Gingerbread Train Wreck

Yesterday, I went to Costco and picked up this set (for about half the price). I love Gingerbread kits, even though the gingerbread is usually hard and stale and the candy is weak and you have to get out your hand mixer to make the icing, all while adding water. I liked this kit better than any I’ve ever used, for a few reasons:

• The slotted tray held up the pieces which was nice since my gingerbread pieces normally topple since I’m not patient enough to wait for the icing to set.
• The gingerbread is soft enough to eat. Boo-ya!
• It came with loads of candy. Tons.
• The icing is pre-mixed and bagged. All you have to do is knead the icing to the right consistency (I never got the white icing to pipe well – I sat on it, kneaded it for probably ten straight minutes and it was still chunky) and cut off the tip (couldn’t find any scissors, so I used a knife and my teeth. Not recommended for children)
• It’s not a dumb house, it’s a train. Too sweet.

Since I suck at making gingerbread anything look pretty – I decided to make a train wreck. I used the included ginger-people, dismembered them. Since I had no red icing, I made do with red candy stuck to white icing chunks. I also made the people puke the yellow icing since I couldn’t think of any other use for it. I made the cars carry candy, filling them mostly with leftover white icing and then dumping candy on top of it. I ripped off some walls of each car to mimic a destroyed train and tada, a train wreck.

Train Wreck - Aerial

If you’re like me, and you’re chock full of Simpsons knowledge and trivia, you find yourself attached to Simpsons’ Valentines ideas. Whether you favor Bart’s painted conversation hearts (bite me, etc) or Lisa’s punny valentines to Ralph Wiggum, there is something to treasure about the way the Simpsons do Valentine’s day.

Last year, WoDM found a replica of the “Choo Choo Choose You” card and laid it on me for Valentines. It is among my most treasured gifts – mostly because the flowers died and the fudge went right to my thighs. haha, rhyme-y. My attempts to find the bee card (“Let’s Bee Friends”) Lisa gave Ralph and my somewhat obscure personal favorite have been for naught [ED note: WoDM informs me that "Let's Bee Friends" is in fact, available.]

The episode, called “I’m With Cupid,” is from Season 10. Apu is showering Manjula with gifts for Valentine’s day, to make up for working all the time. Marge expresses desire for the same treatment to Homer while they lay in bed. Homer assures Marge he has it taken care of, and she makes some snide comment about the monkey card she found on the floor of the car. Homer panics.

Earlier in the episode, we see Homer at the Kwik-E-Mart, perusing Valentines and stumbling onto the monkey one. “You’re A-peeling, Let’s Never Split” it says, and because it’s been forever since I’ve seen the episode, I don’t remember more than that and an illustration of monkeys and a banana.

Here’s my attempt to recreate the message of the card, since I can’t recall the exact design of the card.

Yet again, if you want the .xcf file (or a full-size .jpeg), email me. This image has been scaled and compressed.

It’s something that has stuck with me, the quiet conference room, darkened and transformed by the art of the ceremony, the ritualistic cleansing, the sound of fire and hiss of water. It reminded me of how little we can grasp of the conceptual until we can experience it.

Taking this aesthetic into my own hands, today I decided that even if I can’t bring my fancy origami paper to work without crumpling it, I could absolutely craft my own in the gimp (best free photo manipulation program ever) and print it onto regular computer paper. I made a smaller design (4″ x 4″) because I could print two out on one 81/2″ x 11″ sheet of paper and also because I am intending to use some of these cranes as decoration on wrapped presents.

I found a good-looking vector image of a sakura blossom at openclipart.org. I made it into a tiny image at 300 dpi and saved it as a brush in the gimp. Did a fancy background, pulled out my sakura brush and had a field day.

The image printed out with an outline, so it should have been easy to cut, but I found myself trimming edges with the first few folds to try to get them as even and perfect as possible. The finished product actually doesn’t look bad, so I guess I did a decent job folding and cutting it.

If I was truly attempting to aim for the tea ceremony aesthetic, I’d be crafting my own paper (I intend to start), but as far as it goes, I think this was a good waste of a few hours of work time.

I hung it on the christmas decorations near my desk with a paper clip.

If I had a camera, I’d take a picture of the crane and post it. I don’t, so instead, I’ll add a compressed image of the design I created. If you’d like to steal it, just email me for the .xcf.

K.

The dreaded orange spots seem to strike soapmakers at random, though they seem to favor heavily superfatted soap, soap involving canola oil, soap involving a lot of unsaturated oil, soap with rancid oil, and high heat and humidity. My soap did involve canola oil and a lot of other unsaturated oils, and I suppose it’s possible that the soybean oil was rancid (the others were definitely OK). I didn’t consider it at the time, but putting the soap in a warm oven when it failed to trace and set up properly may have been a problem as well, since it was effectively a hot, high-humidity environment.

There’s one other possibility. I’ve been looking at online posts complaining about the orange spots and there are a lot of people that have had this happen to very different soaps — multiple batches at a time (even a 100% lard soap, in one case). I also find myself thinking about the reddish-orange streaks that appear on our bathroom wall when we take a shower without turning on the vent fan. And so I’ve come to the conclusion that our tap water is of horrible quality. It must be full of crazy dissolved minerals (iron?) to leave those deposits on the wall, even though it’s crystal-clear in a glass. And I can’t think of anything in the oils or lye that would have produced the deep brown color that I find oozing from my failed soap. I’m going to switch to bottled distilled water for future batches and see if it helps.

Last night I tried out the hot process, mostly just for fun. (For those who don’t make soap recreationally, this is the old-fashioned process of cooking oil and lye in a pot, instead of mixing them and letting them sit at room temperature. The soap is safe to use almost immediately but isn’t usually as pretty or elaborate as cold process soap.) I made a small (~1 pound) batch of soap — olive oil with a small amount of palm oil. It went great, with the soap completely cooked in about an hour and a half. This morning it’s cool and very thick, though still far from hard. So either I just need to wait for a few days, or this new soap will also fail to harden and develop the nasty ooze. If that happens, at least I’ll know the water is to blame.

I’m not nearly the artist I fancy myself.