Hot Oatmeal: An Explanation

 It all starts with the story at the end under “About the Authors.”

    At 2:30 am on September 16th, 2020, Lan awoke in a panic from a vivid nightmare in

    which her mother was in terrible danger.  She waited for the night to pass with tears in

    her eyes.  Four hours later, she was whispering on the phone, buried under a pile of

    warm fluffy blankets and nestled next to her sleeping children.  Her mother, in a soft

    and soothing voice, told her troubled daughter the story of her morning oatmeal routine.

    By noon that day, Lan had started drafting this book.

My mother was trapped in a large cage.  Dad and I were seated on cold metal bleachers, helplessly watching as a video of my mother’s fate was projected live onto a stained, scuffed up screen in front of us.  Dirty faded golden carpets unraveled down the sides obscuring our view, and strangers opened gunfire as the cage was slowly, but inevitably, lowered deeper and deeper into a large body of water.
I cried and cried and cried.  I woke up crying.  I wanted to call her, but it was the middle of the night.  George, my giant teddy bear and voice of reason, was working a night shift.  So I just sat there in the darkness, wallowing in my self-imposed trauma.  When morning arrived at last and Mom answered her phone, she somehow knew exactly what to do.  She chose her gentle voice - the first voice I ever heard - to tell me that she eats oatmeal every morning.  She puts a bunch of stuff in it.  The delivery was tedious, methodical, and soothing.  Distractingly mundane.  It became very clear that she wasn’t in a cage.  She wasn’t in the ocean.
When my sister woke up, I texted to tell her all about Mom and the oatmeal.¹⁰ Jokingly, I suggested that I transcribe the conversation into my second children’s book.  Lien agreed, but seriously.  By the end of the morning, the book had been drafted.⁷

Once inspiration had struck, it was time to find a starting point.
My first idea was to somehow incorporate Sách Đếm, a hand-drawn Vietnamese counting book my mother had made for Drakeson several years ago.  I scanned the book, deleted the white paper underneath, and smoothed over the colored pencil and marker drawings with an oil painting filter.²

Next, I started thinking about what I like to see when I open a children's book.  Eric Carle, the designer behind “The Very Hungry Caterpillar,” “Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?,” “The Grouchy Ladybug,” and “The Very Busy Spider” among others, is one of the world's favorites.  He paints and decorates paper to make collages like the illustration below.⁵

Two concepts from his style became central to my approach.  First, I included a variety of textures separated by clean lines and curves.  Eric Carle produces more depth from his painted textures than the more subtly textured paper photographs I chose to work with.  My muted approach set the stage nicely for my mom's illustrations.

Secondly, I deliberately went against my own grain by highlighting inconsistencies.  In other words, I made a rule to try my very best to break rules.  Some of the caterpillar’s sections overlap and some do not.  One eye is smaller on top.  Only some of the feet touch the body.  Some of the green sections are bluer, but these don’t show up in a regular way.  The colored pencil markings alternate colors enough to look patterned, but they are, in fact, perfectly unpatterned.  The orange in the outline isn’t used consistently with the yellow around the border, and even the yellow is missing above the third section down from the head.  Beautiful.

When you’re writing something as simple as a counting book that goes to ten, it’s too easy to make it perfect.  We get books like that for free every year from the Austin Trail of Lights.  My counting book had to be the opposite of that - it had to be flat out wrong.  We start off counting “one bowl of oatmeal” before the second ingredient, which is “raisins and peanuts.”  You could really go back and count “one bowl of oatmeal” followed by “raisins and peanuts,” but of course it would make more sense to count “raisins and peanuts” as ingredients one and two instead.  To make matters worse, I used two raisins and two peanuts, so there were four items to count instead of one or maybe two.
The third ingredient was applesauce, which I illustrated with an apple slice.  Not only is this clearly not applesauce, but the number of seeds and placement of seeds changes throughout the pages for absolutely no reason.  The fourth ingredient, olive oil, was cut differently each time from a picture of olive oil.  You see, I had accidentally built up an empire of paper textures, and it was time to break that rule.  The fifth ingredient, Metamucil, was a powder.  Powder is already difficult to illustrate, so this was a great opportunity to use an overly abstract representation.  The triangle is a color-edited section from the Metamucil lid on page 13.  The sixth ingredient,⁶ legumes, was cut from paper again, but because my raisins and peanuts were the same sizes, these weren't.  Seventh was chocolate, the only ingredient that overlapped itself, and fish oil, eighth, was a simplified photograph.  I wanted the fish oil to reflect light like a real oil capsule, but at the same time, I didn’t want a fully photographed effect, which was reserved for the bowl and the mug.⁸ Ninth was strawberries cut from my only truly patterned paper, and the pour of the coffee on page ten was the only wildly irregular shape.

The backgrounds in Hot Oatmeal preserved the idea of an upper righthand light source by revealing a lower left hand shadow on concrete, but still sidestepped reality by blending into differently colored papers, all of which reflected light in a more uniform way.  Shadings of “steam” were illustrated with concrete seeping through paper.  The bowls were always shot at different angles, but the shapes of the concrete steam were unrelated, and the ingredients weren't scaled or placed in any realistic way.  The ingredients, including the oats, were as randomly rotated as I could manage.  I tried my best, in fact, to have very little regard for the balance in these arrangements in general.  To top it all off, all 55 illustrations from Sách Đếm brought more nonsense and color to the mix.

