Hasta La Ideas

Maple gets made over into cubes, flakes and wafers

To those who grew up tapping maple trees, the toothsome sap is more than the backbone for a flavorful syrup. Maple is as much an ingredient as a way of life, which goes a long way toward explaining its cultish following. Tonewood, a budding maple company that sources product from a number of family-owned operations in North America, is capitalizing on maple’s applications beyond syrup—forming it into wafers, cubes, flakes, creams and seasoning. As Tonewood founder Dori Ross explains, “I want to promote the versatility of maple.”

“It is the perfect natural sweetener,” says Ross. “It is low on the Glycemic Index, high in minerals and antioxidants. It is also a low calorie sweetener and you only need a bit as it is sweeter than refined sugar.” Tonewood’s variation of form allows sap-crazed eaters to sprinkle maple on capuccinos, fresh fruit, salads and even meat.

Ditching the plastic jug common in maple production, Tonewood goes for a refined aesthetic more aligned with Italian olive oil. “Maple has an under-realized versatility and it’s time that it was showcased in a modern way,” says Ross. “The majority of maple in Vermont is sold in plastic jugs with farm scenes on jug. The beautiful color tones of the maple grades need to be seen.”

Due in a large part to climate change and shorter winters, the maple industry has seen truncated harvest seasons and smaller yields in recent years. As supply drops, appreciation for the once-bountiful product rises. Commenting on the glory of maple, Ross says, “It is the only crop that you don’t cut down, don’t harvest, don’t spray with pesticides or herbicides. Maple trees just keep on producing sap generation after generation.”

Tonewood products are available at the company’s online shop.

Images by James Thorne

Goat milk caramels from an artsy Vermont confectionary

Billed as a “farmstead confectionary,” Vermont’s Big Picture Farms is dedicated to blending the sweet creamy goodness of goat milk into candy. As founder Louisa Conrad explains, the short fatty acid chains found in goat’s milk make for a smoother taste in their caramels. Conrad runs the business with her husband Lucas Farrell, both trained artists who have since turned to goat farming, cheese-making and confections. While caramel—a relatively simple blend of sugar, cream, vanilla and salt—leaves little room for variation, we were taken aback by the divinely silky texture of the pillow-soft sweets.

While their caramels are similar in style to those made by San Francisco’s Happy Goat, Big Picture’s secret touch seems to lie in their relationship with their goats. Each has a name and a personality to match, and the spoiled herd changes pastures daily for better grazing. Due to variations in the goats’ breed and diet, the art of the caramel comes from Conrad’s ability to blend milks from different animals in order to get the desired taste. For the packaging, Conrad draws portraits of the goats and Farrell works it into the label.

“If you’ve hung around goats long enough, it would be impossible not to name them,” says Conrad of the brand’s beloved faces. “It’s stiff competition being the cover goat. We try to be democratic about it; no goat gets featured more than once.”

Big Picture Farm goat’s milk caramels are available from their online shop. Interested eaters can keep track of farm life—and news the upcoming chai flavor—on the Big Picture blog.

Matt Singer’s Sputnik-inspired papier-mâché party game

Whether you delight in watching others struggle blindly to hit their mark, or you enjoy giving a papier-mâché animal a hearty whack, piñatas offer instant revelry for party-goers of any age. Designer Matt Singer recently gave the age-old party game a new form with his Space Dog piñata, inspired by the puppies sent into orbit by the Soviet Union during the 1950s and ’60s.

The handmade piñatas play up the kitsch appeal with three Russian dogs—Laika, Belka or Strelka—suspended alongside a tiny Sputnik space capsule and miniature Saturn. Once busted open, the Space Dog will drop an assortment of classic candy, a yo-yo and a mini space dog to the ground.

The Space Dog Piñata comes in blue (Belka), red (Laika) or green (Strelka) and sells online from Matt Singer for $75 each.

Web-connected robots dispense custom scents and candy treats

When a creative brief tasked them to “make something connected to the Internet that doesn’t live on the screen,” Foundry, a small research team at Mint Digital, came up with Olly, a scent-based system rewarding social media activity or, as they describe it on their site, a “web-connected smelly robot.”

Olly links up to web-based social applications and emits a fragrance—thankfully, one that you choose—when you receive emails, re-Tweets, instant messages, and various other pings across the channels of social media. Exploring the notion that smell is one of our most under-used senses in an over-stimulated world, Olly is a modular system that will have its own website from which the user can customize the way the smelly robot responds to web stimuli.

Joining Olly on Kickstarter is Molly, a robot Foundry will release today that graduates from scent to candy, dispensing one’s chosen sweets upon receipt of virtual notifications.

Molly operates in a similar way to Olly, which for scents stores a removable tray and a small interior fan to release the aroma. The user can customize various modules to assign different fragrances to different alerts—perhaps something sweet to soften the blow of a bill from your accountant, or a loved one’s perfume or cologne for their notes. According to the team at Foundry, “Olly wants to be fiddled with.”

While Olly works around a more cerebral sense, Molly is all about indulgence. Together, the robot pair might just serve as the ultimate carrot and stick for the digital generation. Olly and Molly (available later today) sell on Kickstarter for $50 each. The project will only come to fruition if they make the $35,000 goal, so pledge now.

Sweets produced sustainably in Hawaii with some of the world’s rarest cacao

As the only U.S. state with the tropical conditions to cultivate cacao, Hawaii has been producing the sweet-yielding bean since the 1850s. In recent years the demand has raised chocolate production in the 50th State, bringing with it a new breed of chocolatiers focused on small-batch, sustainable processes. Central to the movement is Malie Kai Chocolates, which makes an assortment of limited-quantity bars on the North Shore of Oahu, handling each step of production from harvest to processing. The region’s richly fertile soil yields only a small quantity of cacao, making its single-estate chocolates some of the rarest in the world.

With a stock that’s constantly shifting to account for the seasonal availability of ingredients, Malie Kai Chocolates currently offers seven different bars, ranging from traditional dark chocolate to rich coffee-oriented bars with a bit of a kick. Our favorite so far has been the Kona espresso bar, with a rich coffee taste that blends nicely with the chocolate’s native, fruity flavor. Another standout is the limited-edition Cocoa with Nibs bar, made with fermented cacao pods dried in the Hawiian sun for a nice texture and added hint of flavor.

Although mostly only available in brick and mortar stores in Hawaii, some Malie Kai products can be found online through Hawaiian Bath and Body and in Japan at Hawaiian Host Japan.