Author: hamishmacdonald

A triumph! I made cinnamon rolls that feel in the mouth and taste like the real thing.

My hubby said in passing last week that he’d love to have cinnamon rolls. Of course, those would be impossible for me to make, given my dietary restrictions (or freedoms, depending how you’re looking at it).

Still, my brain doesn’t like that word, impossible. I searched about, and there really weren’t any recipes out there that didn’t require wheat flour, yeast, or cups and cups of processed sugar. So I found one recipe that was as close as possible and I improvised from there. (Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn’t. I’m gradually learning the chemistry and combinations that explain why.)

The original recipe called for:
— All kinds of exotic flours and starches I didn’t want to use. I substituted almond flour, soy flour, and arrowroot powder.
— Buttermilk. We don’t have that here (though I’m pleased that our big supermarket now carries popcorn, agave syrup, and virgin coconut oil!). So I used some of my home made yogurt (since it’s not setting properly yet, and is thus more like buttermilk).
— Lots and lots of processed sugar. I used molasses. Yeah, it’s still a sugar, so these will not be an everyday thing, but at least there are still some minerals left in molasses. I should try honey next time — because I suspect there will be a “next time.”

So here’s my gluten-free, yeast-free cinnamon roll recipe:

Topping:
(Not visible in my photo, ‘cause they were right out of the oven and it would have just melted if I tried to put it on.)
— 1/2 cup of virgin coconut oil
— a few drops of vanilla stevia
— some leftover sugar, salt, and cinnamon that were in the bowl

Filling:
— 3 tsp cinnamon
— 1 cup molasses
— 1/4 tsp salt

Rolls:
2 cups almond flour
2/3 cup soy flour
1/3 cup arrowroot powder
2 tsp xanthan gum
2 tbsp molasses
1 1/4 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 1/4 cups yogurt (thin)
3 tbsp butter, melted and cooled

Directions:
— Preheat oven to 220°C.
— Lay a big sheet of parchment/waxed paper on the counter.
— Mix all the dry ingredients for the rolls, then add in the yogurt and butter.
— Stir into a doughy batter.

— Flatten the dough onto the parchment.
— Sprinkle the filling evenly over the surface of the dough.
— Lift the parchment to separate one edge of the dough, then roll it all up into a log.
— Cut the log into buns and place onto a non-stick tray (I reused my parchment for this).
— Cover with aluminium foil and bake for 12 minutes, then uncover and bake for an additional 12-15 minutes.
— Remove from oven and let cool.
— Flip them over (gooey side up!) and spread on the topping.

~

I’ve really been enjoying baking lately, I think partly because it’s nice to eat solid foods such as breads and get treats. Plus it’s demanded lots of problem-solving and invention, which I like.

Still, I think it’s time to focus on main meals again, and up the amount of greens we’re eating. It’s so easy to ski back down the slippery sugar-slope, but that stuff just makes me feel awful now (even munching on some of the crispy leftovers from the cinnamon rolls has given me a peripheral almost-headache).

This afternoon I’m working on some blank books for a local history centre/museum/craft space here in the far north Highlands. I’m not really sure why, because these things are so much work that there’s no profit motive at all (especially when you remove the consignment commission).

I guess it’s about belonging a bit more to this community, so having visible work here is some tangible proof to point to, rather than nodding at the invisible friend of my copywriting work and past novels.

While waiting for the shower this morning, I found myself (once again) looking at airmail stuff online. What is it about those little red and blue lines that’s so romantic? They just transform any piece of paper they’re on.

Searching around, it seems that no one sells a stamp to make those marks on paper, strangely enough. Good news for my wallet and my creativity: I decided to make my own.

I had a Speedball rubber stamp carving block, so I just cut a length one centimetre deep off one side of that, then made marks every 5 millimetres on one side, then staggered the ruler for the other side and made 5 millimetre marks to fall in-between the other ones. Then I carved out the space between the marks.

The first thing I realised was that the resulting lines were too close together, so I removed every second one. I tested it out, and it made a decent-looking envelope, though a little shabby, because the freehand carving made the lines a bit wobbly.

So I had a second go at it. This time I didn’t use the carving tool, but just shoved my X-Acto knife straight down into the pink rubber between the marks as if I were cutting a piece of cake. Then I used it to plane out the spaces in-between, and I got a much cleaner edge.

