2011 June - moltenchocolate.com

The New House: An Update

June 5, 2011
Categorized: Italia - Life/Inspiration Tagged:

Second Story Staircase

Work on the new house is moving right along! In fact, it’s practically done! Yesterday, Flavio – our fallegname di fiducia, or faithful woodworker and furniture builder – came to get the precise measurements for the kitchen, kitchen pantry, bathroom sink base, inside doors, baseboards and hallway armoir.

Yeah, he’s basically in charge of everything that has anything to do with wood in the house. So far he’s put in the second story staircase. Which I can finally clean up since everyone is done painting. (I seriously don’t understand how people can make such a mess when they work and then not clean up after themselves.)

And he’s also done the wooden flooring that’s in both bedrooms, the hallway and the guest bathroom. It doesn’t have the final coat of finish on it yet – he’ll be coming back to do that when most of the other work is done. We really love the flooring, which is an industrial flooring made up of lots of little pieces…a picture says a thousand words:

: Second Story Staircase

: Bedroom

: Creativity Room

: Flooring Closeup

: Flooring

: Hallway

: Venetian Stucco

: Our bathroom

: The Guest Bathroom

: Our bathroom

: The Green Wall

: Kitchen Island

: Kitchen

: Luca 1st story stairs

: 3rd floor

This week Luca tried his hand at some Venetian stucco in the guest bathroom. It came out really cool! He’s still polishing it up some more, so I’ll post another picture when it’s all done. But here’s one from yesterday. If you’re not familiar with it (I wasn’t!), Venetian stucco is a sort of polished plaster.

Venetian Stucco

Basically you apply two or three layers of really thick “paint” with a chocolate spreader (well, that’s what I call it, it’s a type of metal spatula), keeping it at 30° and you have to really spread it a lot and let it dry between coats. Then you polish it (we learned a trick that involves drying and buffing with a hair dryer that works great). When it’s done, the wall isn’t a uniform color and it looks like glass! It feels like glass too. It’s a very cool finish. For the moment, we’re just doing the one pillar in the guest bathroom dark red, but we already bought two other jars of grey to put somewhere else (not exactly sure where we’re going to use it because the original idea has been shot down…if you need any grey venetian stucco, let me know). In the picture at the left it hasn’t been polished yet.

I’m so excited for my camera di creativitÃ (creativity room)!! I might move in early so I have somewhere to store all my stuff. It’s such a pain having to haul everything out every time I want to do a craft or hem a skirt. I’m already dreaming up things I can do in the room and collecting some interior design ideas. You can check them out on Pinterest and leave comments if you want.

I amazingly managed to convince Luca that we needed some more color in the house and here’s our new green wall on the stairway that goes up to the third floor:

Now that it’s there he loves it as much as I do – a little color never hurt anyone, though sometimes you have to be courageous to use it.

Here’s a video I took on Febuary 13th to give you a better idea of the layout of the house.

THE Best Freaking Blueberry Muffins

June 3, 2011
Categorized: Sweet Tagged: blueberries - blueberry muffins - Cooks Illustrated

(IN THE WHOLE WORLD!!!)

Picture it: industrial, pre-packaged “blueberry” (flavored-ish) muffins. Oh god, they’re the worst thing EVER to have been invented. Every so often when I’m at an airport or a rest stop I stupidly break down and buy one (if I’m desperately hungry) and I always regret it.

Every. single. time.

Until now. Now I have the willpower to resist those jet-lag/car sickness induced cravings because I have consumed The Best Freaking Blueberry Muffins in the Whole World. Twice.

I think I had a blueberry deficiency. Last summer at the mountain house market I bought two plateaus of blueberries and froze some of them. I’ve been pulling them out every so often and making blueberry muffins, and they’ve always been pretty good, but when Mom and Dad came last month I decided to try a new recipe based on one from Cook’s Illustrated. (Unfortunately, you won’t be able to see their recipe unless you have a subscription or sign up for a free trial).

I had to modify their recipe slightly — sidenote: isn’t interesting how we ALWAYS have to modify a recipe, we can’t just leave it alone. No, we have to add more chocolate chips or cut down the sugar because it will definitely be better that way….or so we think…Maybe I should speak for myself.

Anyways, their recipe calls for lemon zest and I only had mandarins, they wanted buttermilk, but I only had yogurt, they wanted vegetable oil and I only had butter and I never have vanilla extract. Plus I wanted to make them slightly healthier (ok I was running out of butter) and less salty.

I made the recipe again this morning with the same fantabulous scrumdidiliumpscious result (in fact just 6 hours laters there are only 2 left).

Ingredients

2 cups fresh blueberries

2 1/2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour

2 1/2 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp table salt

2 eggs

1 cup sugar (plus a little more for sprinkling on top)

1 1/4 cup yogurt

1/2 an orange or lemon

6 Tbsp (3/4 stick) unsalted butter , melted and cooled slightly

Preheat oven to 425°F. Butter the muffin tin.

Zest the lemon or orange and mix the zest with a couple tablespoons of sugar for the topping.

Method

1. Make quick blueberry jam. Simmer 1/2 of the blueberries (1 cup) and a teaspoon of sugar in a small saucepot for a few minutes, mashing the berries occasionally. Note: I use a potato masher and it works great. The berries should be slightly concentrated into a sort of jam when you’re done. While berries cook you can measure the other ingredients. Set aside to cool.

2. Prepare dry ingredients. Whisk together the flour, baking powder and salt.

3. Combine wet ingredients. Whisk eggs and sugar together for a couple of minutes until the batter is uniform and looks like a liquid marshmallow (kinda fluffy). Slowly add the melted butter and continue to whisk. Add the yogurt and a little lemon/orange juice (Note: If using lemon, a couple tablespoons is plenty, otherwise the juice from half the orange).

4. Fold everything together. Dump the cup of fresh blueberries into the flour mixture. Quickly and gently fold the flour mixture into the butter/yogurt mixture. (Note: You just want to barely mix them together, it’s okay if there are some dry flour spots. Don’t overmix!) Transfer the batter into the prepared muffin tin, mounding the batter up in the middle of each muffin. Using a small spoon, spoon some of the blueberry jam into the middle of each muffin (I know, it’s a pain, but it’s worth it!) Use a skewer or a chopstick to swirl the jam around in the muffin, sprinkle with the flavored sugar and get those bad boys in the oven for 15 minutes.

The Garden 2011

June 2, 2011
Categorized: Gardening Tagged:

When Mom and Dad were here last month they tilled the garden for me and even started planting. Tilling that garden is no small chore, let me tell you, that dirt is like cement. In fact they ended up breaking the head of a shovel right in half! Thanks to their efforts, and some follow up work on my part, the garden is now well on its way. Here are some pictures, taken last Saturday: