Strawberry Fields

Some of you might remember that at the "Flowers & Flavours" country show a little while back, we bought a few strawberry plants.

We don't have particularly green fingers. In fact our track record for anything plant-related is pretty poor. It's not our fault. It's because of the snails, and the birds, and next door's cat and global warming and...well, okay, it's a little bit our fault...

We already had some wild strawberry plants which we picked in the grounds of the chateau of Chantilly a couple of years back and they've just started to yield their first tiny fruit too. This year, the five tiny plants we brought back have become a carpet of green and red and today we picked enough strawberries to make, well, a bowlful of strawberries!

And it's been with lots of excitement that we've watched the strawberry plants bought from the show flourish on the window sill!

From a few floppy leaves grew the pretty, white strawberry blossom which slowly metamorphosed into tiny, yellow balls which in turn have started to become large delicious fruit...

Woohoo!! Beats the heck out of the tasteless rubbish on offer in the local supermarket!

So, perhaps inspired by the sun and the taste of homegrown fruit, the latest miniatures on Etsy have a distinct red fruit feel to them!

Chocolate gateau with red fruit

Red fruit charlotte

Enjoy!

Gotta go, next door's cat has just.....ewwww!!!!!!!!!!!

Friday Flashback - August 2003

With more and more people getting into making and collecting miniature food over the last couple of years, many of you will have missed out on the humble beginnings of Emmaflam & Miniman on the internet - a time when blogs were unheard of, there was no Facebook-ing, no Flickr-ing and in order to twitter you needed a beak...

So we thought we'd offer you a regular glimpse into our archive of many thousands of photos and share with you some pieces from our past work.

We're calling it the "Friday Flashback"!

Being the first Flashback, we thought we'd start at the very beginning, apparently it's a very good place to start...

2003 - and we've known each other for....oh, about five minutes. We decide to try selling some pieces on eBay - all made by Emmaflam in France and posted over to Miniman who still lives in England and already sells miniatures on eBay.

Below is a selection from that very first series of listings. Apologies for the mediocre quality of the photos, but digital cameras at the time weren't as sophisticated as today's multi-megapixelled models...

Of course there were miniature chocolates, some topped with coffee grains, pistachio, sugared violets and some wrapped in foil.

This tea tray set with teapot, croissants and pain aux raisins was entirely hand made. The trays available commercially at the time were way too "chunky" so it had to be done with squidgy balsa!

The pizza already looked good enough to eat!

Coming from France, super fine miniature crêpes were almost a certainty!

A platter of charcuterie...complete with pickles (caraway seeds painted green, no less!)

A pair of burger meals with fries and salad...had to be served on paper plates because that's all we could afford at the time! Still, it did give a "picnic" feel to them...

A strung roast beef joint with baby carrots, peas (hand rolled from Fimo one-by-one) and new potatoes.

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Shortly after that, Miniman moved to France and although we did a couple of miniature shows in Paris in between, it wasn't until 2005 that we would offer our next items for sale on the Internet.

One interesting note to finish on...maybe somebody saw some potential in what we were doing because one of the buyers from this series is still a regular customer to this day!

Stop Loaf-ing Around...

...and get over to Etsy!

We've been really busy (between mouthfuls of caramel macaroons...!) trying to get some new miniatures ready for presentation on our Etsy store.

They'll be up a little later on. Here's a sneak peak at one of the items (and an explanation for the lame pun in the title of this post...)

Enjoy! :)

Caramel Macaroons

As we mentioned in Saturday's post, we'd planned on baking some more macaroons over the holiday weekend - real ones.

Being big fans of anything caramel (even old man's favourite Werther's Originals!), it didn't take long to decide on which flavour we'd be trying next - caramel au beurre salé or salted butter caramel.

Although a tad pale due to the lack of food colouring readily available here (we had to improvise mixing the colours that we were able to find), these babies turned out to be just as delicious as we had hoped. Good job too, because we have about 30 t0 "struggle" through!

So - another 1:1 / 1:12 photo opportunity beckons...

A miniature caramel cake with caramel macaroons placed alongside our pale homebaked versions!

Pretty Sweet - Eiffel Tower Sugar!

We were recently having a coffee in a Bistro where one of our friends works.  We loved the sugar sticks that accompanied each cup...!

So we asked...and left a little while later with our pockets full of Eiffel Tower sugar sticks!

But it does seem a shame to have them taking up space here.  We'll keep a few for sure, but the rest are yours!

So until we run out, all packages sent out will have a sweet little extra included!