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Liquid bread? No, liquid cake!

Over the holiday weekend, we started joking about making a beer pie, a dessert pie rather than a savory pie, which resulted in a lot of googling and cries of "Euw" and, less frequently, "Hey, that looks good!"

Oz was especially taken with the idea of Guinness cake and since we had almost all the ingredients on hand, except for the Guinness, oddly enough, I decided to give it a go. I kind of figured we'd end up with a pubscum fruitcake, reeking of stale beer and demanding a cigarette ash garnish, but what the heck?

Here's the recipe we used from the above link, with some minor modifications.

Guinness cake

2/3 cup dark raisins or currants
3/4 cup dried cherries (we used sweetened, dried cherries, not candied cherries)
1 1/3 cups golden raisins
2 12 ounce bottles Guinness stout, plus extra for drinking (because you know you will)
1/2 cup butter
1 cup dark brown sugar
3 eggs, beaten
2 1/4 cups all purpose flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/8 teaspoon ground cloves
1/8 teaspoon ground allspice

1. Place dried fruit in a bowl and cover with Guinness. This takes one 12 ounce bottle. Allow to soak overnight. This was where the pubscum concern surfaced. Dried fruit soaking in Guinness smells like a bad thing to do with your Guinness. On the bright side, none of the fruit got snitched.

2. Preheat oven to 350 °F. In a large mixing bowl, cream the butter and sugar together until smooth, then beat in the eggs one at a time.

3. In a separate bowl, combine dry ingredients with a fork. After the last egg is added and beaten in, gradually add the flour mixture and beat until it is blended in.

4. Strain fruit, reserving the Guinness separately. We placed a colander in a bowl, placed some cheesecloth in the colander, and added the fruit, giving it a few light squeezes to get any excess beer out. Add enough fresh Guinness to the drained stout to measure 8 fluid ounces. We ended up with 3/4 cup of fruity Guinness, so we only needed to take a quarter cup out of a fresh bottle to make up 8 ounces. Yay! Extra Guinness for us!

5. Add the beer to the batter, mixing thoroughly to combine. The batter will be rather soupy. Stir in the fruit. The batter will be chunky.

6. Butter a 9-inch square cake pan and pour in the batter, smoothing top evenly. Bake in preheated oven for one hour, until the center is firm. Stick a toothpick into the cake. If it comes out clean, it's done.

And the outcome:

Pretty good cake, especially considering how easy it is to make. Probably would not taste good to kids. It's very fruity and rich, not overly sweet, with low notes from the Guinness, and not pubscummy at all. Not quite all the alcohol bakes out of the fruit. It does cry out for a scoop of vanilla ice cream or some Jack Daniels sauce. Or both. I made some whipped cream flavored with sugar and a little bourbon and it complements the cake quite well. Actually, a bourbon version of the cake would probably be pretty good too. When I make it again, I may increase the amounts of the spices and add a little ginger.

It's all about the pie

The day before Thanksgiving is my fun day. When I'm not working, like this year, I bake my pies and pre-bake the sweet potatoes for the sweet potato casserole. The oven makes the house nice and warm and filled with the scent of pie. This year I made my favorite buttermilk pie and a cherry pie. When I asked Oz what kind of pie he wanted, he voted for rhubarb, but we couldn't find any and bought a bunch of frozen pitted cherries instead. I've never made cherry pie before, so I looked around on the Internet and cobbled together my own recipe, which is kind of a fusion of all the cherry pie recipes out there.

Cherry pie

4 cups cherries, pitted
1 cup sugar
1/4 cup flour
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 tablespoon butter
Pastry for double crust nine inch pie

In a large mixing bowl, combine cherries, sugar, flour, cinnamon, and vanilla extract. Let stand 15 minutes, then place filling in pastry-lined pie dish. Dot with butter. Put top crust on, cut vent slits in top crust and flute edges. Sprinkle with sugar.

The online consensus for the baking time was to bake at 425 °F for 25 minutes, reduce heat to 350 °F and bake for 25 to 30 minutes more. I actually had to bake the pie much longer, sixty minutes at 350 °F, possibly because I used frozen cherries which were still kind of frozen, or possibly because I placed the pie dish on an insulated cookie sheet to catch drips (of which there were none).

The pie outcome: delicious, but the filling is a little on the fluid side. Many of the recipes I saw online called for quick cooking tapioca instead of flour. I'll try that next time to see if that yields a thicker filling. Still, the cherries were dark sweet cherries and the pie has a yummy Bing cherry flavor. It tastes like summer!

We got to talking about pie and puns and then found ourselves wanting to invent a sweet beer pie. We're thinking Guinness. Maybe chocolate. And definitely not this Guinness pie. In one of my cookbooks, I found a chocolate pie recipe into which we can easily substitute Guinness. We'll let you know how it turns out.

Also, happy Thanksgiving, whether you celebrate it or not.

Still not writing

This is the Internet, the most advanced cat photograph delivery system known to humankind.

