Prize-Winning Lemon Poppy-Seed Muffins

Every now and then I go through my picture folders and I find something I really should have blogged about ages ago. This morning, I found some photographs of some very tasty muffins I made way back in March for the department muffin competition. There were a lot of very delicious entries, including some fantastic zucchini muffins and even some bacon muffins. I opted for a sweeter flavour and went with a (then) recently-discovered recipe from Bittersweet: her Lemon Poppy-Seed Muffins.

I followed the recipe almost exactly, except I substituted non-vegan yogurt for the vegan kind because I couldn't find any in my supermarket. That's ok, I wouldn't even come close to calling myself a vegan. Anyway, I ended up winning! The muffins had a beautiful zesty flavour, and when I tasted the batter before baking, I could almost feel it sparkling on my tongue.

My favourite part was the sugary poppy-seed topping. It was sort of like icing on a cupcake (but healthier of course because it's a muffin). I think next time I might try it with orange flavouring instead of lemon... that'd be nice.

Astronomy Tuesday: Living in a Hologram

It's been a while since I've written about astronomy, so I figured I should get back on it. I just got back from a public lecture given by Leonard Susskind of Stanford University which was this year's Sackler Public Lecture hosted by the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA). Susskind is one of the great living physicists, and is certainly one of the best public lecturers I have ever seen. He has a Feynman-esque quality to his talking, and it's not just the New York accent. The ideas he presented flowed beautifully into one another, and though all his diagrams were obviously created in MS Paint, I never once felt like I was missing the point.

His lecture this evening was about the Holographic Universe, which doesn't have anything to do with holograms like in Star Trek, but instead means that all the 3-dimensional information in the universe can be represented on a 2-dimensional surface, sort of like how the 2D surface of a hologram shows 3D features. (Image from Crispers Handmade Holographic Images page)

The story began with black holes, which are one of my favourite things to talk about (and are, in fact, the area of my research, which I might talk about someday). These objects are essentially points of infinite density that have an imaginary boundary called the "event horizon" which is the point beyond which even light cannot escape the gravitational field of the black hole. That is, you'd need to be traveling faster than the speed of light in order to escape its gravitational pull. Susskind used a nice analogy with fish and a whirlpool in a lake, where past the event horizon, it is impossible for the fish to swim fast enough to escape the whirlpool. The following diagram (taken from AnsweringGenenis.com, which is a pretty good article if you ignore the God stuff) shows the basic idea:

It got a little more complicated after that. One of the most fundamental laws of physics, he says, is that information cannot be lost to the Universe. Even when you delete a little piece of information off your hard drive, for example, that information is transformed into heat which goes out into the environment. The problem with this, however, is that when something falls into a black hole, all information about that object is lost to the outside world, since even the light from that object can't escape the black hole's event horizon.

The next issue has to do with entropy. Entropy is a quantity which more or less describes the amount of disorder in a system. In thermodynamics, it's officially defined as the "unavailability of a system's thermal energy for conversion into mechanical work" (Google Dictionary). A commonly-used example is gas in a box. If you have one side of a box that has a bunch of gas molecules in it, and the other side is a vacuum, and you remove the barrier, the gas will go from one side of the box to the other and eventually mix more or less evenly. (Diagram from Principia Cybernetica Net)

The idea is that it goes from a state of higher order, with the gas molecules on one side of the box, to a state of less order, with the gas molecules floating all around the box. With a black hole, however, you'd expect the disorder to decrease if some gas fell in past the event horizon because the gas would become part of the black hole, which can be described simply by the size of its event horizon. However, a very smart guy named Jacob Bekenstein used some fancy physics to show that black holes actually have very high entropy, and that it can, in fact, be explained by the following elegant formula:

I'm not going to explain the entire formula, but the important parts are the S on the left hand side and the A on the right hand side. The former represents entropy, and the latter represents the area of the event horizon of the black hole. This means that the entropy of the black hole is directly proportional to its area, and not its volume, as one might expect. It's a mapping of 3D information onto a 2D surface... Just like a hologram!

This still leaves the loss of information problem. However, Susskind and other people then used crazy kinds of string theory (like there's any other kind) to show that deformations on the surface of the event horizon could describe (if you could measure them) the properties of the matter that has fallen in to the black hole. So just like a hologram uses a 2D surface to encode information about 3D objects, the 2D surface of a black hole would encode the information about stuff that's fallen into it. (Image of a hologram from Wikipedia)

Susskind also said that you could think of the Universe the same way... that information within a certain volume can be encoded on the boundary of this volume. This is called the Holographic Principle. This means that the information contained within the Universe could be described by information encoded on its boundary, that is, its event horizon. Essentially, we're living in a hologram!

