Teacher’s Corner: Covid lurking around the corner

I’ve mentioned it a few times, Germany has decided to sacrifice its teachers on the altar of keeping businesses open. Bavaria’s prime minister explicitly said that schools and daycares must be kept open so parents can go to work.

This also means we’re not going back to a hybrid system like before the summer holidays with two days at school, in small, distanced groups, and Homeschooling for the rest of the week.

This also means we’re combining the 3Cs in an unholy trinity : closed space, crowded settings, close contact. By now we’re all convinced that it isn’t a question of we’ll catch Covid, but when.

It was kind of a wonder that we escaped our first case for so long. This week it happened and now guess who covered for a colleague in that class on Thursday. But for some reason that was the day I decided it was time to break out one of the 5 KN95 masks the Ministry so kindly provided. Haha. So I should be safe, and I don’t have to go into quarantine.

Soap Opera Part 4: Season 1 Finale

I made the last batches or this year. Now they need 6 to 8 weeks to dry and cure, and if I want them to be Christmas presents that means I need to stop now.

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On top is a mix of pine, rosemary, niaouli (myrtle variety) and a bit of lemon grass and it came out smelling very fresh. Very lemony, actually even more so than the pure lemongrass (I love lemongrass) at the bottom. There I tried to experiment a bit with colour, but it turned out more looking like blue cheese than artful soap, but who cares. If I do it again next year I’ll have to get some mica powders. This year my focus was mainly on getting the chemistry right, we’ll go for pretty next time.

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The very final two are all about the smell again. The lighter ones at the top are honey and oatmilk. I used the oatmilk instead of water here and I think it worked quite well. The smell is very subtle.I think I’d use more fragrance oil next time, but I also like it when soaps don#t leave your hands smelling for days to come. I got those fragrance oils and essential oils from a British seller off Etsy, I hope the current British trainwreck of a  no deal Brexit won’t make it unfeasible to order there in the future. It would be a shame for the seller.

The bottom is cinnamon and orange. There I added some colour, but it seems to have vanished. The smell is surprisingly marzipan-y and just the right thing for a Christmas Soap.

Let#s see if next year brings more soap. It surely has been great fun this time.

Tummy Thursday: Espeon for the Win

I recently read the following on Twitter:

My 2020 diet tip: If you want a snack, think about whether you’re really hungry, or whether you just want a snack to compensate for the horrors we live through. Then have a snack, it’s the only joy we have left.

And, yeah. We couldn’t celebrate the little one’s birthday as planned, but she got her cake nevertheless.

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Two layers of vanilla cake with added lime zest, a filling of lemon and lime curd in an Italian meringue buttercream ring with added blueberries. I can tell you, it’s a combination to die for. The sweet buttercream offsets the tartness of the curd, and the blueberries add flavour.

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If your husband tells you that this surface of the moon crater landscape of a cake looks perfect, he either:

a) loves you very much

b) has no clue about cakes

c) both

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With a fondant espeon, glitter, sugar pearls  and silver stars. I’m quite proud of my Pokemon cakes by now.

Degupdate Getting Snuggly.

It’s rare for me to like pics of myself. There are hardly any anyway, because I’m usually the camera person, but Candy has gotten me to take selfies. Also, the light in the degu run is pretty flattering, I think, and the degus make me happy, so who cares for the double chin when you got happiness?

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©Giliell, all rights reserved

Estelle is definitely getting more trusting. She comes out almost immediately now, puts her tiny feetses on me and takes treats. Oh, and tries whether my thumb is edible… She is also clearly the clumsy one. Where Candy has added the top of the side track to her territory, Estelle just makes it on top of the box next to it, doesn’t manage to get up and then does a half climb, half jump, half fall off it again. Yes, three halves, that’s how clumsy she is.

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They still make me think of Caine and her kingdom of rats a lot. She would be absolutely delighted with the degus.

Mein lieber Schwan (my dear swan)

The above is a German expression to indicate surprise, often with some disapproval: “Mein lieber Schwan, did you see how fast that car was going?”. But there’s absolutely no disapproval for our new swan family. They are pretty relaxed for swans, so far.

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©Giliell, all rights reserved

The two youngsters. One of them keeps holding tight to their baby plumage while the other one has been wearing their adult white for a while now.

Mushroom Hunt

Yesterday we met our friends at the park, and this time I took my camera with me. The whole thing is currently overrun by mushrooms, toadstools, whatever. It’s not like I can identify any of them apart from the red toadstool that says “do not eat”. One day I#ll sign up for a “learning about mushrooms” class, but until that day, I will just collect their pics. the big advantage here is that they’re all good that way.

 

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©Giliell, all rights reserved

©Giliell, all rights reserved

©Giliell, all rights reserved

©Giliell, all rights reserved

©Giliell, all rights reserved

 

Soap Opera Part 3: I Need Coffee

The next batch is coffee and bergamot with a hint of lavender. Both turned out fine, though the coffee scent is very light, since I used no additional fragrance. Since everybody and their dog will be getting soap this Christmas, I also wanted some more neutral scents, because for reasons I don’t understand not everybody likes fruity scents.

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The “cream” is just unscented soap from the other batch. For some reason that turned out to be softer and a bit grainy and I have no idea why. But now it’s drying. One advantage to sticking it in the oven is that you get it to gel phase beautifully and also it cures a bit faster.

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Bergamot. You can see the “grainy” parts here as well. I can only speculate that it’s too much air in the soap mass before filling it into moulds.

