I saw this car on Top Gear winning a race against a plane (admittedly flown by James May, but still ) and wanted one. Unfortunately they're about 800,000 quid and I can't drive yet, so I made a plush one instead.

It's a bit shorter and fatter than an actual Veyron so I can cuddle it

Thought I'd do another one of these. They're fun to do, but I'll be damned if it wasn't bloody difficult. I don't know why it is but whenever I'm taking pictures of a recipe it always screws up!

I tried my hand at making fish 'n' chips, one of the most famous Northern foods a bit more upmarket. It didn't turn out nearly as good as the stuff you can get in Bimbi's but it's better than what they call fish 'n' chips in the South.

This is horseradish salmon tempura with potato rosti and steamed peas.


Mise-en-place. Ignore the egg and one of the spuds and imagine a bottle of beer there. I have got to learn to do these properly.

Ingredients:
1 potato
1 fillet of fish (I used salmon, but I'd suggest white fish, it doesn't fall apart so easily)
2oz (56g) flour
3tsps baking powder
125ml beer (preferably Newcastle Brown of course!)
Peas
Horseradish sauce
Beef dripping

Method:
Peel and grate your spud, and squeeze out all the extra liquid in it.


Shape the grated spud into a disc and shallow-fry it for about 2 minutes on each side in some of the beef dripping. Then take it out of the pan and stick it in the oven on gas mark 6 for about 8-10 minutes.

o noes my rosti has fallen apart!!

No problem - stuff it into a scone cutter and slide it out onto the plate!

While the rosti's cooking, you can steam the peas (I did them in the microwave, ahahahaha).

While the rosti and the peas are cooking, cut the fish into goujons. Mine flaked a bit (last time I use salmon for that, luckily it was one of a big pack of them we got cheap) but it doesn't really matter too much if it does.


Put the flour and baking powder into a bowl with a pinch of salt and about a teaspoon of horseradish sauce. Stir in enough beer to make a thick batter.


Heat some beef dripping in a deep-fryer or saucepan (enough to cover the fish) until it's hot enough for deep-frying (you can test it by putting a wooden chopstick into the fat and seeing if bubbles form all around it). Coat the fish in the batter and drop it into the pan. Let it cook until it's nice and crispy.
Don't worry about it all falling apart in the pan, mine did and it ruined the presentation but still tasted nice!

Serve with a little balsamic vinegar, more horseradish sauce and whatever the hell you can find in the fridge as a garnish, in this case a tomato cut into a stupid shape.



Enjoy!

Also if anyone knows any tips to stop rosti going all discoloured, please tell me!

[Ingredients:]

Right, this might need a bit of an explanation... I go to university in the north-east of England, where the locals are really down-to-earth and a lot of the students are really preppy. So, being half-Geordie and a student (and really bored), I thought I'd have a go at making stuff that'd please (or really piss off) everybody.
Basically I took a bunch of traditional Geordie foods and tried to make them as pretentious as possible.
I got the idea when I asked for a bacon roll in the uni' caff and got a bacon, Brie and cranberry panini...

First up is the old favourite, blaeberry pie, or in its new form, blueberry tart with butterscotch sauce.



Mise-en-place (oh wait I left out the brown sugar, bollocks)
Ingredients:
For the base:
1.5oz (42g) plain flour
1oz (28g) caster sugar
0.5oz (14g) butter

For the fudgey caramely cakey middle bit:
1oz (28g) butter
1oz (28g) brown sugar
2oz (56g) self-raising flour (or 2oz plain flour and 1/4 tsp baking powder)
1 egg, beaten

For the topping:
1 pack of frozen blueberries
1oz (28g) butter
2oz (56g) brown sugar
Milk
Pinch of salt

Method

Base:
Put all the ingredients for the base into a bowl. It's a basic shortbread mixture, 1 part butter, 2 parts sugar, 3 parts flour.

Get your mitts in there and rub the fat into the flour and sugar.
When it's all mixed together, pack it into a 7" tin and prick the top all over with a fork.

Then stick it in the oven on gas mark 3 for about 20 minutes.

Fudgey caramely cakey middle bit:
Cream the butter and sugar together.

Realize that bran is not sugar.  Label your jars properly and start again!
Mix in the egg and the flour until it's all nice and smooth.

