Jenny Quattlebaum

What better reason to celebrate in a pastry way than with Macarons? The air is cooler, Im feeling frisky in the kitchen, and Thanksgiving brings on the need to feed everyone!

I figured that since I’d never worked with fresh cranberries, what better time to try it out than with a nice tangy curd to go in Macarons?

I googled, and found the following recipe, in the Houston Chronicle, by Peggy Grodinsky.

Cranberry Curd
Adapted from Nigella Lawsons How to Be a Domestic Goddess.  (You can tell because of the immediate use of “gorgeous”)

I’ve sandwiched this gorgeous magenta curd between layers of cake, slathered it on a toasted English muffin and given jars of it as gifts. Thats if I can manage to stop from eating the entire batch myself with a spoon.

5 cups cranberries
1/2 cup freshly squeezed orange juice
7 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 2/3 cups sugar
6 large eggs, lightly beaten
Combine the cranberries, juice and 1/2 cup water in a saucepan. Cook over low heat until the cranberries pop, about 10 minutes. Press through a fine-meshed sieve or pass through a mouli. Discard solids.

Return the purée to the saucepan. Add the butter and sugar, melting gently. Stir a little of the warm cranberry mixture into the eggs; this is tempering to prevent their scrambling. Pour the warmed eggs into the purée. Cook over low heat, stirring constantly with a wooden spoon, until the mixture thickens somewhat and coats the back of a spoon, about 10 minutes. Strain the mixture through a fine-mesh sieve. Pour into 5 half-pint jars. Cool and refrigerate.

Makes 5 half-pint jars.

The Macarons were a little bit more of a Frankenstein effort-being a blend of what I’ve learned from a Sur La Table class and tips from the book,  Macarons: Authentic French Cookie Recipes from the Macaron Cafe by Cecile Cannone.

I threw in a pinch of cinnamon and some orange extract to the batter. This gave the cookies the citrus flavor I love in the cran-orange combos in muffins, scones, and a few cocktails.

I’ve captured a few moments from the process with tips that help me improve my Macarons a little more each time I bake them. Someday, they’ll be so photogenic. Hopefully that will be around the same time I am perfecting my food styling skills.

I am too lazy to embed a slide show right now, so check it out HERE.

This was funny. I was tickled by it so much, I had to show the cooking demonstration lady. She was mildly embarrassed on behalf of the store.

It’s got to be hard to be a creative person in a upper-level management, goal-setting, powerful position, and be saddled with a highly creative spirit. I’m glad to not be you.

I’ve found that while designing things for a living, you develop a thick skin, and if you do it for any respectable amount of money, you probably welcome negative feedback with gusto that would puzzle most people. You value the feedback that will put you THAT much closer to the desired outcome to meet the clients goals, and takes a few more options OFF the table.  I enjoy a good creative brainstorm as much as the next humble (sellout) graphic designer/art director/creative director/logo design gimp.

BUT. There’s always a butt.

I just want to make a quick list of why you should trust a designer:

1. We’re sponges. We drive down the street, browse through the web, and pore over design books, observant of shapes that we always see, shapes we never see, and logos that make us want to put it on a t-shirt because it is so tragically cute/trite. We surf stock photo sites and often (almost always) get distracted by interesting shapes, colors and glassy reflections on icon collections that can be downloaded by the thousands. We click through fancy spiraly dotted generic shapes that stink of generic pharmaceutical branding. Globes. By. The. Eleventy. BILLION.

And, sometimes we stare at the ones that have impact, uniqueness and clever irony, then pick apart WHY we like it.  I am probably a poser by even mentioning Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, but after we visually taste thousands of marks, typefaces (I SO wish I was more of a type connoisseur), colors, dimensional effects, and branding collections, we just know when we see something that works.

2. The jokes. There are cliche paths of thought that account executives, marketing managers and business owners start down, and they very often involve some of the following statements and questions.  Every time these words are uttered, somewhere a creative gasps/guffaws/falls down dead:
a. We want something 3D.
b. How about a globe?
c. My child sketched something that I would like you to see. (I haven’t seen this one for a while, but the average quality of my client base has recently improved, so I am hoping this becomes a more distant memory for me.)
d. Can you make it look like it’s moving?
e. I showed it around the office and bla, bla, bla, and  bla all saw it and said, “Blahbeddy blah blah booo bah duh.” They thought you might be able to use something from this Microsoft office document filled with sketchy sketches.

3. We ask questions. Anyone who is at the beginning of a brand is to make sure to know everything about it, except what it looks like.

How is it supposed to make people feel about your company?

Who will it represent? What will it represent? (be more adventurous than”strong”, “dependable”and “capable” – these are the foundation items, though I look forward to designing a logo for a weak, disorganized and understaffed company someday.)
Who has to use it, and how will it pair with coordinating/subordinate/parent brands?

Is there a color that it should NOT be?

Would future acquisitions rule out any iconic representation of your current products/services that would render your logo outdated and underinformative?

