Parenting

Festival Time!

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

Less than two weeks until the Tamariki Book Festival, and preparations are just about done. Last month, we had a little get-together with all the authors and, seriously, you don’t want to miss this year’s festival. The authors have gone above and beyond with their creative ideas for festival activities! Among the many activities, we have author Marc Meaney, who is bringing a real sailboat that kids can hop into and pretend to sail (I also hear he’s giving away a sailing lesson as a prize to a lucky reader). Author Sue Heazelwood will be decorating hundreds of cupcakes with kids to accompany her absolutely gorgeous recipe-lated storybooks. Author Sandra Isaacs will be leading an i-spy activity in a rock pool to promote her beach-themed books. I’ll be there with my dragon name selection spinners and a bit of origami using pages from my books. And there will be so much more from all the other participating authors!

In addition to the authors’ activities, we’ve got lots of fun stuff to do related to our Books Take Flight theme. A selfie station with dress-up wings to wear, a chance for you to make your own writing take flight (literally), a model airplane to assemble, and flight-themed prizes for our author scavenger hunt!

There will also be author readings, spot prizes for those dressed as their favourite book characters, and a prize draw for those who post their selfie-station photos on social media.

If a noisy festival isn’t your cup of tea, visit between 3.30 and 4 pm for our quiet time–no music or loud announcements, quiet voices, and smaller crowds.

Come prepared to find your new favourite books, too! Pick up signed copies directly from the authors themselves! Be sure to bring some cash, as not all authors will have eftpos facilities.

Did I mention the workshops?

Our incredible authors are also running writing and illustration workshops for ages 6- 17. Workshops cost $10, but all participants will receive a $10 voucher to be spent at the festival, so they’re essentially free! Budding authors and illustrators should register soon, or all the spaces will be gone!

Learn more
Register for workshops

Crazy Cake Season 2024—well, that was a fail

/ Robinne Weiss / 1 Comment
The cake was ugly even before the jelly layer was added on top…

The girl turned 20 this week, but she hasn’t outgrown crazy birthday cakes. Her response when I asked her what she wanted this year was: How would you feel about making a hornwort (Anthocerophyta not Ceratophyllum)?

Well, that’s a gauntlet thrown, for sure. Hornworts’ thin, jelly-like ‘leaves’ and tall, narrow sporophytes do not lend themselves to buttercream icing. This called for a new technique.

I immediately thought of agar agar (a vegetarian gelatine substitute, for those who don’t know), which has the right sheen for a hornwort, and which I knew could be made into thin, textured sheets (I knew this because I’ve used it for creating texture on fake wounds … yeah, I do a lot of weird stuff.)

As I was looking up a good water:agar ratio for the consistency I wanted, I stumbled across the world of jelly cakes. I was immediately hooked. They look totally disgusting to eat (I hate jelly/jello, won’t use gelatine because it’s not vegetarian, and I think agar tastes like seaweed), but visually they’re amazing.

So when I found that my thin agar leaves were fiddly and a bit too floppy, I decided I would do a jelly cake and create my hornwort using jelly cake techniques. 

And the jelly added extra special ugliness.

I spent two hours practicing with the jelly last week, making sure I could do it without all the specialised equipment the professionals use. Then I made the other components of the cake over the weekend. I first made the actual cake (because no way was I going to have only jelly cake to eat) using a new recipe. This turned out so awful, I made a second cake with a tried-and-true recipe because there was no way I could use the first. I made the fake moss (using a new technique I hadn’t used before), chocolate tree bark (again, something I hadn’t made before), and the icing (using an unusual recipe I had never used before). 

Then, on the girl’s birthday, I made the jelly hornwort and assembled the whole thing.

The result? Pretty ugly, and not very hornwort-like. Or bark-like, or moss-like. And the icing set up like glue …

But hey, you’ve got to try new things, right? On the plus side, I learned about jelly cakes. I learned that the specialised equipment the professionals use is probably necessary to do it well. I learned how to create a decent jelly from agar agar (I mean, as decent as any jelly can be—yuck!), which I could now use to create moulded shapes or other embellishments for future cakes. I learned how not to make chocolate tree bark, and that a certain cake recipe and icing recipe can be discarded. The fake moss was definitely more moss-like than previous techniques I’ve tried. It’s one that’s probably worth playing with and refining.