Here is a photograph of my cat:

He loves that heating pad, and the plush throw runs a close second. I think it's hilarious that all of the photographs on Flickr tagged "heating pad" feature cats (except for a few of a Siberian husky).

I may have been slack about writing, although I have been writing to people. The Princess's wedding plans are proceeding apace. We bridesmaids have our dresses picked out and now we're exchanging emails about foundation garments and shoes. Can it get any girlier than that?

Presently my main bridesmaid-related concern is the silver shoe problem. I've found the shoe I want, now I just have to find it in my size. For backup, I decided to "make" some silver shoes or, rather, make some shoes silver. All along, Oz has been saying to just spray-paint some shoes with chrome bumper paint. Then, this past week one of our friends told us how his mom likes to spray-paint her shoes and accessories to match, and it totally works.

So I had to try it just to see.

If you've ever wanted to spray-paint your shoes, but weren't sure how to go about it, my illustrated, step-by-step instructions start here.

Black as tar, but oh so sweet

Well, the elections returns are mostly in and it's a good day for some Schadenfreude pie. What with the prospect of gridlocked government and Rumsfeld's resignation, I'm feeling safer and more nationally secure already.

That said, it's sad that the anti-gay marriage amendment was passed in Virginia, thus enshrining in our state constitution both discrimination and really bad wording that is going to have negative implications for all couples, regardless of their gender mix. Also, gay marriage is illegal here anyway. You people who voted for the amendment, you'd better not be the same people who've voted down the Equal Rights Amendment because "discrimination is illegal and so the amendment is redundant." (Another anti-ERA argument I've heard is "Then men could use the women's restroom." As if they'd want to wait in the lines!) On the less dark side, here in beautiful Richmond, Virginia, capital of the Confederacy, through the heart of which runs an avenue decorated with statues of the Confederate generals, 69.35% of us voted against the anti-marriage amendment. Go us! Too bad there aren't more of us.

We're still waiting to see if we're going to be stuck with another term of Senator Maccaca. I think Webb's 7217 vote lead will stand up to a recount.

My Schadenfreude is somewhat tempered by the lack of a concession speech from Maccaca, but I'm happy about the gridlock, which is definite even if the GOP loss of Senate control is not.

Now, about the pie. I basically followed the Scalzis' recipe. I made sure to use 100% pure blackstrap molasses because that (Or they? Is "molasses" plural?) is blacker and tastes much better than the product usually labeled molasses but which is actually a mixture of molasses and corn syrup. I got the darkest chocolate chips I could find, with a 60% cocoa content. The only changes I made were substitutions (dark rum instead of Kahlua, because I didn't have any Kahlua, and a pastry crust instead of a cookie crust, because I like pastry better), the addition of a half cup of chopped pecans sprinkled on top (because Schadenfreude should have crispy bits), and an adjusted cooking time and temperature (one hour and five minutes at 350 °F). One benefit to not being quite sure of the cooking time was the opportunity to repeatedly stab the pie in its black heart to test for doneness. Once I finally declared the pie done, I put it on a cooling rack and watched it pulsate darkly and evilly as it slowly deflated.

The pie is good. Rich, dark, and very sweet.

Election day

Yes, of course we voted or, as Oz put it, "closed our eyes and did our wifely duty for the republic."

That's republic with a small "r", thank you very much.

And I really voted with my eyes open so I could see the touch screen. We still had those non-printing electronic machines that I think are a bad idea. I read online where someone said they used an electronic voting machine which printed out a hard copy of their ballot for them to verify which was then dropped into a locked box. Yes, a countable, hard copy backup. A must for any free and fair election. So that if for some reason (like, say, fraud) a candidate happens to receive more votes from a polling station than were actually cast at that polling station, a recount can be performed instead of those votes simply being tossed.

Anyway, I feel like I voted and that's the important thing, right?

For all your J. Geils Band needs

There's an all request radio station in town. The pizza place we go to always plays this station as a kind of seventies and eighties American counterpoint to their televisions which are always playing an Italian satellite station or soccer on any random station which happens to be showing soccer. This radio station's slogan is (or was) "We play anything!" And, damn, but they sure do.

This is not necessarily a good thing.

Think about it.

In other news, we had another cat pee event, so I guess I spoke too soon. I'm still doing lots of physical therapy. The exercise sequence I'm supposed to do just takes forever and pretty much sucks up time I could be writing. Even so, I started drinking more coffee again. Yay! My imaginary friends have woken up and come out to play. Not so Yay! I also wake up in the wee hours and worry about the warping of the floorboards at one end of the living room.

Yeah, other people get to worry about actual problems, or at least nameless, menacing fears. I get warped floorboards. Thank you, brain.

Also, it is autumn.

This is the railroad bridge over the James River. By the bases of the piers you can see the footings of the older bridge replaced by this one. Oz knew a guy who crossed this bridge on a motorcycle. This was a long time ago, once when the river was so flooded that all the bridges were closed. The river must have spilled way out of its banks, but this guy had a girlfriend on the other side of the river, so what else could he do?