Holiday Cooking Failures

On the weekend, I actually mustered enough spirit to do some Christmas cooking. There are some standards that must be made every year, but the problem is of course that there are two of us, so the standards are different. (The nice thing about standards is there are so many of them.)
My favourite is frying pan cookies, his favourite is fruit balls. The good thing about Christmas cooking is that for everything the ingredients are pretty much the same but the method is different. Ingredients for dark fruit cake, (or war cake as we call it in this house) frying pan cookies and fruit balls are all the same, only in different amounts which make the trip to the bulk barn easier. Sugar, fat, eggs, dates, nuts, coconut, candied cherries and candied fruit are all you need to make anything at Christmas.
War cake is pretty easy, and I posted about it two years ago here. This year, I forgot to cover the outside of my breakaway bunt pan with tin foil, so the cake got mushy on the bottom inch as it sat cooking in water to keep it moist. Moist, yeah I'll say. The fix for that is I have a slightly shorter bunt cake than usual because I cut off the bottom and threw it in the compost.
Frying Pan cookies are also easy, because they don't get baked, just cooked in the pan and rolled in coconut. Yum.
Fruit balls are trickier apparently. This year was my first attempt. He usually makes them, as they are his mother's recipe. They have always turned out for him in the past so I was not forewarned. On Monday, while he went to Digby to pick up his parents from the Saint John Ferry, I got to work to make fruit balls as a surprise for them all. You mix all the stuff together in a bowl, add eggs and sugar, and drop them on a cookie sheet and into the oven. Easy right? The sugar and eggs are supposed to keep the chopped fruit and nuts together and they turn into sticky chewy blobs. It didn't work. They looked fine until I tried to remove them from the cookie sheet, and they fell apart into crumbled sticky fruit and nuts, they wouldn't stay as balls at all. It was at this time they all arrived home to witness my complete failure. That's when his mum told me she couldn't get them to work either most times. She blamed the egg being too runny, I blamed the dates being too hard.
I thought I could salvage the failure by taking the crumbs and using it as topping for a holiday pear crisp. Good idea, but bad execution. I had some already sliced pears in the freezer that we harvested from our tree out back this fall. I threw them in a pan, threw the topping on top and popped it all in the oven. I think, it would have worked better if the pears weren't frozen. What we got was a very watery, mushy pear soup on the bottom with sticky chewy nuts and fruit on top. It tasted Ok once it was drained with a slotted spoon, but there were a lot of leftovers that went into the compost bin.

Flashback Fridays

Tis the season to have flashbacks to all those holiday and special events related trauma. Last weekend I went to the city for some shopping and lunch to celebrate Jane Austen's 234 birthday. I was in a well known shoe store buying my mother's Christmas present to me (thanks Mom, they're beautiful, how did you know?) The salesman turned out to be a fellow sufferer of the dreaded Piano Recital from way back. He wasn't exactly a friend, as he is between my sister's age and mine, but he was a constant for those years.
The very next day, I received a video of a friends son's first piano recital in my email box. Suddenly, as I listened to his unique tempo of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star I had the vivid recollection of buying a new dress especially for the piano recital. I hated wearing dresses as a child and it was probably very difficult to get me to try one one, let alone be excited about it. Usually this item was a hand-me-down, hand-me-down from my sister via our cousin, but apparently this year were were going to splash out. Or perhaps I finally caught up to my cousin and by the time her hand-me-downs were ready I had already outgrown them. At any rate I remember it as the most uncomfortable piece of clothing I have ever worn, it was a stone coloured pinafore I think, although it was probably called a jumper, or maybe a tunic. I remember it made it extremely difficult to slide down the banister of the church hall while I was waiting for the audience to be seated before the show. I don't remember anything about any of the pieces I ever played at any of the recitals, but I do remember practising my curtsy. Similarly, I don't remember how to play the piano anymore, but I'm a kick ass curtsier.

But wait, there's more:
After that wave of neurotic nostalgia, a friend posted on her blog about her children's Christmas concert that was held last week. (Yes, they still call them Christmas concerts here in monocultural Nova Scotia.) This brought on another wave of Christmas concert flashbacks for me to endure. Unlike the piano performances, I can remember a lot about the concerts from my elementary school days. I remember one year I was a Raggedy Ann doll, along with 4 other identical Raggedy Ann Dolls (but I was the one in the middle, and so therefore the most important.) Raggedy Ann was the Uber popular doll that year in the Sears Catalogue. We sang a song and did a Raggedy dance that consisted of lurching back and forth from foot to foot while letting your arms swing about all flopsie like to the tempo of the song. I designed the movement in rehearsal and it stuck, my first stab at choreography. On the night, I got off on the wrong foot, literally. I must have started on the left while the others started on the right, meaning I lurched one way while they all lurched the other. I was concentrating so hard that I failed to notice, but the laughter of the audience spurred me on to lurch wider and wider, thinking that they were really enjoying our performance. (unlike poor JaySee Gee 's traumatic laughter comment on the blog post link above) My exuberant lurching made my shoulders bump the poor girls shoulders on either side and send them flying back off balance the other way. I was completely oblivious to anything but the positive response we were getting until we were off stage and they all told me off.
I can imagine the next week or so will have it's share of flashback joy as we get closer to the tree trimming holiday.

