Craft Pledge 2013

With the completion of 2013 and the New Year's Party gift delivery success, my Craft Pledge 2013 is now finished and I get to post photos!

The faceybooks inspired Craft Pledge 2013 with the following post:

2013 Creative Pay-It-Forward!

The first five people to comment on this status will receive a surprise something from me, in the year ahead. It could be anything - a card, a print, a book, a photo, an invitation for a tasty cocoa... The catch? Those five people must make the same offer in their status. Three, two, one... Go

So I did. Here are the packaged fruits of my labour. 

I sent my Australian craft pledges first, because I knew I would be seeing the Americans at New Year's (Canadian friends, I do not know why, but none of you volunteered for Craft Pledge 2013). 

My plan for Craft Pledge 2013 was that for every craft I would learn/relearn a skill. So for Victor, I learnt to do colour swaping in crochet to design a cellphone holder in Horde Colours.

I found an ENORMOUS horde cross-stitch pattern, mucked about with it and came up with this. I even mocked up a tiny cardboard cellphone in the correct size so that it would fit. I super love how it looks, but I neglected to teach myself how to keep the insides from being a huge mass of yarn ends, so hopefully Victor has found some use for it. 

Tallulah saw my attempts at embroidery for the first time this decade. I now regret not doing a more exciting pattern, but at the time I was just pleased to have found a fabric that took embroidery thread well. 

With the Australian deliveries sent and received, I settled into the rest of the pledges. 

I did acrylic painting for Clara. The tiny incense cones have been called poo by one person already, but I'm still reasonably pleased with how this new medium turned out. 

I did a crochet rose for Christina, which was my first time working in crochet 3D. I really enjoy this pattern and have made SEVERAL of these suckers with odds and ends from other projects:

 http://www.mazkwok.com/2012/12/free-crochet-pattern-blooming-rose.html

The project that took the longest was this video game themed scarf. I found the symbol from Sid Meier's Alpha Centari, which has been Siard's chat icon for YEARS. I then had to design the pattern on graft paper, learn to do proper colour swapping so that it would look good from the front AND the back and then play with a BILLION different balls of yarn because what the hell crochet, you basically are the WORST at making diagonal lines. Plus scarves are actually really big!

Cheryl received an oriental ink brushwork triptych of birds and trees, but I COMPLETELY forgot to take photos of them before delivering them.

The Craft Pledge actually took me all year to complete, so I'm not planning on doing a 2014 version, but since I just learnt to knit, I can guarantee there will be more crafts in my future.

Kitchen Fails: What happened to my pies?

So I'm usually pretty good at pies. They're one of the things that my dad makes, so I've taken part in lots of pie endeavours, and I usually keep them pretty simple. I make the dough recipe that's on the Tenderflake box because it is awesome and super simple (if you're in the states and can't find any Tenderflake, then I don't know what to tell you because none of the pie crust recipes seem to work without that lovely pastry lard. Australia, your pastry lard is kept with the butter) .

Anyway, usually my pies go easy peasy awesome (we've even been recreating Australian Meat Pies here at Home Base Canada, but that's another story). But the other day I got some Saskatoon berries and some currants and decided that I would just make pies with those and that it would be fine.

Guys, it was not actually fine.

First off, I somehow screwed up the dough. This was pretty much just the situation of me making the dough too dry and then FOR SOME REASON refusing to add more water, even though I knew it was too dry. Being stubborn is usually one of my strengths, but sometimes it means I refuse to add more water to dough that I know needs it. So yes, there was that to start, which meant that the dough was already giving me a bit of a headache.

Now, I figured that currants were not going to be the same as blueberries or raspberries, which is what I usually work with. So I looked them up on the internet. I knew they weren't as sweet, so I wanted to make sure I didn't screw it up.

The internet recipe said to cover the berries with sugar before plopping them into the pastry shells, so that's what I did. Usually I just pour the sugar over the berries once I've measured them into the pastrified pie pan, but whatever. This was a new recipe and I didn't want my pies to be too tart.

Then I topped off the pies and popped them into the oven.

Then I cleaned my bowls. And realized that ALL OF MY SUGAR had stuck to the sides of my white bowl, because the berries had been freshly cleaned and all damp. Yep, all of that sugar, not in the pies.

And yes, if you were wondering, currants are WAY tarter than blueberries. All I can say is, thank god for ice cream.

Cthulhu Pie

Have you seen the picture of the Cthulhu Pie? (There's a joke in there somewhere: "Have you seen this pie?" "No, is it new?" "No, it's an Old One" hahaha.)

I saw it, and then had the strange experience, which almost never happens to me on the internet, of looking at something awesome and saying "hang on a minute, I think I can make that".

