My friend Gina asked me when I got interested in shibori, and I couldn’t remember, but I love the graphic simplicity of it and the rich color of the indigo. Indigo dyeing always intimidated me, though—until I found Yamato Indigo’s instant dye vats. It’s a mix of organic indigo with the agents you need to make the dye water-soluble plus a little bit of aniline dye to stabilize the color. It mixes up in minutes and lasts a week (sealed and kept cool).
The process was messy, but we just did the dyeing and finishing outside, and it cleaned up pretty easily. It was so cool watching the indigo oxidize from green to blue as it came out in the air, and it was lots of fun tying the fabric in various ways to produce the patterns (this little guide from Martha Stewart’s team is a good introduction for beginners, which we were!) In the future I’d like to try to prepare a vat from scratch using fructose and soda ash. But this was an easy and fun entrée to the craft, and everyone got good results! I went for more of a denim hue than a truly dark indigo, but I have some extra dye, so I’m planning another round to dye a swath of muslin really dark to use in future sewing projects.
For the dessert bar, we went with a (very) loose Japanese theme the first night (from bottom to top in the photo):
- Cherry pistachio frangipane tart: this was excellent, though making pistachio paste is not for the faint of heart nor the short on time. The cherries were from my friend Satoko and were delicious—it’s been a minute since I’ve had really good sour cherries.
- Sesame tangerine cake: excellent and easy to make
- Japanese cotton-soft cheesecake: could have used some berries to balance out the drier/fluffier texture.
- Sobacha (roasted buckwheat tea) puddings: Everyone’s favorite, I think. I topped them with popped buckwheat (easy to do in the microwave in about 45 seconds—just watch them for burning).
- Ispahan sablés (with rose and raspberry: a Pierre Hermé recipe via Doris Greenspan via Lottie + Doof): watch the timing on these; they get a bit chalky if they’re overbaked. Flavor was fantastic!
The second dyeing night we went with a more random summery assortment of desserts:
- Buttermilk chess pie: Out of this world. Though TBH I don’t think it needs the full 3 cups of sugar the recipe calls for. That was not a typo.
- Lemon pudding cake: Also excellent and in hindsight a bit too similar to the chess pie. But it was interesting how people preferred one or the other: the pie was richer and the cake more soufflé-y and lemony.
- Crispy and chewy chocolate chip cookies. Reliably good recipe from Deb Perelman. If you live at altitude like I do, I recommend backing off on the flour just a bit (maybe 10-20%) and watching the baking time—pull them out on the low side of the cooking time, as the dry air at altitude and low boiling point drive the moisture out of the dough faster.
- Grilled polenta cake with summer berry compote: hard to tell what this one was really like as the friend who made it tweaked the recipe to make it healthier with whole-wheat flour and less sugar, and it came out more like shortbread than cake—the berry compote was great though!
The Rookery 