Coil pitchers

Last spring I made three coil pitchers for fun and then the summer pottery hiatus meant they languished on the shelf until last week, when I finally finished them. That is to say I finished two of the three, the smallest one was knocked off the shelf by a cat and plunged to its death in August or September. No great loss really. I decided to play around with under-glaze to finish the other two, so the red and green tops are painted on the bisque, and then clear glaze applied to the whole thing inside and out. Even though I put two layers of clear glaze on the inside and outside, I find that water still leaches through the bottom where there is no glaze on the outside. It may be because they are coil constructed pots, but I think it is more likely the result of under firing the glaze. I made other water tight pots by the coil method before, I have two functional tea pots made this way, and I don't actually coil the bottom, but I use a slab bottom so it should be leak proof. I know I under fired these pots, because I couldn't see the witness cone very well inside the kiln as it was firing, and as I had over fired the previous kiln, when the temperature reached 2160, I left it for 10 minutes and then shut it down. I thought I could see that the cone had dropped, but I was mistaken, the cone 5 was just starting to bend. These are made of my speckled clay, but they are not as speckled as some other things I have, and this may be another result of under firing too.
The seeping water is really very little, and I wouldn't notice it except I left the green pitcher full of water on the studio table that is covered in canvas and when I went to move it is was damp underneath. The red pitcher is on the wood stove to add moisture to air. Last year we used a crock pot from China Town for this, and it eventually marked the stove with rust where it leached too. Eventually I may get around to re-glazing and re-firing these pots to see if that makes the difference.

Glaze Test Results

Today we got the first snow. It is wet and was preceded by much rain and I don't think it will be here long, but it was a shock to the system after the long mild fall to realize that winter is really here now. How is it that every year I get caught out by it? I saw the leaves falling off the trees. I have had to scrape frost off the car windows a couple mornings. The heat came on last week during the night. Northern New Brunswick and Alberta have already had snow. Still, I refused to believe the weather network when they announced we would get a nor'easter today. Hmmm. It might be time to see if the snowblower will start.
Last week I did some glaze tests to see how I should glaze the plant pot for my friend David. It was very exciting to open that kiln and see what I got. Friday I glazed the pot itself. It's funny but test tiles never really seem to tell the whole story. It is like the paint chip never really shows what the room will look like. These are a couple samples of what I got when I tested some colours. The middle colour of the three is what I used for the pot, and the second tile picture is that glaze over some other colours. My test tiles are relief tiles that we made for the shower, and the relief creates breaks in the glaze colours, which can be quite interesting, but if the surface being glazed is smooth, the colours can be quite different. The glaze didn't break up as much on the pot itself, so the finished surface is quite a bit darker than I expected. You can see how the rim coils make the glaze break, but the leaf imprints weren't enough to affect it. It still interesting because there is a rich sheen to the mat finish under bright light, but in a dark room that gets lost and it is just a dark pot and rather dull. If this were a plate or a mug, I'd run it though the dishwasher two dozen times and know it would get more interesting as the surface wears a bit, but I don't imagine it will be subjected to that sort of daily abuse as a plant pot.
Today I'm firing another glaze kiln with some butter dishes I made last spring. I started making some Christmas presents this week, (nothing like getting started early!) and those butter dishes were just taking up room on the shelf. The bonus of pushing work through is that I may actually have a functional butter dish to use when Peter's parents arrive for their visit.

No Comment

I am experiencing a technology hiccough (this is how to spell hiccup apparently). All your comments seem to have disappeared. It's not that I don't love you. I love you all. All three of you. But today my blog got a spam comment and in trying to erase it, I think I erased everything. Blogger tells me this isn't the case, but the comments are gone. Sorry.
Now you will find that you have to type in a wiggly word from the box in order to post, you know the drill, so that should get rid of the spammers.

Almost there

Last week, (was it just last week?) we finished tiling the 4th shower wall around the door. It took hours because there was only 1 full tile per row, and all the others had to be cut.
We also laid the floor, which went super fast because the hex tiles are in 2 ft square sheets all connected together, and we only had to cut out the hole for the drain and cut the sheets to fit the space.
Today we grouted the walls. That took about an hour to put it all on, and another half hour to take it all off. It was a lot of hard work too, and while I sweep at lot in curling so my arms are at least used to the abuse, the Other One is getting a little soft while he spends most days only exercising his brain. I'm thinking tomorrow he will be pretty sore when we have to grout the floor. We decide to use bright white grout between the tiles hoping that white on white would hide all the imperfections of the tile job, and I think it worked. The corners on the edge of the first wall we tiled gapped 3/8th of an inch because we really didn't know what we were doing. And the blue tile didn't cut so well on the stone saw, so there were nicks and chips in the glaze edge. The grout really did fill a lot of that in, so it looks pretty spiffy I think.
After a few days of letting it set up we will seal it all. We are not going to install the door or window yet, we plan to cover them with a shower curtain because our goal was to be able to have a shower before Christmas while the parents are visiting.