For many Easters I tried to come up with the perfect dessert to name Sweet Jesus. No store bought cross cake or communion wafer shaped, raspberry jam filled cake would do. This year I decided to try Sweet Jesus, the alcoholic beverage. It came to me on the elliptical, dreaming about being out and drunk instead of watching the guy in front of me splatter sweat on the Stairmaster.

A Zombie and sangria mix. What better to represent the Easter Jesus?

I modified a basic sangria recipe and the zombie recipe on Wikipedia.

I don’t remember exact amounts for everything but the sangria contained:

1 orange

1 lemon

1 lime

1 bottle of red wine

1/3 cup sugar

some white rum

some orange juice

I let the fruit soak in the rum and sugar and then added the wine and juice. The the zombie:

about a cup and a half of white rum

about a cup and a half of dark rum

papaya juice

pineapple juice

orange juice

a little Triple Sec

You are supposed to add 2 more types of rum but I’m just not that fancy.

I created the drinks in two separate containers, mixed a glass of the two for myself and exclaimed

SWEET JESUS!

Add ice, encourage friends to drink, taking the rest to Easter at the parents. It is a really strong drink, strong like the power of Jesus!

I know I sound very negative about Western Buddhists but I did manage to find a balance once. See post about my wedding ceremony that I have yet to write.

Baking is much less strenuous on my quest. So here is my journey in making Neen Gow/Nian Gao  or Lunar New Year cake.

I hit up two Asian markets, one Korean and one Thai. The Thai market won for ingredient availability but it’s also a bigger store. I used this recipe. The ingredient I was most suspicious of was “brown candy”. The clerk at the Korean market was confused as me. Then at the Thai market:

What a creatively named candy!

Also some Haribo gummies. I don’t have a steamer so I got creative with the dutch oven and a metal bowl on the stove top.

The bubbles were too strong and the bowl kept moving around so I had the genius idea to flip it over and fill it with water. On top of that went a pie tin with the cake and then the lid. Ta-da! Steamer!

When the cake came out, it looked like this:

Which is how it is supposed to look! The last step of the recipe is to fry each slice which is important if you don’t like that fresh baked clay taste in your desserts.

I also made cupcakes inspired by Nian Gao. They are baked but still have the same chewy consistency of the cake. They felt heavier than the cake and were a lot sweeter. The recipe is here. I didn’t take any pictures because my cupcakes looked very similar to the cupcakes on the site.

Happy Lunar New Year!

So glogg, gluwhein (with or without umlauts) and spiced mulled wine are pretty much the same thing. At Christkindlmarket in Daley Plaza, it’s served in a boot mug (sometimes imprinted with the previous year) and its called gluwhein. When I find a recipe online that refers to it as glogg and follow that recipe, it is called glogg.

I used a recipe from user Happy Hat on the SomethingAwful forums. I excluded ginger because I did not have any and added grated nutmeg and cinnamon sticks. I played with some ingredients like water, sugar, rum, almond and raisins based on taste. I used a dutch oven on the stovetop to cook the glogg.

I purchased the spices from Whole Foods. I’ve found that stores where you expect groceries to be cheap, like Jewel, are expensive for spices. Cost Plus World Market and Whole Foods are usually cheaper and Whole Foods has some spices in bulk. The spices are the expensive part of glogg so make it in big batches to use all of the odd spices you may not use anywhere else. (Why did I buy so much nutmeg??) For wine, I bought the big jug of merlot table wine. Cheaper the better.

I took a few pictures of the first batch.

Adding the non-wine ingredients

Peeking in on simmering glogg

I should have taken more pictures of the bottling process but I was worried about knocking over bottles. A friend brews beer and he let me use some bottles, caps and capper. I sanitized the bottles, filled them with glogg with a funnel, spooned in the raisins and almonds and added a label to describe the ingredients.

The finished product

The ingredients and instructions from the forums:

Traditional Gløgg
Ingredients:

6 l red wine
28 whole cardamom (green)
80 whole cloves
4 thumb sized pieces of ginger
4/10 l sugar
Juice of 2 lemons
Grated rind of 2 lemons
Juice of 2 oranges
Grated rind of 2 oranges
4/10 l water
Half a bottle of rum
500g raisins
200g chopped, toasted almonds

Will yield about 8 liters

Soak raisins in rum and leave in airtight container in the fridge for at least 48 hours before using.

The next day, pour 1 liter of red wine in a small pot, add spices, sugar, rinds and juices and water – and simmer for 30 minutes covered – put aside, and leave for 24h
Strain the spiced wine and add to the rest of the red wine (in a larger pot), heat to 80 degrees.

