Way Past My Bedtime

Tunisian Squares

2012-03-13T06:32:00.000-04:00

I'm working on squares for this blanket. So far I've made 4 squares of Tunisian simple stitch and 4 squares of Tunisian crossed stitch. They may look well-behaved.

But inside they're just waiting to snap!

These are going to be so much fun to sew together. I can already tell.

One Spiced Up Tart

2012-03-06T06:08:00.000-05:00

I found a giant bag of Krusteaz sugar cookie mix at costco that only cost $5. I thought I'd try it with some of the recipes online that call for sugar cookie mix. I made Betty Crocker's apple cheddar-n-spice cookie tart yesterday

You'll have to pardon the foil. The missing springform pans have yet to rematerialize, so I lined a regular pan all the way around with foil to make sure I could get that sucker out of there after baking. For the crust, the only modification I made was to leave out the cardamom, since I didn't have any. I improvised a lot on the filling.

1 large apple, peeled and chopped
5 oz raisins
5 oz sweetened dried cranberries
6 T brown sugar
3 T all purpose flour

The resulting tart was really good. Next time, I'd halve the brown sugar, since the Craisins weren't as tart as I thought they'd be. I think the nice thing about this is that it's a great way of using up whatever fresh or dried fruit is sprouting mold or gathering dust in your kitchen. It's like a fruit crisp, only with a fancy schmancy crust that you didn't have to work very hard to make.

Little Things

2012-02-29T23:14:00.000-05:00

I made a few more wee hats, without umbilical cords this time.

I also made tiramisu on Sunday night. It hadn't been in the fridge too long before we attacked it, so the ladyfingers were still too crunchy for my taste. After some more time in the fridge though, it was just right.

I used the Belgioioso's recipe, as usual. I substituted khalua for the cognac/brandy. I also added a layer of lightly sweetened whipped cream. There's always quite a bit of the cookie soaking liquid left behind, so I usually add sugar and liquor and reduce it to a coffee syrup to drizzle on top of the dessert.

A New Skill

2012-02-20T23:25:00.001-05:00

I learned Tunisian crochet with mom and Erica on Saturday. I'm a pretty crappy crocheter, so it was kind of a rocky start. But it worked out eventually, more or less.

After the class, I tried out some other stitches. Here's Tunisian knit stitch, which really does look like knit stocking stitch, though more so on the front than on the back, where you can still sorta see the vertical bars.

The Tunisian version is also much thicker. It's like two layers of stocking stitch in thickness. I also made a few dishcoths. This one's all simple stitch.

This one's in purl stitch and honeycomb stitch.

As in knitting, the purl stitch is more annoying to make than the knit stitch. I do like how purl stitch fabric stays flat, compared to the Tunisian knit and simple stitched above. From the googling I've done, I could see that "combating the curl" was a major reoccupation among Tunisian hookers. I can't wait to see how Google will deal with the phrase "Tunisian hookers" (sorry, visitors to this site who were looking for something else entirely).

In knitting news, I finished a ruffle scarf wip that had been lying around.

What's Sour Cream Without Pudding?

2012-02-12T10:12:00.000-05:00

I made the sour cream chocolate cake from the Betty Crocker cookbook. It looked promising. I was hoping it would be sort of fudgy.

The crackly crust had the potential of hiding a brownie-like inside.

But it turned out to be pretty dry. Maybe I shouldn't have swapped out the butter for shortening? I'm leaning toward taking a page from the last cake and added lots of pudding mix to the ingredient list!

Necessary Revision

2012-02-07T06:17:00.000-05:00

I've hit a bump on the road to finishing these green socks. I'm making them for Jersey Girl. I had a tracing of her foot, but couldn't remember where I'd put it. So when it came time to finish the first sock in the pair, I guessed the length.

When I finally found the tracing again, I saw how wrong my guess was. I really should have looked harder for that piece of paper to begin with.

