WordPress

Just a quick note to say that, per Melanie's suggestion, I've been looking into WordPress as software for my travel blog. WOW! WordPress is incredibly powerful and customizable - leaves Blogger in the dust. I'm thinking I may move my entire blog into WordPress.

But, there's a good couple days of customization before it's ready for prime time...

Whee! A new toy to play with.

truffle recipes

On recipes:

I mostly improvise my truffle fillings, so I don't have a specific recipe for the goat cheese and honey truffles. I think I added about two ounces of goat cheese to some warmed-up cream, to soften it, and then added a good-sized dollup of honey and mixed it all together. I added a little more honey ("to taste") and then added it to a batch of the ganache base.

The base recipe I use for my ganache comes from Frederic Bau's Au Coeur des Saveurs ("At the Heart of Flavors"), which is an excellent if pricey book on chocolates. Bau was the head pastry chef for Valrhona, and has a bunch of excellent formulations in his book. It's definitely not for the casual cook, but I like it a lot and use it regularly (usually with modifications depending on my mood at the time).

Here is the basic formulation:

275 g chocolate (I used Valrhona's Equatoriale 55%)
200 g heavy cream
40 g liquid additions (brandy, etc.) or additional cream
50 g butter

Chop chocolate into 1/2" dice. Boil cream and pour over chocolate and butter; you may have to put it in the microwave for ~30 seconds to ensure everything gets melted. Stir slowly, starting in the center, until the ganache forms into a thick, liquid mass. Slowly add any liquid additions (coffee, liqueurs, Scotch, etc.). Let sit at room temperature until it thickens, and pipe small blobs onto a sheet of parchment paper (for truffles) or into molds (if making molded chocolates). Put parchment paper in fridge to harden truffle centers, then dip in tempered or untempered chocolate. (Untempered chocolate will work, but you will have to store the resulting truffles in the fridge).

If you want to use something like, say, jasmine tea or lavender or something else that has to be steeped, boil the cream first, add your flavorants, steep as long as you like, then strain, bring the cream back to a boil, and pour over the chocolate. Add 40g extra cream since you won't be adding any liquid flavorants (unless of course you are)- I usually add an extra 10g to make up for any evaporation, for a total of 50g extra cream.

As for introductory books...I got started via Alice Medrich's Cocolat and Rose Levy Beranbaum's A Passion for Chocolate, but both of them are out of print now. I'm not sure what introductory books are on the market now...but I'd recommend starting with untempered chocolate (and storing the results in the fridge) and working your way slowly into tempered chocolate. Another shortcut, if you've got money to spend, is to buy a chocolate tempering machine - they cost around $300 last I checked, and will do all the hard work for you. :-) I keep being tempted to buy one, but I enjoy working the chocolate on marble...Although, after spending an hour and a half scrubbing down my marble slab after the last batch of chocolates, it's sounding better and better. Chocolate is fun to work with and tasty to eat, but it's a royal bitch to clean up. The cocoa butter hardens and then it's like trying to get old wax off a floor.

On other topics, I have finished winding the warp for my next project, and have spread it into a raddle, ready for beaming on. There are a lot of very fine threads in the warp--I'm hoping they don't tangle as they go on. Once I get it beamed on, it'll be time for the very tedious task of threading the heddles and sleying the reed. I enjoy threading, but there are over 759 ends in this particular piece, so I expect it will take some time. Still, the end results should be worth the effort...I hope!

Misc post-chocolate stuff

Well, I packed up and shipped out 23 boxes of chocolates today, to friends, family, and AIDS Lifecycle sponsors. The house is still festooned in chocolate, but I've been scrubbing away at it in spare moments, and it seems to be getting slowly cleaner. I'm still considering hiring a cleaner to help me tackle the rest of the mess. The apartment hasn't been properly cleaned since I moved in, and I'm usually too focused on various projects to organize it properly.

I've also started winding the warp for my next weaving project, a cashmere/silk shawl in five-colored silk warp and black cashmere. Complex floral pattern, very fine threads - 7500 yards per pound (about double the weight of sewing thread). It's very slow going since the threads are fine and tangle-prone, but I hope the finished result is worthwhile. I'm using this project to see if I like working with fine threads.

I have also purchased my ticket to Ghana, using "points" from one of my credit cards. Not a bad deal - the card paid for $1200 of my airfare, so the whole flight is costing me just $93. Whee! I also ordered a travel pack, so I should be set for my trip to Ghana.

I am now considering what I want to focus on for the next few months. Having finished one Project (the chocolates), and having gotten well started on weaving, I think I will probably want something else to focus my attention on. I'm debating whether to return to working on the book - a dreary prospect, but I think I might have had enough of a break from it not to freak out at the prospect of working on it some more. (I have figured out that I have a two-month attention span, at which point I have to rotate out for another project.)

I also need to start getting serious about cycling. December marks the beginning of the training season for the Markleeville Death Ride, and I'm debating whether to hire a cycling coach now, or to wait until I get back from Ghana. I think I will probably train on my own through December and January, and hire a coach in mid-February, thus saving myself some money while getting in my basic training.

Finished!!

And the total is...

...drum roll please...

56.75 lbs of chocolates, fudges, toffee, caramels and what have you

3 kinds of truffles
7 kinds of molded chocolates
5 kinds of fudge
6 kinds of chocolate covered fruit and nuts
2 kinds of toffee
chocolate covered caramels

for a total of 23 kinds of bonbons, over a period of 3 weekends.

(bows with a flourish)

Now, off to pack and ship them all...

The finish line

I've piped the truffles and am preparing for the last batch of dipping. I have also made a batch of "proper" truffle truffles by putting about 3/4 oz of black Himalayan truffle into 120g cream and 140g of chocolate - overkill, but this particular truffle doesn't seem to have a particularly strong fragrance (perhaps that's why it was only $25/oz?), so I need the extra.

I am down to maybe 4 kg chocolate (10 lbs) but I think I will have enough to finish things out, and even a kg or two left over. This will teach me to buy more chocolate next year...30 lbs is not enough! I need more of a safety margin.

It's down to the truffles...