Yay! Now I can make my own air mail paraphernalia.

The Guardian sell things on their website (I’ve no idea why; they’re a newspaper). One of them I spotted while reading an article was a gadget for keeping razor blades sharp:

I’m keen on this idea, because I really hate those Gillette contraptions with the big plastic model airplanes around the half-dozen blades that cost £10 a box and may be tested on animals. For a number of years I’ve been using a safety razor, a brush, and shaving soap (versus a tin can filled with a cup of liquid and a bunch of propellant). The blades are simply metal that decomposes, but I still wanted to see if I could make them last longer.

My first attempt was by using an antique glass “razor hone”. You put a little soap on it and rub the blade back and forth (which is somewhat scary, given that your finger is slipping around on top of one of those blades, which are most commonly associated with self-harm in movies). The idea is that it shapes the blade back into sharpness.

Unfortunately, antique gizmos, like modern ones, are divided 50/50 between “clever things that work” and “snake oil”. I fear this accessory, whilst attractive enough in the bathroom, falls into the latter category.

Searching around for information on the modern sharpener, I learned that it’s just a pad of silicone in a plastic shell. Apparently razor blades don’t get dull as quickly as we think, they just get gummed up with skin and stubble. The roughness and resilience of the silicone is meant to rub all that off so you’re just working with blade again.

I had a silicone watch strap I wasn’t using, so I trimmed that and tried it out. (You wipe the razor in the opposite direction in which you shave, just in case you want to try this out yourself.)

Magic! I’ve been using the same blade for about three weeks and it still feels brand new; usually they last about a week and a half.

~

In my search for tasty-yet-healthy things to cook, one of the best sites I’ve discovered is Elena’s Pantry. Yesterday she posted recipes for healthier Hallowe’en candy.

Of course, this is 2011, and all neighbours like me should be considered poisoners, so I had no intention whatsoever of giving these out. These were for us!

I tried two of the recipes: Fudge Babies, which are little fudge-balls made with only cocoa, walnuts, vanilla, and dates; and Peppermint Patties.

The Fudge Babies turned out like dog crap, but when the fella got home from an evening meeting, I tried them out on him, and he really liked them. (I did, too: mildly sweet, but with some food-y complexity to them.)

The Peppermint Patties”¦ not so much. I shall call them Abominable Snowflakes instead. The innards only half-set, as the coconut oil and agave syrup separated, so I couldn’t dip them in the (85%) chocolate, I could only pour it over-top.

In other words, a mess:

And now it’s time to work!

P.S. Three other things occupying my mind:

1) I can’t find the right drawing paper. Either it takes a line well but the watercolours pool on top of it, or it pulls in the paint well but the ink bleeds. Aargh! So far, regular typing paper is working out best, except that it warps when wet.

2) Scanned watercolours look nothing like their real-world counterparts. I’m really loving the look of watercolours, though, so I’m not sure how to work this if I plan to post things online.

3) My internal critic is working overtime lately and just isn’t happy with anything I do. Right now, it looks kind of like this:

It’s trashing everything because I’m not working on a novel, but I’m actually producing a lot of other stuff at the moment, like these two books I finished for the showcase at Caithness Horizons:

Of course, impossible standards can’t be placated because they’re, by definition, impossible — ever shifting. Thankfully, I’ve been listening to a lecture by Pema Chodron, which is reinforcing thoughts from books I’ve read by Cheri Huber, both of which are wonderful, gentle reminders that the voice isn’t true, or reasonable, or something to engage with.

As Chodron says, it’s always an urge to escape the present moment, to not stay. But just recognising that goes a long way to helping me ‘disindentify’ from what it’s saying, so I can simply go, “Oh, yes, that,” and get on with whatever’s in front of me, rather than running for the hills of oblivion until I wake up again, wonder where the time went, and have to walk back to where I was.

The Bible has as much to say about faithful, loving, consensual relationships between same-sex partners as it has to say about airplanes and iPhones.

In ancient Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and Aramaic, there simply were no words for such a concept. Two questionable terms are used (malakoi and arsenokoitai), but a definition is almost never given.

In the few cases it is defined, it specifically refers to rape, incest, adultery, shrine prostitution, bestiality, non-procreative sex, slavery, murder, or extortion — entirely separate issues, which should not be conflated with this modern question of marriage.

