Homemade Butter

For lactose intolerant people, we have made homemade butter puzzlingly often.  It's been a favorite activity among many groups we've been involved with though.  I must admit it is easy and fun.

If you have never tried it, here's how it's done.

You'll need:

• 1 small container of  heavy cream
• Disposable mini condiment container or mini plastic storage container with lid (one for each person)

Steps:

1. Fill container with cream (or cream plus salt if you added it) about half full.  
2. Fasten the lid securely.  
3. Shake, shake, shake.  Don't get too vigorous.  You'll tire yourself out and it won't form any faster.  Steady shakes work best. 
4. Some people place a clean marble in the container to speed things up

After several minutes of vigorous shaking (think butter churn), you will get a solid glob of butter and some liquid (buttermilk).   Pour off the buttermilk and use the butter right away.  If you want to make a lot of butter to use later, you need to wash it or the buttermilk residue will turn it sour.  Instructions for that can be found here.  We've never tried this, as we usually hand off our butter to someone who can eat it!

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Cooking science links:

Dairy Science and Technolgy - Very detailed discussion of  butter making. Best for older students

Butter making video explains the science in a kid friendly way

Rock Candy recipe

So to recap, we read a lot instructions online for making sugar crystals.  We figured there's no beating science you can eat.   I found there were a variety of comments on some of the posts ranging from "it so easy!"  to "it didn't work at all."

We scrubbed an empty spaghetti sauce jar since it seemed like a good size for a long string of sugar.   I considered using string as many of the recipes stated, but it seemed very unappetizing.  Having eaten a great deal of  commercial rock candy on sticks, I decided skewers were the way to go.

Then I found the secret to successful rock candy-making in a couple of vids and comments.

1. Soak the skewer in water for a few minutes.  
2. Coat the skewer in sugar or in the sugar syrup you are about to make.   I'd recommend using the syrup because that worked well for us.
3. Let the sugar syrup cool and harden a bit on the skewer.  You don't have to wait too long.  My son was too impatient to let it sit too long.

For the syrup I based it on  this recipe.

• 3 cups (384g) of sugar
• 1 cup (128g) water
• 1/2 tsp (2ml) vanilla extract 
• a few drops of blue food coloring

Then:

1. Bring the water to a boil in a pot
2. Important:  add sugar slowly.  We (well, I say "we" but...) ended up dumping it all in and there was a lot of sugar that collected at the bottom.   If you add slowly you can see the moment the water is saturated because the sugar will fall to the bottom and no longer melt into the water.
3. Make sure you keep stirring so that the sugar doesn't burn or caramelize.
4. Once your water is saturated, remove from heat and use it to prepare the skewers as stated above.
5. Add the vanilla and food coloring.
6. Let the sugar syrup (or solution) cool.  We didn't put it in the fridge and we didn't wait until the recommended temp (again -impatient).
7. Pour the sugar water solution into the jar.  A funnel might help with this.
8. Set one or two prepared skewers in the jar.  If you use two make sure they don't touch below the waterline.

Now at this point in all the directions I read, they fussed a lot about not letting the skewers or string touch the bottom or side of the jar.  Nothing we did prevented that, so we eventually gave up and them rest on the bottom and lean against the jar sides.  We did cross the skewers at the neck of the jar and rubber band them together so they wouldn't touch each other. Then you need to cover the jar with plastic wrap or something to keep anything from falling into the open jar and any curious sugar-happy critters out.

Then you wait.  And wait.  We waited for two weeks.  Then we had these:

And they were very, very yummy.  And gone in minutes.

Tips: 

1. What no one tells you straight out is that, (stop and think about it) you are making a syrup that will be gooey, messy and somehow get everywhere. Also, much sugar may be wasted  in the process.  
2. Two few crystals may not be your problem, but too many may.  Our jar kept crusting over on top.  I elected to break them up and give the jar a gentle swirl so the crystals would form on the skewers and not on the surface.

Next time I may try a wider necked jar and several more skewers.  We got busy and failed to make use of the remaining syrup so it ended up being tossed unused.  I think we could have easily had enough solution for twice as much candy goodness.

Rock Candy

Next Project:  Rock Candy


To start we used these instructions for our reference starting point.

•  About.com cooking
• About.com chemistry
• About.com candy making
• Wikihow.com
• Exploratorium.edu

What we learned.

1. It's a lot easier than you think
2. Skewers not string
3. You will waste a lot of sugar until you get the hang of it
4. It takes time and patience
5. Vanilla extract + sugar is awesome
6. Food coloring is fun but not necessary

Watch this space for details in a day or two.

Theme for the Day: Fractals

Remember my earlier post on fractals?   Well, I'm truly hopeless at this point, so I need to share my obsession.