Finished seven flavors of molded chocolates today:

• caramel-cinnamon
• muscat grape-ginger
• Armagnac
• MacAllan 12 whisky
• caramelized banana
• jasmine tea
• rose geranium-honey

I have two flavors left to make up as truffles tomorrow:

• rum raisin (raisins soaked in dark rum)
• goat cheese and honey (surprisingly, it works!)

I'm sad to say that the truffle truffles didn't work out - there wasn't enough truffle flavor, it got overwhelmed by the chocolate. Next year I'll try them again, and double or triple the amount of truffle I use. I've done it successfully in the past, and they're quite good.

I'm very pleased with how the molded chocolates are coming along - they're releasing cleanly, and look very good outside of some problems with air bubbles. The air bubbles don't perturb me because they're more or less inevitable if you don't have a special vibrating belt to shake out the air bubbles. By and large, the molded chocolates are looking very, very good, especially compared to last year when I had to discard nearly half of them for cosmetic reasons.

I forgot to mention that I have finished dyeing the silk and cashmere for my next project, which will be an advancing twill floral pattern from a 2001 Handwoven magazine. I'm using 1/14 cashmere, dyed black, and a 2/28 silk warp dyed in magenta, purple, and two shades of green. I'm going to sett it at 43 ends per inch, so it'll definitely be finely woven. I plan to start winding the warp as soon as I have all the chocolates complete, boxed up and shipped, and have had a chance to clean up the apartment somewhat from the chocolate madness.

Tomorrow Julie and Jon are coming by, either to help me dip chocolates, or to help me pack chocolates for shipping, depending on where I am in the process. I hope they'll also take some of the excess chocolates home - I'm making about 30 1-lb boxes of chocolate, but I'm betting I have at least double that. I think I'll try weighing the candies tomorrow to get an idea of just how much I've made over the past four weeks.

Worried

I'm down to my last 9 kg (~20 lbs) of chocolate. I don't know if I'm going to have enough - I still need to make 10 flavors of molded chocolates and truffles.

I may need to make a desperation run to Draeger's, which sells Valrhona, albeit at incredibly inflated prices...

Back to chocolates -

Molded chocolates

I'm pleased--I finished pouring the chocolate molds in just three batches, and while I partially botched the first batch, it doesn't seem to be too bad - all three batches are releasing cleanly from the molds and appear to be well-tempered. I do believe I'm getting the hang of this! Fifteen years of making chocolates every Thanksgiving, and I learn something new every year. Last year I had a terrible time with the molds and had to throw away (= feed to my coworkers) nearly half the molded chocolates. This year I think I should be able to keep most of them.

I am not, however, pleased with how my SE Asia blog is turning out. I'll have to think about the formatting more...I may wind up just posting it as a set of static webpages in Dreamweaver. Does anyone know of a blogging system/software that will let me set up a blog in chronological (rather than reverse chronological) order?

If not, I think I'll set it up as a set of static webpages over Christmas, when I'll be at my parents' and hence have plenty of time.

I've wound off most of the skeins to be dyed for my next project, and may throw a plastic tablecloth across the chocolate-tempering area so I can do some dyeing without worrying about splashes. I'm almost done weaving off my fourth project, so I need to get started on the new one...

Putting my SE Asian travels online

Just a quick note to say that I've started uploading my email travelogue from my Southeast Asia trip into a blog. I'm only about halfway through, but you might enjoy reading through the earlier posts:

http://www.travelingtiger.com/travelingtiger/travelblog/SoutheastAsia.html

I hope to get the rest of the travelogue up over the next few days.

Spreadsheets for weaving

Poured the first set of chocolate molds last night. I'd forgotten how thoroughly tricky they are to get right; I nearly ruined the first batch by letting them sit too long. I'm not sure how effectively I managed to save them, but I guess I'll find out this weekend. I'm doing another batch of molds tonight, hopefully these will go better.

Mike, electromechanical genius that he is, has successfully wired up my little temperature controller to an electrical outlet, so I will soon be able to use it for dyeing and for maintaining the temperature of, say, a bowl of melted chocolate. (In the latter case, you put the bowl in a larger bowl filled with water, and keep the water warm. You don't stick the probe in the melted chocolate, for obvious reasons...)

I have also done all the warp and weft calculations for my fifth project, which is going to be a complex floral pattern in fine silk and cashmere thread - considerably finer than I've tried before. The entire 19x72" shawl will weigh only about 10 ounces! I have also written out the threading and treadling drafts, and graphed out the drawdown using a freeware weaving program, WeaveDesign. All in all, it's been a spreadsheet kind of day.

Tempering chocolate, and other stuff

Well, let's see:

I dipped all the caramels on Saturday and made toffee on Sunday. Two kinds of toffee, one with almond meal sprinkled on tops (to add a trace of nuttiness), the other with plain chocolate and the words "Happy Holidays" and "Merry Christmas" and "Happy New Year" printed all over it. For the last one, I used an acetate sheet with the printing already on it - you lay it on the melted chocolate, and it transfers the printing to your chocolate. I do it every year with toffee - the holiday touch.

I am, however, still behind on chocolatemaking despite skipping my long ride yesterday - I still need to pour the chocolate molds. I'm planning to do that tonight - Mike is interested in the chocolate-tempering process, so I'll get to show him on the marble slab.

Tempering chocolate isn't difficult, but it is tricky. The secret of chocolate's glossiness has to do with cacao butter crystal formation. Essentially, you want a lot of small cacao butter crystals in the finished product, not big ones (they produce a cloudy, streaked, whitish appearance). The catch is that cocoa butter has five crystal forms, only 1 of which is stable at room temperature. If you have the other forms, they re-melt and slowly metamorphosize into the stable form, forming large crystals, which make your chocolate streaky.

So the art of tempering chocolate is to make sure that you get lots of small, stable crystals.

The secret to this is to heat the chocolate up high, so you dissolve all the crystals, then quickly drop the temperature, so lots of small crystals (stable and unstable) rapidly form. Then you heat it up to "working temperature", whereupon all the unstable crystals melt and you're left with just small, stable crystals.

This sounds complicated, but in reality it consists of dumping a bunch of hot, melted chocolate onto a marble slab, swooshing it around with a pair of paint scrapers until it reaches the right temperature, then dropping it into a bowl with a little bit of hot chocolate left in the bottom, then mixing it all together. The tricky part is figuring out when you've got the right temperature.

I used to use a chocolate thermometer (and had many initial failures), but then Richard Donnelly of Donnelly Chocolates showed me the "chocolatier's way" of testing temperature. You dab a small amount on your upper lip, which is extremely temperature-sensitive. It should feel just cool to the touch - if it feels warm, it's too hot. Using this, and experimenting once the chocolate is "in temper", has served me well, and these days I find that I get the tempering process right pretty much all the time.

Of course, I've also had fifteen years of practice, and much swearing along the way. But I do think I've more or less got it down now.

The other secret to tempering is that, if the chocolate is just a little bit too warm, you can get it into temper just by waiting for it to cool. I test the temper by dipping a knife into the melted chocolate, scraping off one side of the blade, and waiting for the chocolate to harden. If it's not in temper, then there'll be a hint of streakiness as it cools.

Hmm. All that sounds pretty tricky. I guess it is complicated and difficult, it just doesn't seem that way because I've been doing it so long.

While waiting for my marble slab to cool in between batches of toffee, 6-lb batches of melted chocolate, etc., I also wove about 2/3 of the magenta-black silk scarf. Now I have to think about my next project...which is an incredibly complex twill pattern (someone's rendition of a Schubert serenade in woven cloth) that is supposed to be in cotton and silk/wool...I think I will do it in silk and cashmere, mostly because that's what I have on hand.

I could use cotton, but I don't have much experience in dyeing cotton, and I don't have the space to keep leftover dyed yarns around. That's one of the reasons I buy white yarns exclusively - it takes less storage space, and I get a wider range of colors by dyeing it than I would by ordering yarns.

Anyway, I am still meditating on the current project, will probably not do anything about it until after Thanksgiving. We're into the final stages of the chocolate free-for-all, and it will be all-consuming from now until D-day.

I bought 1 gallon of manufacturing cream and 4 pounds of Plugra (European-style, cultured butter) yesterday. Life is good.

More chocolate

Just came home from the farmer's market, where I bought an assortment of interesting truffle possibilities and raided Recchiuti Chocolates for ideas. I've now got it down to a choice of:

• caramel
• cinnamon
• ginger
• peanut butter
• coffee
• lemon verbena
• rosemary
• truffle (the fungus)
  
• muscat grape
• rum raisin
• rose (geranium)
• jasmine tea
• armagnac
• MacAllan 12 scotch
• orange
• fig and goat cheese
• chestnut
• honey (using unsweetened chocolate, and adding honey for the sugar)
  

Of these 18, I'll pick out 8-9 and use them in chocolates. I may also combine some flavors, e.g. ginger-muscat grape sounds like it would be yummily complementary. Some are purely experimental (fig and goat cheese) and because of those I'll probably actually make an extra flavor or two - sometimes experiments work, and sometimes they don't.

It's always hard to choose the final flavors - it usually boils down to a choice between the safe and familiar (the ones I do every year) and trying something new. I usually do about half and half, and keep the REALLY good flavors for the following year.

I have finished weaving the third scarf--which is gorgeous! It's rust brown weft and tea-dyed beige warp, and is beautifully iridescent. I'll take a photo once it's done - I still need to twist the fringe and wet-finish (i.e. wash) it, then it'll be ready for pressing and photography.

I have also wound the warp for my next project, which is going to be a gorgeous magenta handspun silk yarn alternating with a black 12/2 silk which I dyed myself, in a houndstooth pattern. I don't have much of the magenta handspun, so I'm making a scarf that's only 7.5" wide and 72 inches long. I hope that turns out OK, not too long and skinny.

I have purchased a temperature controller for use in dyeing and chocolatemaking. It needs some kind of wiring up, but Mike took one look at it, exclaimed in delight, and has whisked it off to Home Depot, where he's going to wire it up to an outlet for me. I'm so glad he knows about stuff like that. I bet I could figure it out on my own eventually, BUT...

Off to work - much, much, much to do this weekend. I have to dip the caramels, make the English toffee, make the hollow molds for the chocolates, buy cream etc. for the chocolatefest, and go do a long ride to make up for having slacked off last week. I may have to skip the ride again if I don't get cracking on the chocolate - can't afford to be behind at Thanksgiving.

A passport "Yay!"

Got my renewed passport back today--no RFID tag. Well worth the $60 extra I paid to accelerate the process.

(The government is in the process of requiring all passports to have RFID chips that will contain passport information and be machine-readable...the Dept. of State says it's safe because it can only be read 4" away, but various tests by independent agencies have shown that it can be read much further away. Me being naturally suspicious (we tigers are ever-dubious), I'd rather have a passport that isn't making my personal passport information available to everyone in a 30-foot radius.)

Here's an article on it.

Foo.

Well, the agent who was reading my proposal returned (i.e. rejected) it yesterday, so we're back at square one for the book. I'm meditating on what to do about it - I've run into a snag re getting access to some of the people I need to interview, so I'm not sure I'll be able to complete the book as I've envisioned it. I'll probably shelve the project until after the holidays.

I'm feeling kind of discouraged about the whole thing - not that I'll never get it published (it's a good idea), but that I won't be able to write it to the standard I'd like to write it to. At times it seems like an easy task, other times it seems overwhelming. At the moment, it seems overwhelming.

So we'll see what happens.

Meanwhile, there are caramels to make and scarves to weave, so no time to mope! I'm planning to do two batches of caramels this evening.

Misc stuff (chocolate, weaving, Ghana)

Heard back from Ellie, the woman behind Aba Tours, and it looks like I *will* get a chance to study all sorts of things:

• batik
• basketweaving
• goldsmithing
• beadmaking
• Ashanti weaving
• Ewe weaving

and possibly indigo dyeing, up in northern Ghana.