Trying new things can pay off…

So I learned some things. And I got to eat cake. It may not be pretty, and the icing texture is simply wrong, but the flavour’s good.

And I have to remind myself that sometimes trying something new does work. Remember the octopus cake? Better luck next time.

Spicy Christmas Gift

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

One of my Christmas gifts from my daughter this year was a set of creative spice jar labels. She spent an hour or so on Christmas Day affixing the labels to all our spice jars.

I love the creativity of the names: imp skulls, essence of griffin, condiment for a pottle o’ chips, miniature grenades of flavour …

Today I was looking for cinnamon and allspice. It took ages to find the ‘fragrant soil’, and ‘cannonballs of spice’. LOL!

Pandemic Poetry–2021 Edition, #19

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment
notebooks and folders
My notebooks and folders for planning a return to in-person schooling.

I’m lucky to have only one, relatively self-sufficient teen at home for lockdown, but I feel for parents of young children. Good weekend weather will have been a help, but homeschool fatigue will make the coming week difficult.

Desperation grows
As the
Days
Tick
By.

Worksheets that
The school sent out
Make
The kids
Sigh.

We long for
Normal routines:
Work,
School,
Kai.

Desperation grows
As the
Days
Tick
By.

Youthful Adventure / Parental Angst

/ Robinne Weiss / 1 Comment

I find myself pacing the living room floor, gazing out the window at the swirling snow.

par

Stop. She’ll be fine.

My daughter is snowed into a cabin in the mountains. Porter’s Pass is closed and I cannot reach her by any means. I cannot supply her with the food I know she does not have for the 24-48 hours it will be until she can escape.

She is with friends. I know the cabin they’ve holed up in—it is warm and dry. There is water and even electricity.

She’s probably having a blast. No doubt they’ve pooled their food and are concocting some strange dinner tonight from instant soup packets and half a package of pasta of unknown provenance and indeterminate age left in the cabin by a previous inhabitant. It won’t be enough, but they’ll make do.

I know this because I remember my own adventures as a young adult. A day of hiking fuelled only by a pair of bananas purchased from a family in a small mountain village. A trek across the isthmus of Panama that involved an ill fated bus, hitching a ride in the back of a pickup, sleeping on the concrete floor of the police station in an unknown village, hiring a villager and his canoe, and begging meals and accomodation in another unknown village. Cowering in a tent as tornadoes ripped through the forest nearby. Carrying a chicken to a friend, on foot, three hours distant. … The list is long.

Every one of those adventures involved hardship—hunger, exhaustion, fear, danger. My mother would have freaked out had she known what I was doing.

Just as part of me wants to freak out right now.

But I know what those adventures did for me as a young adult. I can’t imagine having not had them. They’ve woven their way into the fabric that is me today. They are who I am.

My husband and I have taught our children how to prepare for adventure, how to be safe, how to face the inevitable difficulties, how to enjoy the hardships. The most important thing we can do now is trust that we’ve taught them well, and keep our own worries to ourselves so they don’t dim our children’s sense of adventure.

So I will pace the room, but never tell her I did so. I can’t wait to hear all about her adventure when she returns.

2021 Crazy Cake Day #1

/ Robinne Weiss / 2 Comments

Many years ago, I tried to make vegetarian rolled fondant. It was a complete disaster.

So when my daughter asked for an octopus cake for her birthday, I first wondered if I could manage to do it in buttercream frosting. I quickly decided that, no, it was really only going to work in fondant. So …

I spent a couple of hours on Tuesday scouring the city for the ingredients. They were easier to find this time—vegetarianism has become more commonplace, so gelatine substitutes are now available in some mainstream grocery stores. I took it as a good sign. My fondant would work this time.

I baked the cake (chocolate), and made the filling (peanut butter), and on Wednesday sculpted the octopus’s body. After a night in the refrigerator, the cake was ready to cover in fondant. Thursday morning I got to work.

The first batch of fondant was marginal at best. It had little elasticity, and I had to roll it out in pieces, rather than one big sheet to cover the whole cake. No worries. I managed, and the result was only a little bit lumpier than I’d hoped.

But I’d used nearly all my fondant, and I still had eight legs to make.

