Homemade Brown Sugar

Did you know you can make your own brown sugar? Brown sugar is literally just white sugar and molasses. I knew I could make it. I even knew how to make it. And yet, I have not been making it.

Logically, I knew I should. I use a lot of it, given how much I bake. It's much cheaper to make than to buy, especially since I prefer dark brown sugar, which is always more expensive than light brown sugar. And I already have a gallon of molasses.

I kept telling myself I should start making it next time I ran out. But then my laziness would overcome me and I would buy more brown sugar when I was at the store.

However.

Here we go.

I finally did it. I used two tablespoons of molasses per cup of white sugar, which makes very dark brown sugar.

I mixed it in my food processor. It wasn't hard, of course, although I did overfill the food processor and have to split the sugar in half to get it all combined evenly.

The most annoying part of making it is getting sugar all over the counters and floor, which seems inevitable with this quantity of sugar. But now I have a lot of brown sugar on hand, and I can always make more when I need it.

Snapshots: Spring Flowers and Shearing

 The week started with a grim, wintery feel outside:

Moody, bare Chinese elm trees against a cloudy sky.

But now look!

Crocuses, yay!

There are quite a few bulbs coming up in the three beds we have them in. They all need to be watered, because we still haven't had any rain or snow, but they're coming. Hooray!

We have some spring inside the house, too. A. cut some apricot branches to force inside. 

The first one to open.

And now there are more. (It's very hard to get a picture of them, though.)

Speaking of flowers . . .

This past week was homecoming spirit week at school. It was a cruise ship theme this year, and we did pretty well finding appropriate clothing for every day. I was, however, kind of stymied by the day when they were supposed to wear "tropical tourist" clothing. We are not a tropical clothing sort of family. Poppy had a dress she could wear that had flowers on it. One boy wore his older brother's palm-tree-printed swim trunks (over his jeans). But the other two boys had nothing appropriate at all.

I mentioned this to A., and he said, "Too bad we don't have any white T-shirts. I could paint tropical flowers on them."

Oh, really? HOLD THAT THOUGHT.

I found two old, stained white T-shirts for him. He got out his watercolor paints* and . . .

Perfect. So handy having an artist in the family.

Our shearer came out on Thursday morning for a slightly earlier than usual shearing. It was windy and cold, but the actual shearing takes place in the shed, so it was bearable.

First one down.

Nice fleece.

They always look like goats to me after shearing.

I was dicing mini bell peppers for our Fat Tuesday jambalaya and scraping them off to the side of the cutting board as I finished each one. Look what I accidentally created.

A slightly wonky heart. Fun.

And last, this is a mayordoma month for me. I stopped in at church on Thursday morning to make sure I had turned off the heat after our Ash Wednesday Mass (I had), and was delighted by the light coming in through the windows.

Especially the pattern on the aisle.

There you have it! My life, snapshotted.

* Watercolor painting is his new hobby. He's really quite good. He mostly paints small greeting cards with flowers and birds.