Winter making - solid moisturiser

It is cold and raw outside and my hands, as they do every year, are suffering.  I think I may have found the solution.  It is simple, smells wonderful and involves a little bit of messing around in the kitchen - solid moisturiser bars.

I don't know if you have a pinterest* account filled with wonderful recipes, tutorials and inspiring ideas.  I certainly do.  But I'm not always very good at actually doing anything with them.  Often it is lack of time but many times it is because I'm off thinking about the next great idea.  This year I'd really like to try and slow down a little and make more use of the many many ideas I already have at my fingertips.

With this in mind I had a look through my pinterest boards and remembered how excited I was to find a solid moisturiser recipe (is it a recipe if it isn't edible?).  I ordered some shea butter and looked out my beeswax and coconut oil and was all set to go.

It is such a simple recipe that I think it is okay to share it here, there is so little to it that I don't think the source (Everyday Paleo) will mind.

 Ingredients::
1/2 cup coconut oil (I buy mine from a local whole foods shop)
1/2 cup shea butter (I found unrefined shea butter here)
2/3 cup beeswax (mine came from here)
Essential oils - around 20 drops

To make::
- Add coconut oil, shea butter and beeswax to a large glass jar (or bowl)
- Place in a gently simmering pan of water
- Shake occasionally and wait for it to melt
- Add your choice of essential oils for frangrance (or leave as is, it will smell wonderful anyway)
- Pour into moulds (I used a muffin tin)
- Wait for the bars to cool and set
- Enjoy!

The children were fascinated by the process (if a little miffed to discover the contents of the muffin tin weren't edible!) and have been enjoying using the moisturiser.  I'm keeping it in a little cup next to the kitchen sink.

I think prettily wrapped bars will make lovely presents.  I'm sure I'll be making more.

*I know there is, quite rightly, such a lot of debate around pinterest. For that reason I sat on the sidelines for a long time and I only recently opened an account - I made the decision to open the account with a self-imposed rule that I wouldn't pin anything that I couldn't link directly back to the original source.  Sometimes this means I don't pin because the route back to the original source is too convoluted, and it often takes me a while to be able to pin what I am interested in because I have to search back a few stages  - but I feel much more comfortable doing it this way (I have broken my rule a couple of times where I have felt the idea is so generic that I am not impinging on someone's personal creativity).  It still isn't perfect but it feels right for me .

Stockpiling, should I be worried?

I glanced around the kitchen earlier today, trying to work out where to put the newly cooked muffins to cool.   There wasn't a lot of room which isn't all that surprising given the kitchen's size, but the main culprit for lack of space was baking and washed-up baking bowls and so on.  And as I looked round I remembered the baking I have stored away in the freezer (a dozen or so banana muffins, two un-iced carrot cakes and an apple cake) - and again we don't have much freezer space.

So the question is, is this normal?  And, should I be worried?  Does anyone else stockpile baking?  Admittedly some of it is going to Islay's school tomorrow for a PTA fundraising event.  And I don't buy biscuits or cakes any more - we only eat home-made sweet things (with the odd exception but it is rare).

I can understand why my Grannie tended to hoard food.  She still had a cupboard full of my grandad's honey several years after he died and I seem to remember that mum found pickled eggs, probably dating from the 1940s, when she cleared Grannie's house.  But she did live through two world wars when access to food supplies was rather different to today.  But I'm really not sure why I'm doing it, is there some deep-seated meaning to it?

I think perhaps we should eat some of my freezer hoard before I have another baking session!

I tried a new recipe of a different kind today - for Cloud Dough.  I came a cross the idea a few weeks ago and thought Islay and my niece would enjoy it.  And they really did.  They both played with it for a good 45 minutes and my niece had to be 'persuaded' to stop when my brother came to pick her up.  Definitely a success.  I'll try it tomorrow with my nephew.  He's two and a half so it will be interesting to see what he makes of it (.....and I'll need to watch he doesn't try eating it).

Cloud Dough is a mixture of one part baby oil mixed with eight parts flour.  I thought it might be hard to mix but it came together really easily, in fact the girls did it with just a little supervision from me. The texture is a little like smooth sand, if you can imagine that.  I find it very tactile, it sticks together when squeezed but crumbles when touched.  It is somehow very soothing to work with.  I'm not sure how to store it and how long it will keep for.  Of course, I won't try the freezer since that is full of cakes but perhaps an airtight box in the fridge might work?

Children's crafty fun with autumn leaves

I'm not sure the title of this post is strictly accurate - it might be better something along the lines of 'mummy (forester who loves all things to do with plants) plays with leaves and encourages the children to join in'!  But they did have fun too.  Well, not Finn he's not hugely into crafty things and he wasn't in the mood for humouring me this time.

I think I first spotted the idea of preserving leaves in beeswax on Small Things and decided then and there that I wanted to give it a go.  Somewhere along the line I worked out, probably from another blog or link, that the leaves could be preserved with paraffin wax as well as beeswax.  I have some beeswax but it is such gorgeous stuff I couldn't really justify using it for playing with leaves, much as I'd like to.  So instead I bought some paraffin wax cheaply on Amazon (there's lots of sellers) - and you really don't need much so we'll have plenty more for another time.

And rather than sacrifice a pan we melted the wax in a pyrex bowl** over a pan of simmering water.  I took it off the hob and onto the floor, well protected with dust sheet and newspaper*, leaving the pan underneath to stop the wax cooling too fast.  As long as the leaves had stalks Islay and Angus were able to do this by themselves.  They dry fast and pick up a lovely sheen but otherwise you'd hardly notice any change.

Then we strung the leaves up. Some smaller leaves made little mobiles which are currently dangling from our hall light shade - Katie loves to blow them. Islay's are strung on her wall and Angus' are on his door.  There's a big garland in our downstairs hall too - I guess they'll have to come down at some stage but I don't think I'll tire of them for quite a while.

* Confession time..........mum just in case you think you recognise your kitchen, and your implements, in the making photos, you are right - it is your kitchen.  But please don't panic.  Your kitchen is safe - all the wax drops landed on the newspaper (and one or two on the dust sheet, oops), the pan is pristine and, um, the bowl isn't.  I couldn't work out how to clean it without a load of hassle. So it has been repatriated to our house for use in future waxy adventures and I have ordered you a shiny new one.

** With this in mind anyone else trying the same may wish to use a very old bowl or pan that they don't mind sacrificing.  Either that or have more patience when it comes to washing up!