Some of my more noteworthy contributions around the Mercurial eco-system during the sprint were:

• Release RepoMan, the repository forest manager that we have developed at Edlund A/S for managing a complex multi-repository setup where some modules are individually co-dependent but we want to be able to modify all of them coherently at the same time. We’re hoping that other people out there will find it useful and/or interesting.
• Proof-of-concept, hg-deadkeys, written with Martin Geisler from Aragost Trifork, which is an extension for marking changesets ‘dead’ (which includes a slightly hacky misuse of the phases concept) so they aren’t propagated across the client/server boundary – requires that the extension is enabled on both client and server. Eventually this should be able to garbage collect changesets (e.g. strip them) that the user considers permanently dead.
• Bit more polished proof-of-concept, hg-multiundo, written with Jason F. Harris, for supporting automatical snapshot-based backups of your repository and working copy state whenever you modify files. The extension allows you to undo/redo in multiple levels the last things you have done in the repository. No more ‘Oh no, I did hg up -C and now all my changes are gone!’ – they’re just an ‘hg undo’ away. Disk space performance improvements will probably be introduced later on.

Apart from that we had a lot of good discussions on the project and things around it. I’m looking forward to the next sprint.

Since it is winter time and the cold north is, well, cold, the fresh herbs we can come by are not particularly fresh, so we turn to the dried variety. For this loaf I’ve used dried thyme, basil, and rosemary, and a sprinkling of chili flakes.

To get them worked into the dough and distributed more nicely, I crush the herbs in my trusty mortar until they’re just small flakes.

On the side, melt a pan of margarine (or butter if you’re not allergic to milk) over low heat. Once it’s melted, remove from the heat and stir in the herbs and crush a small handful cloves of garlic into it as well. Give a good stir.

Mix with water, flour, salt and fresh yeast and give it a good ten minute kneading in your stand mixer. Once it’s mixed, lightly oil a bowl and place the dough in it to rise until about doubled in size.

Pour it onto a lightly floured surface and shape it with a bit of force.

Then it goes into your dutch oven, whatever form or shape it might have. Mine’s big and made of glass.

As depicted it’s important to slice a deep cross at the top of the bread (or another slicing shape that opens up the bread in both directions) as it will have a very good deal of oven spring (or bloom). It bakes for about 30 minutes with the lid on at 230°C and another 20 to 30 minutes at 200°C without the lid on. Remove from the dutch oven and let cool.

Now all we need is some fried fish, steamed vegetables, and a nice generous dollop of sauce hollandaise. Mmmmm.

Recipe

110 g margarine
Dried herbs to taste (e.g., 1 tbsp each of thyme, rosemary, basil, and chili flakes. 3-6 cloves of garlic)
480 g flour (preferably bread, but all-purpose will do)
240 g water
8 g salt
7 g fresh yeast

Olive oil to drizzle (not part of the dough itself)

• Melt butter at low heat. Remove from heat and mash in the garlic and stir in the herbs.
• Allow to cool slightly then mix all the ingredients in a stand mixer and knead for 10 minutes at low to medium speed.
• Ferment in a bowl for about 2 hours. After about an hour to an hour and a half, heat the oven to 230°C.
• Slightly knead and shape the dough and place it in the dutch oven. Cut a cross in the dough, drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle sea salt on top of it.
• Bake for 30 minutes with the lid on at the 230°C, then reduce the temperature to 200°C, remove the lid and bake for another 20 to 30 minutes.
• Allow to cool before slicing.

One of the huge limiting factors of being allergic to dairy products is that, well, most ice creams are made with milk and/or whipping/double cream (granted, there are some products based on soy with an uncomfortably grainy feel, and a few made on oats, but you pretty much have to travel to another country to obtain these). So, time to experiment at home!

With dairy allergies there are a number of alternative choices when preparing ice cream. Rather than milk you can use water, rice drink, soy drink, or oat drink as some of the more readily available solutions. And instead of cream you can use soy or oat based “creams” (they are generally somewhat lower in fat content than cream so some experimentation has to be made). I usually rather dislike the grainy substance of soy, so I tend to favour the oat based products. I generally use Oatly’s oat-based cream for all my cream needs (it’s the only one that’s readily available in Denmark), but if you’re fortunate enough to be in Sweden, for instance, there are a lot of different oat based products available to you, also with higher fat concentration allowing you to stay closer to the milk-based recipes.

