Pudding hunters

Today will be a day again below the fog, grey and rather cool, the perfect microclimatic surrounding to work with warm scents, like vanillin. This pure compound, a thin edition so to say of the vanilla absolute, has a warm, soothing quality to it. If I had to choose a colour for this scent, it would be a soft, yellowish brown. Vanillin per se fits with almost everything, be it lavender, spices, woods, flowers, but it is nevertheless tricky to work with. Contrary to culinary applications, where you may take as much as you want (well….almost), there seems to be a sharp line between the vanillin empowering and lifting a composition and a brute vanillin pudding base.

Vanillin will for sure be part of the leather base, the newest version standing mixed in front of me, on my desk, awaiting my decision on how much more of the v-stuff to add. A little bit more, I think, it might well stand, but this time I will approach it carefully, like a hunter, trying to catch a groundhog. The same approach I will have to choose in this particular case for the Turkish rose that I want to try in order to balance the head note’s initial start as I am not pleased with the medicinal, green kick-off, yet. The hope will be to balance the start, by using the rose’s quality of rounding off. Here, I am not certain yet whether this is going to be an approach worthwhile following. There is no way knowing in advance, I have to try.

Thus, it’s going be a cautious hunter’s day. Which reminds me on a hike in the mountains a couple of years ago: It was a sunny autumn afternoon, and I was on my way down again, when I saw a happy family of groundhogs, already quite fat, ready for a long winter sleep. I sat down and watched them from some distance. After a while I moved on and some 15 minutes later I met a hunter, in desperate search of groundhogs to balance his ego. He complained about his misfortune, lamenting about the groundhogs somehow not showing up today. I wished him good luck and lied recklessly ….