I was happy to oblige and prepare a red velvet cake – everyone seemed in awe of my nonchalant acceptance of the task. I googled it and found this recipe from food network.

Upon rounding up the ingredients, I discovered I would need to buy 4 (FOUR) packages of food coloring, just to get the amount of liquid red food coloring I’d need. (and it probably wouldn’t be that red)

Crazy enough, I was at an Indian market the day before, just perusing and noticed they had dry food coloring.

I high tailed it back over to the market and picked up a jar of the red food coloring and returned home to proceed.

With just a quarter of a teaspoon, my batter was already looking good:

Red Velvet Batter

and it turned out pretty good at the pot-luck, at least no one complained..

Although, Andy commented that it wasn’t the best he’s had… perhaps I need a more intimidating recipe?

So, after a little research I found a local brewing supply store not too far north of my place: Home Brewing Supplies. I wish I’d taken pictures, but the place was pretty cool – kits for winemaking (on my list), beermaking, cheesmeaking, and all the associated equipment (which isn’t that expensive, actually).

I broke down and bought the two-stage fermenting kit that comes with a glass carboy, as I will need it when making wine eventually.

For now, I’m just using the fermenting bucket – I’ll add an additional fermenting bucket to the setup eventually, and this will most likely be the bottling bucket (note the spigot).

Fermenting Bucket

There’s a bunch of other things that came with it as well (caper, hydrometer, siphon rig, sanitizer, etc)

Other stuff

So after a little reading I jumped in:

Boiling Brew (no eye of newt)

Combining the malt extract, corn sugar, etc, you get ‘wort’, which is added to cold water to get 5 gallons of the stuff…

Wort in fermenter

Once it comes down to room temperature again, the yeast can be added

blooming yeast

And the whole thing sealed up with a nifty one-way gas release mechanism

nifty air release mechanism

Theoretically, next weekend the beer will be ready to bottle. After that it’s another two to three weeks before they’re to be consumed.

All in all, the initial outlay for gear is notable, but not crazy expensive 90 bucks for the kit I got. The ingredient kit I used was only $30, which for two cases is very cheap (half price…)

More to come.

thermo

So, I finally broke down at Target and spent the 15  bucks on a thermometer with a corded thermocouple so that I could monitor the internal temperature  of things in the oven. It features a removable cable with a two-conductor phono jack, presumably for the purposes of cleaning it.

It’s a nice little sans-frills unit from a company called Taylor.

We got around to using it the other night on a meat-loaf, only to have it have a weird readout:

Weird Readout

The readout would flicker between ‘LLL’ and the actual temperature as I twisted the connector round and round in the plug. I could get it to stay, but as soon as I turned away from it, it went back to ‘LLL’ – making the alarm feature worthless.

Not that I’ve ever had a problem returning anything to Target, but I wasn’t really ready to put up with the hassle of taking it back – besides, I needed it to work THEN, not two days from then! I said to myself: “I can fix this, I’ve worked several jobs [as an audio technician] fixing just these types of problems!”

So I took it into the office and fired up the soldering iron – I basically assumed that I was going to have to cut the connector off the thermocouple and solder it directly to the PCB. To hell with being able to disconnect it…

Once I got it apart and took a closer look, I began to wonder if the jack was the actual problem… it seemed sturdy enough.

Cable and jack

Partly out of curiosity, partly out of ‘this wire seems extraordinarily loose’, I took the display portion completely out of the housing (BTW – SIX screws to hold the PCB to the housing?! It’s only two square inches!)

So, once flipped over, the problem was annoyingly obvious:

The problem

The caption says “No Solder Here”  Seriously – possibly the most critical solder connection for a thermocouple based thermostat (The connection to the thermocouple) was not even soldered! It hadn’t just broken, it hadn’t cracked, it wasn’t insufficiently soldered – it was never soldered!

So, a few seconds later, it was fixed. And I didn’t have to connect the wire directly onto the PCB – I can still unplug it if necessary.

I wonder if I broke the warranty…

Thermometer Fixed

Oh, that's where I left my car keys!

One flip through it and I knew what recipe (and I use the term loosely – Alton encourages people to ‘own’ their cooking, and the book’s writing reflects that): Chili. Which is the one recipe in ‘I’m Just Here for the Food’ that uses a pressure cooker, something I’ve been wanting for a while.

Isn't it adorable, with it's 'pot belly' - It's a Fagor.

And I got one today from Bed Bath and Beyond, and whipped up the recipe in it – three pounds of cheap beef, spices and such I had around the apartment, and viola!

The beans were added at the end, considering any amount of time in the pressure cooker for cooked beans would destroy them. If you’re ever curious how your local Mexican restaurant manages to get their beef tips and such so fork tender, this is it!

http://pornforchubbies.blogspot.com (Yeah, I know… the name’s a little off.) Throw that in your favorite feed reader. (What’s that? You’re not using a feed reader? Try out Google Reader!)

The other day he brought in a cake and deposited in one of the kitchens and at 9 in the morning, I thought it was a little early for a big hunk of cake, so I said to myself, “I’ll get some here in a bit, maybe after lunch.”

ha. It had already been pilfered.

So, I decided I’d make the same thing, since the recipe had appeared on the blog.

Oreo Cake, the finished product.

In making it, I called Sarah and Kelly concerning the icing. Both demanded that I share the recipe. Here ya go:

1 Devil’s Food Cake Mix w/ related ingredients

1/2 cup Sugar
8 oz Cream Cheese, room temperature
8 oz Cool Whip
1/2 package Oreo Cookies, crushed

1 container Devil’s Food Cake Icing (this is the part that got me… I don’t know what ‘Devils Food Cake Icing’ is, so I used chocolate fudge icing.)

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(1) Prepare the cake as directed in two 9″ round cake pans.
(2) Allow cake to cool completely.
(3) Cream together the cream cheese and sugar.
(4) Mix in the cool whip and cookies.
(5) Top one of the cakes with the cookie/cream cheese mixture (you should have a couple inches of filling).
(6) Place the other cake on top of the cookie/cream cheese mixture, to resemble a large Oreo cookie.
(7) Heavily frost the top [only] of the cake.

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