One of the seemingly rather north European traits is an unending love of liquorice, so why not combine the two: ice and liquorice. One of the very best liquorices on the Danish market is a handmade liquorice by Johan Bülow, and one of my favourites is his Habanero-chili-liquorice. (Non-liquorice-loving people can now experience true, physical pain when eating liquorice—unless, of course, you have a resistency toward Habanero-chili).

To extract enough flavour from the liquorice, I have sliced it very thinly.

This is then covered with a mix of oat based cream and water (to simulate the fat content of milk mixed with cream).

The cream and liquorice mixture is then simmered over low heat for at least 30 minutes, and if you have been using good, natural liquorice, then you will get something like this (after a bit of using an insertion blender; the liquorice pieces aren’t completely dissolved so they can still contribute with a bit of a texture/bite to the finished ice cream):

If you do not use natural liquorice, you will get a gray unappetiteful pot of goo, so don’t do that. In a separate bowl, whisk some egg yolks and sugar together, then, while whisking, slowly pour in the liquorice cream, then pour the entire thing back in the pot and simmer for another 5–10 minutes (until it has thickened). Then it goes into the refrigerator for at least 4 hours (until it has reached about 5°C).

Depending on the freezing capabilities of your ice machine it will typically take 30–40 minutes to cool it to ice cream consistency that is ready for immediate consumption (otherwise place it in the freezer and take it out some 20 minutes before use).

This is a bit more than half a litre of liquorice ice cream that has finished churning.

Liquorice ice cream behaves rather like anise in what foods you can combine it with (anise also has a rather liquorice-y taste). So, typically, it will go wonderfully with strawberries and pineapple, just to name a few fruits.

The ice cream packs a good punch due to the Habanero chili, so this is definitely not a very kid-friendly ice cream, but if you love liquorice, chili and ice cream, this is a mix that cannot go wrong (unless you use poor liquorice, or mix it wrong, or…).

To save other dairy allergics from repeating a lot of experiments, then here is my simple recipe for an oat-based custard:

Chili-liquorice ice cream

• 240 g oat-based cream
• 240 g water
• 56 g liquorice
• 2 pasteurised egg yolks
• 100 g sugar
• pinch of salt

Combine cream, water and liquorice. Simmer for at least 30 minutes. Whisk yolks and sugar, gradually add cream mixture, pour back into pot and simmer for another 5–10 minutes until thickened. Add the pinch of salt and refrigerate for at least 4 hours. Churn in ice cream mixer. Enjoy.

If you’ve kept reading until the end, then it was ice of you to stay with me so long (I know, I know, I need to brush up on my ice puns, that one was absolutely chilling).

I normally score my breads using the bread knife and our old bread knife just wasn’t sufficiently sharp to create interesting patterns, but here and now this changes. Now with even more fancy patterns:

It carves beautifully and the crumb isn’t mashed together like our old knife had a tendency to do. Most of my previous crumb photos took several slices before I got to a slice where the crumb was sufficiently nice to look at.

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with Yaxell in any way. I just love my new knives.

When I think sausage roll, I think some nice bread rolled around a real, actual sausage, not just ‘sausage meat’ (whatever that is). So, I take some nice basic french dough bread recipe and let it preferment for about 3–4 hours, then when we get to shaping, I roll out the dough (very much like making croissants, really, just with a single layer of dough and no fats), place a sausage at the fat end of a slice of dough and roll it up into the typical croissant shape (translated literally, we call these ‘sausage horns’ in Danish).

This is left to proof as normal, i.e. 1½–2 hours, and then baked at around 240°C for 10 minutes, then the oven is vented to let out steam, and finally they finish baking in another 10 or so minutes at 220°C.

And unlike my typical bread, these may be eaten hot. The taste of the sausage is typically a lot stronger than the flavour of the bread, so the added taste of actually letting the bread cool off completely isn’t really worth outlasting the temptation of eating them. And once you start eating them, you are hooked. I have yet to meet anyone who prefers the puff pastry versions to these. Bon appétit.

Some plugins have been made to make SqueezeCenter, the management platform for the Squeezeboxes, support fetching audio from specific extra places, but the few that does that for Linux do not mesh very well with PulseAudio, the sound server that e.g. Ubuntu ships with by default. So rather than getting the music directly into SqueezeCenter, we can side-step the entire issue and just provide the audio output as an internet radio station that is only accessible from your local computer; this, the Squeezebox can quite easily play.

