Feed.. for new recipes delivered mostly daily!  And Foodwhirl’s Facebook or Twitter if you’d prefer to follow us that way.  So go stop by and say hi!  You’ll find me over there, plus lots of other real cooks cooking real food.

Congrats to Alexia who wins the 500 Free Business Cards.   And thanks to the rest of you for entering (especially JPIC who said he reads Dabbled because I’m cute!) and for reading… you’re the reason I do this stuff anyway, ya know!

Now back to your regularly scheduled Dabbled.  Go check out the latest:  Iced Tea Gelato, and more Summer Recipes!

Original sketch: http://dabbled.org/2010/06/sketchbook-tuesday.html

The menu included Deathstar Cantaloupe, Mr Slushie Dogs, Roast Bantha, and even Platypus Eggs!

(Thanks to the Evil Mad Scientists for the Deathstar Cantaloupe idea!)

(See all Phineas & Ferb Meet the Clone Wars Party Posts!)

500 Business Cards, Full color on both sides!  I can think of tons of things to do with these…  Use them for your art or crafty biz would be an obvious choice, or if you have no business, how about your kids pic on there for play date cards.  Or customized gift tags.  Anyways, I figured Dabbled readers could find a good use for them, and I get a prize for hosting the contest, so it’s a win-win!

Just leave a comment over here at the giveaway post to enter!

Giveaway Prize:

500 Premium Business Cards
2 x 3.5”, 2 x 2” (square card) or 1.75 x 3.5” (slim card)
14 pt gloss cardstock, 14 pt matte cardstock or 13 pt recycled uncoated cardstock
Full Color Both Sides
Limited to US residents only  18 years old and above

So how do you win?  Well, leave a comment telling me why you read Dabbled and/or your favorite project.  Or even your favorite recipe on Foodwhirl.com. I’ll be posting the winner next week, so be sure to sign up for our Feed (RSS) or Get Dabbled via Email so you don’t miss it!

Giveaway details:

• Sponsor:  UPrinting Printing Company
• Prize:  500 die cut business cards

PS, for an extra entry, go “Like” Dabbled in Facebook, and leave a comment over there too!

Ready to make your Perry Cake?  Really, you CAN do this!

Yesterday we covered all The Prep Work required to make your platypus cake. Now it’s a day or so before you need the cake, and we’re going to put it all together.

You should have:

• 1 frosted flat cake.
• 1 unfrosted loaf cake
• extra cake (cupcakes)
• 1 batch marshmallow fondant
• the rest of your cream cheese icing
• The Supplies from yesterday’s list.

Clear yourself off a good work area, get your fondant out of the fridge, and let’s get to assembly!

1. The Base

You have your sheet cake, iced with your cream cheese icing.  You really don’t HAVE to do anything else, but I’ve found that working on the platypus tends to mess up your icing, so I added jelly beans to hide my sins, and also for additional color.  Any addons to the base can either be done prior to body placement (Step 4) or after.  I did mine after, but if i was doing this over, I would probably have done it immediately before the body placement, after Step 3.

Some ideas

• If you have plenty of extra fondant, use a flower cookie cutter to cut out fondant flowers.  Place them overlapping all around the cake (skipping the very middle that will be covered with a platypus, of course.  (In retrospect, I would have done this.  Fondant circles in various colors and sizes would also have been very cool.
• Cover the entire top with lime green tinted coconut, to simulate grass
• What I actually did:  Cover the ground around Perry with multicolored jelly belly candies (I was thinking they could be platypus eggs!)
• If you have enough extra, roll out a large sheet of colored fondant (any color but yellow or green) and cover the entire top of the cake with it, for an extra smooth look.

2. Molding the bill and the feet:

Marshmallow fondant doesn’t hold shapes as well as regular fondant, so last year when I did the dragon cake, i decided to use something a little stronger as a ‘skeleton’–molded tootsie rolls.  These can also be done ahead of time.  They also will not be seen on the final cake, but should be a light enough color that they don’t show through the yellow fondant that will cover them.