I also got my second round of shots today - rabies #2, hepatitis B #2, and meningococcal (meningitis). Two weeks from now I get rabies #3, hep B #3, hep A #2, and polio. That leaves me free to take the typhoid vaccine the week after that. Whee! Is there anything left to vaccinate against?

The chocolate-macadamia nut fudge, by the way, came out just fine. It just needed a day or two to settle and for the cocoa butter to crystallize. It's excellent. (And this is from a woman who doesn't even like (most) chocolate fudge.) So now I have:

• chocolate-covered dried apricots
• chocolate-covered dried plums
• chocolate-covered dried pears
• chocolate-covered macadamia nuts (a few)
• cherry-almond clusters (a few)
• chocolate-macadamia nut fudge
• white chocolate-coconut-mint-lime fudge
• white chocolate-lavender-lemon fudge
• maple walnut fudge

to which I will add chocolate-covered caramels and English toffee this week/weekend.

This weekend I will also pull out the chocolate molds and start the first half of the chocolates going - you have to pour the top half of the mold first, let it harden partway,then pour out the rest of the chocolate to create a hollow. Then, later, you pipe in the filling and close up the bottom. I'm creating the hollow molds this weekend.

Hmm. I'd better figure out what flavors of truffle I'm planning to make, too. At the moment I plan to have:

• jasmine tea ('cuz it's my favorite)
• truffle (as in the fungus)
• caramelized banana (yummy yummy!)
• orange
• whisky (MacAllan 12 Scotch)

and I'm not sure about the rest. Lavender sounds good, and Earl Grey tea isn't so bad either. I like green tea truffles, but I did them last year, so I'm not sure I'll do them again. (It was neat to see how radically different different green-tea blends could be, though...I tried three kinds last year and they produced very different green-tea truffles.)

Hmm. I'm sorely tempted to do Thai tea truffles. Perhaps I will...

Well, I have at least a week to think about this more. I should look up what other chocolatiers are doing, too.

I dyed the silk for my next weaving project this morning. I'm not sure if I will get to it this week since this really is chocolate frenzy week, but we'll see...

Calculations

So, I picked up three books by Peggy Osterkamp while I was at Carolina Homespun yesterday, and have been avidly reading through the first one. She explains weaving one step at a time, with fairly encyclopedic knowledge of each step. The best part about the first book is that it contains a detailed treatise on calculating yarn sett! Never again will I have trouble working out the proper sett. She even has some handy tables in the back of the book.

Peggy also has a VERY detailed set of instructions for project planning, including a handy worksheet for warp and weft calculations. Me being me, of course, I've already turned this into an Excel spreadsheet. :-)

So I've been using this spreadsheet to run some numbers, and it appears I can make a rather nice scarf 7" wide and 6 feet long out of the 432 yards of handspun magenta/purple silk that my sister-in-law gave me. I'm going to do it in a houndstooth/pinwheel design along with some black silk yarn that I still need to dye - the black should "pop" the magenta color quite nicely. I'm almost 1/2 way done with the other shawl, so I better get moving!

I'm not sure what I'll do after that - most likely some cashmere. I just got two pounds of 2/14 cashmere, which is too weak to use as warp but would make excellent weft - going to warp up with some 2/12 silk and try weaving some samples.

Now that I'm armed with a little knowledge, watch out! I think I have just exited the era of "follow the recipe" and am ready to launch into new, freewheeling byways.

A couple of screw-ups

So, I went to cut the caramels for dipping, only to discover that I'd slightly overcooked them, so they were too hard to cut. I'll need to make a second batch. I'm debating whether to buy a new box of Peet's Yin Hao Jasmine for the occasion...haven't decided yet. I am slightly cranky over having to go back down to the Peninsula for manufacturing cream, but I haven't yet found a cream better than the one the Milk Pail Market has, so I'll be battling rush hour tomorrow to get some.

I also suspect that the last batch of chocolate fudge got undercooked--it's very soft, and despite being extremely chocolatey is also too soft to cut properly. I'm giving it tonight to harden, but it may need to be chalked up to experience (and microwaved and eaten as hot-fudge-with-macadamia-nuts over vanilla Ben & Jerry's - there are upsides to making "mistakes"!). I think I probably just didn't cook it quite long enough. Next time it goes to just short of firm-ball.

All that said, I have three batches of yummy fudge to show for the weekend, and I should be able to make a batch of caramels and dip them this week, so I won't be too far behind. I suppose I could make English toffee tonight, but I'm feeling a bit tired from all this candymaking, and think I'll spend the evening quietly weaving (and dyeing).

I love this. If I could do nothing else for the rest of my life but cook, weave, sew, and travel, I'd be happy.

Some thoughts about fudge, and lemon-lavender-white-chocolate fudge recipe

I'm feeling smug today...not only have I found a way to accelerate the fudge-making process, but I've also managed to solve one of my thorny white-chocolate fudge problems.

So far I've made lavender-lemon-white chocolate fudge, and coconut-lime-mint-white chocolate fudge (which tastes better than it probably sounds - think coconut-vanilla with a hint of tart mintiness). In previous years I had terrible trouble with the milk solids in the white chocolate burning - this year I finally had a bright idea and thought, "What if I add the milk chocolate at the end?"

Fudge, you see, is a game of sugar-crystal size. In its simplest form it's just sugar, water, butter, and some corn syrup, boiled to the softball stage, cooled to 110 degrees, then beaten to form lots of small sugar crystals simultaneously, resulting in a velvety and somewhat soft texture. (If you don't create all those sugar crystals simultaneously, you get big crystals, and then your fudge is grainy.)

You can add stuff to fudge, the two most common additions being milk (or cream) and chocolate. Adding cream increases the fat content, which retards crystal formation, which is a good thing - reduces the chances of the fudge crystallizing before you're ready, producing gritty fudge. Up to a point, adding more cream/butterfat makes the fudge moister/creamier.

Chocolate is a common flavor addition, being composed of cocoa (flavorant) and cocoa butter. The cocoa butter is a fat, so behaves very similarly to the cream in inhibiting crystal formation. You can (and I often do) punch up the chocolate flavor by adding extra cocoa, though very few recipes seem to do so. (Silly people.)

