To all the Cake and Stencil Freaks out there:

We are proud to announce the arrival of our eBook ‘Say it with a Stencil’ (later in 2012). In this book you can find information about the different techniques of stencilling patterns and images on your sweet and savory dishes. It includes interesting articles about stencil art, styling themes, special celebrations and many recipes for cakes, cupcakes and toppings. Also, it contains more than 100 printable stencils in different sizes and styles that you can cut yourself and then use to decorate your favorite culinary item.

 
How many cakes fit in a kitchen, do you think? To test and photograph our newly created StencilFarm stencils before including them in the book, we had to do some proper work first. So we spent a whole day in the kitchen: mixing, tasting, blending and baking all sorts of flavors and substances into tasty cakes. Then we made toppings for each cake in different colors: white, brown, blue, yellow and red. To finalise, we had to grind raw sugar into fine powder, which can easily be sprinkled on the cakes using our stencils.
 
              
 
Shopping time
Then… the temperature lowered, the canals froze, it snowed for two days in a row and the whole city of Amsterdam was covered in white soft and pure snow. The cakes were still waiting to be stencilled. We put on our hats, scarves and gloves and obtained some peculiar items (flowers, napkins, statues, paper, fairytale stuff, etc.) that we found in the random little shops, spread out in town. Fully equiped, we headed to the StencilFarm Headquarters in Amsterdam West, where we spent the whole sunday afternoon stencilling, styling and photographing all the cakes that we baked.
 
The result: 25 cool cakes with different, exclusive designs, colors and styling. Among them are spring chickens, heart patterns, brown squirrels, rockabilly cherries, organic trees and flowers, rockstars, fairytale-like frogs and princesses, trains with robots, music notes with birds, shiny snowflakes, glittery roses and much more….
 

This is one of the many photos that we shot during the session. You see a design with a skull and hearts, dedicatedly stencilled with white sugar powder on a vanilla sponge cake with a pure chocolate topping. The blooming red rose was added as a warm gesture to this cold afternoon. In the end: the classical combination of roses and skulls always works…

 
We would like to thank Marcia van Oers, our dear photographer, for treating each stencilled cake and cookie with care and attention!
 
                      

Dylan lives in Phoenix, Arizona and is entrepeneur and “un programmeur extraordinaire”. He also likes to make photos of his French Toast with heart stencils sprinkled on them…

Dylan: “French Toast, our first foray into our awesome new stencils from StencilFarm!”

Who doesn’t have his own personal experiences with stencilling? These experiences could be nostalgic childhood memories of rubbing your clean hands through dirty, oily paint and then printing your own hand trace on a virgin, white piece of paper…. Or being a teen and changing your decent clothes into more alternative outfits by spraying, stamping or silk screening symbols of skulls, stars, flowers, peace, anarchy, yin yang signs or a portrait of Che Guevara on it…

Maybe you work for an official organisation such as the military, a utility company or the government, where you have to label objects, vehicles and locations with signs, codes, letters, numbers or words… Or maybe you live in urban East London and like to secretly walk around at nighttime, with a self-made stencil of a political slogan or message… Almost all of us have personal memories of stencilling.

Travelling through the history of stencils, you could first visit Lascaux (France), Altamira (Spain), Australia, Namibia or Argentina and find primitive stencil art in ancient painting caves.

You could then admire stencil-decorated tombs in ancient Egypt or follow well- crafted stencilled signboard directions to get to the Colosseum in Rome.

Gua Ham Cave – Borneo

After your ventures in the ancient past, you can go to Asia and discover the use of stencils for cloth coloring, for example Batik in Indonesia and Katagami and Katazome in Japan. You´ll find some amazing artworks. When stencils reached Europe and the new world during the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the Golden Age, they were used for various reasons: playing cards, religious woodblock printing and also fashionable floor paintings.

From left to right: 1 Japanese Katazome, and 2 batiks from Indonesia

Three revolutions had a big impact on the stencil culture. The printing revolution in the 15th century, the industrial revolution (18th/19th century) and the  information & digital revolution in the 20th century. The rise of mass consumerism, mass media and internet made stencils massively accessible and re-usable on global scale. Pop artists criticised the repetitive elements in mass media and consumerism. In this image of Andy Warhol you can see the repetitive stencil elements of a cow. The central lesson of pop artists is that all forms of communication, all messages, are filtered through codes or languages.

