Purple Soup - yes, purple (and it was delicious!)

Last week I bought some purple carrots (thanks Birgit!). They aren't purple all the way through, just on the outer edges, but it's a marvelous deep purple, and contrasts great with the orange of the carrots.
Come Saturday, we still had some left, and also some zucchini. Our standard weekend plan with leftover vegetables is to make soup, so peel peel peel, chop chop chop, and off into the pot.
A little while later, I had this. A delicious rich stew, with lots of veggies and some ground beef.

But wait. That's not just any soup - it has an odd color. It took a couple of different flash settings to show you both the tasty looking soup and the purple tinge.

Put a few drops onto the spoon rest, and I noticed a distinct purple tinge.

Towards the end of the cooking time, I added some processed cheese that was a nice white color.
BAM! Purple soup. It cannot be denied.
The carrots had mostly turned plain orange, and the purple went into the soup.
 

Odd color, but still delicious.

Cake catastrophe, and a scientific experiment

Granted, a cake catastrophe is not to be classified with real catastrophes, like we read every day in the news. I do have that much of a connection to the real world.
BUT, remember this?

I had high hopes a couple of weeks ago when I first blogged about these pans. Fantasies of dozens of teensy-tiny cakes, and cheese balls, and whatever were going to decorate my future public food-sharing events like birthdays and potlucks.
Today, I had the time to try it out. I pulled out a trusted, if bland, sour cream chocolate cake recipe and mixed it up.
It's been a long week at work, and my brainpower is ebbing, but I still had enough engineer in me to say that I should at least experiment with greasing or not greasing the pans.
So I melted some butter and scientifically greased some cups, but not all.
Then I carefully poured in the batter, placed the pans on a baking sheet, and slid it into the oven, using direct heat instead of convection. I was taking no chances, baby.
This is what I got. For cake, it's quite the catastrophe.

Nothing came off. Not a single teensy-tiny gugelhupf came out. There was a slight indication that the greased cups were a little better, but still shredded the cake. Now I've got a big ol' mess that I have to clean up, no cake, and I even ran out of flour and sugar.
There was still a little batter left over, so I decided to give it another try. But only after a scientific assessment as to what went wrong, and what should I try to see if it could ever work.
In the internets I observed that MANY MANY people have problems with silicone pans, but nowhere did I find a solution. What did I know so far?

• I had overfilled the pans
• Melted butter certainly didn't seem to work
• It wasn't the batter, because the batter that overflowed onto the baking sheet peeled right off
• Heating the outside of the pans was part of the reason the cake fell apart - no crust

The best hint the internet gave me was to try putting the pan on a rack instead of a baking sheet. At the same time I chose to use convection instead of direct heat, because that would also help form a crust. Also, there was no harm in using the old technique of cold buttering the pan and dusting with flour.
So, new clean pan. Butter, flour, shake out excess. Fill cups only halfway. Place on rack and put in convection oven for 22 minutes at 150C.

Here the result. Highly satisfactory.
Sadly, the cake doesn't taste any better than before. At least science has once again proven itself.  No catastrophe after all.

Celebrate and let it go

Sometimes things sneak up on you and you've reached a milestone that you hadn't even thought to notice. For me, it's not just sometimes, it's most times that I don't recognize a milestone.

My DH and I are both blessed with weak memories, so we never fight about forgotten anniversaries. Almost. A couple of years ago, we agreed to exchange birthday gifts, which we don't normally bother with anymore. I planned a nice gift for him, and had it ready to go. My birthday comes first, and I was really looking forward to a nice present, something thoughtful. Do you know what I got?

Nothing. I was quite disappointed, but still had a gift for him, so a few days later, I gave him his gift and we let it go. Some things you just have to choose to let go and move on with life.

Other things you should try to remember. I keep a design book because I want to remember what I've been working on with my sewing. It also helps me to organize my thoughts when I'm writing a pattern.

My Tokyo Subway suburb quilt is in a teeny-tiny, eensy-weensy quilt show (display?) at a local shop. It hadn't occurred to me to acknowledge that it's the first quilt I ever showed, but during some chitchat with Birgit and Tina, it occurred to me to say, "Yeah! my quilt will be on display for that whole teeny-tiny, eensy-weensy audience to see."

So, Yay for me!

Now let it go, Karen, and get on with life.

Ernest Haight, Engineer Quilter

Ernest Haight was a quilter in Nebraska in the 20th century. A new podcast has just been released by the University of Nebraska which shows many of his quilts, and some of his techniques.
He gradually learned quilting from the women in his family, but made full use of his mechanical engineering skills in designing his quilts.
You can download the lecture podcast from iTunes, look for podcasts by the International Quilt Study Center & Museum. The Ernest podcast was released on Mar 9, 2011.
Quilter John Flynn claims Ernest as a strong influence.

Sleepover Retreat March 2011

When my daughter was still a pre-teen, she went on a lot of sleepovers. Half a dozen girls would stay up most of the night, talking, playing, talking, snacking, talking, laughing, in general having a fabulous time. I could measure the success of the sleepover by how tired Taylor was when she got home.
When I got home from my quilt retreat tonight, I feel asleep while talking with my husband. Then I dozed off while the news was on, and again while DH was chatting with his mother on the phone.

Guess I had a good time.

Here a few pictures to give you a taste.

Round Robin quilt

While I may be familiar with quilts and how they were traditionally made, I'm relatively new at quilt guilds and how group quilting projects function.
It was with trepidation that I signed up for the latest Round Robin project at the Black Forest Guild. I really hate the idea of screwing up someone else's quilt.
At least I chose to do Round Robin in the beginners group, and my group looks like it will be fun. There are, however, just three of us, so if any of you BFQ members reading this wants to join us, there's still time. You should go ahead and follow the rules in the instructions. Contact me if you want to join our group, so I can tell the RR program manager.
The block I've chosen for my center is Bonnie Hunter's Roll Roll Cotton Boll block, including the string corners.
What do you think? Kinda neat, huh? I think there are colors and variety enough to let my group partners do pretty much as they like. Do I need to add my own border around the edge before I send it off?
Know any good links to RR quilts? I'd like to get a sense of things I can do to my partners' quilts that will really make them pop.

Look what I got!

As soon as I find some time, I'm actually going to bake something. Use up the last of my precious chocolate chip stash.

Loook what we did!

Cathedral Stars Class with Bonnie Hunter.