Just before serving, add the chopped toasted almonds, and the raisins, and make sure that everybody gets a spoon with their drink to eat up the yummy good raisins.

I started with this recipe for car bomb cupcakes. These cupcakes sound excellent but filling cupcakes with ganache does not. So I made the cupcakes with a few changes. Instead of Guiness, I used PBR. I didn’t have any sour cream, so I used milk.

I wanted a chocolate frosting, so I went with a chocolate cream cheese recipe. I started with this cream cheese frosting recipe and added unsweetened cocoa powder. We didn’t have whiskey but we did have some Green label! I boiled it so I wouldn’t get any kids drunk. Hot scotch does not smell good. I used about half of a shot. The recipe made a lot of frosting so I piled it on and still had a little left over.

Put it all together and you have PBR and a shot cupcakes!

We work out 5-6 times a week, for me a combination of cardio/weights at Bally’s and classes at Flirty Girl Fitness. Flirty Girl classes are surprisingly hard. I haven’t taken any of the pole/stripper-robics type classes. I have taken classes that involve circuit training, lots of sit ups with medicine balls and step ups onto chairs. (That last one practically killed me.)

So some foods that have kept me from going crazy with soo many boring salads and wraps:

Chicken salad with tofu herb dressing
I made the dressing seperately and use it like a salad dressing. I’m new to tofu so I don’t know how to cook with it but this recipe just requires food processing or blending. The dressing is creamy like a ranch dressing.

Banana “ice cream”
Peel and freeze a banana. Blend or food process it. Refreeze if its gooey. Add nuts or berries as toppings if you like.

Egg whites
Egg white scrambles for breakfast! Throw in whatever veggies you like.

Sugar free jello
Makes you feel like you’re eating something

Not that those foods completely keep me from going crazy and wanting to eat Zingers but they help :)

This cake actually wasn’t supposed to be very fattening. My friend asked me to make a rainbow cake for a potluck at her house. She sent me this recipe from The Omnomicon (love the name and I’m pretty sure the author is a SA goon.) There is no rainbow cake recipe, just a white cake of your choice recipe plus tips on making it rainbowed. This cake just called for soda and cake mix.

It’s all lumpy but I was afraid to use an electric mixer because of the carbonation. It doesn’t matter in the end because you stir it a lot more when you add food coloring.
So I divided out the batter into 6 bowls and used my pretty gel dye. I thought the dye would be brighter with less. I felt like I was using a ton of dye. I was scared to make the red an actual blood red because of the amount of dye I would have to use. Isn’t red dye poisonous to children? Oh well, no kids died at the potluck. That I saw.

Then I poured the batter in to the pan, one color on top of the next. One of my friends commented that the batter looks like fake food in the movie Hook.

And then I baked it according to the box instructions plus a few more minutes like the rainbow cake directions say. Its a very squishy cake because of the soda. I took the cake out when the yellow started to look dark.
I let the cake cool while I tried my new dino muffin tins with the leftover cake batter. I set up my cooling rack and tried to get the cake out with disastrous results. The entire middle of the cake stuck, one of the sides started to slide off the rack and I started to make howling noises. No way to repair with frosting. Oh the agony of a broken cake.
No pictures of the broken cake, it was too hard to look at. The dino cakes didn’t turn out well either. The cake didn’t want to come out of the tins. It was the first time I used the muffin pan so I may not have properly greased it.
So I didn’t want to make a new cake and I didn’t want to waste the already made cake. So I made some pudding, used the whipped cream my boy made the night before for dessert, some leftover berries and made a rainbow parfait.

And it was good! It was tasty and still rainbow and kind of pretty.

First stop after rolling out of bed around 11 on a Saturday morning was Angel Food. It’s in Ravenswood so it’s a little past where I usually go in the city but the boy heard about it on Food TV. Angel Food also serves real food so we grabbed some chicken soup and a cupcake each. The chicken soup was also very good. I got a mud pie cupcake which was served with a dollop of what appeared to be homemade whipped cream with little flecks of vanilla bean. The mud pie cupcake was crunchy on top, no frosting needed. The inside was gooey and rich and after finishing it, I knew the other cupcakes would be To Go. I was a little afraid to serve these at my party. I could see everyone eating them and then being unable to get up. The boy got a Boston cream pie cupcake. His had chocolate frosting and creamy filling. He also noticed the weight of his cupcake just by picking it up. These are no light and fluffy treats. These are serious fucking cupcakes. These cupcakes beat up everyone else in the bakery case.
The Angel Food staff was very nice. They told us how awesome the soups were, brought us water when we took on our cupcakes and cleared dishes quickly. The bakery itself was retro and cute like a bakery should be.