The Good Side

2012-01-28T23:17:00.005-05:00

I was going to see a movie on Saturday night, but stayed home and tried a cake recipe out instead. Such are my priorities, make of it what you will. This is Kraft's "Gram's Best Brown Sugar Cake:"
This recipe is basically a yellow cake mix dolled up with pudding mix, sour cream, brown sugar and pecans. It really is a snap to mix up. I used a large 12x3 round because all my bundt-like pans disappeared on me. Considering the size of the pan, I really should have taken the time to line the bottom with parchment paper. But of course I skipped that step, so getting the cake out of the pan was an unnecessarily painful affair. The result:
Not so pretty. But hey that's the underside anyway :P It's still got a good side on top, right? The cream cheese frosting came from this recipe, with the modifications from Paddybog's comment. I forgot I was out of powdered sugar, so I had to make some in the blender. Yes, it can be done! I don't think I processed it quite enough, so it wasn't as fine as commercial powdered sugar. The icing came out pretty well though, if a bit sweet.

Cashew Crumbles

2012-01-23T05:32:00.002-05:00

I tried a new recipe on Saturday. I took this recipe and swapped out cashews and cashew butter for the called-for peanuts and peanut butter. This makes for a big batch, baked in a 15x10 jelly roll pan. Splotchy appearance aside, it's really just a two layer bar.
The bottom later is a cocoa brownie with a bit of oats (I used old fashioned instead of quick cooking because that's what I had) and chopped cashews. The top layer is a cream cheese layer with cashew butter. Cashews have a pretty mild flavor compared to peanuts, so this layer has a mysterious rich texture with a vaguely nutty flavor. Some of the bottom layer mix is sprinkled on the top layer, but I'm sure you could skip that step and just have a thicker bottom layer instead.

I finished a sock.

It took forever because I was distracted by wee little baby hats. This is Miss Babs Windsor sock yarn in the colorway "A Day at Silent Cove." It sounds like a Nancy Drew mystery to me.

From Past to Present

2012-01-20T06:01:00.003-05:00

I've been trying to organize a bit This has involved some book moving, paperwork scanning and yarn sorting. I also found a bunch of cassette tapes and I thought maybe I could do some kind of digital transfer, so I could keep the music I wanted but also free up some space. I found this on sale:
Behold auto-reverse! Now that's some late 1980s state of the art technology for you! But it does have a newer feature for digitizing too:
Here's the USB port.
The build isn't very sturdy, the door is flimsy and the latch that secures it isn't actually very secure, so the door doesn't always stay closed. It's also weird how the battery compartment is accessed from the inside.
I shouldn't even call it a battery compartment really, since it's not actually separated from the main circuit board and other internal components. It's more of a hole to provide access to the part of the box where the battery contacts are. Kinda sketchy, if you ask me! I think I'll stick to powering this device via USB. Craftsmanship issues aside though, I've tested it and managed to transfer a few minutes of audio from an old cassette to my computer. The resulting file sounds fine, so I guess, for all it's quirks, this will do for my purposes. The transfer process is pretty simple, if a bit time consuming (I miss you, hi-speed dubbing!), and is done using the Audacity, included on the CD but also available as freeware online.

In knitting news, well, there isn't much. Just another little hat:

Mediocre Mistake Muffins

2012-01-18T05:55:00.001-05:00

My brother and sister in law gave me a cupcake calendar and Tuesday's recipe was for strawberry muffins. I misread the recipe and added too little flour. The result was denser and eggier than it ought to have been. They smelled nice but flavor and texture wise they were only ok. Maybe it would help to swirl in some strawberry jam or a cream cheese mix. That could make them more interesting.

Ugly but Good

2012-01-17T00:57:00.000-05:00

I tried my hand at a chocolate flan. I tried this but it came out rather pale and tasted only mildly of chocolate. So mom and I tinkered with it to make it a little richer and chocolaty-er. The result certainly wasn't pretty (I omitted the caramel, so it unmolded in two pieces), but it was unmistakably chocolate.
Maybe a bit more tinkering will yield a smoother, creamier texture, but this modified recipe's not too shabby so far:

Chocolate Flan

3 eggs
1 egg yolk
2 Tbsp. cocoa powder
1/4 c. semisweet chocolate chips
1/2 c. whole milk
1/2 c. sweetened condensed milk
1/2 c. evaporated milk
2 Tbsp. strong coffee
1 tsp. vanilla

Whisk eggs and yolk together to combine. Add enough liquid (water, milk, coffee, whatever) to the cocoa so that it forms a paste. In a saucepan, heat 3 kinds of milk together until almost simmering. Add cocoa paste and chocolate chips and stir until chocolates are thoroughly dissolved. Temper egg mixture with a bit of hot milk mixture. Pour remainder of milk mixture into egg mixture, whisking constantly. Strain mixture into baking dish. Bake in water bath or cook in steamer for 55 min.