While this book is dedicated to my amazing mother, it was also inspired by George’s birthday.  My first children’s book, “The Little Worst,” was written for George’s 36th birthday, and it was 36 pages long.  I wanted to do something similar with my second book, and who can think of 44 without thinking of 4x11? Mom’s counting book happens to have eleven pages: a title page and ten counting pages.  I chose a background color for each page, and before you knew it, I had a set of eleven backgrounds.  They are represented in column two and named in column one of the chart below.

Color	Background of	Appears Under	Background of	Border Reference
Mossy Cream	Sách Đếm Cover	Sách Đếm p.6	Hot Oatmeal p.19	Hot Oatmeal p.12
Vintage Lime	Sách Đếm p.1	Sách Đếm Cover	Hot Oatmeal p.7	Hot Oatmeal p.9
Lavender	Sách Đếm p.2	Sách Đếm p.9	Hot Oatmeal p.11	Hot Oatmeal p.5
Polished Turquoise	Sách Đếm p.3	Sách Đếm p.10	Hot Oatmeal p.5	Hot Oatmeal p.21
Sunny Mustard	Sách Đếm p.4	Sách Đếm p.4	Hot Oatmeal p.9	Hot Oatmeal p.15
Antique White	Sách Đếm p.5	Sách Đếm p.3	Hot Oatmeal p.21	Hot Oatmeal p.8
Pumpkin Cream	Sách Đếm p.6	Sách Đếm p.1	Hot Oatmeal p.13	Hot Oatmeal p.10
Robin’s Egg	Sách Đếm p.7	Sách Đếm p.7	Hot Oatmeal p.16	Hot Oatmeal p.20
Deep Periwinkle	Sách Đếm p.8	Sách Đếm p.8	Hot Oatmeal p.14	Hot Oatmeal p.14
Sky Blue	Sách Đếm p.9	Sách Đếm p.2	Hot Oatmeal p.6	Hot Oatmeal p.22
Sea Foam	Sách Đếm p.10	Sách Đếm p.5	Hot Oatmeal p.18	Hot Oatmeal p.17

For my second set of eleven, I duplicated the set, darkened each page, and slid these underneath my first set of backgrounds.  To incorporate them, I needed to create a “mask” for each original background.  A mask is like a window that lets you see into another layer underneath.

To follow this process in the chart, “mossy cream” is the background of the cover for Sách Đếm.  Also, a darkened version of “mossy cream” appears under page six of Sách Đếm, which primarily has a "pumpkin cream” background.  This was my second set of eleven.  You may notice that three of the second set (sunny mustard, robin's egg, and deep periwinkle) were placed under their original counterparts, and eight of them were shifted underneath different pages.
Do you remember how the concrete backgrounds in Hot Oatmeal blended into colored backgrounds? Well, eleven of the twenty-one blended backgrounds use the same darkened set from set two.  That was the third set of eleven.  To follow how this works in the chart, a darkened version of “mossy cream” blends into concrete to create the background of page 19 in Hot Oatmeal.  If you're following along in the book, page 19 is the one that mirrors the cover with Mom's fire illustration.
My fourth and final set of eleven is more subtle, but it references to the original set through the surrounding borders I chose in Shutterfly.  In the rightmost column, you will see that "mossy cream" inspired the outer border encasing the illustration and the words on page 12 of Hot Oatmeal, which is a portrait of Mr. Happy posing with olive oil.

Seeing a grid of 44 colored rectangles is so pleasing that I'll do it just one more time.

On top of these cycles, I wanted each pair of adjoining pages to create a four-color palette that both worked as a set and reflected the text from those pages.  On the one hand, I know I've lost everyone who has started reading this post by now.  In fact, I'm so confident in how boring I am that I helped you save your place with butterfly chapter markers that look like four elevens.  On the other hand, if you’re reading this paragraph right now, you really are here for another chart.  Like I can't imagine why you wouldn’t be interested.

Hot Oatmeal	Left Border	Left Background	Right Border	Right Background
Pages 2-3
Pages 4-5
Pages 6-7
Pages 8-9
Pages 10-11
Pages 12-13
Pages 14-15
Pages 16-17
Pages 18-19
Pages 20-21
Pages 22-23

This is a mess of colors.  All together, they are not pleasing, but we shall examine each set, one row at a time, and see if we can sort some sense out of this.

The coffee pages, 2-3, are a combination of browns, grays, and tans.³ These are easy on the eyes and set the stage for our star, Mom’s ridiculous oatmeal.

The bowl of oatmeal follows suit in neutrality, but hints that we’re entering new territory with a pink balloon.  Gazing right, we’re not in Kansas anymore, but in a world of violet grape vines for raisins.  All together, the browns with this muted version of the classic 80’s color duo purple and turquoise scream "hair wrap."
Pages 6-7, were inspired by my happiest childhood memories with my dad.  Dad loves crisp sky-blue days and apples.  Hang on a sec.  I forgot that a picture is worth a thousand words.

