A Whirlwind Weekend of Creativity

It's been a busy weekend for me..... with lots of creativity, combined with general house keeping, being with the kids, running errands, going out Friday night with my friends, etc.


Right now my world seems to be revolving around soap making. It's become almost an obsession for me. And now that I've made a few batches that have turned out seemingly perfectly, it was time to try something new.


I have made a batch of cucumber soap! Here is what you start with:



And then you give it a whirl with your favorite slicer and dicer.

Until it looks like this:

And here is what the soap looks like before it gets poured into the molds.

This went so well, that I thought I would try making some soap from some blueberry juice.

But oh no! When you add the lye to blueberry juice, it turns a shocking orange color. Oh well, I thought. I'm sure I'll come up with some clever title that will make the soap seem really appealing.

This soap making was done on Saturday night, after the kids had gone to bed. Sunday afternoon, I decided to try what is called the French Milling Process. It is also referred to as Hand Milling, but I think the first name sounds much more romantic.

My daughter has been asking me for weeks to let her help me with making soap. This of course is not an option because of the lye involved. However, I was willing to let her help me out here.

I decided to remake soap using heather, the national flower of Norway. Coincidentally enough, there was a big heather bush by my neighbors driveway - I stole a bit from there (I don't think he checks out this blog at all). The thought was that if this soap was a success, I would make the effort to do a bit of mountain hiking and gather some heather where no one would miss it.

It became my daughter's job to remove the small flowers from the even smaller branches.

In the meantime, I would grate some of the soap I had made previously and begin the remelting process.

Now, I'd only seen the French Milling procedure preformed once on YouTube. The woman there used double zip-lock bags and simply tossed the soap into the boiling water. I did not have any zip-lock bags, but simply thought 'It can't be any harder than melting chocolate. I'll simply use the same method.'

In the meantime my daughter dutifully continues her work. She's an interesting girl. Sometimes she's like many 5 year olds and works for a few minutes and then wants to go back to playing. Today however she worked at this for over 20 minutes, and never complained once.

Here's her at the beginning of her job:

And her she is having completed her work. Even I, who expect wonderous things from my children was really impressed.

So the thing that I learned about using the French Milling process is that it is NOT like melting chocolate. It takes a very long time. I have since found out that it can easily take over a full hour for the soap to melt, as did mine. But in the meantime I vaccuumed the floors, put the laundry away and cleaned up my workspace on the dining room table that my husband has been after me for days to get done.

But the soap finally melted, though it never did reach a liquid stage. Instead it became almost like a candy/toffee mixture and I in my great impatience just wanted to get things done. So I added a few drops of natural cherry coloring that was sent to me from Canada a number of years ago. Then I added some of the heather flowers.

Then I started to put the soap back into a mold. I had never done this before. In addition the soap was clearly a different consistency than it is when first made. So I found myself pushing and squishing it into all the corners of the plastic container.

I must admit I was quite unsatisfied with this idea of mine. In a desperate attempt to find an unplanned solution, I took out my muffin tins and lined them with cupcake holders. And I made little soap candies.

Very and so totally cool.

After I washed and cleaned up that mess, I saw I had a little bit more than an hour before Hubby came home from work (weekend shifts.... blah!). So I decided to hunker down and get the last of the work done, so that my evening would be free.

The soap that I made on Saturday night would come out of their molds. I was excited to see what would happen to the colors of the cucumber and blueberries during the chemical process.

Difficult to see here, above, but the blueberry soap had turned weird terricotta color. I'm still concidering what to do with this.... if there's any way to fix it, add to it, etc. Or perhaps our family will have a lot of soap that doesn't really look so great.

On the other hand, the cucumber soap turned out fantastically! A beautiful light yellow/green color with dark green specks. This really thrilled me and I plan to make more as soon as possible.

Now the picture below does not do justice to the soap. This is the cucumber soap and the color is not showing through as nicely as it is in real life.

And wouldn't you know that the blueberry soap looks much better after being photographed that it does in reality. In real life it's much more of a grey color.

