Upper Murray Farmers Market

Today was the Farmers Market, over all the day was pretty quiet, a couple of new faces and lots of old ones. As always it was good to catch up with people we haven't seen since the last market. Ayala decided to get busy and cook nougat, coconut ice, rocky road and fudge. Kath picked heaps of blackberries, but had another stall at the other end of the park where the Arts Upper Murray group were having a craft market. Kath did get some time to take a few photos, but as she felt a bit conspicuous she took them from a distance.

Mary Grant and a yummy range of jams, pickles and sauces

Tom and Thea Newton from Tandara Gardens with a range of trees and shrubs

Fresh meat from Trevor and Sarah Klippel of Sugarloaf Herefords

The BBQ

Mt Mittamatite Bites

Looking up the park to the free range eggs and Lou Curven with her lip balms and body butters.

CWA ladies with cakes and jams

Jennifer Fennell with her photocards

Katherines sewing

Bonita Nicholas with lots of crafty things

The next market is on the Monday of the long weekend in March. It is all set to be a big weekend in town with the Towong races on the Saturday. Hopefully we will see lots of new faces at the market on the Monday before everybody leaves town.

It's not all about soap

Soap making has taken a back seat this last month, although I have made some liquid soap, more about that in another post. I currently have the best vegetable garden I have ever had, the tomatoes are ripening, we have beans galore, the snow peas and other peas are producing really well, as are the chillis, carrots, and beetroot.The mizuna has been beautiful and we are still eating it although some of it is starting to go to seed. One thing we have an abundance of is basil, I only brought one punnet and at the time it didn't look like much, but it grew, and grew. Yesterday I wanted to make some of my "green gunge" which is a salad / vegetable dressing made with whatever herbs I can find in the garden, garlic, lemon juice or cider vinegar, and olive oil. So I went out looking for herbs and started at the basil, it had grown so much that I only picked basil. I brought it in and decided to freeze it. So here are the photos of how to freeze basil, or any other herb so that it is in an easily usable form when you want a hit of fresh summer herbs sometime during winter. 

This is how much basil I picked, the red container is a 3.5lt

Chop it up, as fine or as rough as you like.

stuff it into ice cube trays.

When it is all stuffed in, fill the trays up with water. This is how much  all that basil chopped  and squashed down to.
Freeze it, and be prepared for some strange comments. Especially if you have a guest for dinner and he brings ice cream.

The frozen basil the next day, ready to put into freezer bags. 

A word of warning, the basil will stain your ice cube trays, but there are worse things in life than basil flavoured ice cubes.

Now  when you are cooking a bolognaise, or a casserole, or soup, whatever. all you do is throw in a ice cube of herbs for a beautiful fresh hit of summer.

Trying out for the Brambleberry S.O.A.P Team

I have been watching the Brambleberry S.O.A.P team get chosen and followed them doing their testing for a couple of years, recently I started thinking that I would love to try and get on the team. Well they have just put out the feelers for the latest team, so here I am, trying to get picked for it. Not sure if they are into allowing international members, or more to the point are international members viable for such a team, but my theory is it doesn't hurt to try.

Although I use mostly essential oils in my soap, there are some fragrant oils that I just can't go past.

Fresh Snow has become a favourite of some of my customers, it has a fresh clean fragrance that has an "after scent" of baby powder, this one took a while for me to like.

Cranberry and Pomegranate however was instantly one I loved, but I love cranberries and pomegrantes any way, but  my customers generally don't like it, it is a very sweet smell, just like cranberry juice.

Rich Dark Chocolate is another standard in my oil stash, I always mix it with peppermint essential oil and cocoa to make choc peppermint, sorry I cant find any photos of that soap. Last time I sorted my oil stash, I thought I would make a jaffa soap with the chocolate fragrant oil and orange essential oil.

But my all time favoutite Brambleberry Fragrant oil would have to be Turkish Mocha, it smells just like a hot cup of spiced mocha, the soap is also a favourite of my customers, whether it be:

In a cupcake....