I like adding acids to my non-chocolate fudges, which poses another problem. Acid curdles milk proteins. What to do? I boil my fudge a little longer than usual (so it has a lower moisture content than usual) and then add the moisture back in as lemon or lime juice, at the very end so it doesn't cook with the milk solids and coagulate them. In practice this seems to come down to "cook to firm-ball stage and add an extra tablespoon of lemon juice at end". Works pretty decently for me.

So, in sum, to create my lavender-lemon-white-chocolate fudge:

1 tbsp dried lavender flowers, stripped from stems and lightly crushed between the fingers
1-1/3 cup half-and-half
4 cups sugar
1/4 cup corn syrup
4 tbsp butter
2 tbsp lemon juice (from Meyer lemons if you can get them)
4 oz white chocolate

Bring cream to a boil in a small saucepan, then toss in lavender flowers. Steep 2-3 minutes, until the cream has a moderate lavender flavor. Strain out flowers.

In 2-gallon pot, combine sugar, corn syrup, and lavender-flavored cream. Boil to just below firm-ball stage. Pour into mixing bowl and put in cool water bath (do NOT use ice water, cool water from the tap is perfect).

Line 9x9 pan with parchment paper. Melt white chocolate in microwave.

When the outside of the mixing bowl feels somewhat warm to the touch (as opposed to hot), remove mixing bowl from the water bath. Add white chocolate and lemon juice, and IMMEDIATELY start mixing with a stand mixer or powerful hand mixer. Mix until the mixture starts to thicken and lose its gloss. Pour into pan (or pack into pan) and let cool. Cut with a knife before fudge hardens fully.

Maple fudge

I had a moderately frustrating day today - I tried simmering the silk with the black walnut hulls, but even after adding some alum to the dyebath, the best I could get was a cafe-au-lait brown, where I'd been looking for a dark brown. I'd forgotten that silk takes dyes differently - wool would have been dark brown, dammit, but what I had was a medium tan. I finally gave up and dyed it with acid dyes, resulting in a lovely rust brown. Unfortunately, I still haven't figured out the art of 100% even dyeing yet, so there are paler spots where the yarn bunched up against the ties in the skein, but it's done, and tomorrow morning it should be dry enough to start winding into balls and onto bobbins. In short, I can start the second scarf tomorrow.

Oh yes. I finished weaving the first scarf, tied the fringes, and threw it into the laundry. I decided to run it through the washing machine on the delicate cycle, and then dry it flat afterwards - interested in seeing how it comes out. I do think the sett (16 epi) was just about right, though: not too tight, not too loose.

I'm not as fond of this scarf as I was of the first one, perhaps because I am not a subtle person and am not generally fond of pale beige/ecru. (So why, then, did I do a pale beige scarf? Well, ya got me there. All I can say is, it seemed like a good idea at the time.)

Also made one large batch of maple fudge, which came out pretty well I think, despite a brief panic when I couldn't get the mixer beater detached at the critical moment of pouring the fudge into a pan. (In my experience there's about two seconds' difference between pouring fudge into a pan to harden and scraping a stiff mess out of the beater bowl and packing it down while it's still warm. Fortunately both seem to work OK, although the first is better.) I then ran out of sugar - typical, I went to buy milk and butter and forgot sugar! Bad Tien. Bad Tien.

Tomorrow's goals, since I can't ride due to this incipient saddle-sore that's slowly healing, are to make some lavender-Meyer lemon - white chocolate fudge (which tastes fantastic, but is difficult to make), some coconut-lime-white chocolate fudge, and some classic chocolate fudge. I used all of Mike's walnuts in the maple walnut fudge, so I'll have to either make straight-up chocolate fudge or else buy more walnuts. Hmm. I might use pecans.

I also plan, of course, to cut up the caramels and dip them in chocolate, which will take a good couple hours.

If I have time left over from any of that (especially in the morning), I'll work on the second scarf. This should go quicker, since the loom's already threaded and the inevitable threading errors worked out. All I have to do is tie up the front end, and I'm ready to go.

Score!!

I found black walnuts at the farmer's market today, still in their husks!

So I will be dyeing the brown silk with black walnut hulls, not coffee. I'm psyched--I had wanted to play with black walnut dye again, but couldn't find a source of hulls. (The seller looked at me rather strangely when I explained that I wasn't interested in the nuts but in the hulls, but let it pass.) I've got them boiling on the stove now to extract the dye, and the silk soaking in preparation for the dyebath.

I've woven 5/7 of the scarf. It looks okay, but I'm having problems with long floats on the back that look pretty unattractive - I'm trying to pay more attention to my weaving, so I can catch them before they're a problem. The current plan is to weave on the scarf until I finish it, and then, while the other skein is dyeing and drying, make fudge, dip the caramels, etc.

I may not be able to go riding this week on account of a proto-saddle-sore that I'm worried about, so I should have plenty of time for all the goodies, and even some extra time to dye yarn for the next project (with the magenta handspun yarn).

Vanilla -jasmine caramel recipe

Here's my recipe:

3 cups manufacturing cream (or heavy cream if you can't find manufacturing cream)
3 cups sugar
2 vanilla beans
2/3 cup orange-blossom honey
3 tbsp butter, softened
2 tbsp Peet's Yin Hao Jasmine tea, from a freshly-opened tin - or the freshest, most powerfully jasminey tea you can find (this is important!)

Line a 9x12 pan (or something of similar size) with parchment paper, or aluminum foil oiled with a tasteless vegetable oil like canola oil.

Slice vanilla beans in half lengthwise (to open up the most surface area), add to cream, and bring to boil. Remove from heat and add 2 tbsp of jasmine tea. Steep for 30-45 seconds ONLY and pour through a strainer to remove the tea. Rinse off the vanilla beans, scrape the seeds into the cream, and add the vanilla beans back to the pot full of cream. (You want to steep the vanilla beans in the cream for as long as possible, so leave them in during the cooking.)