Andy Warhol – Cows

Nowadays, stencils are used for many different reasons: for interior design, tattoos, fashion customising, the industrial sector, media art and one of the most prominent and direct forms: urban street art. In the eighties stencil art became an important element in hip-hop culture in New York, where artists started spraying political slogans in their artwork on the streets. Although street art started as an underground and ‘illegal’ practice, a lot of stencilled sprays or paintings is now recognised as art and is moving from the public space to private galleries and art exhibitions.

From left to right: Sten & Lex, Logan Hicks and Shepherd Fairey

Following the evolution of history, the stencil seems to become more and more commercial and popular, especially now that it is available on the internet, in all styles. The commercialisation of stencil art is also discussed in the provocative documentary ‘Exit through the Gift Shop’, made by Banksy. Whether stencil art is authentic or commercial, I will leave up to Mr. Brainwash and the person being brainwashed…

But authentic or not, stencil art is a fact. What to do? Spray stencils on walls or trains and run away like a lunatic when someone catches you? Or move this art-form from the street into your own house and kitchen? Both are as much fun, I guess, but rediscovering the use of stencils for culinary reasons does add another dimension to the whole stencil culture. Don’t you think so?

Last week, while elaborating on interesting news-items for our StencilFarm blog, Victoria and I received a sudden order from a lady in Brazil. We’re so pleased that people all over the world find our website and show interest in our stencils! This lady was flabbergasted by the idea of surprising the guests in her own cafe with a decorated cappuccino. As she said: “Decorating your cappuccino with texts like ‘feliz aniversário’ (happy birthday) or ‘bemvindo’ (welcome) is just magical!”

The days after, the word ‘magical’ kept on echoing through my mind. Drinking coffee indeed seems to be something magical. It’s one of the delicious secrets of Mother Nature that got revealed to us at one point in history… But where, when and how did people suddenly get the idea to make coffee out of a cherry-like fruit? Although the true origin of coffee remains a mystery of ancient Middle East, the major influence of coffee on different cultures all over the world, is unquestionable. Every culture has it’s own special way of preparing and drinking this exhilarating and aromatic drink – made of roasted beans.

A Turkish proverb says that coffee should be ‘as black as hell, as strong as death and as sweet as love.’ The Italians, on the other hand, are proud to serve a perfectly frothed cappuccino as a symbol of their national culture. The French usually start their days with big bowls of steaming Café au Lait and the Dutch take cappuccino after dinner (absolutely ‘not done’ in Italy). What is the right way to drink your coffee? Black as hell or Snow-white? It doesn’t matter, as long as there is magic to it…

The history of coffee also demonstrates the almost divine and magical element in drinking coffee: a sensory experience, that elevates the mind. One traditional legend tells that coffee was originally revealed to the prophet Mohammed by the Angel Gabriel around 600 AD.

Another legend centers around Sheik Omar, the legendary founder of Mocha (Yemen) in the 13th century, who was known for his ability to cure the sick through prayer. While in exile, he discovered the curing effects of coffee. He chewed berries from a nearby shrubery, but found them to be bitter. He tried roasting the beans to improve the flavor, but they became hard. He then tried boiling them to soften the bean, which resulted in a fragrant brown liquid. Upon drinking the liquid Omar was revitalized. His discovery of this “miracle drug” saw him returned to Mocha and made him into a Saint.
 

“Kaldi, a young goat herder noticed that his goats, were abandoning themselves to the most extravagant prancing.

Kaldi attributed this foolish gaiety to certain fruits of which he had seen the goats eating with delight.

So when one day he had a heavy heart, he decided to eat the fruit himself in the hope of cheering himself up a little.

It worked, and he soon forgot his troubles and now when the goats danced, he gaily entered into their fun with admirable spirit.

 

One day, a monk chanced by and stopped in surprise to watch the many goats executing lively pirouettes like a ladies’ chain, and the herder went through the figures of an eccentric pastoral dance.

The monk asked Kaldi about this saltatorial madness; and Kaldi told him of his precious discovery.

Now the monk thought that this marvelous fruit might actually help him to overcome his sleepiness that happened in the middle of his prayers, so he took some back to the monastery.

There they dried and and boiled the fruit of the herder and discovered the concoction we call coffee.

Immediately all the monks of the realm made use of the drink, because it encouraged them to pray and, perhaps, also because it was not disagreeable.”