I've been quite unproductive on the knitting front, for no particular reason. I did manage another little hat:

Another Wee Hat

2012-01-11T21:20:00.000-05:00

I made a second umbilical hat. This one came out a little bigger than the first, more newborn than preemie.

Anticipation

2012-01-09T22:09:00.003-05:00

As I was working down the leg of the formerly unphotographable sock, I got to thinking about the little gap problem I have on my handknit socks. I can never seem to neatly closed the gap between the stitches on the top of the foot and the stitches picked up along the left side of the heel flap. Basically, there's usually a little hole where the left gusset decreases start. This problem never happens to me on the right side, just the left.

I suspected the eye of partridge heel I use all the time. I start my heel flap with a slipped stitch on what eventually becomes the left side of the sock, which is where that darn little hole always forms. In the past, I would try to pick up a couple of extra stitches in the trouble spot and also making a stitch out of the float that resulted from that first slipped stitch. This time, I took a different, more proactive approach: remembering how the wrapped stitches eliminate holes in short rows, I decided to try wrapping and slipping the stitch before the first stitch of the heel flap. You can sort of see the white wrap around the leftmost stitch on the needle here, just before the dreaded gap.

I then knit the flap, turned the heel and picked up along the right side of the flap, the same as always. After knitting across the top of the foot and arriving at the wrapped stitch, I knit both the wrap and the slipped stitch it was wrapped around together. The hope was the wrap would tighten and close that pesky gap. I think it was pretty effective:
I did pick up one extra stitch after knitting the wrap and wrapped stitch, just for good measure. But there was no long floating strand to have to deal with. Nice! Apparently, the trick was to anticipate the hole, and make it close itself. Now let's see if I can pull off the same trick for the next sock!

While I'm praising preparedness, let me post yet another badly lit photo:

It's a wee umbilical hat for an expectant mom in the family. It's a perfect use for leftover sock yarn.

Oooey Gooey

2012-01-07T14:32:00.002-05:00

I tried out a new recipe for s'more bars. I first saw this last month on the Betty Crocker website. As much as I love s'mores (and I do!), I didn't try them right away because I didn't want to use a sugar cookie mix. I'm not against mixes. I am however very cheap and I'm not going to spend money on a mix when I already have the ingredients contained in the mix at home, bought for much less (per unit, at least).

So today I got around to merging the s'more bar recipe with a sugar cookie recipe. Appropriately enough, I used the cookie recipe from the Betty Crocker Cookbook (mine's from the mid 1980's), so it's pretty much still an all-Betty recipe. I think they came out nicely:

Here's the modified crust recipe I used:

1 cup powdered sugar
2 cups all purpose flour
1 cup graham cracker crumbs
1 teaspoon cream of tartar
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 cup butter, melted

Combine dry ingredients. Add melted butter. Press into pan and dock (this may not be necessary, but I didn't want it too puffy). The rest of the recipe's the same. I guess you could substitute 2 teaspoons of baking powder for the cream of tartar, or perhaps just one teaspoon would yield an unpuffy crust without docking.

And finally, a semi decent photo of the formerly unphotographable sock.

Unphotographable

2012-01-05T23:38:00.003-05:00

I started a sock a few days ago but I've had trouble getting a good picture.

Too far?

Too close?

Bad light!

Good thing I've got a lot more sock to knit. That'll give me more chances to get a good shot.

Green Things

2012-01-04T06:01:00.001-05:00

I got a gift from my friend Nancy, who went on a trip to Mexico. She gave me this really cool bag:
Pretty neat, huh? It'll be perfect for revolutionary trips to El Safeway for tostitos. Viva la reusable shopping bag! I wonder if there are Mexicans getting good use out of Washington Crossing the Delaware tote bags? The bag also came with some mystery yarn:
There were no labels so I don't know much about it. It's a very fine 2-ply of what I think is acrylic. This may take some investigating.