Put cream, sugar, vanilla beans, and honey in a 2-gallon pot. Put on medium-high heat (high heat if using an electric stove) and stir with a wooden spoon until sugar is dissolved. Cook to the firm-ball stage (250 degrees if using a candy thermometer - I personally hate the things, and use the ice water test instead), then remove from heat and add the softened butter. Stir in well, then pour into pan. Remove vanilla beans with a fork or the tip of a knife.

Let cool overnight before cutting with an oiled cutting board and well-oiled knife.

* * * * * *

This recipe is basically a standard caramel recipe (equal weights cream and sugar, plus some invert sugar to keep it from crystallizing - usually corn syrup, in this case honey) with vanilla and jasmine tea added. The reason I stress using fresh jasmine tea is that jasmine is an extremely fugitive fragrance. Try comparing a jasmine tea that's been open for three weeks to a freshly opened jasmine tea and you'll see what I mean. I use Peet's Yin Hao Jasmine tea because it's the strongest jasmine fragrance I've seen, but I literally open the tin minutes before making the caramels and dispose of it within two weeks, because the jasmine fragrance all dissipates once it's opened. (Even if the can's flushed with nitrogen and sealed immediately afterwards--I tried that once.)

The reason you want to use so much tea (double the usual amount for green tea) and steep the tea for such a short period is that you want to extract the jasmine flavor (which comes out almost at once) without getting much of the bitterness of tea. With a very short steeping, it comes out with a strong jasmine fragrance, and just an intriguing hint of nuttiness/bitterness from the tea. Combined with the vanilla and orange-blossom honey (the more floral the honey the better - I buy mine from the farmer's market, where it's better than the supermarket brands), you get an intensely floral vanilla caramel that's oh-so-yummy.

I then cut the caramels into pieces roughly 3/4" square and dip them in tempered Valrhona Extra Bitter chocolate to make my chocolate-covered caramels, but as tempering chocolate takes considerable practice, you might just want to eat them straight up - when they're also very yummy.

Next week I'll give toffee recipes, unless I make toffee tomorrow that is :-)

More weaving

Well, I've warped up the loom and corrected some threading errors, and got started weaving yesterday. I've made rapid progress - wove almost eighteen inches last night - and expect to finish the first scarf this weekend. (I'd probably finish both of them, except that I have to make two batches of chocolate-covered caramels and a couple batches of fudge, plus go out on a long bike ride.) So far I like it - it's a nice pale beige mixed with white - and while I'm still making some errors in weaving, I've improved a lot in just one project.

This is sett a lot more loosely than the other project I did, so any differences in beating really show up - fortunately, I seem to be doing OK with it so far. It's fascinating seeing the differences between plainweave and twill, and the difference between 100% silk and a 50-50 mix with wool. I can't wait to wash it and see how it turns out. Right now it looks a little stiff, but silk is so supple that I doubt it'll be like that once it comes off the loom.

In fact, I'm progressing so fast that I think I'd better dye the silk for the other scarf tonight. I'm still debating whether to dye with coffee or acid dyes, but am leaning towards the acid dyes at the moment, as I have them on hand (and don't have the coffee).

Next on the agenda is a scarf for my sister-in-law. She gave me some gorgeous magenta-and-purple handspun silk yarn that she bought while traveling, and I didn't know what to do with it because there were only about 400 yards of it - not enough for a shawl, and I wasn't sure if there would be enough for a lace scarf, either. But now that I have a loom...I did some back of the envelope calculations, and I think I have enough for a narrow scarf, if I use another yarn for the warp. (I don't want to use this handspun yarn for the warp - as suitable as it would be - because of the loom waste.) I can modify the pattern I'm using for the tea scarves.

I'm thoroughly enjoying the stage I'm in right now. It's the joy of pure discovery - look! I can make cloth! - unencumbered by the desire to over-plan. (Not that I've ever done that, you understand. ;-) ) Right now I'm just enjoying the process, not feeling any urge to be systematic about it.

But I am starting to get the urge to experiment with samples...try weaving things at a tighter or looser sett to see what happens, weave silk warp with cashmere weft and see what happens when I wash it, and so on. I'll probably get around to it in a couple of projects, when the sheer joy of making things starts to pall and I get the urge to investigate things in a more systematic manner. I get the impression that weaving is a hobby that (unlike knitting) can take a lifetime to learn.

Meanwhile, in the chocolate arena, I am making two batches of caramels tonight - my personal specialty, vanilla-orange-blossom-honey-jasmine tea caramels dipped in Extra Bitter Valrhona chocolate. Tomorrow I'll dip them in chocolate, and also make a double batch of maple fudge, and a batch of white chocolate-lavender-Meyer lemon fudge. The last one is very tricky and I've often had to make multiple batches - the milk solids have a tendency to burn. But it tastes so yummy that I usually make it anyway.

I might also make a batch of chocolate fudge with walnuts, but I dunno - compared to the other chocolates in my annual box of goodies, chocolate fudge just can't compare. Too much sugar, even though I "spike" my fudge with a bunch of cocoa powder to make it more intensely chocolatey.

Still no word back from the agent on this book...i'm going to wait until Thanksgiving and then prompt her, if I haven't heard back. At some point soon I'll need to get back to work on it, too.

Vaccinations, various projects

I finished winding the warp for project #2 today, and sleyed the reed. I'm going to put off threading the loom until tomorrow night, when I'll have more time and be fresher. Hope I can get it done in one sitting! I'll definitely need a couple hours of uninterrupted time to thread it successfully.

I also got a pound of cashmere yarn from the UK! It's pure white, which is surprising for the shop I got it from - they work primarily with mill ends, and those are rarely white for obvious reasons. I liked it enough that I ordered a second pound of it - that's all they had left. It's a 2/14 cashmere that measures about 22 wraps per inch.

Which, of course, gets me into the next problem. I don't know what spacing to use with it. With the Jaggerspun Zephyr (the stuff I used for the previous project), the spacing was specified in the pattern; with my current project, the seller included a suggested sett for the yarn. This yarn is mostly sold to machine knitters, so there are no instructions for weaving.

I guess I'll have to weave samples and see how they come out...someone suggested warping with silk (which is much stronger than cashmere) and then using the cashmere as weft. I've never tried that either! So many things to sample and play around with.