Get out your tootsie rolls.  Break one large roll into several smaller pieces, and microwave for JUST A FEW SECONDS to soften.  You can now knead this in your hands until it’s soft and moldable like playdough.

You’ll be making 2 foot shapes, a top bill shape, and a bottom bill shape.

The foot shape is simple.  Just make a flat 1/2 in thick triangle shape.  Then squeeze it with your fingers toward 1 point to elongate.  Then use your fingers to make ‘toes’ on the opposite flat end.  That’s hard to explain in words, but just look at the picture!

The bottom bill is simply a half circle shape (like a “D”), and the top bill is a larger half circle, with the flat side thicker, coming to a triangular point.  See diagram.  (I don’t have any shots of the bill uncovered, but you can see the shapes in the photos of covering the bill, later on in this tutorial)

Use your loaf cake to help judge the size to make these.  Remember, you’ll be covering them with fondant, so they’ll be bigger later, so make them a little smaller than needed in the final cake.  Set these aside.

3. Fondant:

First, you’ll need an idea of how much to color for each part–this can be trial and error the first time, so here’s a trick.  I’d suggest breaking off a workable size ball of white, and rolling it out to about 1/8 in thick.  You’ll need to knead it a little first to get it workable after the night in the fridge.  See how big it is.  Take your loaf pan (that you used to bake the body!) and use it as a model.  Hold your pan in the air, bottom side up.  Gently drape your test fondant over it, and see how big a sheet you’re going to need.  This is also good practice for how to work with the fondant, before you try it on the real thing!  I found Peggy Weaver’s tutorial on working with the fondant very helpful – go read it!

Once you have an idea how much fondant is needed for your body, make a ball that size, and set aside.  Make another ball that size and set aside for the tail.  Then make 2 smaller balls : 1 for the bill/feet, 1 for the legs.  Finally, you’ll 2 even smaller balls (like a large marble) which will be the black eyeballs and hair, and the white eyeballs.  And you should still have a good bit of left over white–which is good, because if you screw up, you may need it!

• Green:  Take one large ball, and one medium ball and knead together with green (and maybe a touch of blue) foodcoloring, until you get the desired Perry body color.
• Yellow:  Take one Medium ball, and knead together with yellow food coloring, with a few drops of red, until you get the desired yellow-gold color for Perry’s bill.
• Black:  Knead one small ball with black food coloring, for Perry’s hair and irises.  (You may not even need that much, so start small)
• White:  leave white, duh! for the eyes.
• Brown (or Chocolate):  If you have brown food coloring, you can use that.  I didn’t, so I kneaded in melted dark chocolate.  This changes the consistency of the fondant, so if you’re doing that, wait until we get to that step, below!

4. Perry’s Body

Roll out enough of your green fondant to cover the loaf cake (remember, we figured out how much we needed in the prior step!  Save some of the green for the legs.)

The body of Perry is basically just the loaf shaped cake, turned upside down. Round off his body by carving off the  4 top edges with a sharp knife.  Also round off the corners.  Place the cake on top of your upside down loaf pan, to use as a pedestal while decorating.

Cover the top and sides of the cake with a thin layer of icing.  Neatness doesn’t count here, you’re just providing glue and padding for the fondant.

Now, the fun part.  Carefully center the fondant over the cake, like we practiced, and drape over the cake and the loaf pan.  The fondant does stretch, so if you’ve screwed up and your not quite reaching the bottom somewhere, don’t fret.  let gravity do it’s work.  Let sit for several minutes for the fondant to stretch.  (Again, this tutorial is helpful.)

Smooth and stretch the fondant as necessary, trim off excess, leaving about 1 inch or so, which you can then tuck under the bottom of the loaf. A Perfectly Packaged Perry body!

