DIY Homemade Eco Orange All Purpose Cleaner – Part 1

In honour of Earth Day, I thought I’d post about a homemade eco cleaner 🙂

One of my favourite scents is citrus.  Especially when it comes to cleaning products. There’s just something about that scent that is very clean and refreshing to me.  (BTW: there’s nothing as awesome as the scent of a freshly cut orange, lemon, lime or grapefruit I tell yas! 😉 )

I have been noticing a lot of homemade orange cleaner recipes popping up all over the internet and since I already had the ingredients on hand, I figured I’d try my  hand at it.  What’s the worst that could happen, it doesn’t work & I have to toss it?  I’d only be tossing pennies away.  Yes. I know they do add up but if this cleaner works – I will be saving a lot more pennies having tried this lil science experiment and slowly replacing store bought cleaners with this thus saving me a small fortune!

What you will need: 

orange (or any citrus) peels, vinegar and an air tight jar

Place peels in the bottom of the jar and fill with vinegar. Tighten lid.  You’re done. Yep, that’s it. Easy as pie right?   Now, while I only have one orange’s worth of peels in the jar, I plan on adding more as I continue to eat them until the jar is packed full. I chose to only fill the jar half way because I’m not sure how this will turn out.  (Trying to prevent waste here remember?)

This needs to sit for two weeks minimum in order to create the yummy smelling magic.  Give the jar a good shake once a day. Apparently the vinegar smell disappears and all that’s left is the awesome orange scent. We’ll see. Is it so wrong that I’m giddy with glee with anticipation?

At the end of two weeks, pour the vinegar mixture through a strainer into a spray bottle. You can either use it at full 100% strength for tough/stubborn messes OR mix with water with a 1:1 ratio. You can use this anywhere where you’d normally use a vinegar cleaner.  Apparently you can re-use the rinds two more times and achieve the same effects but the colour won’t be as strong.

So, I have my jar of rinds going and will report back in about two weeks with my findings and review once I’ve started using it. I can’t wait!!

So tell me, have you ever tried making your own citrus cleaner? How’d it turn out?

Chocolate-Orange Zucchini Bundt Cake

With the garden starting to produce bionic zucchini’s I figured it was time to get cracking on researching recipes on how to use up the bounty.  I do know that the hubster enjoys zucchini bread/cakes/muffins as he keeps requesting that I make them.  The one’s I’ve tried are not very sweet and well we all know, zucchini doesn’t really have its own distinct taste.

Figuring that I will have multiple opportunities to continue trying different recipes, I decided to combine two that I had found and tweaked it in my own lil way.  Thus the Chocolate-Orange Zucchini Cake recipe was born 🙂

All of these lil things made for such a yummy cake!

Ready for the oven.

Removed & cooling.

Ready to serve…oh wait!

Cake looks a lot better now right? I don’t know why but the simplest lil thing adds so much flare don’t you think?  A lil powdered sugar definitely went a long way.

Can you see some of the ingredients? Chocolate chips? Walnuts?
Mmmm….!

Now tell me, which piece would you like?

😉