The next set of colors are all about the olive oil, for you can make olive oil by mixing a little of that blue into the mustard.  They could also illustrate moon and stars, dusk, fields, and sunset.
The Halloween trio, orange, purple, and black, dominate the next set, which is an appropriate setting for the poisonous Mr. Yuk.¹
The greens, blue, and orange on pages 12-13 reflect the Mr. Happys and Mr. Yuks as well as the olive oil and Metamucil, and this time, the green circle background on the right echo Mr. Yuk instead of apples.  Remember how there was an unspoken rule that every page had its own unique border and background?  Not anymore.
Pages 14-15 are the darkest of the set.  The ocean deep is to the left, and the right does little to lighten the mood.  The contrast of yellow and purple in the first place is probably the murkiest of the primary secondary complementary pairs (compared to red and green or blue and orange), and the eerie placement of a lightbulb in the bottom right hand corner reminds us that gravity may not be functioning properly.
The outer borders in the next set represent the text quite literally with chocolate dots and fish scales.  The set as a whole, mint chocolates and soft teals, reminds me of baby sheets because it's so pointedly gender neutral and cuddly.
Next we have strawberries across charcoal.  Again a bit more of a literal representation of the text, but also, bright pink always needs to be tempered.  Sea foam and mossy cream come together to complete the chalk-on-chalkboard effect.
You could order microfiber sofas in the beauties grouped together in pages 20-21.⁹ They add a welcome splash of color, but not so much that you’d regret owning cherry wood furniture.  Page 20 was the only page in which I duplicated an illustration or incorporated a number into the design.  I like the fact that my mother and I are suddenly dragons, and also that as dragons, we’re talking about cholesterol.

My ending page closes this chapter with a book imprint in the border.  It also breaks another rule by fading four layers into the background (concrete, orange, green, and blue) instead of two.  The counting illustrations from Hot Oatmeal are summarized in rows, and Sách Đếm is introduced with one of the first color combinations you ever grabbed from your crayon box - pastels of blue skies and green grass.

Notes

¹ Hot Oatmeal is interrupted by dialogue featuring Mr. Yuk and his imaginary counterpart whom I have named Mr. Happy.  I must have been about a year old when my parents had some friends come over to our apartment.  There was a dark brown case of knives in our kitchen, and everybody watched me say the word, “knife.”  I remember getting so much attention for the performance!  Adults were gushing over me, and I loved it.  In fact, I even remember thinking, “Why am I getting so much attention for this?  They wouldn't believe how many other words I know!”  In any event, Mr. Yuk was on that knife case.

² I had used the same "oilify" filter from the digital image editing program Gimp on my watercolors and colored pencil drawings in my first book, "The Little Worst."  Speaking of which, I also kept the same sizing, fonts, and layouts so that my second book, while totally unrelated, would make a nice set for my sister.  Even the cranberry cover, which frames the dragon's fire and represents maternal love, was chosen with an idea of how it would look next to its precursor.

³ My sister and I maintain that Mom doesn’t finish her coffee.  Then again, sometimes Mom likes to finish her coffee to prove that we’re wrong.  If she remembers, she likes proving that we're wrong more than she dislikes finishing her coffee.  Mom’s coffee on page three, which was not finished, shows a coffee drip that’s not on page two.

⁴ Another way I brought Sách Đếm into Hot Oatmeal was to distort and reuse four of Sách Đếm's original layer masks.

⁵ We all know what a thousand is.  But do you know what a hundred thousand is?  I'll tell you what it is - a hundred thousand is too big of a number for us to imagine.  "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" has sold more than fifty MILLION copies.  To help us make sense of this, Wikipedia says this is 1.8 copies sold every minute since its publication in 1969.

⁶ While ingredients six through ten are completely made up, they are also ingredients that may help to lower cholesterol.

⁷ Drafting the book was a lot of fun.  The actual words of the book have everything to do with my family.  If you didn't grow up with us, chances are you haven’t heard Mom say, “cup’coffee.”  You haven’t heard her use the word “gizmo” as if that's a word anybody other than my dad uses.  ("Gizmo" is a character from the movie "Gremlins."  "Gadget" is the word to use.)  You haven’t heard Mom talk about microwaving her coffee or sending Dad to the store, but these points come up frequently for some reason.  And the store she is talking about is always called "Food Lion" no matter what the actual name of the store is.  (To her credit, it has been a Food Lion before.)  You haven't heard me interrupting my parents with questions transparent with criticism, which without fail provoke no concern whatsoever.  But the funniest family reference to me, of course, is “hot oatmeal.”  When I’m talking to anybody else, “hot oatmeal” is oatmeal and “cold oatmeal” is not real.  Perhaps it’s granola.  I have no idea.

⁸ Speaking of that mug, it has a twin, and nearly every time I'm drinking coffee, I'm using one of the two.  They've been in the family since 1980, which was two years before I was born.  Dad believes they came with a tiny espresso maker, which was a gift from his cousin Sylvia.  He says it was "likely a wedding gift."

⁹ Driving home my favorite joke of “hot oatmeal,” the dragon’s fire breath heats the oatmeal on the last couple of pages before Sách Đếm.

¹⁰ I'll close with the original text.

Kratzke Lan:

    Okay so I can’t talk because my kids are trying to nap but I called mom this morning

    to hear her voice because I was up until 6:30. Anyway.
    She told me two things that made me feel so much better.
    The first is that Ba is living with them right now and Ba started watching YouTube on

    her phone at full volume in the middle of the night and it was so loud that it woke Mom up.

