To eat your cake and blog it too

The above picture is what happens when you take baking directions from a dog. Another "Cooking with Dog" recipe, this one for Christmas cake. There wasn't as much direction as was needed. Theirs turned out looking fantastic of course, where as mine, literally, fell flat. It tasted like an overly sweet, floury omelet. Not delicious.



After watching a much longer and much more in depth "Cooking with the Stars" (hosted by Julia Childs) Lilian and I decided to make a genoise chiffon cake instead. See, the thing that is similar is that you beat four whole eggs until they look like whip cream, then you carefully fold a small amount of flour (and things like sugar and coacoa and stuff, but not baking powder or soda) into the eggs and bake it, then you cut it into sections and stuff it with whipped cream and berries.

One trick is to beat the eggs over low heat to get them to remain puffy. Cooking with dog kind of touched on this, but it wasn't clearly explained. I used the work bowl from Betty (my stand mixer) over my portable gas burner and just barely turned the heat on. I think this helped to keep the cake more stable during the folding and baking steps.



This cake was fantastic. I will make this again.

Liquids of Various Stimulating Properties

Remember that post I did waaaaaaay back about infusing liquors with fruit? Well here's the fruit (or rather, the liquor) of that experiment.

It strangely has kind of a smokey flavor for such a refreshing spirit as gin. I suspect that it would be much better very cold. I say "suspect" because the plastic bottle I stored the berries in has frozen shut and I don't drink liquors at ten in the morning. I still love its color, especially in the little jar I bought for it. I have two other bottles made by the same company as the first. You can't quite see the details, but there are little flowers with stems etched into the glass.

I'm thinking of doing a vodka blue berry and perhaps a vodka kiwi for the other two colors. I'd love to get a yellow colored liquor (primary colors), but I can't really think of a yellow fruit (banana skins are not delicious) that would work. Perhaps lemons?



And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the coffee pot that I want. Available at Amazon.

It's a vacuum coffee maker, you put hot water in the bottom, and coffee grounds on top. Then, you light the butane burner underneath, which causes the water to boil. The boiling water is forced through the tube to the top bowl, passing through a filter and into the grounds. You kill off the burner, the water cools slightly, creating a vacuum in the second bowl and sucking the water back through the filter, giving you coffee.

I dabble in steampunk and the aesthetics of this are almost captivating to me. The next time I have an extra $60 (who has "extra" money these days?) I will be picking this little beauty up.

Also, I (my physical self and not the blog) will be moving shortly! Wish me luck and be patient with updates.

Dealing with Drinks

Lately I've been getting into steampunk (which is an aesthetic which deals primarily with what if the internal combustion engine never was invented and we lived in a clock work world; go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steampunk for a better summary). Amongst my internet finds was Food for the Boiler a "steampunk cookbook". It's available for free in pdf form here: http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/fuel-for-the-boiler-a-steampunk-cookbook/3399708

The book itself is a collection of recipes that were given on a steampunk forum. As with any community based cookbook, there are some great recipes, and some mediocre ones. Half of them use the metric system, which is a hurdle in and of itself to some people (myself included). I also had trouble seeing any steampunk connection with a lot of the recipes, even just in the name. In any event, the only recipe I wanted to try was "Fruit Hip Flask Liqueurs". Since the recipe is available for free online (and you're already here, so I know you can use a computer) I'll just let you skim it yourself.

I chose a small jar with one of those wire closing devices (carefully cleaned out) and filled it with a quarter pint of raspberries, a quarter cup sugar, and filled the rest with gin.



This is the first day of the project, which is supposed to take at least six weeks, so I'm not sure how yet it will turn out. I suspect the recipe is for a much larger batch than I've made, but my flask came with instructions not to leave anything in there for more than three days, so until I get a glass lined flask, I'll stick to smaller batches.

I hear the best part of this technique is eating the gin soaked fruit afterwards. I'm basically going to have the best short cake ever in two months.

If you have an opinion on gin (which seems to be falling out of fashion with younger drinkers) leave it in a comment below.