But first, I think I'll try a couple more easy projects, just to get the hang of warping and weaving.

Meanwhile, I have gotten the first set of vaccinations for my Ghanaian travels. It's a good thing my insurance covers them (after the deductible) because the first set cost $436! Admittedly, I'm getting a VERY full set of vaccinations, including some very optional ones like rabies and Hep B, but it's still pretty daunting.

I think the full list is: rabies (series of three shots), Hepatitis A booster, Hepatitis B (three shots), polio booster, meningococcal, yellow fever, typhoid, and, um, stuff. I'm pretty sure I forgot one or two. Plus a prescription for antimalarial medications, and another for an antibiotic in case I get traveler's diarrhea.

Quite the kitchen sink.

(You don't actually NEED all those vaccinations to go to Africa, by the way--the only one that's legally required to get into Ghana is yellow fever. But since my insurance is paying for all of it, I decided to go the paranoid route and get vaccinated for everything I could possibly get vaccinated for. The shots are mostly good for 5+ years, so it will make subsequent travel a lot easier.)

Finally, I've been teaching Mike how to knit (he's been picking it up with astonishing speed), and he's decided to make a "Dr. Who" scarf as his first project. I think that will be fun! We've ordered 3 lbs of sportweight Kona Superwash yarn (from Henry's Attic) in white, and we'll dye it in the appropriate colors for him to knit. That sounds like great fun to me--I can reproduce most colors reasonably well with my palette of dye samples, and it'll be fun experimenting with the rest. Best of all, we get to do a fiber arts project together! :-)

Photo of shawl

I've decided I like the rainbow effect after all (the red is redder in the actual shawl, by the way, not magenta-ish as it appears in the photo). It's nothing to write paeans about, but it's a nicely woven shawl and not at all bad for beginner's work. I'm pleased.

Last night I got impatient with the tea-dyed skeins, which were taking longer to dry than I'd like, so I stuck them in the oven with the temperature set to 120 degrees and a chopstick keeping the door slightly ajar. It worked perfectly, and I now have four skeins of evenly-dyed silk yarn that are, amazingly, exactly the same hue despite my not having dyed them all at once. I is im-pressed.

Now it's a matter of winding all four skeins into balls and starting to wind the warp. This will probably take awhile, but not nearly as long as for the rainbow shawl...the shawl is going to be only about half as wide and the sett is much larger (16 vs 24 ends per inch), so it should go relatively quickly. Ditto the threading. Instead of 605 ends, I'll only have 329! That's a mercy.

Anyway, that's all for now. Click on the image of the shawl if you want the larger version (warning: it may not be a great photo, I took it with my cell phone this morning).

Impatience

I couldn't sleep last night (the result of eating chocolate while making my chocolates - Valrhona packs quite a theobromine kick), so I got up at 3am and spent some time looking at scarf and shawl patterns. I decided I wanted to do one with natural-looking colors (after the riot of color in the last shawl, my eyes need a rest!), and with a subtle pattern, so I decided to do a complex pattern in beige and white, in silk.

However, I wasn't at all confident in my ability to dye an even beige color using acid dyes - I've never tried pastels before - and was thinking about how to handle this when I realized that tea produces a lovely reddish-beige. Aha! So I ran off to the grocery store as soon as it got light out and bought myself a package of teabags.

And it worked! I boiled the entire package of teabags in two or three gallons of water, and threw in the silk. The dye "took" more or less instantly, producing a beautiful beige that is now drying on the back of a chair. After dyeing the first two skeins, I decided that I wanted to do two scarves in the same pattern, one white/beige and one beige/darker brown, so I threw two more skeins into the dyebath. I had forgotten that the first two skeins had partially exhausted the dyebath, so it took considerable soaking to get a nearly matching color, but I managed it in the end. The last two skeins aren't quite as rosy beige as the other two - a bit more sallow in shade - but they're about the same value and I'm hoping the difference won't be too noticeable. With natural dyes, you get more variation than with acid dyes - it's part of the fun, and hopefully will add to the scarf rather than detracting from it.

I haven't yet decided how to handle the darker-brown scarf yet. I may dye the brown with acid dyes, and I may decide to go another route and dye it with coffee! At last, a use for instant coffee!

Anyway, that's the news for today...I'm going back to sleep, then going out on my long bike ride, then have a dinner date in the evening, so probably no more fiber arts stuff for me today. Just as well--it will take a day or two for those skeins to dry, anyway.

A productive day

I finished the shawl I've been weaving!

I'm still not sure how I feel about the colors--I think they're OK, not ugly but also not stunningly beautiful. I figure I'll let that sit and percolate for awhile.

Overall it looks pretty good--the selvages are relatively even (although I did have significant draw-in), and apart from one area where I inexplicably wound up with very long floats on the reverse side, it's well-woven. I rate it "not bad for beginner's work".

I still have to twist the fringe on it (I did a few threads before aborting to work on chocolate), wash it, and finish it, but the weaving is complete. I cut it off the loom this afternoon, just after Mike got back from his race. WOW! What an accomplishment. I'm feeling happy and proud.

Also happy because I've completed the first round of chocolate-making: chocolate-dipped apricots, pears, plums, candied ginger, macadamia nuts, and cherry-almond clusters. I'm not happy with the cherry-almond clusters--Trader Joe's, my source of dried sour cherries, has changed their cherry formula to just plain dried cherries (instead of whatever they had before), and they're not nearly as good/tart IMO as the ones they had before. I'm going to sample them again in the morning, and if I still don't like them, they go to the coworkers, not friends and family. Same with the macadamia nuts - I used salted ones this time since they were all I had, and I suspect unsalted is better. I'll have to try some in the morning.

And, I managed to get rats to feed to Isis and Astarte. The pet shop has been out of rats for several weeks now, but they had them today and I bought four. Isis gets three, Astarte gets one, and I get to feel good because my sweetie Isis is FINALLY eating again!

So all in all, it's been a productive day, and I'm feeling pretty good.

Now, of course, the next question: what do I put on the loom next?