    For some reason, this is beyond hilarious to me.
    The second thing she told me that made me feel better were all the details of her

    morning oatmeal routine because it sounded so bad that I love this story.
    This is how the story goes. You won’t be disappointed.
    Every day, Dad wakes up and makes me cup’coffee.
    And I sip on it and go to work.
    And then by 8:00, I’m just about done with my cup’coffee.
    So I go downstairs to make myself some oatmeal.
Kratzke Tins:
    Mom said that she’s done with her coffee?
    That’s not a true story.
Kratzke Lan:
    Some hot oatmeal.
    Well yeah, of course that’s not true, but that’s part of it.
    Some HOT oatmeal.
    And I put in raisins and (sounding very happy for no reason) peanuts.
    And Dad made apple sauce so I put that in.
    Because Cau Tung and Co Vy bring by the apples
    And they have the little brown spots
    And Vy says we have to soak them in vinegar or something.
    Actually, I don’t know what she said.
    And Dad says that’s okay because he’ll just peel them

    Because you know he got the apple peeler.

    So I throw in the applesauce with my raisins and peanuts.
    “Uh, is it good?”
    Oh yes.  It’s very good.
    “Oh!”
    Hot oatmeal.
Kratzke Tins:
    Oh
Kratzke Lan:
    Oh and then I also throw in olive oil and Metamucil. 
    “That does not sound good Mom.”
    No but it is good.  The olive oil is good actually.
Kratzke Tins:
    Ahh hahahah
    This keeps getting weirder
Kratzke Lan:
    “I didn’t have a problem with the olive oil.  It was the Metamucil.”
    Oh no, the Metamucil is very very neutral.
    “Oh okay.  Because I was thinking it was the orange one.”
    Well I don’t know if it was the orange one because if I drink it
    I probably get the orange one so I can have some flavor.
    But the color is not the orange one.
Kratzke Tins:
    Oh okay
    I didn’t know that exists.
Kratzke Lan:
    It is very neutral.  So when I put it in my oatmeal, I don’t know if it’s orange.
    It’s very plain.  Like (thoughtfully) white.
Kratzke Tins:
    Hahaha okay.
Kratzke Lan:
    “Uhhhh”
    “and it’s good?”
    Oh yes.  Hot oatmeal.
    “Mom, I feel a lot better now.”
Kratzke Tins:
    Hahahah she needs to stop calling it that.
Kratzke Lan:
    The End.
Kratzke Tins:
    HAHAHAHAH
Kratzke Lan:
    There are tears in my eyes from quiet laughing right now.  Our mom is the cutest.
    And she knew I was tired and upset and she told me all of this in a very soothing sweet voice.
    It was like I was her baby and she knew the kinds of stories that would calm me down.

Kratzke Tins:
    Hahaha that’s soooo sweet
Kratzke Lan:
    I feel like I want to transcribe the whole thing into a children’s book and every third page it says
    “Oh yes hot oatmeal.”
    But because it’s a children’s book I’ll put cotton candy and pizza and stuff in it.
    And the first 4 pages will all repeat “cup’coffee.”
    And the illustration on the page where she finishes it will show it half full.
    It would be one of my favorite books.
Kratzke Tins:
    Omg please do it
    Make it the same dimensions as the little worst.
    So it can match my book collection of one book.

On the tenth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me

Ten counting pages,

Something penultimate

Eight for 1980

Seven family references

Six to ten ingredients

Fifty million sold!!

Four layer masks

Three Kratzke ladies

Two children's books

And a story of one-year-old Lan

Holiday Videos 2020

29 Nov 2020

Drakeson & Mama Toccata for Two by Robert Vandall

14 Dec 2020

Drakeson & Milli's First Piano Duet

14 Dec 2020

Trail of Lights

22 Dec 2020

Gingerbread House

24 Dec 2020

Drakeson's Holiday Pieces

25 Dec 2020

An Awesomer One, Mom!

How to Make a Paper Snowflake

I know, I know, it's easy.  Fold some paper and cut it.  But skimming Martha Stewart's post only takes a minute and always yields something better than a rectangle with some holes.  The problem is that you might forget how to do it, and you might forget that Martha Stewart was the one with the post, and you might not want someone to try to sell you a $19 pad of paper and a $12.49 pair of scissors.  Let's agree to be judgmental here - anybody who wants those scissors ought to be doing something more impressive than paper snowflakes.

I'm only gonna tell you what's important, and I'll do it mostly with pictures.  Let's start with three sheets of printer paper.  They're cuter when they're smaller, but we can do that after this post when we're professionals.  If you're cutting your paper down to smaller shapes, you can go ahead and start with squares.  Oh, and if you can find papers you'd normally recycle, that's even better.

Fold the square diagonal.

Bisect the diagonal and quarter that square.

Flip the paper over (left).

Fold one side towards the center to create a 30° angle, a third of the 90° you started with (middle).

Fold the other side 30° towards the center as well (right).

Here's another view with my hand on the once folded snowflake.

When you're done, they'll look a bit like paper airplanes.

Cut along that line.

Bam - dodecagons!

Three of them.

Turn them so they're pointing away from you.

