Question, Questions, and Their Answers

Gather 'round, my dears, and hear the answers to your queries. Though I promise to answer honestly, the truth is something else all together.

What is a malted milk cake?
The best way I can describe it is thusly: a malted milk cake, or at least the one that I make, is very much like a white chiffon cake that has malted milk powder added in. Malted milk powder is the stuff that ice cream shops add in to milkshakes that transforms them into malts. It is also the brown crunchy stuff that is at the center of malted milkballs such as the candy known as Whoppers.

Since the cake is flavored with malt and is covered in a chocolate icing, it has a taste similar to the chocolate covered Whoppers.

By the by, the icing is made with 20oz of chocolate, 1 and 3/4 cups of heavy cream, 3 tb of corn syrup, and 1lb of softened butter. Mmmmm....

What is up with Chasing Jackalopes and Sine Logicum?
To be honest, I have no clue.

I first started blogging over a year ago to occupy my mind and (hopefully) get my mind off my court case. Since my new date is quickly approaching, I am having trouble focusing on much of anything. I thought posting handsome dudes on the Tumblr blog would be fun, but now I am not so sure. It's kind of losing its luster.

As for this blog, composing posts of any any length is a challenge to me. It's pretty much what has happened to me every time a significant date begins to approach. This time is slightly different in that I anticipate this one being the one. I don't see the court postponing me again. I mean, It's been 3 years now, far longer than cases are ever strung out.

So anyway, we'll see how things go.

30 Days of Thanksgiving

Yesterday was Thanksgiving. My family and I gathered to eat and spend time together and argued/discussed what channel the television should be on. My niece and I always want to watch movies, but everyone else is more interested in the various  football games.

But we never actually gave thanks.

Odd, don’t you think, that the day we set aside to give thanks for what we have, all we did was look at the Black Friday ads, fuss at each other, and eat. I think that is a bit of commentary on us all.

So, I have decided to write down and post things I am thankful for, 30 days worth of things, in fact.
It sounds like a simple exercise, but I am not sure I’ll actually be able to come up with 30 entries. This should be interesting. So, without further adieu, here is the first entry.

*****

I am grateful for quiche, quinoa, quesadillas, quarter pounders, Queer as Folk, the music of Queen, the antics of certain residents of Quohaug, quizzically queer quips that cause querulous questioners to quail, qualified qualms, quantised quandries, quatrains, quirky companions, comfy handcrafted quilts and my quadruped companion Miss Lulu

The Night Before...

I just finished icing my homemade Malted Milk Cake with a chocolate buttercream. And considering that I no longer have an electric handmixer, making that damn buttercream by hand was a royal pain in the ass.

I had planned on making some hamburgers and fries for dinner, but "they" decided that "we" should make all of our Thanksgiving desserts tonight so that oven space won't be such an issue, as per every other year of my life. So, no hamburgers....crap. Hence, Malted Milk Cake and assorted pies.

Sadly, the pies are all frozen stuff from the store. I woud have made them from scatch, but I just haven't had a lot of energy lately. Which is also why this blog has suffered from a lack of posts.

My Tumblr blog, though, is moving along nicely. It features primarily, to borrow a Sethboyardee term, cuteboys. There are a handful of nature photos and wallpapers as well to flavor the place up a bit. I've had fun there with the exception of a couple of altercations I've had with two different people.

Oddly enough, both of them said the same thing, that I "stole" images from their blogs and placed them on mine. Now, as I've said before, I don't save many images so have to search for whatever I blog each day. I don't grab images from other Tumblr blogs but look other places. To be honest, even if I did take the images from other Tumblr blogs, why would they get mad? They took the images from other places themselves.

I was able to assuage the ego of one blogger. The other got into such a snit that he deleted his blog altogether. How silly is that?

Anyway, if you haven't checked it out yet, please feel free to do so. It's called Chasing Jackalopes. In fact, sign up for an account so you can comment. That would be fun. Well, for me at least. Lol!

Happy Thanksgiving to you all, or at least to all of you who actually celebrate the holiday. To the rest of you, Happy Just-Another-Thursday!

The Return of the Pumpkin Muffins

Jay from Jay in VA asked if I would put up the recipe for the pumpkin muffins I made the other day. Of course I said yes! The problem is that I tend to fiddle with recipes because that is my nature. I find that I don't like following people's directions, be it in the way I live my life, the rules I live by, of the way I make pumpkin muffins. This means I can't always recreate things precisely from batch to batch.