So what are fractals anyway?

Wiki says:  a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole, a property called self-similarity.

Well (for the non math people like me) that basically that means layers of repeated shapes that can be calculated by a formula.  But you don't need a formula to enjoy them.  Check these out:

• Fractals in nature and even in the garden 
• Fractal art gallery on Cool Math
• Also check out the wiki link for some lovely examples

Ready to make your own?  Try these cool (free!) online generators:

• "Snowflake" style - design your fractal with five straight lines
• Cool Math has five
• Easy Fractal Generator lets you draw a Julia or Mandelbrot set (or a custom one if you are mathematically inclined) and lets you export your finished work to a file for printing.  Nice.
• This generator is similar to the snowflake one above but lets you overlap fractals and export the finished work
• Sierpinski Triangle

Hands on and fun links for the younger kids:

• this pbskids.org    project 
• The fractal foundation project
• Sierpinski Triangle color page
• Sierpinski carpet (cubes) color page
• Sierpinski gear (circles) color page
• A youtube.com search for "fractals" will give hundreds of results
• Fractal your dinner with the unusual  Romanesco cauliflower (see the details here - scroll down)
• Fractal cookies!  (Okay - a brave parent will have to help with this)
• Fractals in clay  (again better to stick with fewer iterations- repeats- with the little ones)

For the older kids and the lesson planners:

• pbs.org has a wonderful fractal lesson from Nova episodes including:
• A generator
• An article on Benoit Mandlebrot
• A fractal lesson that includes an interactive and a   discussion of fractals 
• A working video link to an interesting story about fractal analysis of tapestries
• You might notice the link to the Nova episode Hunting the Hidden Dimensions which is no longer available on PBS.org.  It is available for free on Hulu however. 

• Hoagies has some recc'd some interesting sites also.

Downloads

• A caltech worksheet for the Sierpenski Triangle. Notice! This is a word doc that will want to immediately download.
• A PDF worksheet on fractal math from fractalmath.com, advanced HighSchool+
• A PDF worksheet from Randoff College for grades 5-8
• Open Source software to download. Note: I have not trialed, so use at your own risk.
• A trial copy of (not-free) fractal software. Note:  I have not trialed, so use at your own risk.

Tuna Cat Treats

Last week was cooking class with our homeschool group.  Junior loves it but it's a little bonkers. They always make too much food. They did fruit salad (but then they *always* do fruit salad) Chinese dumplings, and cat and dog treats. And they *really* overdid the cat and dog treats. Even with 19 kids in attendance there were far too many to go around.   The cooking teacher was afraid there would be too little so she doubled the recipes.  Oops.  So we had mounds of dough and only one little convection oven to cook it all in.  I ended up bringing home a big blob of dough to finish the last of it at home.  

I failed to get the dumpling and dog treat recipes but I helped with the cat treats so I have that.

Tuna Cat Treats (Giant Batch)

•  1 1/2 cups of flour
•  2 cans of tuna.  

I'd use less flour than that.  It ended up being a little too dry and we needed to add water.  Then I'd half the recipe.  Twice.  ;-)

The worst part was making the little tiny dough blobs, argh.  You will need gloves or lots of flour because the dough is very sticky.  

Photo evidence:

(Wow that pizza pan looks ugly on film)

I baked them around 400F until they were little slightly golden and sorta cookie-ish.  Soft is better because they still came out too big for a cat and needed to be cut up.  They also need to be in the fridge because they will spoil.

Strawberry Pizza

Was a very long day. 


Junior had an all day migraine so we drove everywhere today.  Today was Math class and cooking class. 


Today's menu, pizza and cheesecake. The pizza was great, the cheesecake took way too long. Too many things to bake as usual. I let Junior bring home two cupcake sized cheesecakes even though we are now certain he's lactose intolerant. His stomach has had a lot to say about him having milkshakes and cheese. He even made his pizza without cheese. Though he did put a few of the sliced strawberries for the cheesecakes on the pizza. Wasn't as bad it sounds. No worse than pineapple. Ha. And the baked berries have a really interesting taste.  I would try it again.

Pumpkin Pancakes

We tried out this recipe in cooking class today.

For a class full of kiddies we increased the recipe to:

• 2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 4 tablespoons sugar
• 4 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon ginger
• 1 teaspoon nutmeg
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 2 pinch cloves
• 2 cup 1% low-fat milk ( can be any kind)
• 12 tablespoons canned pumpkin puree
• 4 tablespoons melted butter
• 2 eggs
  
  
  The kids also made fruit salad to go with them.  Despite my dislike of pumpkin pie, I thought these were really good.