Bad Pete's Bourbon Blues Cakes

My dad broke his thumb in three places this week-end. At this point, it's a bit of a gnarly mess beneath a splint and a load of gauze. He's doing great, but it puts a big 6-8 week wrench in the woodworking projects that he's got going right now. Now, if it were me in this situation, I'd be a right cranky pain-in-the-ass, but my dad is a take-it-as-it-comes kind of guy, so he's being pretty great about it. Still, it's not hard to figure that a broken thumb would make anyone a little blue, so I decided to make him something especially and very specifically with him in mind. 

This is what I had to work with: My dad loves bourbon. My dad loves cake. My dad loves dried fruit - especially raisins.

This is what I came up with: Bourbon soaked raisins in little, one-hand-eatable teacakes (the one-handed part was James's idea). 

These are based on the raspberry pistachio teacake from Tartlette, one of my favorite food blogs. I'd made a strawberry almond variation the day before and it went really well, so I decided to go a little farther afield and use it as a base for my dad's broken-thumb blues cakes. Just a warning, there's *a lot* of bourbon in this version, so you have to really like the stuff to go for it as is. That said, this recipe is really fun to adapt with all sorts of fruits, nuts, liquers, juices and whatevers, so you can have all kinds of fun with it. 

And now, without further ado, Bad Pete's Bourbon Blues Cakes!

Ingredients:

- 1 1/2 cup cake flour

-pinch of salt

-1/2 cup dark brown sugar, packed

-3/4 cup to 1 cup raisins and dried cranberries (depending on your taste)

-1/3 cup bourbon (I used Knob Creek, but any tasty bourbon would do)

-1/2 tsp granulated sugar

-1 tsp baking powder

-1 stick of butter, melted and slightly cooled

-2 eggs

Process:

1. Preheat the oven to 350. Butter or grease a 12 cup muffin pan (or two 6 cup pans).

2. Put the dried fruit in a microwavable bowl with the sugar and bourbon. Loosely plastic wrap the top and microwave for 30 sec. Check to see if it's warm. If it is, stir, tighten the plastic wrap and let it steam itself. Otherwise, heat up until warm, but not hot, going at 10 sec. increments. Then stir, and let it steam. Set aside.

3. Put the salt, cake flour and baking powder in a separate bowl, stir and set aside.

3. In the bowl of a mixer (or in a separate bowl with a handheld), beat the brown sugar and eggs on med. high until thick, about 2-3 min.

4. Turn speed down to med. low and add the butter and 1 tbs. of the bourbon from the raisins. Beat for 30 sec. 

5. With speed still on low, add the flour mixture slowly. Beat until incorporated. The batter will be quite thick. 

6. By hand, fold in the plumped up dried fruit and as much of the bourbon as suits your tastes. You can either leave the bourbon at the 1 tbs. from above, or use the entire 1/3 cup, although the amount will affect the crumb and baking time a bit - the whole 1/3 cup will make denser, more tender cakes that needs slightly less baking. The cakes with less bourbon will be crumbier and more crumbly and need a minute or two more in the oven.

7. Distribute the batter evenly into the cups of the muffin pan. The cups will only be about 2/3 full. Place in the oven (center rack) for 20-25 min, or until gently golden brown.

8. Remove the cakes from the muffin tin and let cool on a rack. Can be eaten warm or at room temp, and are even lovely the next day with coffee or tea.

New Review Up

So, after over month of nothing, there's a brand-spanking-new post up on the Foggy Foot Review. Read scintillating thoughts and intriguing excuses that are guaranteed to change your life, wash your windows and waste your valuable time!

Macaroon: Journey to the Forbidden Countertop

To what lengths is a cat willing to go for a coconut macaroon? 

If the cat's last name is Mitchell, it will brave water pistols to nab one off the cooling rack on the counter, it will hop into the microwave in pursuit of the now relocated cooling rack, it will wade through a soapy sink to score a few crumbs and it will hop up onto the stove. 

Who would have guessed that cats liked macaroons? I mean, really - there's nothing in there but sugar and coconut and vanilla extract, and they were acting like I was baking mouse-muffins. So in honor of an evening of thwarted attempts, here is the recipe for "Phot and Vesp's Forbidden Macaroons" (from "Sally's Macaroons" in The Splendid Table's How to Eat Supper, which is fantabululous by the way). 

Ingredients:

- 1 14oz package sweetened, shredded coconut (about 3 cups tightly packed)

- 2 eggs well beaten

- 1 tsp vanilla extract or almond extract (make sure to use the real thing and not imitation - there are so few ingredients in there that imitation anything gives the cookies a nasty chemical aftertaste. Ask me how I know....)

-1/2 cup granulated sugar

- 1/3 rough chopped almonds (optional)

Process:

1. Preheat the oven to 350. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper (don't skip this - the cookies get sticky during baking and will stick to anything but parchments paper)

2. Beat the two eggs and the extract in a small bowl with a fork. Set aside.

3. Put coconut and sugar into a large mixing bow. Stir until roughly incorporated. Add the almonds at this point if you're using them.

4. Pour the egg/extract mixture into the coconut and sugar. Mix until roughly combined. This shouldn't look like batter so much as clumps of coconut.

5. Put generous tsp. sized dollops of mixture onto baking sheet - roughly 15  cookies should fit roomily. Make sure that you pack each cookie down a bit - they should look like compact little haystacks when you put them in to bake. 

