Wheels

The world has a new bike rider, as my big girl Sydney, at four years and ten months, takes her first spin:

Watch out, world, because my baby has wheels!

The Science Behind the Butter

Willow explains the scientific principles behind Mason jar butter:

In case you wanted to know.

Tutorial: Heart-Shaped Cake

Matt was gone for five days earlier this week, to visit some old friends and attend a memorial for that dear child that I was telling you about. His absence coincided with what will ideally be the last of the unpleasant wintry weather that we'll see until next winter, and so our time without him wasn't what I'd call super-fun, exactly.

Sydney, acting out proven coping methods for her gender, requested that we bake a different sweet together just about every day. We baked muffins, and vegan cocoa fudge cookies, and, with pretty much the last dregs of the pantry supplies, a heart-shaped cake.

You can use any standard cake recipe for a heart-shaped cake. I used the 1-2-3-4 cake from The Art of Simple Food, with an absurd number of substitutions due to the oddness of our pantry (I try to shop only every other week now, due to the oddness of our budget, you could say, so it's typical for recipes to turn odd after a week or so). Let's see...I actually used the eggs that the recipe called for, even though I don't normally eat eggs, because Matt eats them and he wasn't home TO eat them. Instead of milk I used the rest of the organic cow's milk yogurt and then the rest of the soy yogurt--together they came to exactly the right amount, yay! Instead of cake flour I used organic, unbleached all-purpose flour. Instead of the butter I used the rest of the homemade Mason jar butter that the girls and I made earlier last week, and Earth Balance.

Phew!

Despite the way it sounds, the cake came out excellent--perhaps slightly on the dry side, which made it perfect for picking up and eating out of hand, which we all prefer, anyway.

The real trick to baking a heart-shaped cake is to divide the recipe, and bake the cake in both a square pan and a round pan:

The length of the side of the square pan should be equal to the diameter of the round pan, although it can be a little smaller, if you just don't have the right pans--for instance, I bake these cakes in a square 8" casserole dish and a round 9" cake pan. I'll show you how to trim the cake later if you do that.

The other option is to bake the square part of the cake in a rectangular cake pan and just cut it down, but that method wastes some cake, and this method won't.

Cut the round cake exactly in half:

Turn the square cake so that it's a diamond, with a point down and a point up. Put the flat side of each half-circle against one of the top sides of the diamond:

Heart-shaped cake! If the round cake was slightly larger than the square cake, then set each half-circle down independently, lined up correctly at the bottom, and trim the top straight up, the way that I did in the above photograph. If your round cake is the smaller one, though, you'll mess up all the proportions, so just don't do that.

I made a batch of vegan buttercream frosting from Vegan Cupcakes Take over the World--don't shame me, but I was almost out of Earth Balance and I didn't have cow's milk butter, so I used Crisco from the can that I'm saving to make soap with! I don't regret it, though--that icing was perfectly white and pure-looking, and took food coloring gorgeously. I divided the frosting and let the girls each choose two colors--Willow chose purple and green, and Sydney chose two colors of pink that were practically identical, and refused to let me darken either one even a little.

Then, basically, I got out of their way:

 
 
 A perfectly-decorated cake!

Obviously, you're meant to frost over the gaps in the cake so that they don't show, but I think that the way that the girls chose to decorate their cake was both charming...

And delicious:

And because it's really two cakes, there are plenty of leftovers!

Candlemakers

Willow and I have a new hobby to tell you about:

Candlemaking! Even though we'd never tried it before, I was confident enough that the girls would enjoy making rolled beeswax candles to buy some supplies in bulk from Knorr Beeswax. I figured that Sydney, my hands-on craft kid, would be the one to sit at the table for four hours in one day rolling beeswax candles, but I was surprised:

Syd hasn't touched the candlemaking supplies, but Willow apparently finds it a meditative, contemplative break from her immersive mental world (Matt and I call this "the Willowverse"), because she spent pratically an entire afternoon, and much of the evening, rolling out a huge variety of candles.

Well, of course someone had to sit with her and help out when she needed it (ahem), and so I ended up making quite a variety, myself:

I have a rolled beeswax candle tutorial up at Crafting a Green World, but they're really quite simple to make, even for little children. Willow found her niche in creating one particular size of two-toned candles so well that I encouraged her to consider making some to sell at our summer craft fairs:

"How much should I charge? One dollar?" she asked.

"Well," I said, "For every candle that you sell, I think that you should pay me $1 for the cost of the supplies, so you'll want to charge more than that, or you won't make a profit."

