Many people have a favourite food or recipe that they associate with holidays or seasons. One half of one of my favourite desserts this time of year is candy cane ice cream (I’ll tell you about the other half of the desert in this series another day). If you have an ice cream maker, it’s easy to adapt any vanilla ice cream recipe to make candy cane ice cream. Here’s how:

Ingredients

• Ingredients for the vanilla ice cream recipe that came with your ice cream maker (~4 to 5 cups or 1 to 1.25 L liquid ingredients)
• Peppermint candy canes or peppermint candy
• Vanilla extract
• Peppermint extract

Instructions

1. Crush the peppermint candy/candy canes by putting them in a plastic bag (or between two paper towels) and smashing them with a hammer. You will need about 1/2 cup to 3/4 cup of crushed candy (one box of candy canes will do). NOTE: Do NOT use red and green stripped candy canes as these will turn your ice cream brownish in colour–use red and white for pink ice cream, green and white for green ice cream, or all white candy canes for white ice cream.
2. Prepare vanilla ice cream for the ice cream maker following the ice cream maker’s directions but DOUBLE the amount of vanilla extract–usually this will mean using around 2 to 2 1/2 Tablespoons (30 to 38 mL) of vanilla extract.
3. Add the crushed candy canes and 1 tsp (5 mL) of peppermint extract (or whatever flavour matches the candy cane flavour) after the ice cream mixture has been heated but has not yet cooled. NOTE: The heating stage is usually the last stage before cooling the mixture and then putting it in the ice cream maker–I believe this is also called the custard stage and applies to recipes that use egg yolks (if your recipe doesn’t follow this method, take your best guess as to when to add the ingredients).
4. Stir the mixture until the candy canes have dissolved (the liquid will turn a light pink).
5. Cool the mixture and then run it through your ice cream maker according to the manufacturer’s directions.

The accompanying picture is of a batch of candy cane ice cream I made earlier this week (it also filled another container, but we’d eaten out of that one so I didn’t take a picture of it). The big silver bowl next to the ice cream is the KitchenAid ice cream maker attachment for that brand of stand mixers.

Let me know if you try this.

When you give a gift it’s good form to remove the price labels (especially any big red stickers screaming “30% off” or “clearance”). Not all gift recipients care about that sort of thing, but no need to announce the fact that you got a good deal on something. The problem is that those pesky labels rarely peel off cleanly. Often you are left with bits of torn label or bits of glue that do their best to stick to everything else and attract the nearest speck of dirt.

The good news is that it is fairly easy to get rid of the glue left behind by labels with a little patience and a few household supplies:

Removing Price Tag/Label Glue from Porous Surfaces

This method works best for items that would stain from having oil rubbed on them (e.g. books, cloth, some plastics). It is also the cleanest and quickest method for removing label glue so I usually try this one first:

Sticky Tape Method

1. Remove the label as much as possible. Avoid tearing label as much as possible.
2. Take a length of packing tape (the clear stuff works best) and wrap it around your fingers, sticky side out (if it’s sticking to your fingers when you’re done, you’ve got the tape inside out).
3. Dab at the label glue with the sticky side of the tape–this should pull the label glue off.
4. Repeat until all of the glue is removed.

This method works well when you can get the label off without tearing. It does not work well for removing torn sections of label so you may have to scrape those off before using the tape to remove the remaining glue.

Removing Price Tag/Label Glue from Non-Porous Surfaces

These methods work well on non-porous surfaces like glass and some harder plastics (note: some softer/porous plastics will stain from oil):

Hot Water Method

It should go without saying that if you use this method the gift it question should not be one that would be damaged by soaking it in water (if that would damage the item, see the oil method below):

1. Fill a sink or other container large enough to hold the item with hot water.
2. Place item in sink so that the label is covered by the hot water.
3. Let soak until the label slides off (this may take 20 minutes to several hours).
4. Use dish soap to remove any remaining glue or dry the item and use the Sticky Tape Method to remove the remaining glue.

