Patchwork

It's safe to say that I am secretly an old lady in a twenty-something (okay, late twenties, but still) body. I love knitting, I collect doilies and old books, and then there's the whole tea obsession. So now I'm taking it one step further with sewing patchwork.

I tried out this patchwork ball tutorial from purlbee.com yesterday. I hardly ever sew, and this is only my second attempt at patchwork. I nearly declared a Jihad on my sewing machine but we resolved the issue peacefully in the end (with much swearing on my part). I think I did pretty well, though I did make some mistakes. One of the fabrics should have had some interfacing as it was unraveling at the points. I should have left the opening for stuffing in the middle, not at the end, and I didn't cut as perfectly as I needed to. My patchwork ball is sort of shaped like a mutated football as a result. I definitely need more practice and better fabric/cutting tools.

Oh well. It's kind of like those first pathetic knitted swatches a person makes, where you end up with about three extra stitches on one end and a wonky part in the middle. And you love it anyway.

All in all I had a great time with this. I get tired of the pressure of only crafting for sale and gifts... sometimes it's nice just to try something out for fun of learning a new skill. It only took a couple of hours from start to finish (I'm sure a more skilled seamstress would be able to do this a lot quicker... less time spent yelling at the sewing machine) and required very little material. I may even try more. Every granny needs a quilt, right?

Homemade Marshmallows!

Do you like things that are sticky?

Do you like things that are sweet?

oh.... no... I don't mean... that.

I'm talking about homemade marshmallows! I had been itching to try the marshmallow recipe from joyofbaking.com as part of my obsession with getting away from store-bought stuff and heading in a more old school direction with food.

Go homemade!!!

So, do you have sugar? Corn syrup? Gelatin? Vanilla? Well, you've got pretty much everything you need to make marshmallows!

This recipe was perfect. Everything worked out the first time through, even without a candy thermometer. And I'm definitely no candy expert. Every time I've tried making fudge I've ended up with a dismal ultra-sweet mess-in-a-pan... yuck. The instructions at joyofbaking.com are awesome and very precise.

Here is the syrup cooking away. Even though the sugar seemed to be getting quite caramelized, the marshmallows turned out gorgeous and pure white.

I even overcame my fear of this lovely KitchenAid mixer. The syrup needed to be whipped for 10 minutes and you can bet your ass I was motivated to try anything that would allow me not to use the hand mixer. My husband gave this to me for Christmas -wait for it- three years ago (!) but I had never used it. How stupid! It was so easy to use and worked like a charm.

Here's the finished product. The edges of these marshmallows are extremely sticky and need to be coated with something to keep them from being pulled apart or drying out. I rolled some marshmallows in plain toasted coconut, some in macaroon mix, and the rest in cocoa powder.

This recipe makes a lot of marshmallows. They're not really the kind of thing you can eat a batch of in one sitting. I think they would make a nice little gift wrapped up brown paper and tied with a pretty ribbon. People were very intrigued by the fact that you could make your own marshmallows and they are lovely and old fashioned.

Happy baking!