Or a Latte.....

Or another cupcake

Or just a plain cake of soap.


So to Anne-Marie and the rest of the Brambleberry team, thank you for a great site and all the teaching you give, and also for the great service, I am forever grateful for the extra work and personal service recently when I was having some difficulties with an order. Whether or not I am considered for the S.O.A.P team I have had fun doing this blog post.



Happy New Year

I have been so busy I can't believe how long it has been since I did a blog post, or even a facebook update. To add to the usual Christmas and New Year busyness we spent a week in Sydney, pre christmas, with our eldest and then she travelled home with us to spend the summer holidays, and then just after New Year a very dear friend of hers came to visit with her mother and 3 adorable kids, so that was a very busy week, showing them what life on a farm is like, we milked cows, rode horses, fed calves, saw chickens hatching, ate carrots straight out of the ground, and plums straight off the tree, patted the pig, swam in the creek, rode on the tractor and heaps of other things. They left on Wednesday and it was so sad to see them go, we had such a wonderful time with them. So in all the busyness of the past month soap making has taken a back seat. But I have managed to do some.

This is todays offering, Aussie Bush, an EO blend of Lemon Myrtle and Eucalyptus, coloured with Olive Leaf Powder, Chacoal and Tumeric

These ones look a bit "blah", but they are nicely going through their gel phase, so I took the photo and quickly covered them back up. Hopefully we'll get some photos of the cut soap in a few days.

This is one of the couple that I managed to sneak in during the busyness, no colour but scented with Orange and Cedarwood EO's.

Coffee cake, I have made this in cups and cupcakes before, but was feeling a bit lazy this day and although I did do some cupcakes as you can see at the bottom, I also poured the rest into a loaf tin and sliced it.

Below I poured it into the bee mould, not sure yet if I will cut it into 6 full sized bars or 9 guest size bars.

Did you know that the coffe grounds in the soap not only are a great exfoliator, but are also a great odour remover.

We'll be at the Upper Murray Farmers Market tomorrow, maybe I'll remember to take a camera.

I hope you all have a wonderful, happy and healthy new year.

Long Overdue Photos

I gave myself a fright today. I realized that it is only 3 days till the next farmers market, and that I had not put any photos up of the latest soaps that I had made, so seeing as the boys are busy fixing my car and don't want tea yet I will make the most of the few spare minutes. So I grabbed Kaths camera and a few bars of soap and went out to our rusty old stove that is now a garden ornament.

Morrocan Spice. This is a remake, I wasn't totally happy with about half of the bars in the last batch, so the best thing to do with them is grate them up, make another batch and add the gratings. This is scented with orange and cinnamon, and has almond meal and yoghurt.

Vanilla, same again, I wasn't really happy with the previous batch of vanilla as I had used an essential oil, or in the case of vanilla it is an oleoresin, it really smelt like nothing, so I cubed it and made a batch of vanilla with a fragrant oil and added the cubes for interest.

This one is new, and it is very limited. Cranberry and Pomegranite. If you read my last post about my Aussie Soap Supplies order you will know that they gave me this as a free gift for spending so much money. As it was only a small bottle, I could only make a small batch, but it smells so yummy, just like cranberry juice. I am thinking that it will be a popular one, but I am often wrong in thinking what will be popular or not.

Rose Castile, this one was a really popular, so I had to make it again. Pure olive oil, rose geranium essential oil, and rose clay.

Summer Garden, another really popular one. Scented with rose geranium, lavender and lime essential oils. How do you like the orange colour, that was done with a paprika infused olive oil. I was so excited to see how bright the colour came out.

What a Week

 My apologies for the delay in getting this post up, the SD card with the Henty photos went missing, and I just found it this morning, on the office desk, of course!!!