Knitting Recap

2012-01-02T22:50:00.000-05:00

Here's a quick summary of the stuff I've knit recently. There were a bunch of sorta slouchy brioche stitch hats:I also got sucked into the ruffly scarf trend.
They are quick and so deceptively easy. Also, here's my first finished object of the year:
It's my standard stocking stitch scarf in self-patterning Kroy sock yarn. Now if only the weather would cooperate and turn sufficiently wintry to warrant socks. I'm always disappointed by 50 degree temps in January!

Resolved

2012-01-01T22:47:00.002-05:00

That was a very long blog hiatus indeed. I certainly didn't intend to be off the air for quite so long, but life events, anticipated and otherwise, got the better of me. I'm not in the habit of making New Year's resolutions, so instead I'll just call this is regular old resolution to try to blog a bit more regularly.

There was a wee bit of crazy baking over the holidays. Not as insane as at the height of my crazy baking glory, but still pretty respectable I think:
7 types of cookies spread over 9 sugary tiers of dessert goodness. From the top left:

pecan bars
Nanaimo bars
caramel heavenlies
more pecan bars
lemon bars
marble brownies
dulce de leche bars
more dulce
oatmeal caramelitas

The caramelitas didn't come out as intended. I tried making my own caramel sauce instead of using bottled topping. I substituted whole milk for cream, and, well, I got a reminder of why sometimes there is not substituting for the real thing. Ah well, still came out sort of caramelly, just not as creamy.

Back to Blogging

2011-02-03T06:35:00.000-05:00

Well that was a long time of no blogging. It wasn't intended of course. Life got busy and before you know it, it's a whole new year! I've decided to pre-select some sock yarns to turn into socks this year. Here they are all caked and ready to go:

I started at the upper left with the extremely soft Princess from Rapunzel Yarns.

It's much farther along than this (I'm actually on the second sock), but I haven't had a chance to take a recent photo. The yarn is fairly fine and a bit fuzzy. I'm using 00 needles to try for a sturdier fabric.

I've also decided to spin more regularly, so I tried to turn this:

into a chunky single, which I haven't been able to produce reliably since I was a very new spinner who could do nothing but big fat singles. I came up with this, which has moments where it looks like it was gonna get chunky, but then thought better of it and went skinny again. Still pretty though.

It's ok. I have lots of fiber, and 11 more months to go. I will have chunky singles!

Old Timey Train

2010-06-04T00:59:00.001-04:00

We went on the Western Maryland Scenic Railroad last weekend. Jersey family was in town and Jersey Baby is a big fan of all things train. It was an hour-long ride from the small town of Cumberland to the even smaller town of Frostburg, which I knew of mainly because the Redskins used to train at the university there. It was hot and disgustingly sunny, so I only explored about 1 block of Main Street before hiding out in an air-conditioned cafe surrounded by cold beverages.

The railroad was indeed scenic, though we seemed to be on the slightly less scenic side, so there was a lot of craning to see past riders on the other side of the train. Here's a pretty picture from Cumberland, when we were on the more scenic side.

I started the O w l s sweater and worked on it through during the trip. I decided to go sleeve first to try out some gauge-related pattern changes.

Nationals Stitch 'n Pitch

2010-05-22T10:36:00.004-04:00

What's more disturbing? The massive size of this nacho plate:
Or the the fact that it matches the color of my sock?

Weekly Update

2010-05-18T23:26:00.002-04:00

It was another weekend of semi-random crosstown rambling. My friend Kim and I went to the Greek Festival at St. Sophia's.It grows a bit each year though it's still a pretty cozy event. The food is good, but if you want the gyros and souvlakis (Of course you do! You're at a Greek Festival!), come early or be prepared to stand in an insanely long line.