Conveniently, I was also going to Harvest Noir (a picnic flashmob where we all dress SUPER FANCY and ALL IN BLACK and eat local food in neato Ottawa locations) with the Ottawa Steampunk society and if that isn't a perfect situation to make and consume Cthulhu pie well I don't know what is. (I mean, we play a lot of Arkham Horror, so it isn't like my life is short on opportunities to add some Lovecraftian edibles to my life, but I did need something to bring to the picnic)

Guys, if any of you make pies, this is not actually tricky AT ALL. Which I wasn't sure of when I started, so I made two pies, but waited until the first one was baked before starting the second pie JUST IN CASE. Also I made them four days in advance because I still needed to make bread for the picnic and ALSO also there was the possibility I was going to have to start all over (which is why I bought two boxes of the lard/shortening). But it all turned out really well AND they tasted good, so double win!

I made the recipe for pie crust on the Tenderflake box, because I love that recipe and it is easy and I know the pastry dough it produces is easy to work with.  This time, I was super careful about not making it too dry (unlike last time). I also decided to make blueberry pie instead of trying the cherries from the photograph because I know what I'm doing when it comes to blueberries and I wanted to use something familiar (unlike last time). I also didn't do any of the strange berry prep things that books seem to think are a good idea and just poured the corn starch and sugar right onto the berries once they were in the pie (again, unlike last time. God last time did not turn out well.) I also avoided using the frozen berries I'd bought and used the nice ones from our local market, but that was mainly because we're supposed to be using local produce and I'm not entirely sure "Canada" counts as local when the country is as huge as it is.

I tragically did not have a krinkle cut cookie cutter or pastry cutter or whatever they used to get that nice edging, and also forgot to buy one on three separate occasions. My lovely boyfriend picked me this up to use instead.

I admit that I was skeptical, but it actually turned out just fine.

So I layered the tentacles all over the pie and shaped the head with some more blueberries. The eyes turned out to be really simple to do, I just wrapped a triangular strip of dough around a berry and then threw the whole thing in the oven at the temperatures suggested by The Joy of Cooking for berry pies (450 F for ten minutes, 350 F for 35-40 minutes until Golden Brown). I even did the thing I Never Do and brushed it with milk so that it would turn out all pretty and browned.

Guys, I love how these pies turned out. Look at that Old One, just hanging out in my oven, dreaming his dreams of destruction.

I ended up with two pretty distinct Ancients, Mr. Squinty and Bright Eyes.


Then I popped them both in ziplock bags and just hoped they'd maintain their awesomeness while hanging out in my fridge. I also hoped they wouldn't destroy everything else in my fridge. And then, on Saturday, I took them out into the wild. Turns out blueberry Cthulhu pie survives in a fridge for a couple of days Just Fine. The nice part is these guys are easy enough that they may be appearing at future parties from now on. ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn (1)

Kitchen Fails: People Lie

Kitchen Fails: Never listen to people who cook when they casually tell you an easy recipe, they are lying

Yes, that title sounds like a bold statement, but hear me out. I don't think they are lying On Purpose. I don't think they are maliciously looking at you and telling you recipes missing key ingredients and then cackling to themselves. At least, none of my people are doing that. If the people giving you recipes are doing that they are jerks and should just tell you that they don't want to share. Also, you should stop asking them for recipes.

Nono, people who cook will tell you recipes in shorthand and blithely neglect the fact that you will Follow Their Directions but probably not know to also do x, y and z which they know to do but which you don't because Kitchen is hard.

This happens to me. This happened to me RECENTLY.

I bought this awesome ginger-orange sauce mix thing from a guy at a booth at a local fair. It smelled great. The sample tasted great. The recipe the seller at the booth gave me sounded wonderful and easy.

Take fish. Rub mix on fish. Put fish on couscous in a foil packet in oven, fish juices will cook couscous and VOILA. FOOD!

I already knew that Cooking People Lie, so I looked up the recipe online as well. This jived with what Selling/Cooking Guy At Booth told me. I also added some cherry tomatoes and some spring onions because they looked good and I am not actually BAD at kitchen.

Guys, I do not know what type of magical couscous and/or fish these people were talking about, but couscous does NOT cook itself in the oven in fish juices. It stays hard. And a little crunchy. This recipe only works if a) you cook the couscous first by following the directions on the box (remember to read those! See third post. They don't usually lie to you, although you can modify them later. I'm impatient, see all my kitchen posts, so I just add some hot water, and it is usually enough. ) or b) you know what the hell magic steps that guy was leaving out. Maybe there's a really juicy fish? I dunno. It is also possible that he did not think I would try this with uncooked couscous because that would be crazy and I misunderstood?

So yes, don't trust those cooking folk! Unless they've taken into consideration the fact that you need some extra steps spelled out, in which case thank them because remembering to tell people steps you take for granted is hard.

Kitchen Fails: Read the $&%@)& Instructions Right

Kitchen Fails: When you should really pay more attention to the cooking instructions

I like making muffins. It is one of my favourite things to make. So when my friend made these great Bran Muffins, and I discovered it was actually from the instructions ON THE BRAN BOX, I was in heaven. It had molasses! I love molasses. It had raisins. I love raisins! It did not and should never have chocolate chips, which I learned from experience by trying it, but that was an honest mistake and not the point of this post and really who would have expected chocolate chips to go poorly in a muffin? Not me!