My picture shows flaps opening on the left side, but it doesn't matter which way this happens.  You can even turn your paper upside down so there are creases on both sides.

Now you can cut away.

Asymmetry is your friend here; I've arbitrarily decided to cut each lefthand side shorter.

Angular cuts look like Elsa made them.

Curved shapes create doily patterns and teardrops create hearts.

Long skinny shapes create stars.

There's only one thing left to do.

And that's all there is to it.

Star of Wonder

Off With His Head

Arendelle

Aside: how awesome is my enormous Manhasset Conductor's Music Stand?

Now you're a pro, just like I promised.  Go get 'em.

Happy Thanksgiving

 

Royal Icing

I've always dragged my feet on learning anything about royal icing because it doesn't taste good.  In fact, that's still where I am with fondant.  But last year when Drakeson asked for sugar cookies on his birthday, I thought I'd take the plunge, bury my head into it, and become moderately proficient.  I spent the money, did the research, and practiced a few times, all while my dreams of moderate proficiency slipped far, far away.  Instead, I figured out how wrong royal icing can go.
Now Milli's birthday is coming up, and she wants sugar cookies.  This time, I've wisened up.  This time, I'm being meticulous.  Gone are the days when I thought I'd make some cookies and icing and somehow get by respectably.  Now I know better.
This is my first plan.  This post is a tutorial on how to create two dozen similar four by four inch Ann Clark pumpkin cookie cutter sharp-edged lavender sugar cookies with an original design in lemon royal icing.  Hopefully I will never write a post anything like this again.  I expect my second plan will happen naturally, sort of like what I assume happens during most people's first plans.

Some Common Sense I'm Missing:
Allow several hours for cookie decorating and crusting.
Scoop (don't pour) powdered sugar to avoid getting it everywhere.
Silicone bottle screw pieces must be clean, dry, and perfectly secure before using.

Decorating:

Common tools are piping bags, parchment cones, and plastic or silicone bottles.

Decorating can be done with no tips, plastic tips, or metal tips.

If using no tips and plastic bags, cut opening across the seam to lessen a seam point.

For tips sized 0 or 00, consider straining royal icing through fine mesh like unworn pantyhose.

For smooth outlining, tip should be lifted off cookie, touching down only to start or break flow.

For flooding, tip should be touching cookie and various pressures can be used.

Flooding icing still requires careful piping and spreading with a toothpick or scribe tool.

Thicker icing needs to be piped more slowly so it doesn't break.

Colors:
Never use watery food coloring, only gel food coloring.

The three biggest brands are Chefmaster, Americolor, and Wilton.

For an extra crisp white, add white coloring gel.

White royal icing will be off-white the next day as air bubbles escape.

All royal icing darkens over time.

Mix colors into thicker icing before thinning for even color distribution.
Dull icing is a result of over-mixing the original batch.
Red and black stain easily and have the most trouble mixing and drying properly.
Red and black also sometimes smell like permanent markers and taste bad.

Red and black need to be made ahead of time to darken for at least a day.

"Super red" and "super black" colors are sold to aid with saturation.

If making black, it is helpful to start with leftover dyed icing instead of white.
It is also possible to add cocoa or charcoal powder to help darken black icing.

Ingredients:
Pasteurized egg whites or meringue powder both work.

For each two pound bag of sugar, use five whites and a half teaspoon of cream of tartar.

Alternatively, this is ten teaspoons of meringue powder hydrated with ten tablespoons of water.

Water can be replaced with any liquid that is fat free and acidic like coffee, tea, or juices.

One full bag of powdered sugar makes about six cups of royal icing.
Extracts must be oil free, which is harder than it sounds.
Cream of tartar and/or lemon juice can keep icing from becoming grainy.
Glycerin prevents the icing from drying very hard.

Drying:
Allow eight hours of drying time.
The faster the icing dries, the smoother the surface.
Avoid drying on stacked cooling racks and allow cookies plenty of breathing room.
For the shiniest finish, dry cookies in front of a fan for the first hour or use a dehydrator.

Dehydrators can also help to set layers quickly in multi-layer designs.

Dehydrators should be at 95 (and no more 105).

Most layers require about fifteen minutes, and flood layers can require up to twenty.

Quick setting with a dehydrator maintains royal icing shape and keeps puffy icing puffier.

With a dehydrator, large, under-baked, or high-moisture cookies can ripple or crack more easily.

After dehydrating to set the crust, it's still necessary to fully air dry for the 8 or so hours.

Storing:
Store covered at room temperature for up to ten days.
Separation of water and icing is normal - just stir well.

Always double check consistency; as air escapes, icing can thin.
If freezing for up to three months, cover with plastic wrap on all sides.

Thinning:
Making royal icing is easy; thinning it out is not.
Some people use spray bottles, which emit 1/40 to 1/8 of a teaspoon at a time.
If icing has gotten too thin, add more stiff icing.

It is also possible to thicken with sifted powdered sugar if in a pinch.

All royal icing gets looser over time as air bubbles escape.

Consistencies are everything.  Thicker icing is better for maintaining shape and drying quickly, and thinner icing is better for drying flat and creating flush "wet on wet" designs.  Royal icing consistency is described by the number of seconds it takes the icing to smooth over after a disruption.  Normally, a cut is made with a spatula or a knife across the surface of the icing in order to time its disappearance.  As a thinner icing smooths over more quickly, it follows that thin icings have smaller numbers and vice versa.  The most popular numbers used to describe royal icing consistency are 5, 10, 15, 20, and 25, but 4, 12, and 30 have a place in this discussion.  Any less than 4 seconds will not dry well and is considered unusable.

