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.

Lego Grand Piano 21323

George bought me the Lego Grand Piano 21323 set for my birthday.  If you scroll down that link, you can see their promotional video.  This is a prettier commercial, and this is a short interview with the designer, Woon Tze Chee.

14 Aug 20

The manual is 564 pages.

There are 3,662 pieces.

Those pieces are divided into 21 sets of bags, which I brought to Sealy.

Assembly starts at dawn.

15 Aug 20

Bag 1: Partial Underside & Partial Rim

Bag 2: Crankshaft, Motion Sensor, Motor, Battery & Bluetooth

Bag 3: Damper Rail & Rods

Bag 4: Partial Soundboard

Bag 5: Completed Soundboard & Rim Tail

Bag 6: Partial Case Front & Partial Rim

Bag 7: Partial Case Front, Partial Rim, & Partial Cheeks

Bag 8: Completed Case Front

Bag 9: Completed Rim

Bag 10: Legs & Pedal Lyre

Bag 11: 7-Note Keyboard

Bag 12: 12-Note Keyboard & Action

Bag 12.1: Keybed, Keyframe, & Balance Pins

Bag 12.2: Close-up on those Adorable Yummy Hammers

Bag 13: 17-Note Keyboard & Action

Bag 14: 24-Note Keyboard & Action

Bag 15: Completed 25-Note Keyboard

Bag 16: Fallboard

Bag 17: Music Stand & Damper Heads

Bag 18: Partial Lid

Bag 19: Partial Lid

Bag 20: Completed Lid

Bag 21: Bench

With a Horse & Little Ones

Measures 8.5" by 12" by 13.5" When Closed

Final Thoughts:  What a beautiful model.  The Lego set does not produce sound, but rather runs the crankshaft which depresses sets of unrelated keys while your device plays selected recordings through an app.  I don't really see the difference between this and listening to any piano recording while the crankshaft runs, but I still love this set.  The highlights of this design include a vintage LEGO logo, rolling casters, an adjustable bench, a foldable music rack, a foldable lid that can be raised, a working damper pedal, a removable fallboard, and a removable action.  Each of the 25 keys has its own "string" and its own hammer.  The colors, down to the red and green felts and white hammers are reflected beautifully in the design.  It's also quite the build; if you were to connect 6 pieces per minute for 10 hours straight, you'd almost be done.  We'll do about a section a day starting every December 1st for the holiday season.  I think it's lovely.

Playday by Donny Chen, Lego Piano Ideas Proposal Author

Basic Disassembly

But that wasn't all the fun. Then it was time to organize the pieces. I bought six Sterilite 14028606 bins, which I love for so many reasons. They're semi transparent, stackable, and come with two different types of interchangeable removable trays.  I made a lengthy post on exactly how to organize all the pieces, but of course I redid the project later.  Click here to see the updated version from January of 2022.