Making Kapet
So rather shamefully, as a Kemetic of over 15 years, I’ve never actually made kapet. I’ve always just made do with frankincense on its own. The various recipes have always been in the back of my mind meaning that I’ve collected most of the individual ingredients over the years and stored them away.
That all changes today!
I will be using the following recipe:
3/4 measure honey
3 measure raisins
1/4 measure myrrh (did not have this ingredient)
1/4 measure mint
1/2 measure cinnamon
1/2 measure cardamom (I went for green cardamom)
1/2 measure frankincense
1/2 measure juniper berries
Benzoin powder
Sweet red wine (again I missed this ingredient as I didn’t have any)
I used a teaspoon as the measure, and I made six pellets.
Mixing the dry ingredients
So I collected all my dry ingredients, essentially just missing out the honey because I wanted to use my spice grinder to mix. However, my spice grinder decided today was the day to pack up completely… so it all got mixed in the nutribullet, meaning that some of the cardamom didn’t get as well ground as I was hoping.
At this point, the mixture was already quite damp and smelt really strongly of cardamom.
Adding the honey
After I added in the honey, the mixture became quite a wet paste. So I rolled it into little pellets and laid them out on a paper towel to try to suck up some of the moisture.
I’m torn between if adding wine would be a good idea or not, on the one hand it would make the mixture far more difficult to work with as it would become wetter. However, because of the low boiling point of alcohol I wonder if it would ‘cook’ the mixture on the coals and if this would make a significant difference to the end scent?
I decided to try one of the kapet pellets immediately and fired up a coal, and I want to try to dry the rest out a little for storage.
Into the fire
There was very little smoke, which I was surprised about. And I would decide the initial scent as very benzoin forward and very sweet from the honey - the strong scent of cardamom is completely lost when it hits the fire.
Additionally there is a lovely sizzle sound from the incense that is very cosy.
Overall, the incense isn’t quite what I was expecting, it is much more mellow that using frankincense on its own. But, it’s very nice and I will have to test out the rest of the pellets to see how well they store and if there is a difference to them not being made fresh.