Cookie decorators say that "each decorator has their preferred consistencies," but I think there's a lot more to it than that.  In truth, they're all being very annoying.  Most obviously, they don't use timers and they count at different speeds.  If you're not already annoyed, some of them wait until the line completely disappears and some wait until the line mostly disappears.  If you're not annoyed by now, you have no place reading this blog.  Get out!
To add to the confusion, decorators that use very small piping tips require looser, flowier icings, and with the shorter height from those pipings, their designs will indeed spread less.  It's not like those decorators just prefer looser icing; their tools require it.   Anyway, I'm a novice, and my silicone bottle tips are pretty large (I'm guessing the equivalent of a Wilton #2 and a #4), so I'll need thicker icing than those kinds of cookie decorators.  My chart will include how many teaspoons of water per cup of stiff icing cookie legend Julia Usher uses, and for what purposes.

Seconds	Consistency	Julia Usher	Description
Indefinite	Buttercream	0 t for 3D decorations	Straight from the mixer, stiff icing is used for 3D decorations like flowers and leaves, gingerbread cement, and stenciling.  It retains detail.
26 to 30	Peanut Butter	1/2 to 3/4 t for outlining 1/2 to 1 1/2 t for stenciling	Piping consistency settles, but the knife line may never completely dissolve.  When stirred, peaks form but fall quickly.  Piping consistency is used for writing, outlining, and stenciling.
21 to 25	Pudding	3/4 to 1 1/2 t for marbling	Medium-thick consistency is puffy.  It may be able to create adjacent shapes that don't flow into each other but still level their own surface areas.  Medium-thick consistency is used for raised 3D effects like eyes or outlining and flooding small areas.
15 to 20	Ketchup	1 1/2 to 2 1/2 t for top coating	Medium consistency is all the rage, particularly at 15 seconds.  This is the sweet spot where icing is most versatile because it can outline and flood.  Like medium-thick, it can be used for wet on wet effects like marbling.
7 to 14	Shampoo	2 to 3 t for flooding 2 to 3 t for bead work	Flooding consistency dries very flat and works well for dipping the entire cookie.
4 to 6	Honey		Thin consistency is best for painting cookies with a brush.

Now that that's out of the way, we shall begin our tutorial.
First, make one batch of sharp-edged sugar cookie dough.
To do this, you'll need to set out two sticks of butter to soften, and while you're at it, blend a tablespoon of culinary lavender with your eggs. It will be a frothy (and unsavory) mess, but it will settle down by the time your butter is soft.   Whenever it's ready, get that sticky dough in the fridge to firm up.

Next, make a double batch of royal icing.  This will yield six cups at about 200 g per cup, which is too much, but you need too much when you're following a plan.  This is a tutorial on how to make a matching set of two dozen cookies, not a tutorial on life without insurance.  You can always make more cookies later.
As soon as it's ready, set aside 700 g of stiff icing, and divide the remainder into five batches of 100 g each.  Store in glass containers with lids.

Once your dough has chilled, it's time to bake.  You will need your dough, a pumpkin cookie cutter, a rolling mat, extra flour, a rolling pin, two baking trays, three silpats, a large cutting board, a plate, and wire cooling racks.
This dough gets very soft at room temperature, so working quickly and using flour as needed, roll half the dough out to 4 mm or 1/6 inch.  You should be able to get 8 pumpkins from this.  Place 6 of them on a silpat-lined baking tray and the remaining 2 on a silpat-lined cutting board.  Chill both in the fridge and preheat the oven to 350.  Sprinkle the plate with flour, shape the leftover warm dough into a disc, and chill in the freezer.

(If this hasn't gone to plan, it's possible to roll the dough out and then freeze it.  Cutting the cookies and transferring them to the silpat has never been easier.)
Because these cookies are large, they'll need around 14 minutes of baking time.  Bake the first tray of 6 pumpkin cookies and let them rest for at least 5 minutes on the baking tray before transferring them to a cooling rack.
While the first tray is baking and cooling, remove the second half of the cookie dough from the fridge and create a second silpat-lined tray of 6 cookies with 2 more for the cutting board.  Gather the leftover dough and add it to the plate in the freezer.  Bake the second tray.
Once the first silpat-lined tray is free, place the cutting board cookies on this tray and chill.  Using the leftover dough and plenty of flour, create your final 8 cookies.  If you can create more, good on you.  There's that insurance we talked about.  Bake the third tray.
Your fourth batch, of course, uses the silpat from the cutting board and the second baking tray.
 With any leftover dough, roll into small spheres.  Press them into flattened cookies or shape them into little bowls filled with jelly.  These will probably be thicker than 4 mm, so give them a nice long bake.

While the cookies are cooling, color and thin your icing.