I have done this on Ubuntu 10.10, but any system using PulseAudio should be fairly analogous. You need a few prerequisites:

• icecast2: Ogg vorbis and MP3 streaming server.
• gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio: GStreamer plugin for PulseAudio.
• gstreamer0.10-plugins-base: The base set of GStreamer plugins.
• gstreamer0.10-plugins-good: A set of GStreamer plugins containing interface to icecast2.
• gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly-multiverse: A set of GStreamer plugins containing MP3 encoder.
• gstreamer-tools: tools for use with GStreamer.
• pavucontrol: PulseAudio Volume Control

Any standard configuration of the icecast2 server will probably do, as long as you can receive music from it and send feeds to it using the configured password you should be good.

First we tell PulseAudio that we have a sink we’d like to register: pactl load-module module-null-sink sink_name=squeezebox

Then we start playback with this easily understood and very apparent command line invocation: gst-launch pulsesrc device=squeezebox.monitor ! audioconvert ! lamemp3enc target=1 bitrate=128 cbr=true ! shout2send ip=127.0.0.1 port=8000 password=PASSWORD mount=mystream.mp3

If you live in parts of the software patent encumbered world, you can probably make it work with Ogg Vorbis instead.

You can now point your Squeezebox at a stream at http://127.0.0.1:8000/mystream.mp3, however, you still won’t have any sound! Why? I hear you pondering… Because above we simply said that we wanted the Squeezebox sink to be the null-sink, i.e. nothing goes on there apart from a timer keeping stuff in sync. In order to hear anything we’ll start up pavucontrol, the PulseAudio Volume Control program and in the Recording tab, we ask it to show all streams and we should be able to see a stream called gst-launch-0.10 and a button next to it that says ‘Monitor of null output’, click this button and select ‘Monitor of your sound card’ and presto, music should appear from your Squeezebox after it’s done buffering (provided, of course, that you are playing something on your computer at the moment).

Just be aware that this plays all audio output from your machine, but it isn’t terribly adequate for watching videos, etc. as there is a noticeable delay between what goes on in the video and when the music appears on the Squeezebox, but for streaming music, it’s perfect.

While Wikipedia currently attributes the creation of chocolate-covered marshmallow treats to Denmark (by way of a now defunct reference to Jerusalem Post…), it is more likely that they were invented in Switzerland or Austria, but the exact origin seems lost in the mists of time. Nevertheless, that shan’t keep me from having a go at making them. Since making marshmallows was rather easy, I figured these treats should be run-of-the-mill to make quickly before guests arrived, but, of course, that was not so.

To create these beauties, we start with a good chunk of marzipan and roll it out in confectioner’s sugar and cut out small circles of them.

These are then dipped in chocolate. Most confectioners only dip the bottom in chocolate, but I find it gives a more wholesome experience if the bottom is entirely surrounded by chocolate, provided, of course, that you use a good chocolate.

Leave in a cool place to set and get to work on the marshmallow interior. While a plain white marshmallow is typical as the interior, I wanted to add a bit of colour and taste to it, so I took out some frozen berries and cooked them with some water.

This gives a lovely dark red liquid that tastes of all the berries, this is mixed together with some sugar and cooked up to 117°C.

Remove from the heat and slowly add wet gelatine plates.

Who says you ever get too old to build card houses…

Slowly drizzle the sugar syrup into beaten egg whites and beat another 8–10 minutes.

This is then, supposedly, ready to be piped unto the chocolate coated marzipan bottoms, or so I thought, but it ran everywhere, so before damaging everything, I allowed it to cool a while in the fridge, albeit not enough.

I sort of managed to contain the runniness, but it isn’t as perfect as normal chocolate-covered marshmallow treats. So, given the lack of height, I call these… rustic chocolate-covered marshmallow treats. The smaller amount of marshmallow interior actually allows the chocolate and marzipan to contribute with more flavour than usual, not giving the exceedingly sweet marshmallow a chance to overpower it, and you could still pick up a very slight hint of forest berries, but most of the purple colour was lost after the whipping. Adding a bit of extra red fruit colouring while whipping would probably have made it somewhat more spectacular.

Normal, store-bought chocolate-covered marshmallow treats can be eaten rapidly, allowing you to easily consume 5–6 in a fairly short timespan, but even if you’re an experienced sweets eater, the dark chocolate, the marzipan and the rich marshmallow interior allows you to at most eat two of these, smaller marshmallow treats. And, apart from their rustic appearance, they were delectable, if I have to say so myself.

A lovely mix of 500 grams of sugar and 100 grams of water is brought up to 122°C and once it’s removed from the heat you add in 10 leaves of dissolved gelatine (be sure to add the leaves slowly as they will make the sugar syrup foam up, but not dangerously so).