Yes, I made more muffins. Again. As if my belt isn't already on its last notch.

Love it or leave it, bitches. It's how I roll. (I don't know where that came from.)

Now, you should also know that I love making things from scratch; I just think food tastes better when made with real ingredients rather than with processed stuff. However, as I was looking around for a pumpkin muffin recipe, I stumbled across this one that uses a boxed cake. It looked interesting so  tried it.

So, anyways, I will put up the original recipe I found on the internet and then I will tell you what I did.

Original Recipe
1 18.25oz packaged yellow cake mix
1 15oz can of pumpkin puree
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground nutmeg
1/4 tsp ground clove

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Grease a 12 cup muffin pan or line with paper cups.
2. In a large bowl, mix together the cake mix, pumpkin puree, cinnamon, nutmeg, and clove until smooth. Spoon equal measures of batter into the 12 muffin cups.
3. Bake for 20-25 minutes in the preheated oven until an inserted toothpick comes out clean.

No matter what the cake mix requires in terms of eggs, oil, butter, or water, you don't put any of that in. All of the moisture comes from the pumpkin. Exactly..what the hell sense does that make? So, this is what I put in.

1 yellow cake mix
1 cap pumpkin puree
1 egg
1 cup water

1 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground nutmeg
1/4 tsp ground clove
1 cup pecan pieces

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Grease a 12 cup muffin pan or line with paper cups.
2. In a large bowl, mix together the cake mix, pumpkin puree, egg, water, cinnamon, nutmeg, clove, and pecans until smooth. Spoon equal measures of batter into the 12 muffin cups.
3. Bake for 20-25 minutes in the preheated oven until an inserted toothpick comes out clean.

Please feel free to use the original recipe. It won't hurt my feelings.

Big Ass Cookies

I have been watching Top Chef: Just Desserts and twice, Chef Eric Wolizkv from New York made these huge chocolate chip cookies. Both times, the judges thought his cookies were really good.

I scrounged around on the interwebz and found his recipe. Yay! Of course, me being me had to fiddle with his recipe because....well....just because. The original recipe is below as are my changes.

Mmmmmm!

 

 

Eric's Recipe

Ingredients:
    * 340 grams butter (3 sticks of butter)
    * 200 grams sugar (1 cup sugar)
    * 400 grams brown sugar (2 cups firmly packed)
    * 21 ounces flour (4 2/3 cups)
    * 1 tablespoon baking soda
    * 1 tablespoon salt (I used 1 1/2 teaspoons)
    * 2 eggs
    * 2 yolks
    * 21 ounces chocolate chips (or quality bar chocolate, chopped into chunks)
    (I added in 1 tsp of vanilla)


Directions:
1. Melt butter, cool slightly.
2. Paddle sugars with melted butter.
3. Whisk together dry ingredients.
4. Add eggs slowly. (And vanilla, if used)
5. Add flour, mix, add chips.
6. Bake at 325 for 14min or until golden brown. (I baked them for 16 minutes)


© 2010 Eric Wolitzky  - Bravo

Top Chef: Just Desserts

All right..what...the...hell?

I watched last week's episode again tonight since it was rerun before the new one. Last week, the special guest judge, Nancy Silverton, looked very familiar to me, though I was pretty certain I had never seen her before. However, I just couldn't place her.

Until today.

Separated at birth? I think so.

A New Venture

My Tumblr icon

I find that my posts here at Sine Logicum are growing flat. I no longer write stories since I can't seem to focus, and I am posting mostly photos.

So...............

I've decided to play around with a Tumblr account. Right now, it's half hot guys and half interesting (to me) photos I've collected from the internet.

You are certainly welcome to check it out.

Chasing Jackalopes

Oh, but I'm not abandoning Sine Logicum, by the way.

The Writing on the Wall

I have always believed that everyone is important to someone in the world, perhaps many someones, and we may not even know it.

Dinner with the Doc: Tomato Basil Soup

I roasted Roma tomatoes, an onion, and a head of garlic.

I blended the roasted stuff, and added in chicken stock, basil, and heavy cream.

Add a grilled cheese sandwich, and dinner was born!