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Kitchen research

The past couple of weeks I've been researching Rotiboy so that I can make a Memory Bites video for my friend Christin. She writes her own newsletter and has recently wrote a book Debug Your Meditation 🔥🎉

This was my first attempt at Rotiboy (looks a bit like half a burger):

The bun dough itself was beautiful, but whole topping slid off and formed a cake-like layer. I thought about the recipe, and though three eggs for the topping does indeed sound more like a cake. I compared it to Melon Pan, a similar bun with a cookie outer layer. My Melon Pan recipe has one egg for the cookie crust. So I went for a second batch with one egg for the topping:

Definitely looks better, with no puddling. But the topping wasn't smooth. So in the name of kitchen research I went for another batch and used two eggs for the topping:

Third's a charm after all.

Jaime loves it when I do research. It means there's always more. Luckily school holidays back then meant there were always a few teenagers hanging out at ours, and I fed them the duds with them not knowing any better 🤣

When you are passionate about something you would always spend the time to research on it. The kitchen is one of my main passions. What was the latest thing you researched in the name of passion?

Video will follow soon.

Fountain pens

This year the main change I made for Plastic Free July is writing with a fountain pen.

When I started writing three pages of long-hand writing (A4 sized journals) for my morning pages I discovered I went through pens like mad. Even before I finished the first journal of 188 pages I had gone through four pens.

A few years back I bought a LAMY fountain pen and a couple of jars of Platinum Black Carbon Ink to use to line my watercolour drawings. Most ink are not waterproof. After much research I found that the Platinum ink is waterproof, crucial if you're using it for watercolour.

I pulled the pen out of my art kit, and even after months of no use, the ink still ran smoothly.

I had only used the pen to line my watercolours and thought it would be scratchy to write with. Surprisingly, I found the LAMY Safari is smooth and a joy to write with. Admittedly the body and cartridge still has some plastic content. But ink jars are glass.

If you are interested in fountain pens, make sure what you get is refillable. I needed to get a converter for the LAMY to make it refillable. Maybe this is only for the LAMY though.

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See you next week :)

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