If you have a logo already, is it failing you? Why?

Do you already have brand equity with your customer base?  Would they wander around in aimless circles and never find you again if you changed your logo? Do you have a printed collateral collection that would need to be exhausted before a branding change? Clients with existing collateral are often a best case scenario, because that gives a client time to go through the logo selection process and to set a timeline to a brand launch.  It’s tough to hear “We ran out of brochures and we want a new logo real-quick so that we can print new ones” WHOA. Wait – what?”

The next time you see someone getting creative with an Microsoft Application, jump in and offer them the corporate spa treatment of working with a designer (in-house, outside, out-sourced) so that their creativity can be, ah, put to better use.

I’ll ice this cake with all that needs to be said about suggestions on photography. Thanks.

While indulging in my mid-century eye candy of Mad Men a few days ago, I realized how easy it seemed back in the Golden Age of advertising. The agencies were a fast paced frenzy of creativity, where the ones with the ideas (with assorted creative client exceptions) were actually the talented folks working at the agency. Some of the largest concerns were client fears of being too “brash” or “sexually charged” with their advertising or having the big agency superpower “standing in the hall” when you’d leave a pitch.

Now, the stimuli fly around our heads, multiplying with blinding speed. Now people, who may or may not be qualified, can make up their own niche media specialties. Popping into and out of the market, they sell their intangible wares, fabricating a company’s need for social media with no thought put towards the consequences of the unmoderated spread of company information and ideas.

Social media that is not handled with foresight and concrete objectives leads to public relations skid marks that linger indefinitely all over the internet. The value on all of these different diggs and tweets and facebook fandoms add to the beige hodgepodge of today’s branding.
Dear Client: Let’s decide if you need it first.

Internally, companies have branding hemorrhages every day, with ambitious employees wielding the blunt-object weapon of design – PowerPoint. Meanwhile, all we can do on the marketing services side is to triage these documents and make them as fool-proof as possible. It’s like crack – they’re going to get it somewhere.
Dear Client: Let us help you.  We can clean it up in a jiffy.

I occasionally do long for the days when the only people with the markers and black board had the ideas, and if the client was too conservative, the creative director could storm out of the room and kick the client out of the building. Then I gaze lovingly at my iPhone and change my mind. I’ll just think 50 years forward when the marketing professionals of the future reminisce about these early Facebook days and chuckle to themselves. I am sure they’ll be dealing with larger issues by then.

Last night, I was knitting in my my home office haven, my escape from the incessant din of the World Cup blaring in the living room. I spent a little idle time on Bravo, watching even the commercials (I don’t have a DVR in the office). And then I see a preview for “Work of Art: The Next Great Artist“.

I was thinking, “Whoo! Back in the day, I was artsy…Hmmm… Even now, I sport hair that the artsy folk might refer to as “Avant Garde”. Maybe I could score a spot on that show. I have artsy GLASSES that make me…more creative. Surely that counts for something.

Maybe I am cynical, judgmental, or just over it, but I browsed through the show photos, and some of the profiles of artists (who seem to have education worth far more than their possible career-funded vocations will ever justify) and I just started to scowl in my mind. I began to envision what today’s “Art Crowd” would look like. I pictured the folks on Beetlejuice blah-blah-blah-ing, and then my lip started to curl at the thought.

It was a nice brief idea to think I might have a shot on that show, but I may flatter myself. If it were something with a crafty-survival-DIY-Papier-mâché-hot-glue-war feel, I might be more of a power player. Until then, I am going to remain a practical capitalist who enjoys the everyday challenge of making a client’s everyday product shine like the greatest thing since sliced bread.

I don’t think that I will be too disappointed that I can’t cover an entire trade show booth with bleached beef tripe to make a statement.

UPDATE:  Here is an interesting take on the whole circus – don’t worry, it might just cement everything that you might have suspected happens on reality shows.  My fave – “Now make it a complete sentence…”

“Gossip” – Excerpt from This American Life on NPR

I wish there was a game show where the objective was to locate assorted vector logos on the Internet. I would be a big money winner.

From a link I saw @tferris (author of the 4 Hour Work Week) post on twitter: Visualizations on the usefulness (or non-helpfulness) of assorted elixirs and supplements. I love infographics.

My favorite viking chef, Gordon Ramsay, came to to the U.S., and visited with the friendly faces in Oklahoma to go noodling.  I’ve watched this episode a couple of times.

I tried out this recipe tonight. It was zingy, but good–using tilapia was a bit of a downer because it doesn’t have the density that the catfish has, but it still had the flavor.  The trick seems to be the deglazing when you throw the splash of white wine while it’s cooking. I am going to attempt again later this week with a more substantial cut of fish.

Hi folks – I offed the old jennyquattlebaum.com.  This is a much more entertaining venue for jennyquattlebaum.com.  It puts my work out, I can change the look around without having to design the new one myself every time, and it keeps me on my toes! Hope you enjoy.