Image Source: Dancing Goats

The coffee plant was a native plant of Ethiopia and was cultivated in Yemen. The earliest credible evidence of either coffee drinking or knowledge of the coffee tree appears in the middle of the 15th century, in the Sufi monasteries of Yemen. By the 16th century, coffee had spread from Mocha to Egypt and North Africa and by the 16th century had had reached Mecca and Medina and the rest of the Middle East, Persia and Turkey. From the Muslim world, coffee drinking spread to Italy, then to the rest of Europe. Coffee plants were transported by the Dutch to the East Indies and to the Americas. and Northern Africa. Coffee then spread to the rest of Europe, Indonesia and the Americas.

From Kaldi to StencilFarm

Could Kaldi ever have imagined that in the future the plant he discovered would be cultivated worldwide to be consumed by people all over the world? And how would he feel knowing that in 2011 StencilFarm had created a stencil displaying a jumping goat, a symbol of the origin of coffee dedicated to Kaldi himself? Stencilfarm draws upon the ancient, magical tradition of drinking coffee by adding a modern element to the tradition: the stencil.Try out stencilling Kaldi on your coffee and feel the magic!

So here we are again… summer has finished but autumn hasn’t started yet. I find this a beautiful time to experiment. This time between holidays gives you an opportunity to create something unusual. Nothing is expected of you, Halloween and Thanksgiving are still far off. This is why my inspiration for this week’s cake was to try out new things, to combine summer and autumn elements.

When I made the “Deer” stencil I immediately thought of wood, green colours and nature… and that got me thinking. Can I actually use more “unusual” items as cake decoration? Maybe not the flowers, but their leaves? Nuts with the shell on? I’ve discovered that by making the cake the centerpiece and experimenting with table and cake decorations, mixing summer and autumn elements (berries and nuts) and colours (green and brown) can create an unexpected and dynamic centerpiece. My “Deer” cake was covered with white icing and stencilled with cocoa powder.

So next time you throw a dinner party don’t stick to traditional rules, experiment, discover… Maybe even make your cake a part of the table centerpiece. Oh, just make sure that your topping won’t melt until the dessert time

Until next time, Victoria

This has been a very busy week here at StencilFarm. So busy, in fact, that it seems we have forgotten to breath let alone bake cakes or cookies. Still,  busy or not, “pretty” is in my blood. I just can’t serve my visitors shop-bought cookies with their coffee… or can I?

In our daily life there are many weeks like that. So what is a modern woman to do? Serve guests coffee without cakes or cookies? Offer shop-bought (gulp) baked goods? Well, these days there are many good quality cookies on offer in supermarkets and bakeries. Surely, they are not the prettiest of the bunch… but here is where we come in.

I bought these cookies in my supermarket. They are almond filled shortbread (gevulde koek in Dutch) with flat top (in this case all cookies with flat top will do). I’ve covered them with white icing and used a cupcake stencil with cocoa powder. The whole thing took me no more than 5 minutes. The cookies were the hit of the day. Just try it, it’s very simple

Victoria’s simple icing:

• 250 g icing sugar
• half a lemon
• Floral stencil

Put all the icing sugar in a bowl. Squeeze the lemon into sugar and mix well (adding lemon instead of water gives the mixture lightness and breaks the sweetness of the sugar a bit).
Cover the cookies with icing (if the icing is too transparent and runny you’ll need to add a bit more sugar, it’s better to have the icing a bit thicker. Don’t worry about smoothing it too much on a cookie, the icing will flatten out by itself. The ideal consistency of icing should be like a thick soup). Put the cookies on a tin foil or baking paper (in case the excess icing will run down) and put them in a fridge for 30 min. for the icing to set.

Happy Stencilling

Hello Kitty visited StencilFarm and baked cakes and cookies with us. She surprised us with strawberries, red currants and flowers all the way from Japan.

We stenciled her with pink sparkles on a vanilla cake, topped with white icing.

Hello Kitty says Bon Appetit… or in Japanese:

ボナペティ 

Hello coffee, cake and stencil lovers,

We are pleased to announce the launch of our new StencilFarm weblog…

For those, who don’t know StencilFarm yet: we are a farming, online community that cultivate coffee and cake stencils in different sizes and styles. You can order downloadable or pre-cut stencils through our online webshop. You can also have your own stencil customised.

This summer Victoria and I have been spending many hours in the kitchen, experimenting with stencils, cakes and coffees. It was very fun and yummy. The weather might have been bad, but our farm significantly increased with number of cows, chickens and pigs.

The chicken that you see in the images below, is one of our StencilFarm Summer Products. We used our special summer chicken stencil to create a chicken – made of brown M & M’s – on  a three layer vanilla cake with whipped cream and blue icing on top of it.

We used the Rooster stencil to give this cake a funky look – for more images of animal stencils, click here.