So, I made another batch. This one would be better, of course, because it was the second try. And it seemed to be going better for a few minutes. But by the time it was finished, it was clear this batch had even less elasticity than the first. 

At least I didn’t have to roll it out thin. It worked fine for the legs, as long as I worked slowly and didn’t try to curl the legs too much.

It took quite a long time to smooth all that lousy fondant into what looked like one continuous animal, but eventually I managed. Then I had a fabulous time painting it, watching the octopus colouration take shape.

It took a bit of trial and error to work out how to make zillions of suckers—thinned fondant piped into balls, partly dried, and then shaped before allowing them to harden. Then it took ages to place them all. I finished up just as my husband was putting dinner on the table. 

It was a heck of a lot of work for one cake.

But the final octopus looks like it could swim away any moment. And more importantly, I think my daughter is truly impressed—a rare feat.

Pandemic Poetry: Poem of the Day, 9 April 2020

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

I was thinking last night, as my husband and daughter were playing ping pong on the dining table, that I am blessed to be in lockdown with those two. I wish our son were also with us; for all the stress of such close quarters, it’s lovely to have the excuse to spend time together.

I hope you are all staying safe and healthy and making the most of the difficult situations we’re all in. Kia kaha!

Summer Soup 2020

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

No pandemic hoarding here, just the usual late season batch of Summer Soup. I’ve written about Summer Soup on numerous occasions (2015, 2016, 2018, and twice in 2019). We’ve been making it annually for at least a decade, and it has always been a family affair. In the early years, the children’s vegetable chopping efforts were more symbolic than helpful, but as their skills improved, their input became critical to the relatively rapid production of vast quantities of soup. 

This year, with our upcoming move, the garden output is less than in many years, and there’s so much to do, I wasn’t sure we would have a chance to make Summer Soup. In the end, I did it alone. Starting at 7.30 am, with many interruptions to help move furniture and tools, I began picking and processing vegetables. I pulled the final jars out of the canner shortly before 11 pm.

I listened to music and podcasts while I worked, and I got some brief help from my husband, but it wasn’t the same without the rest of the family there. Neither was the output—13 quarts of soup and 4 quarts of stock. 

I’m not disappointed—thirteen meals plus flavouring for four more will be lovely in the coming weeks and months—but I look forward to getting back to the family production of Summer Soup next year. It’s not just soup; it’s a celebration, and not nearly so much fun alone.

Crazy Cake #2–2020

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

My son, the budding architect, has always challenged my cake decorating skills with his annual birthday cake requests. A star destroyer, the city of Dale, Wellington … his requests tend toward angular, built structures difficult to sculpt in cake and icing. This year he asked for ‘a brick’. Just getting the colour right was going to be a challenge. And then I had to make the brick special in some way.

I thought maybe I’d cover it in lichens and moss (easy to fashion from frosting and Mexican paste). But a photo online caught my attention … I came up with a plan that I thought would tax my confectionery skills more than mere decoration would. A little maths, a little measuring, a little cutting, and …

There’s more to this brick than meets the eye.

Crazy Cake #1–2020

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

It’s birthday cake season again! This year, my daughter’s brief for me was a Kura Tawhiti bouldering theme, with ‘maybe a climber and some alpine plants’ done in chocolate and hazelnut flavours.

I think both of us had a vision of a grey boulder or boulders with climber, plants, etc. But as I started in on the cake, the vision changed.

I made one of my favourite devil’s food cake recipes (from Tartine) in a range of round layer sizes. I sliced each layer in half and filled it with my homemade Nutella, stacking the layers in a wonky boulder-like shape. 

Then I stood there and contemplated the decoration. My plan had been to make the standard quick icing I use for decorating, but the amazing rich chocolate cake with decadent Nutella filling really needed something better than quick icing. It needed ganache.

So that’s what it got—chocolate ganache covered with ground hazelnuts to get a more appropriate boulder colour. 

I added chunks of hazelnut praline for a more rocky appearance, and made some alpine plants and a climber from Mexican paste. A few small final touches with a simple sugar and milk icing, and the cake was finished.

It didn’t look anything like I thought it would when I started, but it tasted absolutely divine! No wonder—it contained over 400 grams of chocolate, two cups of hazelnuts, and a gloriously unhealthy quantity of butter and cream. In the end, no one was paying much attention to the look—we were too busy oohing and aahing over the taste.