Oil Method

Again, it should go without saying that this method should not be used on any gift likely to be damaged by applying oil (which some softer plastics are):

1. Dab oil onto the label (keep rubbing it in until it starts to soak in or it starts to run off).
2. Let the item sit for 20 minutes or longer (the label will slide off easily when ready).
3. Use dish soap to remove any remaining glue or dry the item and use the Sticky Tape Method to remove the remaining glue.

I hope that was helpful for someone. See you tomorrow.

After I moved out, I skipped coming home one Christmas because I was saving vacation time for a trip to Australia and New Zealand. Toward the end of November I got a package in the mail. Inside were twenty-five gifts wrapped in Christmas paper, each with a number from one to twenty-five — an advent calendar in a box courtesy of Mom.

Last year I made an advent calendar (well, box) for my other half and I’ve just finished putting together days 1-17 for this year. I suggested to him that I could hide the packages to make it an advent/treasure hunt but he didn’t go for it (although if you have kids, this could keep them busy for a bit each day). What you put in the packages depends on both your budget and your recipient, but it doesn’t have to be expensive or elaborate. You can find little gifts at dollar stores, thrift stores, or even grocery stores. You can also give I.O.U’s of your time or skills. Or do a digital version of an advent calendar.

Here are a few suggestions to get you thinking:

Small gifts

Keep in mind that gifts don’t have to be new; they can be made or bought from the dollar store. Advent gifts don’t have to be expensive, just thoughtful:

• Bookmarks
• Hot chocolate (split a box of several packets for multiple days)
• Tea
• Second-hand books
• Bookplates
• Notebooks
• Pens
• Pencils
• Sticky notes
• Candle
• Coffee mug
• Bulk candy
• A can of Coke (add one of those little tiny bottles of rum if you like)

Digital gifts

• A link to an interesting site
• An ebook
• A link to a funny video
• A picture
• An I.O.U.
• A link to a quiz
• A link to a game

My dollhouse from when I was a kid. Since I was weird, I ditched the dolls for Smurfs.

If you don’t have time to do an advent calendar for Christmas, consider that the idea can be adapted to other events as well. When I was a kid I got a dollhouse for my birthday. In the days leading up my birthday, my mom let me pick a gift out of a bag. Each item was a piece of furniture for the dollhouse. It was a fun way to get the gifts (and likely made me appreciate them more than getting them all at once).

Just think of the possibilities for Valentine’s day.

If my little blog is down it’s not going to ruin anyone’s day but mine, but I saw an error screen tonight that reminded me how important it is to customize the error pages on your web site. I notice these things, since I do web sites for clients from time to time (and yes, I do tell them up front that I am not a designer–as you can tell from my little homemade template). Or maybe I just notice because when a favourite site of mine goes down I tend to hit refresh obsessively.

As a visitor I appreciate it when someone goes to the trouble to inject some humour into the very frustrating situation of a website I rely on being down. If you’ve ever taken a really close look at the “site offline” screen that is displayed when LibraryThing is down you’ll have noticed a picture of a stack of books. Look closer and you’ll see that the titles of the books in the stack have been carefully chosen to reflect the site being down and user (as well as administrator) frustration at that fact.

Tonight I came across another creative “site offline” screen. I was refreshing my Blip.fm account because the site has been down for maintenance for several hours. Instead of the standard message (which was already customized and branded), the screen went black after a moment and displayed a boot up screen like you would see on a PC. The screen wasn’t static though, information was added at intervals as if it really was a computer booting up. Looking more closely, it was clearly a little gift to anyone frustrated enough to click refresh more than a few times. Here is a screen capture for your enjoyment (didn’t manage to get a vid):

Did anyone else see this? I wonder if it changes depending on what kind of computer you have since it clearly identifies your computer and browser.

Know of any other sites that have gone to the trouble of entertaining their visitors even when the site goes down? Let me know in the comments.