katy perry

The long hot days of summer are finally here so Saucy and Loopy are taking advantage, taking a little break from the kitchen and the blog (it's too hot to bake anyway) and are trying to do fun summer things, like seeing Katy Perry in concert. Before too long, Saucy will be entirely too old for these types of things.

Saucy pounced on the internet the cold January morning tickets went on sale at 10:00 AM and got hers at 9:59... that's right. The computer and cell phone still said 9:59 but the refresh key ensured good floor seats.

Katy wowed her audience with an amazing stage show, her first after a bad case of food poisoning. Saucy was almost worried the show wouldn't go on and the road trip would be cancelled - but Katy pulled through and the show went on.

There were seventeen costume changes - eight in one song alone. Here, Katy wants to see your peacock.

You know, there was a mother with her daughters right in front and that lady was peeved. She found the lyrics distasteful. What did she expect at a Katy Perry concert? Did she not know who she was taking her kids to see? Katy Perry kissed a girl and she liked it, after all.

She'd make a helluva Batgirl or Catwoman.

The audience was whipped up into a frenzy by the time she donned her trademark blue tresses. They'd seen acrobats, Vegas showgirls, mimes, videos, magic tricks, cartoons, bubbles, giant candy and cupcakes. It was kinda trippy. The giant dancing cat at the end was very trippy.

Katy was interactive with her crowd. You could tweet her before the concert and she posted the messages on giant screens. You could send her party pictures on Facebook and she danced in front of them to "Last Friday Night," another song that offended the mother in front.

You may have figured out already that some of these pictures aren't Saucy's. She had great seats but she wanted to enjoy the show and not fiddle with her camera so much.

(That's kind of why the angles are changing).

Saucy wants an outfit that looks like pair of Hershey Kisses, and badly.

This might be an argument to bring back high waistbands, don't you think?

Check out the sparkling caftan... Saucy also wants a caftan and be it sparkly, all the better.

Katy wore a cotton candy skirt and drifted over the crowd on a pink candy cloud. She sang with her sparkling guitar.

She got every forty-something mother up on their feet dancing to Whitney Houston's "I Wanna Dance with Somebody"... but not the mother up front. She sat, cross legged and arms crossed, fuming. She rolled her eyes violently when Katy sang her own rendition of Rebecca Black's "Friday."

Saucy will say it again... it's a Katy Perry concert... what did she expect?

If she was expecting ten dancing gingerbread men in a finale of pyrotechnics, confetti and beach balls, she got it. If she was expecting less, then too bad.

Maybe Saucy isn't too old for these things after all.

make your own sprinkles

Recently, a reader from New Zealand asked Saucy where online she might find black or red sprinkles for her daughter's upcoming birthday party. The answer is simple... make them yourself!

Start by preparing a batch of royal icing. Saucy uses meringue powder for her hard icings, she's a little unsure of uncooked egg whites at the best of times but the powder is just so darn easy. Most powders come with their own recipe and/or measurements so you might want to look at the recipe yield and make a half batch. A half batch of royal icing netted Saucy about 3/4 cup of finished sprinkles. That's plenty!

At this point Saucy would like to offer you a tip: instead of wetting the powder and sugar mixture with straight water, try adding flavoured extract to the liquid. Your sprinkles will not only look good, they'll taste yummy. Saucy made hers a very strong vanilla flavour.

She added black food paste to the frosting after it was mixed up. Remember, professional grade food pastes and dyes deepen in colour as the frosting dries so adjust accordingly. Here, Saucy tinted her frosting a deep grey shade but it dried a perfect black.

Using the smallest tip in your collection, pipe long straight lines of the tinted frosting onto parchment paper. Just make sure your icing hasn't even the tiniest lumps that won't go through the tip, it will get a little frustrating.

When the strips of frosting are completely dried and hardened (this won't take long at all... only a few minutes) you can use a small blade to chop up the sprinkles. Saucy worked away at it and eventually decided it was tedious and she ended up picking the strips up and just breaking them into a small dish while she watched Oprah:

Don't fret about breaking them into uniform sizes, they actually look better if they're all different lengths. If you're an OCD perfectionist like Saucy, you should pick out or discard the ends of the strips (the part where you started squeezing the bag) because those can look a little curved or lumpy.

Otherwise, this is a pretty simple solution to finding just the right shade of sprinkles for your cupcakes and baking. Lime green, anyone? Hot pink?

Store your sprinkles in an airtight container. They should keep indefinitely. Amaze your friends when you say, "I made them myself."

copycat bundt cake

Have you ever heard of...

Well, Saucy hadn't but she and Veto passed one of these bakeries in April while cruising around Scottsdale. She Googled it when she got home and was pretty intent on getting into one last week... but surprise birthday parties, baseball games, martinis and hunting for Juicy Couture kept her away. It also didn't seem to be prudent to carry baked goods around in 119 degree weather.

Saucy decided instead to bake her own version when she got home. It looked something like this:

This is Saucy's version of the bundt cake phenomenon - it's red velvet with cream cheese frosting. The cutest part of the Nothing Bundt Cake creations is the finishing: Saucy was really digging the long droopy dollops of frosting and the finish using a fresh flower.

So, if you want to try this yourself, it's easy. Easy, easy. Emphasis on the easy. Once you track down a bundt pan (that might be the hardest part of the entire task but check with your mother or grandmother, bundt cakes were the rage in the seventies) the rest is a bundt-cake walk.

1 package red velvet cake mix*

1 package instant chocolate pudding mix

1 cup sour cream (not low fat, thank you very much)

4 large eggs

1/2 cup water

1/2 cup oil

* You may substitute any chocolate cake mix if you can't get your hands on a red velvet mix, but you'll need to add red food colouring - use the Wilton no-taste red. Add a tablespoon of white vinegar also to give your cake the red velvet "bite".

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. In mixer, blend all of the ingredients on low speed until lightly blended and then crank up the speed for about a minute. Don't overbeat.

Pour batter into a bundt pan that has been sprayed with non-stick cooking spray. Bake for 45-50 minutes and remove to cool on a rack. The cake should release from the pan easily after 15 minutes. Allow to cool completely before frosting.

For the frosting:

2 (8 ounce) packages of cream cheese, softened

1/2 cup butter, softened

3 to 4 cups confectioner's sugar

1 tablespoon vanilla extract

Using your stand mixer, blend the cream cheese and butter until it is very smooth and there are no lumps. Add the vanilla and then the confectioner's sugar, one cup at a time. You will need to scrape the bowl periodically. Depending on how warm your kitchen is and how sweet you like your frosting, you may not need the full four cups of sugar. The main thing is that your frosting is easy to pipe from a bag using the largest round tip you have but thick enough that it doesn't slide right off the cake. Pipe around the cake, one stripe at a time, making sure each stripe is a different length. Finish with a fresh flower or a fluffy bow!

Told you it was easy! Let Saucy know if you give it a go.