I'm hope it's not premature...

I rescued a baby bunny from the neighbours dog this evening, it's still a little young to be on its own... The neighbour thought it would be a good idea for me to take on the little guy... Here's hoping it stays strong!!

The little cutie is sleeping on my chest at the moment (I can't help myself!) this is definitely a cuter aspect of farming. 

Party weekend!

This Sunday was my mum's 50th birthday!

Happy Birthday Mum!

I hosted a party to celebrate the big day, inviting friends and family over for a BBQ and was pleasantly surprised that almost everyone I asked came (and even a few extra which resulted in a busy house!)!

The chickens were loose all day and the bees were VERY active (with rain coming and going all day they could feel a storm trying to come so they were busy stocking up food) but everyone coexisted well. The chickens crossed the creek to see the horses in the bush paddock for the first time (that I'm aware of) and the (not-so) chicks were admired by everyone for their pretty feathers.

I may share the recipe for this pink angel food cake with pink marshmallow frosting too!

Pink was the colour of the day for mum's party and I made a pink vanilla angel food cake with very pink marshmallow frosting and vanilla macarons with raspberry purée and pink vanilla buttercream.

I want to share with you the recipe for the macarons because I found them to be very successful. They were a little "rustic" because I couldn't be bothered to do step 2.... they still turned out good (maybe a little taller than they should have been) but they were delicious regardless!

Vanilla Macarons with Raspberry Purée and Pink Vanilla Buttercream

Vanilla Macarons

Ingredients

Shells
ingredients

• 120 g egg whites (separated into 60g and 60g), room temperature
• 150 g almond meal (ground almonds)
• 150 g icing sugar
• 150 g white granulated sugar, + 35g for the meringue
• 50 g water
• 1 tsp vanilla (clear if you have it, pure otherwise)
• sprinkles or other decorations (if you just want them plain, skip this and skip step 13, going for 15 minutes at step 12 instead!)

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 350F
2. If you don't own one of those fancy macaron mats, trace 1 inch circles on one side of parchment paper and put the paper pencil-side-down on a baking sheet (so you can still see the marks through the paper but don't make a mess of your pretty meringues!)
3. In a food processor, pulse together almond meal and icing sugar and sift into a bowl.
4. Mix in 60 g of egg whites and 1 tsp vanilla extract until you get a smooth paste.
5. In a pot on the stove, start to boil together 150g of sugar and 50g of water while you whip you whip the egg whites (you're aiming for 230F on your candy thermometer!)
6. In a clean, grease free bowl (I usually wash it out with hot water and soap before mixing, just to be sure it's clean) whip the egg whites and remaining 35g of white sugar to stiff (not dry!) peak (when you lift the whisk, the egg whites will stand straight up).
7. When your sugar reaches 230F, slowly stream the hot syrup mixture into the meringue while mixing. Continue to whip the egg whites until they become room temperature and it gets to stiff peak.
8. Not-so-gently fold about a third of the meringue into the almond paste mixture to loosen it up (you won't completely deflate your meringue here).
9. Gently fold in the rest of the meringue into the batter until no streaks of meringue remain (It will become a thick, lava-like texture that reincorporates itself into the batter within 25 seconds).
10. Transfer mixture to a piping bag and pipe onto your prepared parchment lined baking sheet or macaron mat.
11. Rap the sheet against a table to get out the air bubbles, if that doesn’t get them all out use a toothpick to pop any big air bubbles.
12. Let them sit for about 10 minutes to form a skin.
13. Add sprinkles and let them sit for 5 more minutes.
14. Bake in preheated oven for about 7 minutes, turn the pan and bake for another 7 minutes.
15. Allow macarons to cool on the sheet (since they're so light it only takes 10 or 15 minutes)

Buttercream
Ingredients

• 1/2 cup butter
• 1 1/2 cups icing sugar
• 1 tsp vanilla (clear if you have it, otherwise use pure)

1. Whip the butter and vanilla in a mixing bowl until lighter in colour.
2. Add Icing sugar in 3 stages and whip until light and fluffy.
3. Transfer to a piping bag with a small appropriate sized tip to fill the macarons.

Assembly

1. When all the macaron shells are cooled, pair the shells to matching sized halves.
2. If you want a fruit filling (I used a thick raspberry purée), pipe a ring of buttercream and put the fruit in the middle before sandwiching the other half of the macaron together, if not, fill the whole shell with buttercream, then sandwich together.
3. Store the macarons in an airtight container in the fridge at least overnight which will result in a soft, chewy macaron (otherwise they shatter when you bite them which is yummy, but not a macaron!).
4. Try hard to not eat them all!

