As this is a food, drink and craft blog, writing about cleaning products might seem a bit strange, but I wanted to share with you all a brand that I’ve come across that is really helpful when you are making cakes!
Norwex is all about “cleaning without chemicals”, using microfiber cloths with water. When the company started in Norway in the 90s this was a unusual idea – in an era of heavy duty chemical products – but of course does hark back to more traditional cleaning methods. Norwex has since expanded around the world and branched out into other products like personal care and baby care.
It’s not hard to understand that using chemicals around the house can be bad for the environment or your skin. Norwex claims that homes have chemical levels up to 70 times higher than outside, and that most of the chemicals people are exposed to every day have never been assessed for their impact on human health. Cleaning products are also expensive, so buying a more expensive cloth and then just using water works out a lot cheaper in the long run.
I was quite accepting of all this but still not convinced that I needed Norwex products when my friend Jane first mentioned them to me. She is an Independent Sales Consultant for Norwex and sells their products, though she – and the company – has not approached me about writing this and this is not a sponsored post in any shape or form.
Jane did what she called the ‘butter test’ while we were at a friend’s house, and smeared butter on a mirror. She asked us to clean the mirror so we tried kitchen roll and water (leaving huge smears), a leading chemical cleaning product (which still left a smear and residue) and then a Norwex cloth and water – which removed the butter completely.
When Jane gave me one of the little blue microfiber cloths and suggested I use it at home, I was still a bit dubious that it would replace all my cleaning products, and I kept the cloth by the sink, using it occasionally. Then I came to decorating a big cake with fondant.
When I have to cover a really big cake I use my glass dining table as it’s very wide, so I can roll out the fondant as large as I like. I can sprinkle the glass table with icing sugar and don’t need to put down a mat and it works like a dream. What it does however is leave a sticky residue that I really struggle to get off the glass afterwards. When it dries you can still see a sticky residue, then it has to be cleaned again, and it takes a lot of elbow grease.
You can just about see the marks on my glass table:
I tried the Norwex cloth just with some water, and the marks came off easily. I left it to dry and went back to have another go to remove the rest of the stubborn residue… and there wasn’t any. This is why I felt compelled to write this post – I’ve tried all sorts of things and the Norwex cloth is the only product that has cleaned the fondant residue off my glass table in one easy swoop. I was actually astounded and told my friend Jane, whose reaction was basically “I told you so!”.
Norwex products are sold through parties in the home, much like the Tupperware parties of old, but the difference is you get a product demonstration where the Norwex rep will pretty much clean something in your home.
If you want to have a party to see the products in action, visit www.norwex.co.uk and go to the host a presentation link. You can then put in a request to find your local representative as Jane only covers Devon and Cornwall (and a bit of Somerset, I think).
Disclaimer: I was not asked to write about Norwex by the company or by Jane, and all opinions are my own.