As the sugar syrup makes it up to that, you start whipping 120 grams of pasteurised egg whites (you could just go for plain egg whites, but they’re only heated by the sugar syrup and I’m not a betting man when it comes to salmonella—plus there’s less to fuss about when young children are handling eggs). When they’re nice and fluffy, you start pouring in the sugar syrup ever so slow. This is really a time where a stand mixer is a great benefit as the mass needs to be beaten for more than ten minutes.

After all the sugar syrup has been poured into the egg whites, you leave the mixer to do its thing for another 10 or so minutes, and then it’s ready to pour into a 30×20 cm shape. Be sure to dust the paper/dish with copious amounts of sifted confectioner’s sugar, this is what keeps marshmallows from sticking to everything.

Leave them in a cool place, though not cold, for some hours, and they’re ready for slaughter…

Dust each marshmallow in a nice bit of sifted confectioner’s sugar and lightly dust away the worst excess.

And voilà, you have home made marshmallow treats. A lot more rich, and a lot more tasty than the ones that are store bought. But beware, it’s impossible to eat up an entire portion all to yourself, so make sure you have friends over to share them with.

The basic process is this: mix everything and incorporate the ingredients, then walk away from it for a while. You could just leave it like this for a good 16–18 hours and the dough will magically have kneaded itself, but from waking up until lunch, 16 hours seems a bit unrealistic. Instead, you can gradually strengthen the gluten strands by folding the bread, say, every 30–40 minutes or so for 2–3 hours. After that, we can shape the bread, let the loaf proof for about five quarters of an hour, then stuff it into the oven at a good 240°C for 30–35 minutes, and finally let it cool completely before slicing the bread. That last part is usually the most difficult part of them all, but like a good roast, you will not get a full, rich flavour unless you let it rest (unfortunately bread usually takes more than 20 minutes to rest, it’s more like 40–60 minutes).

That is what 500 g flour, 10 g salt, 14 g fresh yeast, and 360 g of water will give you when folded every 30 minutes for 2½ hours, and otherwise following the procedure above.

A lovely creamy crumb, and a wafer-thin, flaky crust. In a professional bakery, the ovens are able to take in water and turn into steam in certain intervals inside the oven, which keeps the bread moist and prevents the crust from forming prematurely—home bakers are, typically, not as fortunate, so we have to make do with alternative methods of getting those thin crusts. A lot has been written on the topic: people throw in ice cubes when they load the loaves, they put in wet towels that give off steam, they put a pan of cold water below the plate with the breads on, etc., etc.; In my opinion, this is all much too much work (plus the ice cube thing might damage the oven, crack the glass in the oven front and whatnot, plus it interferes with the bottom heat for my baking stone). Instead, I take some cold water from the tap, and place it in the cup of my hand and slowly drizzle it across the unbaked loaves between my fingers, then bake it just like that. This, of course, keeps me from doing fancy flour-patterns on top of the bread, but I didn’t really plan on doing those in the first place.

At any rate, for a fairly quick bread (yes, my quick breads take in the vicinity of 6 hours), it has a nice taste, but not as pronounced a taste of wheat as the 12+ hour breads do. But, at least, there was bread for lunch.

So, it is on shaking ground that I break with dogma and not only replace the raspberry jam with forest berry jam (we were out of raspberries, sorry!), and use margarine instead of butter (so us poor lactose intolerant people won’t suffer the worse, apart from gaining weight). Of course, we didn’t really have any jam at all, so we had to make that first from a blend of forest berries that we had in our freezer, along with some fresh Danish apples to provide thickening.

Allow to cook in with a smidgen of sugar.

Once that’s reduced a lot more, we can apply it to the baked shortcrust pastry slices.

And now, with jam, glacé icing and hundreds and thousands ready, just smear, smear, smear (carefully, though, so the slices don’t break apart).

Once the jam is applied on two of the slices, the remaining two are carefully placed on top. If you are wondering, this is what too much jam between the layers looks like.

So, just add the glacé icing and the hundreds and thousands, carefully cut into mouth-sized bites (provided you have extremely large mouths).

You can see how the jam is spilling out a tad too much. But even if we broke dogma, they had that raspberry slice feel and taste to it that is always great to bite into. Our daughter applied the hundreds and thousands; according to dogma, they should only be placed in a small but generous strip in the centre of the slice, but that was a bit too much to explain to a two year old who got to sprinkle them across the slices (I know, it’s almost sacrilegious).