More crayon antics

I have been experimenting with crayons again. I wanted to try and make some in a more interesting shape and a first birthday present seemed like a good excuse. I had an ice cube mould that looked suitable, but I didn't know a) the melting temp of crayon b) the melting temp of ice cube tray and c) was the difference between a) and b) large enough to allow oven-based crayon meltage.

It turned out that the answer to c) was no and odd smells alerted me to immanent (no doubt) toxic breakdown of ice-cube tray.

So I built a kind of double boiler and tried same in the microwave.

This was loads more successful and produced some rather lovely star crayons that I was pretty proud of actually.

A couple of them exploded because I popped them into the freezer to cool down and they had accidentally got a drop or two of water in them during the process. But hey, what's a little collateral damage?

CUPCAKES. EAT THEM!

I have met several people in the past that love cupcakes and I have never really totally understood them. I mean the issue is that the actual cake is never that good. However Mum bought me some of those silicone cupcake cases so I thought Bean and I would have a go at baking some.

Now I may be addicted to the process. Firstly, they are super fast to make (I just used a standard Victoria sponge recipe, 4oz of everything makes 8 cakes). Secondly, icing them is so much fun! Bean has been running around saying "little cakies" for a couple of days now so she is as into it as I am.

I'm still not totally in to the sponge recipe. It does rise very nicely so gives you a great cake to get a peak of icing on, but it is a bit DULL. So watch this space while I try to find a nice cake recipe that gives more satisfaction.

gazebo

At last the sun is here and we can get the kids in the garden! We've had a little trouble with gazebos in the past because we bought the cheaper ones with plastic frames. Our apple tree has been decapitated twice by high speed gazebo blowing across the garden when the corner pieces snapped in the wind. So last year we invested in a proper metal framed number. It is much stronger and as a bonus is super fast to erect. I've customised ours into a fully shaded play tent!

Check out this fantastic sheets that D's Nan gave us years ago. They were in their original 70s St Michael packaging, but although we have slept on them once, I thought they were just too good to be used in private. So this is the ideal use!

broken phone

OK so at some point Bug either dribbled into or dropped my lovely phone. Sadly this means that although the screen works when it is closed it doesn't when it is open. I can use it to make and receive calls, but texting is rather dependent on my blind skills. So for some reason I thought I might be able to fix it. I have no idea why I thought this, I no nothing of phones or electronics or anything like that.

Here it is disassembled:

I didn't manage to fix it.

I did manage to put it back together and it still worked in the same not working sort of a way. And that is surely an achievement.

Eat this!

Check out this beautiful cake of goodness cooked by my mother-in-law.

BLUE

Easter

I had a lovely Easter up with the Grogs but the weather was not that fantastic. Let's face it, it was freezing...and therefore we didn't want to spend too long outdoors. A bit of hurried crafting did cure the cabin fever for about 5 minutes though...and here we present the Brewer Easter Lamb.

OK it might not be that stylish, but it was a pretty good way to get rid of some of that present packing! We don't give out Easter gifts in case you are wondering, but my brother and I share a birthday and it usually seems to coincide with the Easter weekend...so birthdays are lovely chocolate-filled events for me!

Sugarless cake

An unfortunate aversion to sugar in one member of our family has led to the necessary discovery of a sugarless birthday cake. So we decided a carrot cake would be a good thing to try and that Splenda would be the sugar substitute of choice. Have you ever seen this stuff, it is really strange! Tastes lovely and sweet (slight aftertaste noticed by me but not by D) but weighs next to nothing. It's bulked out by a filling agent to make it spoon for spoon as sweet as sugar, but in its raw form it is apparently 600 times sweeter (how do they measure that?).

Anyway the first attempt produced a slightly sticky cake that we polished off in a couple of days so can't have been that bad! It seemed to take a lot longer that a normal cake to cook...but maybe that was because I added milk to try and get the consistency right.

In any case the second attempt was a bit more like bread pudding in texture and tasted good enough to scoff too.

RIP beany chairs

I feel like the old blog has been a bit of a hurried hit and miss recently mainly due to birthdays and Easter etc. etc. but also the terrible death of the beany chair. After much research and deliberation I have decided that I will not be able to afford the capital outlay that is required to start up a furniture business. The fact is that the legislation for fire safety in furniture is very strict (rightly so, I mean who wants to set fire to a baby?) and requires too much for me to cope with as my business was on such a small scale.
But this will not be the end of BeanPi! I'm already trying to get the business up and running to sell my other stuff and hopefully that will be sorted too. So I spose I should say watch this space...but I won't as you might get very tired eyes before it all gets sorted. Got to wait for my contract with my old employer to expire before I can register as self employed in any case.