6. Put one sheet in and bake for 20 -25 min. until golden brown and toasty looking.

7. Pull them out and cool on a rack while the second sheet goes in. 

8. Allow them to cool as much as possible before eating them - the texture improves the cooler they are. They can be stored at room temperature for 3-5 days in an airtight container. The Splendid Table ladies also recommend freezing them (they'll last for months that way) and eating them straight out of the freezer, which I'm definitely going to try. These macaroons also beg for vanilla ice cream if you have any on hand :)

Variation Idea:

I'm going to try doing a Tropical Macaroon by replacing the extract with lime juice and adding a bit of lime zest. If it works, I'll post a little progress report and then try it with orange - or if someone else wants to give it a try, let me know how it goes!

My Grandmother and Julia Child

Before James and I moved ever-so-briefly to Texas, my grandmother, Lita (short for Abuelita because she's small and Spanish, but mostly because "abuelita" is a mouthful to say when you're three years old), taught me how to cook many of her special dishes. We're talking about everything from her traditional arroz con pollo to her sauce-drenched spare-ribs. It took us about three months to get through the catalogue as I could only go to her house one or two afternoons a week, but even as we were spending the time, I knew that this experience, the experience of cooking with her, was going to be one I remember for the rest of my life. 

At the end of the last recipe (chicken croquetas and sopa de pollo), she pulled out her favorite cookbook. Imagine my surprise when I read the cover, which was stained with sauce as any good cookbook should be. Apparently, my very nationalistic, proud, non-frills grandmother had based most of her cooking on recipes from Julia Child's classic, The French Chef. Not to be overly dramatic about it, but I was kind of shocked. I was even more shocked when she told me that it was a very good book and that she wanted me to have it. This meant a great deal to me - enough, actually, that I don't have words for how it made me feel, so I'm not going to try to describe it.

Anyway, I was browsing through her copy of The French Chef the other day, looking for souffle recipes (I'm obsessed right now), and a bunch of her page-markers and notes fell out. As I was putting them back, I found a lot of the base recipes for the dishes that I grew up with and I was struck by the fact that the reason I love cooking is because you can take someone's wonderful idea, and make it your own. Julia Child's beef stew bears only a passing resemblance to Lita's gisado, but I can see the basis for Lita's variation in the Julia Child's recipe.

It made me think about how my chicken soup has started to look less and less like Lita's Sopa, but I can always go back to her recipe and do it her way if I'm feeling a little homesick for my childhood. This is wonderful - a sort of metaphor for life. You take the examples of others and the lessons you learn early on, and build a foundation from them. Then you go out and live your life. But when push comes to shove, you can always revisit that foundation again, sometimes for the pure nostalgia of it, sometimes for deeper reasons. 

Even if I didn't love cooking this would be reassuring, but because I do, it's even more so. It's a tangible continuation of the experience Lita and I shared when I spent those afternoons with her in her kitchen, learning her recipes. Given that she's 91 years old, I'll take as much continuation as I can.

Cao Yu

I came across this quote yesterday at a particularly apt time.

"For a writer, life is always too short to write. I will just try my best during what remains of my life." 

- Cao Yu, (Chinese Playwright)

In the past month or so, I've been feeling a great deal of despair over my inability to be as productive as I would like. Even though I write for 4-5 hours a day, I don't feel that it's enough. I find myself resenting my perfectly good job because it takes me away from my desk. I find myself resenting perfectly lovely things, like coffee with my mom, or a walk with my dad, because they take me away from my desk. This is both unhealthy and unfair to everything not my desk.

I know that I will never be able to write everything that I want to write, just as I know that I will never get to read everything I want to read, or learn everything I want to know - but that's true for everyone. I don't actually think it's possible to do it all - not well, at least. It's just that awareness of my own mortality has landed heavily this past year, and with it came realization of something that I'd only intellectually known: I am going to die with list of experiences left un-had. And that's ok, because it has to be. All I can do is "try my best during what remains of my life." 

And with that in mind, I'm going to end this post and get back to work :-)

The Watchmen

This is going to be brief, but I really wanted to do a quick post on The Watchmen movie, which James and I saw yesterday. It's really, really good. As in, "wow, I was expecting beat-em-up fun, but that was actually really good". 

I won't get into serious detail, but I will say that it impressed me on three counts.

1. The writing was excellent. The narrative structure demands a lot of faith from the viewer - as in they don't give you anymore information than you need, until you need it, but they reward that faith by never dropping the story's various threads. Disparate stories are woven seamlessly and tightly together, nothing lags and scenes of great emotional impact are presented without pulling punches or in any way sanitizing them. This is an adult movie and they allow it to be such. The ending is also magnificent, but that's all I will say about that.... 

2. The acting, with one exception, was really damn good. I especially enjoyed the performances from the guys who played Ozymandius, Nite Owl and Rorschach, and Carla Gugino did a seriously fantastic job as the first Silk Spectre. Honestly, the casting was brilliant - they cast a lot of little known actors who performed with incredible subtlety. There was very little "action movie acting", except for the woman who plays Laurie Jupiter, the second Silk Spectre. She wasn't awful, she was just shallow, which stood out in a movie peopled by actors who were obviously invested very deeply in their work. Her performance was negligible and consequently, the weak link, but like I said, it was the exception. 

3. Visually, it was beautiful. That's pretty much all I'll say about that, but it really was. The scenes on Mars were especially impressive.

So that's my two cents. I really enjoyed it, I'm really glad we spent the money to see it in the theater and I completely recommend it to anyone, as long as they realize what kind of movie this is. It's dark and has some seriously adult themes, and although it wasn't as violent as I had expected it to be, the violence is well-chosen and very effective (some sexual in nature) and meant to have emotional impact. It's a movie to chew on, so I would recommend seeing it when you feel like having a meal....