Get the shortbread base out of the oven and pour this mixture all over it. Then put it back in the oven on gas mark 5 for 10-15 minutes.

Topping:
It should look sort of like this now, but less blurry:

Put the blueberries in a pan with a little white sugar and gently heat them until the juice has thickened into a sort of compote. Pour it on top of the tart base so it looks like this:

(Ignore the missing bit, I got hungry )

Now we're going to make a fudgey butterscotch sauce to go with it. I wasn't sure what to put with this to dress it up a bit, but blueberries and maple syrup do go pretty well together. There aren't any maples round here but there IS the best bloody fudge in Britain, so it's close enough and still traditional!

Heat the butter and sugar and a little milk in a saucepan until all the sugar granules have dissolved and the sauce starts to thicken a bit.
Mine looked like this:


Cut a slice, drizzle some of the sauce over, and serve.



(The colours are a bit weird there, the sauce is a bit more brown than that )

Enjoy i.e. stuff it down yor fyess 'til yer geet full, like.

My boyfriend and I are huge fans of Metalocalypse, so I made him these little chaps for Christmas.

We have Skwisgaar Skwigelf, taller than a tree:



Toki Wartooth (not a bumble-bee):



William Murderface (Murderface, Murderface):



Pickles, the drummer (doodily doo, doodily ding dong doodily doo):



And Nathan Explosion:



The band faces their biggest challenge yet (yes, bigger than slaying a troll): trying to be brutal AND cuddly!

My friend loves World of Warcraft (though I've never played, it looks like fun), and he told me he wanted "something made" for his Christmas present.

So, heavily inspired by Ahsavka's beautiful Tauren (http://www.craftster.org/forum/index.php?topic=111304.0), I made this: a stuffed Tauren with a rather... Celtic feel to him. I didn't exactly use a pattern for this one, but instead resorted to my usual method of making him up out of lots of tubes, some short and fat and some long and thin.



Here he is with his felt bracers, kilt, tufty tail and (of course) cowbell!



And a close-up of his fringe and nose ring.
*snort* he says. (Translation: "I'm not emo, but...")

...and introduces himself only as "The Bard".
This flamboyant little chap was based on a D&D character that the other guys lumped me with ("AHAHAHA, YOU GOT THE BARD!! )

I drew him first in manga style, then decided to, er, bring him to life:

I'm a huge fan of The Order of the Stick (OOtS for short). It's a hilarious web-comic based on Dungeons & Dragons. You can find it here.
It's my favourite web-comic, so I thought I'd bring the characters to life.

Here they are:



There's Durkon, the dwarven cleric...


 Vaarsuvius, the androgynous elf wizard...


Elan, the clueless bard...


Belkar, the psychotic halfling ranger...


Haley, the lovably greedy rogue...


and Roy, the fighter and the leader of the group.

I LOVE YOU!!!
OMG !!!!
I wanna make that!!!
Stencils?!

It's unbelievably easy. A Vogon could do it. You just print the logo out and type out "DON'T PANIC" and print that too, then arrange them on some card or acetate and cut them out of it to make the stencil. Then just place it over your T-shirt and sponge on some fabric paint. (I'd recommend putting some paper or cardboard inside the T-shirt to stop it going through to the back, though.)

Edit: I found the logo on good old Google.

I don't know if this is respectful or just plain blasphemous. I didn't mean him to be blasphemous in any case, hehe.

Well, the brief was someone you admire, and I couldn't think of many things more admirable than letting yourself be killed to save the world, so I made a sock monkey Jesus.
He's made with bleached black socks (they didn't bleach as much as I'd expected, so he looks a bit too dark to be Middle Eastern, but ah, well), fake hair and felt for his beard.

Here's what He probably would have looked like in real life (without the tail of course):



And here he is in the more classical image of Him:





Close-up of his sandals (I found a pair of suede trousers in a charity shop and I've been using them for fake leather things on my plushies ever since):

After making a load of D&D monsters, I realized that there was no point in having the monsters if there was no way of deciding what they were going to do.

So, inspired by this, I made my first machine embroidery project: a d20.





Yay, natural 20!

I used the pattern for a paper die from this site, but instead I used it as a sewing pattern and straight-stitched down the edges where each triangular face joins. Then I just embroidered the numbers on and sewed it together.

I think I'll make some more dice with different numbers of sides. At least that's the hardest one done!