If you want to learn more about Leonard Susskind's work, he's written a couple of popular science books: The Cosmic Landscape, where he talks about string theory, and The Black Hole War, where he talks about information and matter falling into black holes. I haven't read either, but I have it on good authority that they're both really good, so go check them out!

Adventures in Kool-Aid Dying

Ages ago, I was gifted a beautiful skein of Oberlyn Stella yarn, which is a gorgeous cashmere, alpaca, merino blend. The only problem with it was that it was so... white!

I can't remember exactly where I heard about Kool-Aid dying, but I used this Knitty article as my main source. I picked out a couple of packets of a pretty Kool-Aid colour, Ice Blue Raspberry Lemonade, and went at it.

Here's the yarn getting a nice bath before its dye-job:

And here it is in my microwave-safe dying dish:

I decided to go with the microwave method because it seemed quickest, but I had to leave it in there for about 5 or 6 rounds of 2-minute zaps with a couple of minutes resting time in between, so it might have been better to just leave it on the stove-top to boil. (Please excuse the messiness of my microwave. It might not have ever been cleaned.)

At the end, all the dye had been absorbed into the yarn... magic!

Here it is drying:

As it was drying it had a beautiful robin's egg blue colour:

That faded a little when it dried, though I'm still quite happy with the colour. If I had wanted a more saturated colour, I should have used 4 packets of Kool-Aid instead of 2. The article suggests 1 packet per ounce of yarn, and I had about 3.5 oz (or 100g). Anyway, here it is all skeined up next to the yarn I plan on using it with for the next project I'll knit, which will be this booby sweater:

The Perfect Baileys Oatmeal Cookies

Photo courtesy The Happy Seamstress

This recipe is courtesy of the boyfriend, who is an awesome cook. This all started when we had a craving for cookies, but didn't have any eggs. We looked up some egg replacements on the Interwebs, but it seemed as though you could replace eggs with pretty much any liquid. I think we briefly considered milk as an option, but then the boyfriend came up with the much better idea of using Baileys instead. The result is nothing short of incredible.

The real key to making these cookies taste amazing is to cook them just long enough so that they're barely firm on the outside and incredibly chewy on the inside. To quote the boyfriend: "Don't fuck with the timing, 11 minutes is perfect and I will fight anyone who says otherwise. If you want a crispy cookie, find another recipe, this one is wasted on you."

So, without further ado, here's the recipe!

Perfect Baileys Oatmeal Cookies

1 1/4 C Brown sugar
3/4 C Butter
1 tsp Vanilla Extract
2 tbsp Baileys
1 C Flour
2 C Oatmeal
1 tsp Baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1/2-3/4C Optional additives

Preheat oven to 350. Mix sugar & butter, add vanilla & Baileys and mix until well combined. Mix dry ingredients together and add to wet; combine to cookie dough consistancy. If too dry, add more Baileys of course! Spoon onto baking sheet, and cook for exactly 11 minutes for perfect chewy consistency. You can customize the recipe by adding desired amount of chocolate chips, dried cranberries or apricots (chopped), pistachios, almonds, soylent green, or walnuts.

EDIT - Here are some factual errors and important notes the boyfriend felt the need to point out:

1) Not any liquid works as an egg replacement. We gave up looking for egg replacements because vegans make the worst websites. Inspired, I developed an extreme sense of adventure leading to an alcohol related experiment.
2) Milk was not an option because it had chosen to transform itself into an intriguing form of blue cheese
3) The cookies are only firm on the outside after they cool down. You want to cook them until they are lightly golden brown 3mm from the edge.
4) Soylent green is an acquired taste that once acquired, works with everything. If you prefer, you can use vegetarian soylent green made from algae.
5) I'm serious about the timing. Don't fuck with it. Unless your oven temperature can't be controlled with accuracy. Then watch for 3), or experiment further. Don't be afraid to experiment, even the batch I burned was delicious.
6) Using the cookies as ice cream sandwiches is pretty much the nicest thing you can do for yourself or your loved ones. Details & pictures in a later blog post.
7) If you use artificial vanilla extract, margarine, or white sugar when you make this, don't tell people it was my recipe. Spend a few extra dollars, it is worth every penny.

Holy pop tab dragons, Batman!

I've now accumulated enough pop tabs that I could probably make something really rad with them. I was thinking, maybe a bag, or a top hat or even a corset... so I looked to Google Images for inspiration, and came across this:

Yes, this amazing dragon sculpture is made entirely of pop tabs and glue. This seriously impressive work of art, entitled Shinkonryuu, was made by OniMushaKid on Deviantart. My mind is blown.

