Sweet Insta-Inspiration

Kicking off this sunny summer Monday with the fabulously frosted layer cake manicure I did this weekend, inspired by a recent online rabbit hole I fell into of over-the-top cake decorating accounts on Instagram.  I can bake fairly well (however, pie crust as delicious as my mother’s will forever elude me) but I can’t decorate for shit – just ask the TURQUOISE, hideously malformed, liquid fondant-covered abominations I once optimistically called tea cakes, or the batches upon batches of Christmas cookies I gave up on flooding and just started adding gargantuan green frosted genitalia to.  Happened just about every year like clockwork until I FINALLY figured out that I’m utter crap at the decorating side of baking, and I should just stop.

But I can admire other bakery artists’ incredible work, like manvscakes, COCHOBAKE and brittanymaycakes, whose sweet, striped creations – heavy on the vibrant hues and whimsical, outlandish toppers – were the inspiration for these nails.  I love the more-is-more-is-more approach to the bakery arts, especially all of the brights at play in these fun cakes, a technique (you know, over-the-topness) that transfers pretty darn well to the lacquered arts. 😉  Hoping for sweet weeks for all of you, friends, filled with as much inspiration and colour as these cakes and these nails.

Valentine’s Day Chocolates

Dark chocolate (KB Shimmer’s holographic brown, Oh My Ganache) dripping with ooey gooey caramel (Whimsical Ideas by Pam’s Caramellow.)  Or possibly peanut butter.  Pick your Valentine’s Day poison!  Unless of course you’re allergic to peanuts, in which case the peanut butter is actual poison, so perhaps best to stick with the caramel?  Well, no matter how you’re celebrating or what you’re eating, Happy Valentine’s Day, friends!

Caramel Apple

And a Whimsical one at that, thanks to the two Whimsies I used in this manicure, toffee-coloured Caramellow and un-adorned red, Starbucks Holiday Cup.  Cremes both, these lush polishes not only provide the perfect base for all manner of nail art, but they also work beautifully as detail polishes – never have my drips turned out so well, a nice little touch I credit to Caramellow, which is as beautiful and glossy as its namesake would suggest.  Tasty!

Say My Name Three Times

Or “Say my name, say my name (say my name)” in the musical parlance of Destiny’s Child.  Because you just know they’re playing a horrible Muzak version of a Beyonce song in the Waiting Room of the Dead.  On repeat.  It’s actually just a playlist of one.

In case none of that made sense, here is a Beetlejuice-inspired manicure.  He wears a lot of black and white stripes and has green hair.  Anything that’s not striped is purple. And in order to get him to appear (and disappear) you have to say his name three times.  Why? Not a clue.  But I went with the lame Beyonce joke, because how could I not?

Foot Candy

No, I have not changed the focus of this blog to foot fetishism…yet.  Rather, I received a rather awesome pair of ice cream-style ballet flats for Christmas (generous gift-giver: me!) that were just begging for a sweet matching mani, and who am I to deny my shoes when they’re calling out for love?

This manicure is your basic drippy waffle cone design, but the shoes are a different matter altogether. Available solely (heh) through Shoe Bakery, these flats, and their many gorgeous high-heeled cousins, are handmade, custom made and beautifully unique – edible-looking, wearable works of art that are now inspiring this edible-looking, wearable work of nail art.  I can’t wait to give these guys a proper workout come the spring and summer – just in time for ice cream season.

To Bee or Not to Bee

A honeybee, that is! And a little nail art inspired by the colour yellow, which just so happens to be the next colour in the rather inadvertent rainbow of manicures I have done this week, starting with yesterday’s swatch of a juicy red jelly and continuing today with some coral-hued, knit-type nail art. Okay, so there’s a lot of blue in these nails, too, but I ask you, what else do you pair with gently buzzing honeybees other than sky blue (to say nothing of Pooh’s hunny pot on my thumb, a bit of crossover nail art from the Disney files!)

Hunny Bun

Winnie the Pooh nails are nothing new around here, nor are manicures that look like food, but what about ones that combine just a little bit of both? For this sticky, drippy manicure inspired by the chubby little cubby all stuffed with fluff and his favourite snack, I topped a Pooh-coloured creme, Pure Ice’s Show Stopper, with a touch of sweater red glitter, Sally Hansen’s Complete Salon Manicure in Strawberry Shields. I then added a couple of Pooh Bear and hunny pot accent nails before daubing on some sticky-looking honey drips with Orly’s scattered gold holo, Bling. ‘Cause you just know that bear’s a messy eater, and he’s gonna get that honey everywhere. Even so, he’s quite the cutie Pooh. 😉

Colour Inside the Lines

Speaking in the most general of senses as it applies to life, I think it’s far preferable to be a colour-outside-the-lines kind of person as opposed to a colour-inside-the-lines. This world needs true innovation – not just a bunch of aging bros who think they’re Steve Jobs and consider the highest echelon of public discourse to be one in which they sell me on their nine-tiered pyramid scheme business plan to personal and financial happiness through gluten-free nutritional supplements – and so long as that behaviour stays on the right side of the law, I see no reason to get antsy with those who choose to push the boundaries.

But if we’re talking about actual colouring books, particularly MY colouring books, let it be known that I beat wholesale ass on anyone who scrawls outside the lines, even with crayons as cute as these. 😉

I Don’t Give a Damn About My Bad Reputation

Fruitcake gets such a bad rap, yeah? I mean, it’s not that I don’t know why. If you were to assume that all fruitcake is related to those 10-pound bricks of goop-covered, peel-infested door stoppers they sell at the grocery store, you’d think ill of fruitcake, too. But real fruitcake, like my family’s recipe that combines super buttery, melt-in-your-mouth cake with sliced almonds, dried fruit you actually want to eat (seriously, you’re eating turnip! PEEL! IS! TURNIP!) and num yummy maraschino cherries? How on earth could that be a bad thing? Only if you eat two loaf pans’ of the stuff over the course of about an hour, which I have absolutely never done only twice in my life. Oh hey, look at that thing behind you! *scampers away in shame, probably to eat more fruitcake.*

But as much as I love my family’s fruitcake recipe, these festive nails – my first mani of the holiday season, actually – are inspired by one of my favourite glitter toppers, Candy Lacquer’s Candy Cane Fiesta. I’ve used Candy Cane Fiesta in a quite a few manicures, and it’s proven to be remarkably versatile (I never thought I’d find a use for a Christmas polish in either berry or beachy nail art, but here we are!) but for these scrumptious looking nails, I went the full fruitcake, embracing the festive flair of Candy Cane Fiesta and emerging the other side with nails that look yummy enough to eat (or certainly yummier and more edible than the stuff they sell at the grocery store!)

Candy Appletini

Mmm mmm good is the candy appletini. And I’d know, because it was the signature drink on offer at my Halloween wedding and I drank about 10 of them (you’ll be glad to know I wasn’t one of those sad, sloshed brides, though – I powered through that day on pure adrenaline (and a lovely cheese plate that seemingly apparated out of thin air; come to think of it, where did that cheese come from?) and I suspect the alcohol just burned off the second it passed my tonsils.) Of course, those 10 cocktails led to one tremendously awkward, yet hilarious, trip to the ladies room with a friend, the two of us in near-hysterics, squished into a stall in which my dress was taking up about 80 percent of the space, and that’s a wonderful memory I wouldn’t trade for anything (not even the sugar hangover I had the next morning. Mmm mmm good is the candy appletini, but I’m pretty sure one drink contains more than your lifetime allotment of refined sugar.)