I made another batch that is currently resting, and I’ll make one more batch and then I#m finished for this year,since anything I make later would not be finished in time for Christmas and I DO need to give as much of it away as possible, because soap making is an easy way top make lots of stuff, which is probably ideal if you want to make something with great chances of success  but not too much effort, but if you’re like me, and want to try as many things as possible, you end up with several kilograms of soap…

The huge advantage is that your whole house smells nice because there’s soap drying everywhere…

Degupdate: Candy Mistaking Herself for a Cat

Apparently degus and cats share a tendency to climb up things they then have problems getting down again… I’ll have to take some measures to prevent them from breaking their neck, as Estelle managed to get into the “storage” compartment on top of Degustan and then fall most of the way down…

In the first video you can see Candy trying to jump onto the side track of Degustan where the food is kept.

In the second video she managed to get onto it, and up the side of Degustan. We quickly needed to make that top “degusafe” after that.

Here’s a triumphant Candy with a well deserved stolen treat…

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©Giliell, all rights reserved

They’re also trying hard to gnaw their way out of the enclosure. They’ll find out I have more hinges than that…

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And finally, our “latest degu”: Sugar, a giant crochet degu. There’s a distinctive lack of degu plushies on the market, but thankfully somebody on etsy sold a crochet pattern, so I made one for the little one’s birthday (Happy birthday my love!). While this is meant for small amigurumi projects, that wool was just too amazing.

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Enter the Muskrats

The town our friends live in has a really nice park, with an amazing playground that even the resident teen is happy to visit, so we declared it our meeting place while the plague is on. Apart from the playground it also has a pond with a muskrat family. Unfortunately I only had my phone with me, I promise to do better the next time. They’re neozoons in Europe, but cute.

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A Soap Opera, Part 2: Vanity and Hubris

Those are common elements of soap operas, right?

Now, the second batch turned out beautiful:

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I wrapped it tightly in old towels and for good measure stuck it in the oven at 80°C, because those small moulds will of course cool faster, but the “soaping” is a chemical reaction that feeds on its own heat. I could demould it the next day, no problem. The smell is rosemary, orange and lemon grass, with some ground rosemary and food colouring for the visual. Thus encouraged I decided to make that one soap I’d been thinking about: A marble cake soap: One part Vanilla soap, one part cocoa soap, blended in a cake mould and then cut into pieces.

Yeah…

For one thing, both batches experienced “soap seize” (in German it’s “Blitzbeton”, instant concrete): Instead of staying in a custard consistency for quite some time, it turned hard fast, so any attempt at making a marble cake was out of the window. Second, there’s a million recipes for making cocoa soap. Just stir the cocoa powder into your soap gloop. Looks and smells like chocolate, only if you think that chocolate smells vaguely like old fish. I wouldn’t have mixed it with the vanilla anyway, but I still did my best to put it into the cake moulds and let it set. So here’s the result:

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As you can see, because of the soap seize the moulds have not been properly filled. Second, the smells kinda, reversed? The chocolate soap smells now very mildly of chocolate, while the vanilla fragrance smells like cheap, over aged eau de cologne. They are not fit for giving away as gifts, but good enough around the house. At least the chocolate. Also, without the marble, the cake slices don’t look that nice. At least they look realistic enough that my beloved kid bit into one while I was shopping. I swear, she’s the dumbest smart kid I ever met…

A Soap Opera

I’ve wanted to make soap for a long time now. What stopped me so far was the lack of a safe work space. I am not going to handle NaOh in my kitchen with the kids running around. But with the workbench finally set up I got myself a “starting kit” for soap making and tried my first batch.

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I did everything by the book, prepared my stuff, and still managed to grab a bottle of bergamotte scent instead of lavender. That turned out to be a blessing in disguise. For one, my oils turned the colour pretty yellowish, the purple didn’t look that nice, and for a pure lavender soap it would have been ugly. But with bergamotte in the mix, the yellow “makes sense”. Second, while I used the amounts of essential oil specified in the recipe, the lavender does come off really strong. If I’d used 20 ml of lavender, it would have overpowered everything and probably made the soap unusable.

I let it rest for two days, and it was still too soft to take out of the moulds. Re-reading everything I came to the conclusion that the freshly made soap cooled too quickly as my work shop is quite cool. The next batch will get taken to the kitchen and wrapped thoroughly so it can cool more slowly.

My book also offered a dirty trick for dealing with too soft soap, which is to freeze it for an hour or so. That worked fine, but somehow turned the purple pink. I’m curious to see if it will turn purple again. It’s now off to drying and should be ready in time for Christmas. Yeah, this year’s Christmas presents will smell nice.

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Degupdate: A New Sand Bath

We decided to get them a different sand bath on our recent trip to Ikea, because the big round plate was less than ideal. I hoped that a higher rim would prevent “spills” but it merely slightly reduces them. Anyway, the degus really like it. They need sand baths to keep clean and prevent/get rid of parasites and they obviously also quite enjoy them. They also like digging a lot.

I decided to shoot a short video, because it’s just over-cute.

Here’s some more pics. Estelle almost dares to take treats from me, and she is now ok with putting her front paws against my leg. She will come out more quickly, at least as long as the rest of the room is quiet.

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Estelle, being unsure, deciding to wait for Candy to take the treats and bury them. Given that Estelle is the larger of the two, I’m pretty sure she gets her share of treats.

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Estelle, trying the bath

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Candy, stealing all the treats.