Weaving and chocolate

I have been steadily weaving this shawl and am now about half done. (Yes, I have been doing other things besides planning my trip to Ghana!) It's going well--my rectangles are now (mostly) squares, and the pattern is looking better than I'd expected. I think it'll still be a riot of color, but I'm holding judgment on the finished project until I actually see the whole thing. It's hard to judge something when you can only see it four inches at a time.

I've been doing more reading on weaving. It's extremely intellectually engaging--there is so much complexity to weaving, MUCH more so than knitting! Mastering Weave Structure is a great book that covers many (most?) of the things you can do with different weave structures, and makes it plain that you could keep yourself busy for a lifetime just with plainweave! It's a great book but I find it exhausting to read, because it introduces so many new concepts and ideas so quickly. It's definitely not a beginner's book, but I love it because it challenges me to keep up with it. Going to keep reading it.

Uncharacteristically, I don't plan on doing anything too ambitious until I feel I have my weaving "feet" more firmly underneath me. I've found a couple of patterns in Handwoven that I think will suit, and will probably follow those for the next few projects, until the thrill of just plain weaving wears off and I'm willing to entertain the possibility of weaving samples. :-) I'm not sure where this newfound conservatism comes from, but I suspect part of it is just that I'm intellectually engaged with other projects right now, so don't want to focus too much on weaving. (Someday, for example, I *will* have to get back to that book...) I would like to learn to do my own drawdowns and designs at some point, but that point is not now. I'll be a "recipe weaver" for a bit longer, I think.

Some things never change, though, and my taste in yarns remains fairly true-to-form: silk, cashmere, and fine wool. I've ordered a pound of cashmere yarn, I have a pound of silk yarn, and I've ordered another pound of a silk-wool blend. I think I'll mostly be doing finework, though not ultrafine (30+ epi), for my weaving. Rugs are right out.

Meanwhile, chocolate doomsday approacheth. This weekend I'll be making chocolate-covered apricots and pears, cherry-almond clusters, and chocolate covered macadamia nuts, if I can find macadamia nuts (Trader Joe's has very unsportingly stopped carrying them). I might make some fudge as well, although I don't know--fudge is usually better fresh.

Next week the plan is caramels, fudge, and English toffee, the weekend after that I'll start the molded chocolates. Then, of course, comes Thanksgiving weekend, which is truffles, filling the molded chocolates, boxing up the chocolates (hopefully with assistance), and handing over piles and piles of leftovers to my friends Jon and Julie, who will no doubt eat themselves happily sick. (I don't particularly like eating chocolates myself - I'm in it more for the artistry - so thankfully, they won't be eaten by me.)

Weaving, chocolate, and Ghana. All three related, now that I think of it. Well, Ghana has both weaving and chocolate, anyway...

One of the things I love about my life is that I never know where it will take me next. I feel very, very lucky. Even with the bipolar disorder.

More on Ghana

After talking with Ellie of Aba Tours, I now have a tentative itinerary:

Saturday, Jan 27 - Arrive in Ghana
Jan 27 - Feb 1: Stay in Aba House (in Accra, the capital) and study goldsmithing/silversmithing, basketweaving, and beadmaking with local artisans

Feb 2-6: Go live in a weaving village in the Volta region while studying at a Kente weaving school

Feb 6-10: Go live in an Ashanti weaving village while studying handspinning, adinkra, and Ashanti weaving

Feb 10-16: Visit northern Ghana, study indigo dyeing (tied-resist, dipped in indigo)

Feb 16-18: Back in Accra, spend more time with local artisans, visit the central market and shop for craftwork

This sounds like it will be loads of fun, although a bit more time-constrained than I'd like. Three weeks is no way to see a country...a month would be better.

Other stuff I plan to do while in Ghana:

• visit a cacao plantation (yeah, I've been to cacao plantations in Belize and in Hawaii, but Ghana's main export is cacao, and I hear they have good chocolate in the country, too)
• go to a wildlife preserve and see hippos, crocs, etc.

I've called up the travel vaccination clinic and will be going there next week for my vaccinations. (I've already sent my passport off for renewal.) Yellow fever vaccination certificate is required to get into Ghana, and typhoid is probably a good idea (plus other stuff I don't know about yet, will find out next week).

I'm really excited about all this--this sounds like the perfect vacation to me. And, if I can buy the flight using "points" from my credit card, it shouldn't even be that expensive. I'd rather pay $60/day for room, board, and weaving lessons in an African village than $100/day for some American hotel, that's for sure. I'm infinitely happier in a thatched mud hut, eating bats and bushrats, than in an air-conditioned hotel room somewhere in Hawaii. (Where are most people's senses of ADVENTURE?? Or FUN?? Sheesh.)

Definitely going to Ghana

Ghana it is! Thanks to Linda, who suggested looking up Weave a Real Peace - I went to their website, devoured the many pages on textile travels, and decided to go to Ghana. (Peru also sounded tempting, but I really had my heart set on Africa.) A big factor in my decision was Aba Tours - they specialize in setting up cultural trips to Ghana.

There are a lot of handicrafts in Ghana that sound interesting - basketweaving, kente cloth weaving, adinkra (cloth stamped using carved pieces of gourd), indigo dyeing, goldsmithing, etc. I'll probably base my tour out of Accra (the capital of Ghana), where the Cross Cultural Collaborative is located - they have a lot of artisans there, so it's a good place to start.

Then I'll go out to the villages - apparently a lot of their artisans are from the villages originally, and Ellie (the woman who runs Aba Tours) thinks she can get some of the artisans to take me to their home villages and teach me there. That sounds wonderful--I'd get my lessons, AND I'd get to stay in the villages. I could also spend some time hanging around the Cultural Center, learning from artists whose villages are too remote to visit.

And, of course, I could also strike out on my own and see what else there is to be seen. I plan to spend at least one portion of my trip going to a wildlife preserve where I can see hippos. :-)

All in all, it sounds like it'll be a fantastic trip - really looking forward to it. I hope I can get things settled quickly, so I can put it out of my mind and get back to weaving, chocolate, and the book.

Whee! Ghana! Sounds like it'll be great fun.