I'll have to share the recipe for that cake too, it was a HIT! The cake was perfectly springy, fluffy and delicious and the frosting was SWEET and sticky and yummy! Not a crumb was left from the party!

Happy 50 mum!!

The bees have arrived!

Sorry for the radio silence this past week, it's been a crazy one!

Last Friday I took the day off work to travel with my boyfriend from my home in northwestern Ontario to a farm in southwestern Manitoba where I would be picking up a pair of honey bee nucs!

The day began early with feeding the chickens and moving the chicken tractor for my adolescent chicks. We grabbed some gas and hit the road. My Honda is involved in that huge recall going on (with the passenger side air bags) so we stopped in Kenora to get that all sorted then after picking up some coffee we continued west to Winnipeg!

We did the trip in stages because frankly I don't like sitting for 6 hours, so when we reached Winnipeg we went to a HUGE antique store and ate at the Old Spaghetti Factory (omg, can you say tortellini!! YUM!), made a quick stop at the BeeMaid store to get some bee supplies and we were off to Brandon!

We didn't do anything too spectacular in Brandon. After a long day of travel we were pretty zonked so we ordered in some pizza to the hotel room and relaxed.

Cute little things they are!

By noon the next day we were out at the Bygarski Honey Farm talking with Bill about bees and everything we could think of to do with them. We loaded up between 20,000 and 40,000 bees (in nuc boxes!) and headed home.

The drive home was (thankfully) uneventful with only about a dozen or so bees escaping from the boxes (apparently they can do that!). They were put in their appropriate location and waited for a friend and member of our local beekeepers association to come out on Sunday to help install them into the hives.

Even installing the hives was uneventful (but fun, even for someone like me who has no bee experience and is pretty scared of getting stung!). Tim showed me the ropes, we even spotted the queens in the fray, and that was it!

By the end of the day all the dandelions in the area had been well pollinated and the bees were settled into their new homes.

speedy little guy!

So the bees have been home almost a week now, so far no stings, I'm hosting a birthday BBQ for my mum on Sunday so it'll be interesting to see how the new livestock gets along with guests, open drinks and food!

I lost a chick.

Well it was bound to happen eventually, I just really hoped it wouldn't be with my first batch.

Chicks coming home last month. (I'll not be morbid and point out the missing one.)

I've been putting the chicks (who are really more like awkward adolescents than babies now) in their old brooder but relocated to the garden shed for the nights lately. There are a number of wild cats, large rodents and dogs in the area that would love to make a snack of the little guys in their tractor and since we don't have any large enough dogs to scare these critters away, safety is indoors.

Yesterday morning before I left for work at 7, when I transferred the chicks from brooder to tractor, I realized that I had a goner on my hands. My little brown chick (who had come to me with paste bum, but had seemed to overcome it as it grew) was very limp and didn't even attempt to stand. I made a makeshift triage of chicken wire and Rubbermaid container and left the poor baby on clean grass in the sunshine and left a note for my mum to check up on it.

Work doesn't wait for sick chickens.

When I had a few minutes between my morning work tasks I did a few google searches and determined that either the paste bum caught up with the chick or (my guess) it had gotten sour crop. I texted a few treatment suggestions to my mum but she responded at about 10:30 that it was gone.

I realize that death is a part of a farm, its nothing I'm afraid of, I just had high hopes that my first batch of chicks (who were all doing very well!) would be spared!

Welcome to the life of a farmer, folks! Sometimes it suck.

But sometimes it doesn't. I did gather 6 eggs yesterday. I do gather on average 5 eggs every day.

Balance.

That's what a person looking to farm needs to remember. There is a balance on a farm. Sometimes animals die (unexpectedly or planned) sometimes that results in a freezer-full, other times it results in one less future egg per day. Its a balancing act between life and death, ups and downs, surviving and thriving.

The different shapes and sizes of my hen's offerings

Beautiful Weekend!

We had a really beautiful weekend (my shoulders can tell you just how much sun there was!) and I just have to share some of the photos I took while cleaning up the front paddock and hanging out with the chickens!

 

one of the ladies visiting me while I was laying on a blanket, knitting

 

 
 

Oh and maybe having a drink too ;)

 

A storm blew right by us, not a drop fell on our party

 

The chicks still hang out in the tractor (they don't get along with the hens yet)

 

My babies are growing up!

 

A couple hens like the chicks though

 

Max wasn't too keen on sharing his paddock with the ladies...
To be fair, they get all the green grass out there, but he's stuck in here.