Chainmail and wire crochet earrings

I've recently become enamored with chain-mail jewelry (especially after making that jewelry for my mom), and recently, after being inspired by some earrings from this etsy shop that are no longer for sale, I decided to give it a another go.

With the exception of the ear wires, I just used material from my beading stash, and the whole thing took me less than an hour, so they weren't much of an investment all things considered. The ear wires are pure silver, the bead is glass, I think, and the wire and jump rings are silver plated. The hardest part was making the loop for the bead wire.

This next set of earrings was a little more difficult, but only because crocheting wire is an act of pure masochism. Well, it's not that bad, but also not for the faint of heart.

I used the thinnest wire I had with a 2.5mm crochet hook and made my own jump rings with slightly thicker wire. The join in the jump rings isn't as tight as I'd like, so I'm thinking it might be worth investing in a soldering iron. I'm not sure what the construction of the wire is, but the thinnest wire certainly isn't gold because it's already oxidizing a bit. I guess I'll have to invest in higher quality materials too.

I'm toying with the idea of maybe opening my own etsy shop, but we'll have to see. I certainly plan on making more of this jewelry!

More finished objects

Gosh, it's been a while! Please forgive me for my sporadic posting... All I can say is that I've been busy with school.

Pay-It-Forward update: Thanks to everyone who commented on my Pay-It-Forward post. I will be giving awesome hand-made gifts to Tas (who has an awesomely named blog), Eleanor (my mom), Ellie (a fellow grad student in Toronto), and The Happy Seamstress (my partner in crafty crime). If you still want to participate, there's still room for one more comment, so feel free to leave one.

Now on to the interesting stuff! I've actually been quite crafty of late, though you'd never know it from my lack of posting. I'll go over my latest finished objects in more or less chronological order. Warning: some of these date back to January... Eep!

First on the list is another Baby Surprise Jacket, the legendary pattern by Elizabeth Zimmerman. I knit this one out of S.R. Kertzer On Your Toes, which is quite a lovely yarn to work with. This one took me a little longer than the last one (a full week instead of 4 days), but I certainly enjoyed it just as much. This pattern is strangely addictive. I knit this for little Eleanora, the beautiful daughter of my friends who got married a couple of Halloweens ago.

Next up is a pair of mittens for me! This is the Chevalier pattern by Mari Muinonen. I used a couple of skeins of Misti Alpaca Merino Worsted, which is a wonderfully soft yarn, though there were several cuts in the plies of the yarn in the balls I got. That was annoying, but I managed to hide most of the errant strands. Even though I did fewer repeats than were called for in the pattern (because I have very small hands) I still ended up running out of yarn when I got to the tip of the thumbs. You can see from the photo that I've got a different colour yarn there. I was pretty pissed at first, but now I kind of like how it looks. The boyfriend calls my "thumbs" when I wear them. I knit these using the magic loop method, which was ok, but I think I still like my double-pointed needles better.

I haven't given up on crochet either. I have a lot of dresses that leave very little to the imagination when it comes to cleavage, so I figured I should make myself a modesty panel. It's quite an ingenious design, the Lacy Cleavage Cover by Linda Z. O'Halloran. I used some good ol' Royale Crochet Thread which was probably a little thinner than the pattern called for, but I managed to make it wide enough with a little improvisational edging.

I'm a pretty big fan of the fastening mechanism for this thing. It attaches to my bra with those little elastics.

Next on this lengthy list of finished objects is an awesome pair of socks for my friend Daphne. She requested a pair of thick, comfy socks, and when I asked her what colour she'd like me to make them, she simply said, "Oh, I don't know. Make them wild!" And so I did. I used a skein of Bernat Satin and some random scrap yarn for the stripes, and I knit them using a generic short-row toe-up pattern. I made my first attempt at knitting one sock inside the other on double-pointed needles by first creating two short-row toes and then putting one inside the other and continuing with the double-knitting outlined in that awesome Knitty tutorial. I'm pretty happy with the result (and so is Daphne), though my gauge was a little looser than I usually like for socks.

Last but not least is this wonderful little tote bag, which I made using Elisa's Nest Tote by Purl Soho. I wasn't entirely satisfied with the seaming in this pattern last time I made it, and I was looking for a slightly sturdier bottom, so I decided to make it a crochet/knitting hybrid. The bottom was crocheted in the round in double-crochet and increased to 80 stitches, which I then picked up with my circular needle and knit in the round in pattern. I therefore didn't have to bind off before doing the applied i-cord edging. The latter caused the opening of the bag to be a little tight, but I can live with that.

Well, that's about it for now, folks! Let's hope my next entry appears a little sooner than a month from now.