Clockwork Lemon

Delta Faucet Review and {Giveaway}

Waaaay back in April I attended the Food Bloggers of Canada's very first food blogging conference. It was a blast spending the weekend with so many talented food bloggers and finally putting faces to names (a challenge for me, I am terrible with names.).  After a weekend of eating and learning and mingling we left the resort with our suitcases stuffed with swag.. so.. much.. swag. 

Amongst jars of free peanut butter and packages of cookies was a little black box from Delta that contained a card saying each and every one of us would receive a free faucet from them. And not just any faucet.. one of those super-fancy touch technology faucets (Touch2O) that turns on and off when you touch it. 

Seeing as my current faucet was very old and very small, I was extremely excited at the prospect of having something that my big pots would actually fit under. There is one particularly huge pot that needed to be washed in the shower because it didn't fit under the tap in the kitchen. As glamourous as it is to be washing dishes in your bathtub, I was looking forward to trying something new. 

Oooohh so shiny. And all of my pots fit under it with room to spare!

Plus you can pull the nozzle out and easily wash smaller things. Really handy for anyone like me who creates small mountain ranges of dishes on a daily basis. 

Installation should have been easy (and it was for the other people who received taps) but while moving things around we discovered that our super-old pipes were all corroded inside. And by 'discovered' I mean the stupid things were as thin as my fingernail and snapped right in half. And - as is the case with  old houses - one discovery led to another and suddenly we were ripping out old pipes and cutting new holes in our counters.

Actually, I say 'we' but I wasn't doing any of this. My boyfriend was busy installing my beautiful new faucet + new plumbing + fixing the counter and I was simply baking around him (and washing the dishes in the bathtub.. of course). 

I managed not to trip over the tools and sink and he managed to get all new plumbing installed and the kitchen back into working order. 

For those of you whose plumbing hasn't corroded to the thickness of an eggshell, putting the tap in just means taking your old one out, and hooking the new one up to the water supply (no ripping out your sink necessary!)

 

And the very best feature is that you can turn it on, adjust the temperature, and then just tap it anywhere to turn it on and off. Perfect for messy baking hands, and also really really handy while doing dishes because you don't need to adjust the temperature each time you want to rinse your dishes off. Just tap, rinse, then tap off again.

 

The nice people at Delta  want you to enjoy one of their magical Touch2O faucets at home, so they are giving one away to one of my readers! You would receive the one in the photo here which is a Pilar with Touch2O Technology.

 

HOW TO ENTER:

There are THREE ways to enter. You can do one, two, or all three of them and each will count as a separate entry (leave a separate comment for each)

1. Leave a comment with why you'd like a new faucet

2. Follow Delta on twitter : https://twitter.com/deltafaucetCAN then leave a comment here with your twitter handle

3. Tweet " I entered to win a Touch2O Faucet from @DeltaFaucetCAN and @Clock_worklemon #touchon #touchoff " - then leave a comment here with a link to the tweet.

 

 

This giveaway is open to Canadian Residents only

Winner will be chosen randomly on June 25th 2013 and contacted by email.

Good Luck!

 

Full Disclosure: Delta supplied the faucet as part of the FBC Conference swag, I was not paid to write this post and all opinions are my own. Delta is also supplying the faucet for the Giveaway at no cost to myself or my readers.

 

 

Toasted Marshmallow and Nutella Chocolate Chip Cookies

"Toasted Marshmallow And Nutella Chocolate Chip Cookies" is sort of a long name for a dessert, but after mulling it over I decided that there's no better way to describe them.

I had the idea of hiding a dollop of Nutella under half a marshmallow on top of a cookie for a while. Yet, I just hadn't gotten around to actually making them until recently. Partly because I don't trust myself to take the jar of Nutella down from it's hiding spot on top of the cupboard, and partly because I was worried the Nutella would melt everywhere and ruin a batch of perfectly good chocolate chip cookies.

But then it happened. I had collected all of my odd and ends of quarter-full bags of various chips (chocolate, semi-sweet, dark, peanut butter, white chocolate) and decided to throw them into a batch of cookies.

Ale Washed Trappist Cheese {Cheesepalooza}

So much cheese-news to share! 

The cheesepalooza challenge has moved along to the more challenging cheeses and this month we made our first stinky cheese. I have to admit that although I am a fan of strong cheeses, I wasn't sure if creating and babysitting a 'stinky cheese' for weeks on end was going to be that fun.

Luckily, I was wrong and am now super excited for this cheese to develop over the next month and a bit. 

The recipe stated that the cheese would take about 2.5 hours to make which seemed very reasonable. However, if we had added up the times listed for letting the milk rest and heat and drain we would have seen right away that the cheese takes well over 4 hours before it gets into the mold to be pressed. Two and a half hours must be some sort of typo.. good thing we didn't have anything else planned. 

The cheese itself is an ale washed Trappist cheese flavored with crushed cardamom seeds and dried orange peel. Trappist cheese was originally made by Trappist monks when they weren't busy baking bread, making beer, and writing manuscripts.

 At the beginning of the cheese-making process we steeped the milk with the seeds and peel, then poured it through cheese cloth to strain all of the bits out. We weren't able to find dried orange peel (I swear it shouldn't be that hard to find!) so we used fresh zest to flavor the milk. 

Sweet Spring Cupcakes + Minted {Giveaway}

I'm excited about this post, and not just because there are sparkly cupcakes to share. I've paired up with Minted.com which happens to be one of my favorite paper-based websites. Minted makes wedding invitations, customized notebooks, stationary, and (cutest of all) an array of paper goods for parties. Everything is designed by independent artists and the quality is great. Basically a wonderful/dangerous place to visit if you're a stationary addict like me. 

Last Christmas I bought everyone in my family  customized notebooks, and since then I've also purchased stationary sets, more notebooks, and now this spring themed party-table set. Little did Minted know when they wrote to me that I was already a huge dorky stationary fan girl (YES I WILL TRY THE CUTE PARTY TABLE SET, THANK YOU)

 

 

Strawberry Basil Angel Food Cake

One of the best things about spring finally being on it's way is the containers of fresh berries that start popping up in all the grocery stores at reasonable prices.

For those of you who don't live in the prairies, I'm sure that you've been enjoying spring for quite some time now... but for us it has *just* arrived.. just in time for summer! So maybe we've skipped spring this year and are going straight into the next season, but the berries have arrived regardless.

Fresh berries lend themselves to quick and easy desserts that still have that 'wow' factor. For Mother's Day this year I wanted to use a flavor combination that I've been obsessing over recently.

Strawberry, lemon, and basil. Both the lemon and basil somehow make the strawberry flavor taste even more like strawberry. Plus the sweet-tart combination tastes so fresh and summery that it makes it seem impossible that just two weeks ago there was snow falling from the skies.. still.

Strawberries always remind me of Mother's Day from when I was little and the kindergarden and grade one classes would put on a Strawberry Tea for the Moms. We would serve little slices of poundcake with strawberries and whipped cream and cups of hot tea. In my mind the dessert will forever be something that you make as a treat for your mom.