Daffodils

I 'm not usually a huge fan of daffodils in a vase, but these three really caught my eye. Lovely spring!

Fabulous birthday present

Just wanted to show my lovely new thread box from my sister!

Planting seeds...ish

I promised myself I would take lots of lovely pictures of us planting seeds this year as I didn't manage it last year, but it is actually pretty fraught doing this with a 2 year old, and requires more supervision than an observing cameraman can give. So this is the best I can do. I mentioned previously the great new seed place I found on ebay, and here you can see some (very few) of the seedlings we have produced. Potting on was a little less fraught, and the Bean loves watering things, so hopefully can be slightly more unsupervised...

Borscht!

I have never tasted or made borscht before, but gave it a go on Soup Saturday recently. Wow if something looks this good, it must taste good, right?

update....it did!

Buttons!

I'm not a great fan of homeschooling or unschooling, but hey if the Bean want a game to be a little bit educational, who am I to complain. We had lots of fun yesterday with my button collection, first of all sorting out colours and then big (large, enormous, huge) and small (tiny, little) buttons...and then just throwing them into the tart tin and shouting PING POP!

Experiments in Recrystallisation 2 - Success?

I may have achieved success! So here's the method for making delicious delightful tablet that will help weight loss as part of a calorie-controlled diet.

1) Prepare!

100 g butter, 1 kg granulated sugar, 1 cup milk, 1 tin condensed milk

butter the tin well

get a plate, a glass of cold water, and a teaspoon.

2) Begin!

Put all the ingredients into a LARGE pan (do not use a non-stick pan). The mixture will more than double in volume when it starts boiling, so make sure it is big enough, for goodness sake. The idea is that the milk just damps down the sugar, so don't put too much in. I found just under 1 cup of milk to be enough to dissolve the sugar, but not too much to boil off.

Heat the mixture on a medium heat until everything is dissolved. Take a little of the mixture out and put it on the plate to keep track of the starting colour. Stir regularly. If you get bits of brown coming off the bottom reduce the heat and keep stirring, if you get black good luck cleaning the burned sugar off the pan.

Once it boils you can stop stirring all the time, but do it every so often. It won't stick to the pan unless the pan is too hot. Periodically check the colour and smell of the mix. At some point it will suddenly stop smelling of hot butter (yuk!) and start smelling of tablet (yum!). This is the point to stop! To check take a small teaspoon of mix and plunge it into cold water. If you can push your finger into it and it retains its shape then it is ready. It takes about 15-18 minutes to get to this stage.

Take it off the heat and stir like crazy. As soon as you feel crystallisation (slight thickening on the bottom of the pan), STOP and pour it into the tin.

This is where it went weird. I think I boiled it too long and the solution was far too saturated. As I poured it into the tin it boiled over! Anyway I squished it down again and the result is perfect!

Lovely shatter.

Eat This!

Best ever ever cheesecake cooked by my Mum.

Another Beany Chair

Fabric: Roar - Red

Soup Saturday

I have found this diet to be the most effective for losing weight (I can't really comment on keeping it off as I keep on getting pregnant all over the place). I like the fact that it is researched, designed, and written by a real doctor, not nutritionists that buy their PhDs off the internet.

While I stand by my membership of SINAM (soup is not a meal) and its partner group PASAM (peoples against salad as main) the efficacy of both in weight loss cannot be underestimated. This is primarily due to their non-meal status.

Anyway, in a quest to lose the last few pounds to reach pre babies weight, I made a load of soups this Saturday: The trick is to make them filling without putting in any potato. For a hardcore carb lover this is not easy!

Anneli enjoyed crushing and smelling lemongrass, though.

Pink Popcorn

A special request from the Bean for pink popcorn (grrrr, why oh why does she like pink?) got me thinking...

One hastily washed plant sprayer and some food colouring later...

More stencils

I've just done this T-shirt for the son of a friend on mine who has been very poorly recently. The paint is still wet but I was so pleased with it I took the picture already. Perhaps you can guess his name?