700 g	medium-thick	orange	2 bottles, tip sizes 2 & 4
100 g	medium-thick	uncolored (white)	1 piping bag, tip size 1
100 g	piping	dark green	1 bottle, tip size 2
100 g	stiff	dark green	1 piping bag and leaf tip
100 g	thin	bright yellow	1 bottle, tip size 4
100 g	stiff (extra, just in case)	uncolored (white)	container with lid

At last, it's time to decorate.  You will need your icing, piping bottles and tips, a scribe tool, a paint brush, a leaf piping tip, a piping bag, two dozen cooled cookies, and a plan.  Here's the plan.

Perform each step to all 24 cookies before moving on to the next.
Your finished cookie will have the face from the middle diagram.

Step 1:  Pipe and brush a thick layer of yellow where the face will be.

Although this cookie cutter was designed to produce three or five sections, I think four works a little better with my design.  We'll label them 1, 2, 3, and 4 from left to right.  The middle diagram shows the face we'll be piping, and the diagram on the right shows the teeth and pupils filled in.

Step 2:  Pipe section 1, smooth with the scribe tool, and pipe in the white shine.

          Use the scribe tool to help shape and dot the bottom of the shine.
          Pipe section 3 from the middle diagram and smooth with the scribe tool.

Step 3:  Pipe sections 2 and 4 from the middle diagram and smooth with the scribe tool.

Step 4: Pipe pupils and teeth.  Use the scribe tool to help place small shines.

Step 5:  With your piping icing, make three green lines on the stem from the left diagram.

Step 6:  Fill in the remainder of the stem.

Step 7:  Switch the tip to size 3 and pipe vines.

Step 8:  With the piping bag, make small leaves along the vine to finish your cookies!

Smaller Simplified Practice Set

09 Oct 20

Update: By the time it was Milli's birthday, I had gotten distracted and made stenciled royal icing cookies and pumpkin profiteroles instead.

Belinda the Chipmunk by Seymour Bernstein

 

My good friend, Jack Mills, brought me several large stacks of music a few weeks ago.  In one of the piles was "Belinda the Chipmunk" by Seymour Bernstein, copyrighted in 1986 and showcasing Belinda in the lower righthand corner of a retro faded coral cover.  It's not every day that I run into a chipmunk advertising a score, and the font was captivating, so I flipped it open to find a collection of a dozen short teaching pieces, black and white photography, and several paragraphs of narration. What could a chipmunk have done that was captivating enough to inspire this set?

But wait - I didn't want to know.

I called my brother-in-law and asked if he'd record the narration.  He agreed.  A few days later, I asked my sister if she'd edit the video together.  She was rightfully annoyed that Bill was already in on it, and neither of us had bothered telling her about it, but she agreed, too.

After playing through the pieces for a short time, I was charmed by the attention to detail, and the music struck me as both playful and sincere.  I never listened to any other performances and never read any of the narrations; I only played the music as it came naturally to me, and I did not learn of the beautiful friendship between Belinda and Seymour Bernstein until after Lien stitched it all together.  We hope you enjoy sweet Belinda.

The Argument for Pumpkins & Pumpkin Pie Spice

"But I hate pumpkins," you say.

You very well might, but I'm not convinced yet.  Hear me out.

We'll begin by defining what a pumpkin is.  A pumpkin is not a Starbuck's pumpkin spice latte, which happens to cost a small fortune ($5.75).  Nor is it the pumpkin pie from your local grocer that's sold for a song ($4.10).  It's okay if you thought it was.  I'm willing to bet that most of the people on my side, wearing merchandise touting "pumpkin spice everything" and "you had me at pumpkin spice," made the same mistake.  They just happen to like those two things.

No, a pumpkin is a winter squash, and a squash is a fruit.  The type of fruit is a berry and the type of berry is a pepo, but I'm not a botanist so we'll stop that business right there.  In the US, our most common winter squashes are butternut squashes, acorn squashes, and spaghetti squashes.*  Chances are, if you don't hate those, you probably don't hate pumpkins.

Summer squashes are sold year round, and winter squashes are sold from late summer through the winter.  You see, these pepos were named a long time ago, and vegetables that could keep until the winter without spoiling deserved special recognition.  Summer squashes mature more quickly than winter squashes, and the most common one here is the zucchini.  In New Zealand and Australia, all winter squashes are called pumpkins, so they roast butternut pumpkins and acorn pumpkins.  And if you think you like butternut pumpkins and acorn pumpkins, which have nothing to do with those dreadfully common pumpkin pies, you can probably guess what I'm about to say next.  Canned pumpkin purée, which is what's behind the vast majority of those pies, is made from a variety of winter squashes.  But this is not to say, "Oh no!  Libby has lied to us!"  If that's what you're thinking, pish posh.  Libby was just acting Australian.

Pie pumpkins, also called sugar pumpkins or sweet pumpkins, are the pumpkins normally used in cooking.  If there was one year that you never got around to carving your jack-o-lantern pumpkin, also known as a Connecticut field pumpkin, and you threw it into the oven, the result would have been edible, but your dinner would have been fairly watery, stringy, and flavorless.  And if you had judged all pumpkins on that experience, you might just need a few more data points.  Easily corrected.

Sometimes, people say that they hate pumpkins because the insides are slimy.  If you find yourself nodding in agreement, do you hate cantaloupe and honeydew for the same reason?  Or instead, do you willingly slice your tomatoes and spread raw slimy bits of fruit all over your BLTs without a second thought?  For what it's worth, nobody eats the slimy parts of the pumpkin.  Once a pumpkin is roasted, the stringy bits scoop away as easy as pie.  If you're grossed out by the sliminess in a pumpkin but don't go out of your way to pick the tomatoes off of your cheeseburgers, look straight through your excuses and peer deeply into your heart.