You can now place him on his base.  Remember, you still have to add the bill to the front, so don’t center the body on the cake, leave several inches to add his bill.  The tail drapes off the cake, so no need to leave much room for that.

Covering & Placing the Bill and Feet

Roll out your yellow fondant, and wrap pieces around each of the feet, and the top and bottom bill.  Since the mouth is mostly closed, you don’t have to wrap the whole bill.  For the top bill, just turn the rounded end up a bit to achieve a slightly open mouth. You can go ahead and place the bill on the cake. See photos:

5. Make the Eyes and Hair:

In his platypus state (as opposed to Agent P) Perry eyes a little goofy, with no lids, and look in slightly different directions.

Use a little of your extra cake (the leftover cupcakes) to make a cake ball mixture.  Combine crumbled cake with leftover icing and mix with your fingers until the cake sticks together in a ball.  Make a ball the size of a large marble, and cover with white fondant.  Now make another!  (Note: if you don’t want to do cake balls, you can just use a ball of extra fondant in place of the cake)

Then take a little ball of black, and press flat.  Dampen one side, and press on to your white eyeball.

They are a little to round now, so use a knife to slice off the back 1/3 of the eyeball, so you have a flat side to stick to the cake.  You may want to embed a toothpick in the cake, and slide the eyeball on to that to make sure it stays put.

(I placed mine a little high on his head, I think, so you may want to place a little lower on the front of the face.)

6. The Legs

The legs are similar to the eyes.  Use your cake ball mixture to make the basic shape, then wrap in fondant.  Hide your fondant seam by putting it against the cake body.  Moisten with water or extra icing to stick to cake.  Note, I did his back legs too far forward, the thigh should have been closer to the rear of the platypus.  Place your yellow feet in the appropriate place, as shown.

….

7. The Tail

I didn’t have any good foodcoloring for the brown for Perry’s tail, so I figured why not mix it with some chocolate!  I melted a bar of Hershey’s Special Dark and kneaded it into the fondant the same as you would with food coloring, until I reach a good brown.  This worked, but it also caused the fondant to lose pliability, so it’s a little harder to work with.  Roll out a large piece of your chocolate fondant (either double the normal thickness, or stack two sheets).  cut out your tail shape, then use a chopstick to press a diamond quilted pattern into the tail.  I waited to attach the tail (since it falls off the cake) until i set up the cake for the party.  Just adhere the end to your platy-posterior with some leftover icing (see above photo in the legs section)!

Your Completed Cake

You’re ready to go now… store the cake in some sort of box, not in the refrigerator, but protected from ants and other lovelies.  Place in a cool room out of reach of children and pets.  The fondant will soften overnight, so be much more careful touching it the next day.  And even if it doesn’t come out perfectly (mine had a few flaws!) your Phineas and Ferb loving child with think you are the greatest!

(See all Phineas & Ferb Meet the Clone Wars Party Posts!)

I have a request for the tutorial to make the Perry the Platypus Cake, and since it’s needed in a hurry, I’m doing this tutorial in two parts.  By the way, I did a really detailed tutorial on last year’s dragon cake, and this year’s cake is actually similar, if a little simpler. So it wouldn’t be a bad idea to read through that tutorial in case I miss anything I covered there, as far as techniques.

More pics of the cake and the party here!

We’ll start with the prep work: assembling your hardware, getting the shopping done, and making ahead the components!

Hardware:

• 8.5″x4.5″ loaf pan
• second loaf pan or cupcake pan
• 9×12″ rectangular pan
• Rolling Pin
• Parchment paper (optional, but helpful)
• Large piece of cardboard, covered in foil, freezer paper or other paper, for cake board. ~24″x18″

Shopping List:

• 1 16 oz bag Marshmallows
• 2 lb powdered sugar
• Crisco
• Corn starch
• 1 8oz pkg cream cheese or Neufchâtel cheese
• vanilla
• 1 stick butter
• Pound Cake Ingredients
• Ingredients for base case (1-2 boxes cake mix or your favorite recipe)
• Food coloring (I used this one for the black and the green: Wilton Garden Candy Color Set, and some cheap yellow and red gel coloring.)
• Brown food coloring, or 1 bar dark chocolate.
• Vanilla or other light colored tootsie rolls (our local Dollar Tree had a two pack of the large sticks, which was more than enough)
• Wooden skewers (short ones are fine)
• Candy for base cake decoration (I used jelly bellies, but anything would work.  Green candies or green coconut would make a nice ‘grass’ effect)

Make ahead:

Set out your butter and cream cheese to soften.

Bake your first cake (ours was chocolate!) to serve as the ground that Perry lays on.  I used a box mix for this, and i think 1 box in a 13×9 pan was a maybe a little skimpy.  So you might want to consider making up 2 batches, and using 1.5 for the cake, and doing the rest as cupcakes.  Let cool thoroughly.

Bake your second cake, in a loaf pan, 3/4 filled. (here’s the recipe – with this recipe you’ll have enough for the loaf pan, plus some extra cupcakes) You want it as tall as possible, so err on the side of overfilling (Place a sheet pan under the loaf pan to catch any spillage). Bake the remainder of your second cake batter as cupcakes, or in your second loaf pan.  You’ll need some extra cake later, so save the extras, don’t eat them yet!
I like to use a sling of parchment paper as a liner to ensure ease of removal from the pans.  Just cut a sheet of parchment paper as wide as your pan is long, but long enough so that if set inside the pan, it hangs over both sides.  Spray the pan with non-stick spray, and  press the parchment.  If necessary, secure the sides with binder clips to keep the parchment in place and pressed against the sides of the pan.

Allow cakes to cool thoroughly.

You can go ahead and make up your batch of icing.  I like Cream Cheese Icing — here’s a quick recipe:  Cream together in mixer : 8 oz cream cheese, 1 stick butter (both softened).  Add 1 teas vanilla.  Slowly add 1 lb powdered (icing) sugar.  Beat until smooth.

Place your base cake on the cake board,  and frost the base cake.  Reserve at least 1/3 of the icing for later use.

Make up your batch of Marshmallow fondant and place in the refrigerator, wrapped tightly according to the directions.  Don’t color it yet.

You’re all prepped and ready to go!

Next we’ll assemble and decorate your Perry cake… go here!

She had a pretty good scare that she’d lost her entire site, so I figured it would be a good idea to share how to avoid going through that kind of panic!

The advice that follows is specifically for self hosted WordPress blogs, but no matter where you host, you need to be doing regular backups!

First, understand a little about your blog… A WordPress blog is made up of multiple components:

1: Your posts.  All of this information is stored in your Database.  They are also what is exported if you do an export.

2: Your theme.  This is a directory of files on your server, under wp-content/themes  (This determines the look and feel of your site.  If you have a custom or modified theme, you’ll want to make sure you can restore it in case of emergency.

3:  Your photos or other files.  These are the files you attach to posts via the upload/insert button.  These are by default  stored under wp-content/uploads

4:  Your plugins.  Any time you install a plugin on your site, the files for it are stored under wp-content/plugins.

5:  Your settings, Users, and widgets.  Everything else that makes your blog function and look like it does is stored in the database.

6:  The actual WordPress installation (the programs that run WordPress)

So, if you totally lose your blog, and you want to seamlessly restore it to it’s former glory, you’re going to want to have a backup of all of these things (except for #6).  So how do we do this?

Backup your Files

First, set up a backup folder on your computer.  Make sure you know where you put it, so you can find it if you ever need it!  In this folder , you’re going to put everything you need to restore your site.

To get the files off your website, you’ll need an FTP program.  I use Filezilla, but it doesn’t matter which one you use.  If you use Firefox, the FireFTP plugin is another good one.  You’ll need the logon and password from your host to access the files on your site.  Your host should provide instructions on FTP access.  Get your FTP program set up, and access your site.