After the festival, we explored the newly re-opened Social Safeway, which was amazingly amazing! It had an unbelievable prepared food section, with sushi, gelato bar and, of all things, a nut bar:

Pre-packaged peanut butter just not doing it for you? No problem! How about some freshly ground honey roasted cashew butter? That's so much nicer, so much more worthy of the Social Safeway. Despite the name, we didn't make any new acquaintances, but we did get to lounge in the living room, er, I mean, cafe seating area.
Don't you wish your living room opened into an amazingly amazing grocery store?

On Sunday, I ran into an Asian festival in Silver Spring, which had a tinikling demo.
Tinikling is a Filipino dance that's kinda like the hokey pokey, only bad dancers are punished by having their ankles whacked. I didn't have enough free memory on my camera to get video, but fear not, there are plenty of fine examples on Youtube.

I haven't posted much about knitting, since I haven't really done too much lately. Most of my knitting time has been spent on this scarf:

It's a modified Loopy and Luscious, knit in the round, forever and ever. I'll finish it someday, though it's getting a bit bulky to carry around to all the weekend festivities.

Locomotion

2010-05-09T12:54:00.001-04:00

I had a busy Saturday. I went to Union Station to see what National Train Day was all about. It was about a whole lot of families with double wide urban combat strollers waiting in very long lines. This was one of the few things (apart from the gift shop) that had no line:They had lots of trains going at once. It looked pretty neat.

Then I went down to the mall to the much more sedate Smithsonian Garden Fest, which had no lines whatsoever.It was a nice spot to be on such a pretty, if windy, day. I picked up tidbits on chocolate production (the pods come in different colors and grow in clumps out of the bark) and Sweet William (they're related to carnations). They also had some cool gourds on display:
On the way home, I stopped by the DC Streetcar Showcase, where one of the city's new streetcars was setup for people to visit.They're a lot like the ones I rode on in Portland, though I think the TriMet cars had a different seating arrangement and bike hook/hanger things on the inside too. A couple of the DC streetcar routes are supposed to be up and running in a few years, with other lines to follow.

Sheep!

2010-05-04T10:41:00.005-04:00

Yup, it was Sheep and Wool last weekend. Mom and I went on Saturday. It was ridiculously hot, even in the shade of the exhibition buildings, so we left a few hours earlier than usual. I managed to make the rounds to all the stalls, even the ones moved to the upper field. There was plenty to see:

Squares of the month? I think these are Squares of the Century! Can you believe the square that has a little sweater in it? Speaking of sweaters, how about this wee one made of sock yarn at the Three Waters booth:
As always, the t-shirt line was long and winding. I was content with watching the samples waive in the wind.
By the end, I'd bought a bit to spin and a bit to knit, but happily not enough to have to rearrange my stash. So it was a pretty low key Sheep & Wool for me!

Maryland Day

2010-04-26T23:35:00.001-04:00

Maryland Day was this past Saturday. The turn out was good despite the gray skies and on-and-off sprinkles of rain. The scary looking weather probably contributed to the unusually short free ice cream line at the agriculture school. I got my usual chocolate.
Yummy! They also had ice cream-related paraphernalia on display this year:
I know the whole "farm fresh milk delivered daily" idea is supposed to instill nostalgia, but I don't really see the appeal of dairy products being driven around town for hours before being left outdoors until you retrieve them. I'll stick with the constantly refrigerated kind.

There were the usual Maryland Day staples, like a selection of turtles:
The hand-made country fair games were really impressive, in all their sack toss, roulette wheel, pin the tail on a Plinko glory:

The 4-H lollipop clover was especially creative. There were some variations on putt putt too, but I somehow missed taking pictures of them.

We got to see a how strong eggs are:
This egg crusher (it was actually has a label that says that) holds the egg vertical while some evil mad scientist piles on 25lb lead bricks (repurposed from the university's cyclotron, per said mad scientist). So how much could this egg hold? Somewhere between 100 and 125lbs.

There were some surprises this year, like *gasp* misleading advertising!

They were trying to save people's hearing though, so maybe the end justified the means?

And I got to see the local rink's zamboni in a non-ice rink setting.

I guess it doesn't get much use in the off season, unless it has a feature that lets it teach swimming. It does remind me that I haven't gone skating in a while. Hmm, where did I put those skates?