Tim Hortons Is Everywhere!!!

Remember my friend Louise had a birthday last month and I gave her a couple of signs for her Via Rail railway station? Well, I knew there was a surprise birthday party planned for a few weeks later when other friends got back from vacation but I gave her the little signs on her actual birthday to "throw her off the scent", as it were. Anyway, tonight was the party her husband had arranged for her. It was a great evening and she actually never suspected - I suppose coming a month after her real birthday made it easy for it to come as a surprise!

Anyway - knowing that tonight was the party and that, in her upcoming project she also plans on including a ubiquitous Tim Hortons, I thought I would do something along that vein for today's "better late than never" birthday. I had some Fimo modelling clay I had bought years ago but never got around to using. I have never made anything with Fimo before but thought this would be a good time to give it a try. I decided to make doughnuts, bagels, cookies and TimBits for her planned project.

I started by trying to figure out what to make the trays out of. My first try was with some Penelope cloth but that looked too much like wicker baskets. Then I bought a cheap splatter screen at Dollarama and cut out the screening, thinking I could fold the edges and form rectangular trays. I found that the edges were much too ragged and sharp to either look good, or to keep fingers safe and blood-free. Then my DH suggested I try using a metal wall patch that is used when you have a large hole in your wall board that needs to be patched. We had a couple of pieces of it in the tool room so I thought it was worth a try. I peeled off the plastic mesh that is attached to these patches. It enables it to self-stick to the wall, in preparation for using crack-filler over top of it. Then I cut a strip I thought was the appropriate width, cut this into three lengths, folded up the edges and - Bob's your uncle! - They worked like a charm! Then I cut strips of a beige tissue paper to line the trays, like they do in Tim Hortons.


Then it was time to try out my Fimo and fill the trays. I started by kneading some cream-coloured Fimo, rolling it out, and cutting out 16 cookies. Then I took half of the cookies and, using the back of my craft knife blade, I made cross-hatched lines in these, to resemble peanut butter cookies. For the other 8 cookies, I used the sharp end of a toothpick to "texturize" the top of them a bit. Then I used my pastel chalks to colour the peanut butter cookies an appropriate colour. I did the same with the remaining cookies to make them look like chocolate. Then, I rolled out some more Fimo, thicker than for the cookies, and cut out some circles for bagels, making small holes in the middle - smaller holes than if they were for doughnuts. I used my chalks again to make half of the bagels look plain, and the other half the colour of multi-grain bagels. I used a fine tip black pen to dot over the multi-grain bagels to look like seeds. Then I rolled 33 tiny Fimo balls to represent TimBits. I coloured half of them for plain Timbits, and the other half for chocolate. Then I put these into a 220F oven for 30 minutes.

While these were setting up, I decided that Louise should also have some doughnuts but I didn't want to make more Fimo ones. So, I took some Cheerios cereal and made 16 doughnuts. I left half the Cheerios in their natural state and, having mixed up some pink craft paint with equal parts of Aileen's Tacky glue, I dipped the tops into the mixture to resemble pink icing. I then mixed up half and half dark brown paint with glue and completely immersed the remaining Cheerios to look like Double Chocolate doughnuts.

When the cookies, Timbits, and bagels were removed from the oven and cooled down, I used some of the chocolate "icing" to top the chocolate cookies, then rolled the chocolate TimBits in the icing so they would look "glazed". I rolled the plain ones in a watered down tacky glue so they would also look "glazed". Then I arranged them in the trays I had prepared earlier - gluing them in place, of course. Here's how they looked as I got them ready to be gifted to Louise:


Louise seemed very pleased to receive them. I hope she'll be able to use them in her Tim Hortons. One thing that surprised me, once she had opened up the gift, was that the Cheerios that I had completely immersed in the paint/glue mixture, had shrunk as they dried. They ended up smaller than the ones with the pink icing just on top. Hmmm. Now I may have to go back and make her another set using Fimo so they won't shrink after the "icing" is applied.

So - Louise opened her cards and gifts, we all enjoyed a nice meal and, just in case you don't know about the flamingo collection Louise has accumulated over the years, here's the birthday cake her DH got for her.


Thank you for inviting us, Brian. we had a great time. Happy birthday again Louise - this is the last time this year - we promise! TTFN!