"Two dollars?"

"I think that people would pay more."

"Three dollars?"

"How about six dollars? Then, after you give me one dollar, you'd have..."

"Wow, five dollars!"

"And how about if you sold six candles?"

"Five...ten...fifteen...........thirty dollars! I'll buy some BeyBlades!"

"I'll drive you straight to the store."

There's still plenty of room for experimentation, however, as she then went on to make "the longest candle in the world":

And then the shortest:

I had thought that these beeswax sheets would be sort of a novelty craft supply, but I already need to order more! I'm thinking that we'll be doing more math with spiral forms this week.

They Look Better in Your Old Clothes Than You Do

After one custom order guinea pig (I hope you love it, Miranda!), I've decided to make custom T-shirt baby gowns a regular pumpkinbear etsy item:

I had been worried that I'd happen to receive an order in a week that was too stressful for sewing, but my last couple of weeks have been SUPER busy, and I've still been amazed at how much I can accomplish with just a few minutes of sewing here and there and whenever I can. I'm also keeping the custom orders down to one listing at a time, because if there is anything that I am not, it is a baby gown sewing sweat shoppe.

The Paparazzi Snaps Her Photo as She Reads

I needed a few photos of Willow reading, to accompany an article on the same subject that I'm submitting to Home Education Magazine. Our wintry weather isn't exactly conducive to reading picturesquely outdoors, so we retreated with the camera to the place we would have gone even if there hadn't been a photo shoot to do...

The library!

Although I took care to comb the child's hair (normally it's her responsibility, and I let her get away with just brushing the outer layer of that wavy/curly mop) and to dress her decently (unlike her sister, who will regularly screen at least two outfits before leaving the house, then will preen and dance and talk to herself in the mirror once she's in the chosen frock, Willow's habit is to pick the top item from her shirts drawer, the top item from her pants drawer, and to attempt to do away with underpants altogether), you will notice that I forgot to actually have Will remove her coat for these first few photos. As she normally does, she ran straight into the children's department and dove right into a book, and I merely followed and snapped photographs:

Will doesn't pose as naturally for the camera as Syd does, but this isn't a problem when taking photographs of her reading, since she doesn't even notice me hovering there, camera up to my face:

This allows me to creeeeeeeep in ever closer, until...

Got it!

I Let My Kids Paint My Car

The first death knell sounded for our pretty nice white minivan one day when the little kid was a newborn and the big kid wasn't yet two, and a driver careened through a red light and T-boned us at an intersection just a few blocks from home and across the street from the police station (I was so flustered calling 911 that when the operator asked for my location, I was all, "I'm right outside your house!"). Did you know that even if the other driver's insurer pays up, you're never going to get enough money to flat-out purchase a comparable car in a comparable condition to the one that the other driver trashed for you? Fun, right?

We drove that minivan with the caved-in driver's side for years more, and actually it wasn't so bad because since the insurance totaled the car but it was still safely drivable, they paid us an extra coupla-grand for the salvage rights to the car and lowered our insurance payments, since who needs collision insurance on a car that's already been totaled?

Of course, if your car already looks that beat-up then it's only downhill from there: window stop rolling down? Meh. Air conditioning stop working? What's the point, right? We even kept driving the damn thing after the transmission went out on the way home from Cleveland last winter--the trick was to keep the rpms under 2,000 and the speed under 20 mph.

We were SO happy when my partner's parents offered us their old minivan and we could officially trash this white one that's been half-dead for four years already. And wouldn't you know, when my partner called the insurer to tell them that they could pick up the car for salvage, they said, "Yeah, we don't really actually want it. Feel free to junk it yourself."

And so while my partner waits for the perfect offer (he's holding out for $220 at least), our junked minivan just sits in the driveway, a giant white paperweight.

White. Like, blank canvas white.

I told the kids that they could paint the car.

Our paints are standard student-grade tempera, and the brushes are soft student-grade acrylic brushes:

Our kids are standard student-grade kids, and they jump right in, as you can see:

Yep, I even let the big kid climb onto the roof. But I assure you, when she's not busy breaking her leg at the playground, she is quite the little mountain goat:

A little paint got on the children, as well as the car:

Especially when they discovered splatter paint, Pollock-style:

Behold, our masterpiece!



A rainstorm the same night knocked about 70% of that paint right off. It's freezing cold again outside, but as soon as it warms up I'm going to send the kids out with some buckets and soap and sponges and teach them how to wash the car up perfectly clean again.

And then?

We'll paint it!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!