So this is where I am in my journey of soap making. Next week I plan on making more cucumber soap.... that was so cool. And coffee soap. Look forward to updating....

My First Soap

It's not a perfect picture (taken with my cell phone), but this is the result of my first attempt at making soap..... creamy, white bars of soap made almost entirely from olive oil.

I'm so impressed with myself that I'm giggling like a little girl.

Because I needed to don rubber gloves, and because my cell phone is still very new and cool and I did not want it to get wrecked by any traces of caustic substances, I didn't take any pictures after this.

But...... These two blocks have now been sliced into 19 bars of soap, and have been packed away in a dark place. I will have to wait 4 weeks before I can use them.... or give them to friends. They will need this time to finish their chemical reactions and have a soft enough ph-balance to use.

I'm looking forward to it....

Mother Daughter Bake Off

So last week I was quite sick, and was home for the week. And since my daughter attends the same day care that I work at, it was just easier to keep her home than get dressed and go out of the house twice a day to both deliver and collect her. (My husband was working a split shift that week, and was unable to help with either of these, which would have made all the difference).

Towards the end of the week, I was starting to feel better. And my daughter was going nuts. She'd watched a lot of tv. She'd played every computer girl-game known to man. She'd painted and drawn so many pictures that the kitchen and living room walls were covered. She had pearled and beaded, built sculptures with Lego, played with her dolls and gone outside to take pictures with her camera (we'll chat about that later) until she just could not do these things any more.

Finally, she was bored.

So I asked her if she wanted to make cup cakes from scratch. Not from a package.

I didn't need to ask her twice.

Before going further, do realize that this is NOT a food blog. You will NOT find professionally taken pictures here. If you want that, why not visit two of my favorite food blogs:

The Pioneerwoman Cooks: http://thepioneerwoman.com/cooking/

and

Everybody Likes Sandwiches: http://everybodylikessandwiches.blogspot.com/

In the meantime, this is the story of my day with my daughter.


First, I don't normally use recipes when I cook food. I'm more of what you would call an intuitive chef. However, I do know where my boundaries lie.... usually anything that comes after dinner and involves dessert. This would include cupcakes.

My recipe came from a Norwegian recipe book pictured below. spis drikk lev, which translates as eat drink liv.



Oh yes, and before I get sued, I should say that this book was created and put together by Fran Ward, to whom I am eternally grateful for. Her hard, industrious work will be an inspiration to me for many years to come.


The recipe chose is called SPICED CUPCAKES, found on page 32, as seen below.



Unlike most North American recipes, the ingredients are measured out in weight.


First, 250 grams of flour are tossed into a bowl of your choice.



Next, 2 teaspoons of baking powder.

And then 175 grams of brown sugar. Mine was quite hard since I had not used it for quite some time (perhaps close to a year?) and I needed to spend a lot of time breaking it apart with a fork.

Next go the spices: .25 teaspon of cinnamon and .25 teaspoon of freshlly ground nutmeg. I ignored the instructions here. First, I added a lot more spices (Norwegians are NOT known for spicing up their foods) and added ginger as well. Secondly, I doubt I will ever in my life have a fresh nutmeg to ground, so dried powder had to suffice.

In the meantime, my daughter needed a job to do, so that she could rightfully say that she made the cupcakes with a little help from me. Thus I gave her the most important job: chopping up two bananas into tiny pieces.

We just won't tell anyone that after 4 minutes she thought that this was not fun any more and wanted me to finish the job she started.

I chopped up the apple needed.

As for the liquid ingredients, one needs to whip together: 1 deciliter (100 ml) of milk, one egg and 3 tablespoons of peanut oil (I only had raps oil).

Then you pour the mixture into your dry ingredients:

And mix it together until it is nice and thick like this:

Then you put in all the chopped up fruit:

And mix these until the batter looks like this:

Then you fill up the cup cake tins.....

And give the bowl to your daughter who is eternally grateful because she has NOT had ANY fun this week.

And ignore her when she's still working on it 15 minutes later.

