Cake Time

So, as it usually happens every year at this time, I count myself one year older. On this day, or some day in close proximity there is usually cake involved. I have had many different kinds of cake throughout my life, but I turned 50 this year (0x32 for those who know) and I thought I would request something I hadn’t had before and something decadent.

I did search through recipes on the internet but that has its drawbacks. A lot of recipes tend towards being “quick” and use preprocessed ingredients, or they have the sugar WAY out of proportion or other such anomalies. So I pulled out several cookbooks that we had and searched those. This is the one I settled on:

Chocolate Phantasmagoria found in the Death By Chocolate recipe book.

Of course, I handed this to Kat and said this is what I want. Not being one to back down from a cake challenge, especially one involving a tonne of chocolate, she pulled out her crafting skills and now I can show you the final result.

Tada!!

Doesn’t that look awesome? I gets even more interesting when you slice it.

There are several layers. Moist, chocolaty cake, ganache and a hazelnut paste kind of thing.

It turned out great, and had a tasted to match. There were a few minor things such as our blender isn’t powerful enough to actually make nut butter so the hazelnut paste was a bit grainy. Still, chocolate and hazelnuts is a nice combination.

If you are interested in the recipe details, I found someone who has tried it online: Mrs. Cake. Feel free to try it out for yourselves.

The Splendor of Autumn 2023

Yes, it has been quite a while since I last posted. Not much earthship related things going on these days in our circle. However, today is Thanksgiving here in the Great White North and that usually means that is time for harvest feasts and autumn colours. I should mention though, that if you waited until this weekend to come see the colours, you will be greatly disappointed.

First, it’s been cold, cloudy and rainy all of this long weekend. Also, the peek colours were the previous weekend and all of the really vibrant trees have now dropped their leaves. Fortunately for you, I managed to get some pictures. So if you missed getting out to see the autumn colours this year, here is a tiny sample.

I should take a moment to point out that I am by no means a photographer. I took all of these pictures with my ten year old phone. In most cases, the pictures fall short of the actual experience, but this is what I have so it will have to do.

The above picture is the blueberry field where I work. Their leaves turn red as well in autumn.

And with that, we keep on heading down the road towards winter, which has a different sort of beauty compared to this time of year. I can try to take pictures, but I would also urge everyone to go out and enjoy some nature on as regular a basis as you can manage. Pictures just aren’t the same.

What Are We Doing?

Pretty much all of my posts up to this point have been about general stuff going on in our lives and earthship related things. Right now there isn’t much earthship stuff going on for us, unfortunately, so I thought I would spend a bit of time talking about life, in general.

Now, I’m not talking about our lives specifically, more society and everyone on the planet. As the title of this post says, “What are we doing?”

A while back I watched this video from Jonna Jinton (she’s from Norway, so those Js are pronounced like Ys).
Message to the World

She had recently acquired over four million subscribers and, as a project, decided to ask her viewers if they could send a message to 4M people, what would they say? She received a huge number of responses and that video I linked shows many of them. They are all super positive and supportive, inspiring and full of kindness.

Unless you go searching for it specifically, this type of video doesn’t show up a lot. Certainly not on mainstream media where it seems that only bad news is reported. Apparently we are not all out to get one another and people who believe in each other is a real thing.

I don’t have four million followers. Heck, I’m lucky if I have forty. Nevertheless, if I wanted to send a message to millions of people, it would be this:

Life’s purpose: Can you express the light and love within you despite experiencing, and being surrounded by, darkness and fear?

Seems simple when put into words, but everyone throughout their lives will be faced with dark moments. It is as inevitable as death. And some people experience truly horrible things that many of us can’t even imagine coping with. The challenge is, however, no matter how terrible a situation may be, can you bring yourself back to being a loving person or do you simply sink into a quagmire of anxiety, depression, anger and many other debilitating feelings? I have found that in knowing this, coming back to love is much easier. Sure, I have bad days, but I let them go much quicker now.

We need to take a step back and also realize that we’re all in the same boat, working on this same problem. When we take a moment to notice this fact, we can see our own struggles show up in the people around us. We’re not so different after all and when we can relate to each other like this, our empathy and compassion goes up as well.

That does seem to be what we need a lot more of these days: kindness, care and compassion (all aspects of love). That will get us through just about anything.

Trailer Enhancements

It’s been a while since my last post and some interesting things have happened. We’ve been building things. The biggest item on the build list was the pantry for the trailer. It has been a long time coming and we decided (last year at this point) that we would finally get down to doing that. So at the end of September, 2022 we headed out and bought the materials for it.

Getting time to work on it came and went. I was still working on the farm at that point so pretty much weekends were it, but there was also all of the regular stuff to take care of as well, not to mention some time away, so this project took some time.

As usual, we have some pictures to show the progress. Here is the space where the pantry is located.

We had never panelled the wall so you can still see the spray foam insulation. Here it is from another perspective.