As the heading says, What a Week, we started with the Corryong Vintage Machinery Rally at the Corryong Show Grounds, the rally went for the whole weekend, but we only attended the Saturday as we needed to spend Sunday packing and getting ready to head to the Henty Machinery Field days on Monday. Mark and Dan spent Sunday enclosing our stock crate on the trailer, it looked great when they were done. It was however very humbling when we turned up to the camp site at the Henty show grounds and had to park amongst new caravans and motor homes, but the first night we were thankful for the trailer as the wind blew hard all night, so we would have blown away had we opted for a tent. On Monday afternoon when we arrived we found out where we had to go and went to set up. We had been placed in a shed that the organisers decided to make a feature shed, so we were sharing the shed with the Wagga Lighting Store, Smitten, which is a family owned clothing company designing and making beautiful pure wool clothing, gecko decko which is a store that sells metallic wall art of Australian and mythical creatures, and a toy seller, I cant remember what their names were, although I did buy a few Christmas presents from them. Next came the Cudgewa Spring Fair, I had not committed to being there, but decided at the last minute that I would go, when I turned  up I found that they had given my spot to somebody else, which is what I had told them to do so I was placed out side, but right in front of the walk way, so it was a great day, not only for me but for all the other stall holders. Sorry no photos for that day as we forgot to take the camera. Will try to remember for next time.

Here are a few photos, in no particular order, of our time at Henty.

We set up the soap so that all the "cupcakes" and "lattes" were facing the crowd. It really drew people in because they thought I was selling food. Somebody asked me "why do you make it look like food if you cant eat it" I responded "because it is fun". Most people thought it was fun too, and if I can give somebody a laugh or just lighten somebodies day then that is good.

The scene from behind the tables, I have been trying a new way of labeling the soap, the bands always seemed to leech colour into the soap and the paper would look ratty very quickly so I started printing off stickers and putting each variety of soap into paper bags with the appropriate sticker.

A very small selection from Wagga lighting shop.

A pretty cool hand bag from a stall in the lifestyle tent. Could easily be a self defence handbag.

Looking past the soap to our neighbour and his giant bubble wand, when things got a bit slow he would start blowing bubbles or whistling with his bird whistles.

A small part of the crowd.

More bubbles.

Somebody lost their balloons. This was a common scene.

.

looking past the trailer to the shed that we were camped in front of.

The cupcake and latte soap from behind.

I love presents

OK so it isn't really a present, I had to order it and pay for it so I guess it doesn't count as a present, but is really felt like it was to go to the post office and get the box, then come home and open it. I felt like a kid at Christmas. Well I always do when I order one of these boxes. My favourite shop at the moment is Aussie Soap Supplies, and after our big sell up at Henty and then the Cudgewa Spring Fair, I needed to do a restock of soap, which means that before I can make the soap I had run out of I had to restock the essential oils that I had run out of. Well nearly run out of, any excuse will do.

The excitement is really building, I know exactly what is under this paper, but I still get excited.

Coconut oil. This is what gives soap a really creamy lather. It also tastes great, and as this is a food grade oil, we do eat a bit of it. It is really yummy in smoothies.

2 more bee moulds. the bee shaped soap is really popular, but as I have only ever had one mould thanks to a Christmas present from my beautiful sister, I can only get 6 bars out of each batch, so now I can get 18. Or more if I do guest size soaps.

The essential oils, and a couple of fragrant oils. So we will soon have vanilla and fresh snow back in stock. The lovely people at Aussie Soap Supplies sent me a free sampler of Cranberry Pomegranate, it smells so yummy, I think we will have a new favourite. The green stuff is Olive leaf powder that will be used for green colouring, great for making camo coloured soap with bamboo charcoal.

 Also in this order was Potassium Hydroxide, or for all the chemistry buffs out there KOH. As it is dangerous stuff they are not allowed to post it, but thankfully my wonderful mother was holidaying in the same city so she was able to pick it up for me. Unfortunately I won't see her till about Christmas time. As KOH is the lye agent to make liquid soap all the people who have been after liquid soap will have to wait til some time next year. Hopefully it wont be too hard for me to learn, and the people who get chosen to test it come back with positive feed back, then we should have liquid soap for sale not too late in the new year.