Now, as the cup cakes were baking, the house filled with a wonderful smell that reminded me of autumn: apples, spices, thick breads.... Mmmmmm......

Now when the cup cakes came out of the oven, they certainly looked a lot different than what was in the book...

One cannot see it from the picture below, but they really did look a lot different.

But they tasted wonderfully. I would definitely make these again any time soon. Even if my daughter refuses to help me chop up bananas.

My New Model

This is my new model, BM. I am very grateful that she has said yes to this project because for the first, she has a great jaw line. Just look how it gracefully slopes upward to the ear. Almost like a Greek sculpture.... Her complexion is also perfect, as most truly Norwegian skin is.


The second reason as to why I am grateful is because I have no money and can't afford to pay someone who looks as nice as her.

However, I am not allowed to say anything more about her. That was part of the deal: no full facial pictures, and no details about her on the internet. The truth is she has an important job and it's not in her best interest to have herself displayed in a public way. I can say that she works for the government, but she's not a spy. She's not a senator either. (Or a mayor, or councel woman).

Her job covers a lot of different areas in Norwegian life. For some, she helps to bring closure to years of pain. But she's not a priest or a pastor. Others would rather never see her again, feeling that she has ended their lives. This however is the price she must pay to do the kind of work she does. I don't think she takes it too personally.

Her work involves a lot of different types of knowledge that has taken years to aquire: economic, legal, social, religious, ethical, and anthropological as well. But she is not an expert in any of these areas.

Finally, one would think that her job would make her very stuck up, stuffy and pretencious. However, she is one of the most lively people I know of, perhaps THE most lively person I know right now in my life. So we now know that she is not a docor.

She always has a smile on her face, almost always can see the humor in any situation. She almost always has a kind word to say about people, even to those who have not been particularily kind to her.

And when I brought up the idea, wondering if she would perhaps be willing to do this for me (I had expected her to turn me down immediately) she immediately jumped at the chance. While she has not said this to me, I think that she saw this as an oppurtunity to do something she would not otherwise get a chance to do.... another item she can write on her list of 'Things I Have Done During This Life.'

In any case, it has been a lot of fun to work with her in this way and it seems like both of us are looking forward to taking lots of pictures together in the future.

Saturday Mornings at My House

Well, not all our weekends are like this.

Most of the time one or both of us is working on somthing.

At the cabin working....

Or Viking Man has a work weekend...

Or Viking Man is working overtime....

Or I have a long list to complete and have the kids tagging along, doing their very best to not let boredom get the better of them....

But this weekend is not like this.

And life is good.

An Enlightening Experience

A few weeks ago I purchased and then received a light tent. This has completely changed the way I take photos. And I've learned one major thing about myself - I am (or was) scared of light.


Now, I've never been scared of the darkness. Even as a child when I was scared of alligators under my bed (I had a deep blue carpet.... thoughts of sharks appeared later), but this had nothing to do with the dark. When it was time to go to bed, I was able to convince myself that they too were sleeping.


But during the day getting to my room would involve running down the hallway at full speed, making a sharp 90 degree turn at the end of that hallway, and the flinging myself through the air until I landed safely on my bed which was in the middle of my room.


However I digress.....


The first round of photographs I took were a great improvement over those that I took before I had the light tent. However, many members of the European Street Team I know and love were telling me that they were not light enough.


This involved a second round of photography. When this was done, I touched up my photos using my favorite (free) tool: Picasa3. I lightened them so much that I thought they looked unreal. However, my team members cheered me with great energy, saying I had finally got it right.

Had I really? I thought my pictures looked like they were almost touched by the hands of God, light cascading from above.

But apparently there are many who are not agreed with me. The traffic in my stores has soared to almost 3 times what it was before.

And I'm getting hearted. By others than my team members. That too has not happened for quite some time.

So once again I've learned that I do not see the world quite as my fellow man does. Why this surprises me is another good question as I had resigned myself to the fact that I live in a slightly altered universe than many - and feel quite at home here.

Still, I'm starting to get use to the changes, to stretching the walls of my security box. Starting to think: Yeah - that is a really cool picture.