Witty, one-of-a-kind imaginative cupcake designs using candies from the local convenience store.

America's favorite food photography team, responsible for the covers of America's top magazines, shows how to create funny, scary, and sophisticated masterpieces, using a zipper lock bag and common candies and snack items.With these easy-to-follow techniques, even the most kitchen-challenged cooks can

• raise a big-top circus cupcake tier for a kid's birthday
• plant candy vegetables on Oreo earth cupcakes for a garden party
• trot out a line of confectionery "pupcakes" for a dog fancier
• serve sausage and pepperoni pizza cupcakes for April Fool's Day
• bewitch trick-or-treaters with chilly ghost chocolate cupcakes
• create holidays on icing with turkey cupcake place cards, a white cupcake Christmas wreath, and Easter egg cupcakes

No baking skills or fancy pastry equipment is required. Spotting the familiar items in the hundreds of brilliant photos is at least half the fun....

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In the meantime I had my dream of moon-magic and sea-palaces and day by day I lived more in another dimension where I had that which, I knew I should never have on earth, and I was very happy.

Dion Fortune was the pen-name of Violet Firth, one of the most luminous and striking personalities of the twentieth century, Womanhood's answer to Aleister Crowley, and quite possibly the Shakti of the Age.
This new, revised, expanded and beautifully-written edition tells the full story of a woman who hid behind a veil of secrecy and who became a cult figure in the years after her death in 1946. A brilliant writer and pioneer psychologist her whole life was devoted to living out an eternal Myth in a story that can be told in terms of Virgins and Dragons, Moons and Oceans, and the spirit of the land itself.
As a powerful psychic and medium, obsessed with the study and practise of Magic, and a high-grade initiate within the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, her career was never entirely in this world, and her companions not always human. In her own eyes at least she was a Priestess, a channel for the Great Goddess, an exponent of the time-lost Mysteries of Women long before the present generations of feminists and goddess-worshippers were even born.
From her birth in Llandudno, through her years in the drowned lands of Somerset, Alan Richardson unfolds the luminous and very moving patterns of her life: her early career as a psychoanalyst, her nervous breakdown, her time as a Land Girl and her developing psychism; her memories of past lives on Atlantis and relationships with Inner Plane beings who have an evolutionary interest in our world; her romance with a man she believed to be non-human and her fraught marriage to a doctor whom everyone knew as Merlin; the foundation of her own group devoted to bringing through the Western Mysteries at a time when few people knew that there was such a thing; her occult battles against the Nazis and fellow magicians - and the start of her long, hard, and always stormy journey into the Otherworld, toward the heart of the Goddess that she saw as sleeping within the Earth itself, and who needed awakening ......

Aleister Crowley and Dion Fortune were two of the most controversial and powerful occultists of the 20th century. Crowley was regarded by many as a creature of the night, albeit one whose soul was streaked with brilliance; Fortune was viewed as one of the Shining Ones, who nevertheless wrestled with her own darkness. Between them they produced some of the best books on magick ever written, and their influence upon contemporary magicians has been profound.

Written by occult scholar Alan Richardson, this unusual and provocative book draws upon unpublished material to reveal little-known aspects of Crowley and Fortune’s relationship, and their role as harbingers of sweeping cultural changes—foreshadowing the women’s movement, the sexual revolution, and 1960s counterculture—as well as other surprising influences upon our present culture. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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