Find the folder where wordpress is installed.  It may be the www directory, or it may be a directory under your main directory.  The directory will have 3 subdirectories – wp-admin, wp-content, and wp-includes.

If you want to be on the safest side, you can just copy down the entire wordpress folder to your local computer.  But it’s likely that the only folder you really need is wp-content, since that contains your theme, plugins, and uploads, so copy that entire folder down to the Backup folder on your computer.  (Note, you may have additional themes you’re not using in your /wp-content/themes folder.  Those can be deleted)

Most of the things in your wp-content folder (plugins, themes) don’t change very often.  But likely you are uploading new photos all the time.  So it’s not a bad idea to copy down the wp-uploads folder (at least the new files) on a periodic basis, say once a month.  Set up a reminder in your calendar!

Backup your Data

Next we’re going to deal with the Database.  The real meat of your blog is here, and if you lose this, you’re in trouble.  But non-techies hear the phrase “database backups” and get nervous.  Although backing up the database from the phpMyAdmin tool generally provided by your host is not difficult (here’s a step by step), there are also plugins for WordPress which make it less scary, and automate the process.  Here’s the one I use: WP-DB-Backup.  You can use it to make a backup at any time (it saves a compressed SQL file to your computer.  Move that file over to your Backup directory so you know where to find it!).  You can also set it up to make weekly, monthly, or daily backups of your site, and have them emailed to you.  I like to set up this option to email to my gmail account, so I have access to it, even if I’m not at my computer.  (I don’t recommend the option that saves the file to your website.  Besides filling up website space, if you need to rebuild your site due to a failure on the hosting side, you may not have access to it!)   How often to backup?  It depends on how much you can risk losing.  For a personal blog, weekly or monthly may be fine.  But for Dabbled and Foodwhirl, I do daily backups, and just go in every so often and delete the old ones.

You now can recreate your blog if it’s lost.

Restoring your Site

Obviously, whatever happened to cause your site to be lost may impact how you have to fix it, but lets take Carissa’s example of having to move to a new host.  Her site was totally down, so we were just trying to get her back to a web presence as soon as possible.

To get her back up and running, I had to move her URL to point to the new host (in her case, that involved changing the settings at GoDaddy where her URL was registered).  That can take a while to propogate, so you may want to do this early..  If the url is not pointing to the new host, the restore can be a little trickier (you’ll have to modify the database).

I installed a new WordPress installation with a new database on her new host.  (Most good hosts have an automated method of doing this – this just took a few minutes.)  Note your new logon and password.

Make sure you can access your new wordpress install by typing your domain name.  At this point, you may want to throw up a ‘We’re having technical difficulties” message, too!  Just make a new post.  Your site will not be pretty, but at least it’s not an error message.

Next-  restore the files and data.

Files:  Use your FTP program to upload your backup theme(s), plugins, and uploads to the appropriate directories within wp-content.

Go into your wordpress admin panel and set the theme to your old theme if you like.  Your blog will look at least somewhat like home, but your posts, widgets, and so forth are still missing.

Database:

Note: If you’re not comfortable doing this yourself, you can always get someone to help you.  At least you HAVE a backup!  And you can google for more step by steps on doing this, like this one.  I’m just going to give you the basics here, so you understand what needs to happen.

• Use phpMyAdmin to access your new database.
• To be on the safe side, do an Export of the current database (saves a .sql file to your computer).  That way, if you mess something up, you can always restore back to this point!
• Next, the scary part.  Select all the tables and Drop them.
• Then, Import your backup .sql file.

Cross your fingers, and see if it worked!  Since your Users are also stored in the database–and we just overwrote the database–, your logon and password will be your OLD one, not the one you set up when you did your new install.

*I’d been recommending Bluehost so much, that I decided to sign up with them as an Affiliate, so if you need a new host, follow my link above so I get affiliate credit for it!