Not only was the section for the pantry uncovered, but the entirety of that wall was still exposed. It’s a bit ugly, but you kinda get used to it.

The first thing to do was prep the bottom to receive the pantry. I used a piece of 19mm (3/4″) plywood as the bottom. This allowed me to route some wires in the back corner that are attached to the control box for our inverter. You can also see the nice purple wall covering we put up over the rest of the wall.

Why purple? Well, why not. Kat did the painting and we had some purple paint from a previous project so we just used what we had on hand.

The next stage was to build the box and install it.

Voila, one pantry box frame, fully stained and varnished on the outside. I would like to point out here that we couldn’t get the same type of plywood that we used for the other building projects we did in the trailer. We used red oak veneer previously, but I called three lumber yards in our area (which is pretty much all of them) and no one carries it any more. The fact that we had to borrow a truck to go get the materials meant travelling to a larger city would further complicate things so we just bought plywood with finished fir on one side. The grain pattern on the wood looks totally different, but after the stain is applied it didn’t look too bad. By this point, it was November.

The next step was to put some doors on it.

I’m not certain as to when the doors were actually completed as I forgot to take a picture of when they were installed and only took the picture later. It was probably December.

Next, it was time to work on the shelves and we decided we wanted shelves on drawer rails so we can pull them out. If you don’t do that, anything you put at the back of the pantry will be lost and forgotten, potentially for years. So pull-out shelves were a must.

I also decided to try and get a bit more fancy with the joinery. It will be easier to describe with a picture, so here we go. This is a top-down view of how the sides of the shelves fit together.

What the plan was for the sides was to use a tongue-and-groove type joint to fit the pieces together. For those who enjoy technical jargon, this meant cutting a dado (groove) in one piece and two rabbet cuts on the other to form the tongue. Sounds pretty straight-forward, right?

Well, it gets a little more complicated as I did a similar thing for seating the bottom of the shelf. Here is a side view with the pieces pulled apart so you can see all of the parts that were cut away.

I did a rabbet cut on the bottom piece and another dado cut along the bottom of the side pieces for the bottom to slot into. This all works great on paper, or in this case, on the computer, but all of that joinery requires some pretty accurate measuring and cutting. Not to mention that doing this with plywood for the bottom can be tricky as making rabbet cuts around the whole thing means on two edges you’re going to end up going across the grain of one of the layers. This can make for less than ideal results.

Here is what it looked like with the actual materials. Kat painted the shelf bottoms white and stained the side pieces, which were real red oak, to match the outside of the pantry.

Here you can see how all of the cuts were made in the side pieces. Not having a table saw, I did have to go visit a friend who had one to do the lengthwise dado cuts and the rabbet cuts on the shelf bottoms. It also helped that my friend had a dado blade for his table saw, which made it go much faster. I did the cuts at the ends of the side pieces using my mitre saw.

I don’t know how well it shows up in the next picture, but I was attempting to show the rabbet cuts in the bottom of the shelf.

With all that, I glued it all up and fit the pieces together. It was finicky and if you’re off by even a millimeter it won’t want to go together, but fortunately it all worked more or less as I had planned it.

After letting the glue set, it was time to attach the slides and a spacer and install a shelf.

Shelf number one was installed and functional at the beginning of January. You can also see that Kat painted the interior of the pantry white.

Yes, it even pulls out properly. If you’re wondering about the wood spacers at the sides where the rails are attached you need those so the shelf clears the door hinges when you pull it out.

By the end of the first week of February, the rest of the shelves were completed and installed.

But wait, why is there so much space at the top? Well, we had planned originally for five shelves. I wasn’t sure how much space each shelf was going to take as I positioned them according to what we wanted to put in them, not just some standard measurement. I figured we would start with five and if there was more room, we would make some more. So we will be making two more shelves to add to the pantry, but I will need to get some more slides for that as I only bought five when we started. They were $32 a piece so you don’t really want to buy more than you need.

You may be wondering about the extra section at the top of the pantry. Well I built it specifically so our stand mixer would fit in it. Previously, we had to keep the mixer in the shipping container as there just wasn’t anywhere to put it in the trailer. Now we have it on hand whenever we need it without having to go outside to get it.

There was also enough room to store a few other kitchen gadgets, some pumpkins and a couple of Kat’s tiles.

On the other side of the pantry, I put up some shelves and ran the wire for the inverter box up the corner and across. We now have a nice, fixed position for that box which you can see at the end of the shelf beside the pantry doors.

The shelves are also convenient for storing books.

Previous to the pantry, we had most of our dried goods in a bunch of coolers that sat on the floor. With this new addition, we have put everything that was in the coolers in the pantry and cleared up all of that floor space, which is good because Kat’s painting supplies take up a fair amount of room.

It took us quite a while to get around to this project, but it is a welcome addition to our little trailer now that it is here. It will make our lives just that much easier now.