So I mixed up the muffin batter, remembering what my mother told me to not overwork it and popped it in the oven. The box said 200 degrees C (390 F), so I put the oven at 200 and carried merrily on. And the muffins did not rise. They looked... sad. And not fluffy. And at 18 minutes I realized that my oven was in F and that I had put them on at 200 degrees F and that I had THOUGHT that seemed low but had just reasoned that bran muffins were weird and not bothered to read the instructions properly because come on, how hard was it to get the heat right on the oven?

Too hard for me that evening.

Luckily when I casually left the muffins in the oven at a higher heat for a bit longer they rallied and were totally tolerable. And the next batch was awesome (or possibly a little bit burnt, muffins are tricky. But also pretty hardy, thank goodness. They are like the aloe plants of the baking world).

Kitchen Fails: Yeast is a living organism

I love to bake bread. My dad's been making homemade bread for as long as I can remember, and one of my favourite things in the world is to happily feast on think trenchers of fluffy white bread covered in butter. Fresh bread doesn't last very long near me.

I have a healthy scorn of bread machines, but the prospect of only bought bread, no matter how lovely, was too tragic to face. So I was pleasantly surprised when I moved out on my own and realized that I'd watched my dad make bread enough times that I could do it too. A little bit of this, a little bit of that, loads of time, some therapeutic kneading and voila, fantastic bread. 

True, there was the time that I made it entirely out of wheat flour and it turned out like bricks. Or the time that I left in the middle of the rising period because I hadn't left enough time and it ... actually, wait, that may have been the same wheat bread brick fiasco. Anyway, needless to say there were problems, but that's what happens when you don't stop baking bread after your first success. 

But guys, Australia has been a DISASTER in terms of my bread making adventures. 

One of the reasons is simply because I've started making DIFFERENT bread. I have a sweetie to try it out on and enough time to experiment, but I am still the person that would just delete a half-cup of cocoa from a cookie recipe and things can go ....wrong.

I decided to try making the bread in the cook book. My dad always told me that my bread recipe was based off the white bread in the Joy of Cooking, with maybe a cup of bran or wheat flour thrown in for health and texture. Guys, this is not true. The Joy of Cooking asks you to do all sorts of things that I never bother doing, and sometimes it doesn't even want an egg. Madness!

But it is the ancestor, no matter how distant, of my recipe, so I decided to try it. I scalded the milk. I dissolved the butter and lard and then I ... poured the hot mixture directly into the bowl with my yeast. 

The bread did not rise. The moment I noticed it wasn't rising like normal, I knew that I had killed it with my stupid scalded milk. I had killed all my beautiful little yeast monsters with milk that was too hot. I felt like a monster. So I promptly primed some more yeast and added it in. Because of course adding more yeast most of the way through the first rising would fix it. >.<

The bread still not rise particularly well, and was dense like a block of bread dough which does not rise. Literally. I may have stormed resignedly out of the kitchen, muttering darkly. The happy ending is that it made the Most Amazing bread pizza base ever, but it was not exactly a triumph (actually, it kind of was, those bread pizzas were DELICIOUS). 

I decided to go back to my original recipe. Similar, but not quite as drastic, rising bread problems. I did it AGAIN, but primed my yeast for longer (this is where you dissolve the yeast in water with a bit of sugar first). This time it turned out almost right. 

By this point I had begun to suspect that my yeast was perhaps not the one I was used to, and that the package didn't tell me to prime it because Maybe I Wasn't Supposed To. Priming yeast is one of my favourite steps, and I had figured that even if Dried Yeast wasn't the same as Active yeast, or some such that it would still benefit from a bit of activating time with water and sugar, but after the failed batch of pizza dough (it should still be fine, if maybe a bit denser once again) of tonight, I think I will try not priming it at all. 

Australian ingredients being Almost but Not Quite what I am used to keeps tripping me up. I shudder to think what is going to happen when I make pie crust from baking lard as opposed to Tenderflake. Everyone wish me luck! 

(Also, to those Canadians moving to Australia [Americans, I have not checked for your Crisco, you crazy people, that stuff is gross], they totally have baking lard, but keep it in the chilled area with the butter instead of near the baking stuff. There, two hours in the grocery store saved!)

WOA: Book Adventures

As a side quest in my World of Australia adventuring, I've started a book blog with a friend.

www.bookswehaveread.wordpress.com

Yes, that is a different blogging platform, but that is what happens when you don't want to be the one setting it up and your friend does wordpress. We'll all survive somehow.

So if you want to know what I'm reading, and more importantly, what I thought of it, and follow some interesting adventures in SciFi reading (which is what my partner in crime is up to), feel free to wander on over there. Or click the link thing to the right. I've included it so that you can wander over WHENEVER YOU LIKE and not just when I mention it. Because I care.

And seriously, it is just whatever the hell we're reading and what we think. Which means I'm even going to talk about the more embarrassing young adult stuff I read. Which is Awesome.