tickle tour at Handmade Cooperative

13 months ago, I took over as editor at Handmade Cooperative, a select group of 70 small independent businesses who handmake gifts and clothing for kids. I have had an incredible year leading this group and have thoroughly enjoyed exploring these awesome businesses and sourcing and negotiating exposure for them. In some ways, my schedule with the Coop has meant less time for my own business ~ as evidenced by the reduction in blog posts, for example ~ however I believe that the professionalism of kaetoo, as well as my skills in blogging and online community management have blossomed.

A big part of Handmade Cooperative is the fun activities with like-minded artisans. Our most recent task, which took place last week, was a tickle tour. We each chose a project from the most recent edition of the creative lifestyle magazine, tickle the imagination, and shared our "real world" interpretations in a loop tour on Facebook.

If you know me, you know that (1) I can't follow a recipe and (2) I'm not brilliant at cooking sweet food. But my husband does love chocolate cake! So, with Miss 4 and Master 1 helping out, I set to work to bake the cake. It's meant to look like this:

It took two days.

My cake turned out to be a triple chocolate cream nougat cake made with 70% cocoa dark chocolate - it's chocolate pastry filled with chocolate tart, covered with chocolate ganache, covered with cream nougat. It looks nothing like it was meant to.

But it was SO GOOD! Nougat is better than meringue anyway...

Search the hashtag #tickletour on Facebook and Instagram to see the other projects.
Grab the recipe and your own copy of tickle (digital or in print) right here.

And, yeah, if you're missing the blog posts, I will try to do better. You can always stalk me through 
Facebook and Instagram to see what the kids and I are up to.