"But I hate pumpkin pie spice," you probably didn't say.  So let's talk about that, too.

Pumpkin pie spice is mostly cinnamon.  It's almost always a blend of five spices, which are cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, allspice, and cloves.  Less frequent players borrowed from the mulling spice world are citrus rind, cardamom, and peppercorns.  If you put some variety of these spices together, you will not get a Starbucks pumpkin spice latte.  It's quite the reverse; Starbucks tried to imitate winter squash and these warming spices in a mass produced way, and they came up with something thick and orange.  It made money, so it's here for everybody that loves it and everybody that doesn't.  If you don't like pumpkin spice lattes and all the other pumpkin spiced shelf stable products on the supermarket shelves, this does not mean you don't like pumpkin pie spice.

While sugar can help to bring out many of these flavors, there's nothing about this blend that prevents it from being perfectly suitable for savory cooking.  Many Moroccan spice blends use several of these ingredients.

Cinnamon is from the inner bark of Cinnamomum trees.  There is one kind of tree, the Cinnamomum verum, which is sometimes considered to be the only source of true cinnamon, and I don't know if I've ever had it.  Am I making this up?  It certainly sounds like a children's story.

Ginger is a spicy root, and I think it's better when it's not dried.  If you can juice a piece or even boil some to make a ginger tea to replace the water in a recipe, you'll get a much punchier team player.

Nutmeg is a big seed that's ground into a powder.  It's nutty and woody.  Purists will insist on using only freshly ground nutmeg to eliminate cheaper additives, but if you only have so much time, I'd recommend spending it on the ginger.

Allspice is a dried unripened berry that's ground into a powder.  Each berry looks like a giant brown peppercorn.  They're named for their flavor, which resembles cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves, and they are very charming.

Cloves are the flower buds from clove trees.  They're the strongest of the five; while ground cloves are on the pricy side, a little bit goes a long way.

I grew up wearing itchy lacy dresses to Easter services, which are held in the only hour of the year in which adults pretend they believe a man came back from the dead.  Add pollen and dreary rain to the mix with a mascot that's a giant rodent dressed in pastels whose claim to fame is the ability to madly reproduce, and it's no wonder I think spring is gross.  The real question is, why don't you?

The summer air is thick and heavy.  Smelling of rotting carcasses and mold, it is eager to engulf our lethargic sweaty bodies until we feel we're nearly decaying ourselves.  Each summer, as you make an effort to enjoy the great outdoors, you will inevitably be hit over the head by a sense of festering sewage.  Summer is a reminder that our beautiful blue marble is, in fact, made of excrement.

And then everything changes.

The leaves start to die.  Through their transformation, with their sacrifice, a magnificent array of colors explodes onto the trees and drifts down to carpet what's left of summer.  They perfume the air as it cools.  Marking a new academic year, the changing of seasons presents a new beginning and a fresh start.  The relief from the oppressive heat is a reminder to us all to wake up and enjoy the lives we've been given.  And right on cue, what arrives in every corner of our stores?  On your neighbor's doorsteps?  On every seasonal menu?  So vibrantly beautiful, so diverse, and even more charming than allspice, our wealth of hearty winter squashes are on display for all to see.  Surely, only something so undeniably un-hatable deserves all that attention.

If you've made it this far and you still hate pumpkins, I am sorry to have failed you.  But don't worry; they'll be moved aside to make way for your car's reindeer antlers in no time.**  If, however, you're willing to reconsider your stance, then let's celebrate together.  Move over, Easter.  It's time for the real candy.

* While "squash" is a perfectly acceptable plural form of the word, "squash," I shall continue writing "squashes" four times in one sentence when the opportunity presents itself.

**Although you are correct in assuming that I am making fun of you, I must confess to also own car reindeer antlers, and mine are sparkly.

Rings II

 

In July of 2016, we were young and in love and bought wedding rings. Of course I lost mine right away. Here we are four years later, ordering from the same jeweler and messing everything up. I have recently learned a few things. First, thicker rings should be ordered in larger sizes, which makes sense. There's a tool to measure ring sizes, and it's called a mandrel, and that makes sense too. Different jewelers use differently sized mandrels, and that is downright preposterous. This is to say nothing of the fact that the UK, France, Germany, Japan, and Switzerland all have their own unique measurement systems.

But before I learned those things, we printed out some charts and made some measurements and ordered our rings and got it dead wrong. Kay Jewelers very kindly measured George at a 9.5 and me at a 5.25. Our jeweler only produces rings in half sizes, and due to our insecurities concerning the world of unstandardized mandrels, we resized our orders to a 5.5 and a 10.  It worked.  "But why would I care?" you may ask. You most certainly should not. But I will lose my ring again and wonder what sizes we are if I haven't given up on having a wedding ring, and then this information will be right here in my trusty memoirs.
Blue topaz (George December), peridot (Lan August), garnet (Drakeson January), and opal (Milli October) represent the four of us, and of course, L&G is still engraved inside. Let's see if I can make it another four years.