It’s time for church leaders to stop wilfully misrepresenting re-re-re-translated scripture in order to sanctify their own hatreds and fears, then surrender their tiny notion of God, make peace with this reality of nature, and stop inspiring this emotional (and sometimes physical) violence toward gay and lesbian people.

Tonight while I ate my dinner (bad timing), I watched a documentary about an English taxi driver who allowed a team of Egyptologists, in tandem with forensics experts, to mummify him when he died.

The program was fascinating, of course, because it took a lot of time showing a dead body — that great taboo in our society (cartoonist Lucy Knisley did a great riff on that today in her Hallowe’en comic).

The scientists were pretty geeky, but the whole team treated the man’s corpse with a lot of dignity — which felt a little odd, as I got the impression from the pictures of his past and from his wife’s description that he didn’t take much care of his body (every photo showed him with a cigarette hanging from his bottom lip, and he died of lung cancer, so my automatic judgment motors whirred into action pretty quick at that).

My other impression is that about 70% of the narrative could have been cut out and no information would have been lost. (I kept thinking, “Yeah, I get it.”)

I’m having that thought a lot lately, that most of what’s said could be left unsaid. That’s a dangerous line of thinking for a copywriter, and it’s also keeping me pretty muzzled as an artist. Either life is so grand that I feel it’s beyond capturing (cf: today’s great waves), or there doesn’t seem to be a point in trying.

As I typed that, though, I was struck by the notion of sharing. I do get a lot of pleasure and insight from other people sharing their perceptions and ruminations about life.

Inspired by Lucy Knisley‘s awesome talent and copious output, plus her fun travelogue how-to video, I finally made the time to sketch-blog this morning.

I often wonder about the ‘quality’ or refinement issue in making books by hand. It’s not about being lazy, but other people I’ve taught instantly made more squared-off and tidier-looking books than mine and I’m okay with that. Still, I keep coming back to the question of whether I should be trying to make them look perfect.

I aspire to keep learning more and more about this craft, but I’m most interested in these books as useful things first rather than art objects. They’re places for storing and retrieving ideas and plans — an invitation to think and dream. Plus, I think people really like the hand-made look. I’m honestly tempted to just make everything out of kraft paper!

Case in point: This morning during some hard drive data hell, I used my offline time to sketch out ideas for next year’s day-planner. Now that I look at them, though, I feel moved to use something just like them rather than “fix” them on the computer and make tidy, bland pastel versions of these pages.

I like cooking because I like activities in which I can make constant improvements and refinements. “Make it better!” and “Fit it!” seem to be my driving forces.

Yesterday, I made smoked paprika almonds to take along for breaks (in a little cardboard packet I’ve made, of course), and in the evening I made chocolate frozen yogurt with the ice cream maker Craig gave me for my birthday. It turns out home-made ice cream tends to freeze solid; the trick is the fat content (or cups and cups of sugar, which I’m not going to use), so I’ve been playing with thickeners, but yogurt did the trick, being fatty enough to not just turn into sweet ice!

Meanwhile, I’ve got two craft shows coming up in the next couple of months, so I’ll have material for “Show-and-Tell” here on the blog soon. Two thoughts:

1. How am I about being in “craft” fairs? There’s some snobbery about the difference between hobbies and arts, and crafting blurs those. I guess why it jangles my nerves a little is that I like making things that are useful, not just cute or decorative. But, hey, what’s wrong with beautiful things?
2. If anyone finds this website, it’s for the book-stuff, so I don’t know if it adds dimension or if it’s just annoying when I go off-topic.

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I’ve been feeling run-down lately. I was starting to worry that I was malnourished from how I’ve been eating, or it was depression from all the people around me being mortally ill. It all gets under your skin after a bit, and really felt like depression did — no oomph to get going, finding myself staring off into the middle distance, that kind of thing. Except I wasn’t sad.

I don’t know why, but today I’ve got my energy back, and boy am I glad! It feels so good — partly to be back on top of Maslov’s pyramid where I can think and plan and make stuff, and partly for the relief of knowing there isn’t anything wrong with me!

Maybe it’s just the change of seasons.

This mortal life is weird, being teamed up with a body whose workings I’m not privy to.