Friday Photos: Defiance by CJ Redwine inspired cupcakes!!

Hi there again!

Remember the cupcakes I was thankful yesterday for being inspired to make? Well, here you can read all about half of them! ;)

This Friday Photos is the result of my brain wave & inspiration yesterday to take part on a contest!

What contest you may be wondering? Well, as it happens, CJ Redwine the author of one of my favourite books from last year, Defiance, is hosting a contest on her blog for the chance to win an annotated ARC of the next book in the series, Deception! Getting any ARC is super cool (Advance Reader Copy) since the book doesn't come out till August, but an annotated one? That's like 10 times cooler!

The contest called for us the readers to create something inspired by Defiance, be it a poem, photos, a cake... and even though I'm thinking of also trying to get some photography inspired by the book done, I just got the idea of baking some cupcakes!

I wasn't too sure of how to decorate them, so I decided to re-read the book last night and instantly started getting ideas! So this morning I was up bright and early with plenty of energy and super excited to start baking and decorating!

 Yeah, those are all the tools involved... a wee bit of a mess!

The cupcakes recipe is for lemon cake cupcakes, since lemon cake is Rachel's (the main character) favourite dessert, with a lemon buttercream, with fondant decorations.

And then it was time to start piping the frosting to then decide how to distribute all the fondant decorations I had made.

Celtic knots, ribbons with initials, sticky buns, a wrapped parcel and leaves from the forest, it all has a significance in the book. I wanted to include one of the "Cursed Ones" but my modelling abilities are not up to par for a wingless dragon creature yet!

The Celtic knots might be my favourite part, I love how they look and I love using the stencils with fondant!

 Don't they look cool? I love those designs! Also, I spent quite some time trying to get a fondant colour that would match the cover colour! Yay for gel colours! At one point my hands were looking as if an unicorn had barfed on them, so many colours! I think after all the hand washing and the dish washing I got rid of all of them...

So there you go! Those are half the cupcakes that kept me busy and happy yesterday. Whatcha think? They're not poetry, but I think they look quite awesome, even if I say so myself! Wish me luck on the contest!

Mark This Book Monday: Defiance by C.J. Redwine!

Welcome, welcome, welcome! To the start of a new week, to another Monday and to another edition of Mark This Book Monday!

Today I want to share with you all a book that I have been eagerly await since I first saw the cover and read the excerpt at Goodreads: Defiance by C.J. Redwine! Aside from recommendations, that's how I tend to pick up book, I see a cover I like, I grab it and read the excerpt, if it sounds intriguing enough, I pick it! The trouble of doing it in Goodreads is that sometimes the book you like is not out yet! That's exactly what happened with Defiance, and once the book was out, I had quite a fight to try and purchase it somewhere, just the epub file to read it on my android tablet... I have a huge rant about device-centric websites for books, and how that's simply beyond irritating for me, but I'll save it for some other day!

Now, onto the book itself! First compliment for this book? It got me out of my reading slump! I'm a huge bookworm, but as of late I had spent two weeks without reading any books, the previous week I had read one book to kill the 4 hours I had to wait at the train station in Valencia waiting for my AVE, and it was Saturday this week and I hadn't done any reading either! But, since I had bought Defiance on Friday before heading to work for night shift, as soon as I woke up, I decided to start reading it!

Let me tell you, it was a refreshing change from the paranormal books I had been reading as of late, no angels, no vampires, no nothing of the like! It's a fantasy mix with postapocalytpic/dystopian kinda book, and also quite unlike some of the previous female leads in other books, Rachel is not exactly your whiney teenager that you want to slap... She starts like a headstrong and rebellious girl, and ends up broken and looking for a way to live with herself, so it's quite a journey for her. The book switches between her point of view and Logans point of view, and like the characters themselves, they're different and balance each other out, complementing each other flaws and strenghts.

This is mostly a character driven plot and not a very happy book, things don't go as you want them to go, just as life itself tends to. The world of Defiance is one that progresses and we discover more of it as the characters show it to us, it's like they keep opening doors and drawing curtains for us to see. You get to know about the world as much as the characters themselves know, and you discover things as they do.

Defiance is the first book of a trilogy, and thankfully, although it leaves questions unanswered and many wounds unhealed, it doesn't end with a massive cliffhanger, cause frankly, I hate those! And they're particularly horrible when you have to wait for a full year to get the next book! According to Mrs Redwine herself, the next book will come out Fall 2013... 

So in the meantime, do check it out, and let me know what you think!