Next up was Bittersweet. My friend got her wedding cake from them and said it was so good it made her want to cry. I was sick with a crazy fever the day of her wedding so unfortunately I never got to try the tear inducing cake.
It was busy when we went in Bittersweet. The 2 counter people were talking to other customers so boy and I perused (licked) the bakery cases. They had lots of small, perfect looking cakes and tarts. Were they plastic? Is it really possible to make a cake that perfect looking? I’m not sure. They have lots of iced cookies, a few types of macaroons and other cookie type things. The only cupcakes they had were mini double chocolates so we decided to get cupcakes and macaroons. We were going to get iced party hat cookies but they were $3.50 each and pretty small.
So one counter person was obviously busy with a big order because she was giving box dimensions that sounded like it could have stored a small child or large TV. I got in line behind the 2nd person who was finishing up. The counter girl finishes with customer, looks at me, turns around and calls out a number. I turn and notice the number tags and guy closer to the number tags was nice enough to give us the next number before grabbing one for himself. Counter girl was nice enough with the rest of the order but what’s with not acknowledging my presence? At least tell me to go get a fucking number.
Obviously, bitch rubbed me the wrong way and her desserts didn’t win me over. We ate the Bittersweet treats last that night and they were the least impressive. The icing was really good, I could tell it was made from a nice dark chocolate. The boy pointed out the cupcake itself could have come from Jewel. The chocolate dipped macaroons were good but I need something more impressive than a macaroon for my party dessert.

After leaving Bittersweet, we went to Bleeding Heart Bakery. Bleeding Heart wins me over before we even go in because they do the whole organic and vegan options thing. I’m not vegan and I ingest more poison than most roaches but I still appreciate healthy options for “unhealthy” snack foods.
So we go in and the tattooed, heavily gauged counter guy is helping some other customers. Some punky music is playing. I think presentation matters so I am happy with this place. They have some awesome looking tarts and bars in one case. Another case has a few types of cupcakes. We ask about the types of cupcakes and choose a hazelnut chocolate cupcake and white with sprinkles. I admit I chose the sprinkled cupcake because it was entirely covered in sprinkles.
The white cupcake had a ton of frosting on it. The top of the actual cupcake was crunchy and everything tastes good but it had something odd to it that reminded me of cornbread. Maybe they use corn flour instead of white flour? The hazelnut frosting was really good. I think hazelnut is a hard flavor to work with. A lot of hazelnut desserts just taste like chocolate to me. The boy offered to buy cupcakes from multiple bakeries for the party so I think he liked his cupcake a lot more than I liked mine.

So even though they might put my guests in some kind of sugar coma, I think Angel Food wins this round. Yay science!

I have 3 clients again at the GLBT center. The 3rd client is the easiest to work with so far. I identify with her in some ways which is something I will eventually discuss with my clinical supervisor. Last week we talked about one of my clients that is “internet famous” in her subculture and asked me to read her blog. I took her blog address without saying yes or no and I admit, I looked at it. I told on myself, knowing my supervisor would tell me I shouldn’t look at the client’s blog. My information should come from sessions, directly from the client, not through the information she shares with her internet community. The next session I told her I wouldn’t be reading her blog and she seemed OK with it. She has a lot going on in her past and I think she wanted to be able to say “just read this and understand me” but telling me all of those details in session is important to The Process. I’m slacking with clients, too. I haven’t done progress notes in forever and haven’t started my monthly report.

What have I been doing with my time? Not quite sure.
I went to the Chinese Democracy listening party, got a new GnR tshirt and the CD in the mail. The CD is growing on me, I really like Better. And the shirt is a total boy magnet.
I made Mac n Cheese Pancakes twice and they’re so simple and good. The 2nd time I made bacon, prosciutto wrapped cantaloupe and mimosas to go with them.
I’m making meatloaf cupcakes for the family tomorrow. My mom is jealous of hearing about my adventures in weird food and not tasting any of it. My mom called me today and told me a list of the liquors and wines she has at home and didn’t even mention food. I called her back and asked if we were just drinking this year and told her I fully supported that idea.

Step 1. Mix everything in a big bowl. The directions say with your hands but I was reluctant to touch the meats. This is not one of my prettier batters.

Step 2. Grease and fill the cupcake cups with meats. The meat shrinks so it is good to fill the cups to the top and pack it in so the cups don’t detach from the meat.

Step 2b. While you are doing all of this, boil some potatoes. I boiled the hell out of mine so I wouldn’t have to work hard to get the lumps out. You want the mashed potatoes to be nice and smooth so they look like icing.

Step 3. While meat is cooking, make your mashed potatoes. I decided to use a few drops of blue food coloring to make it looking more icing like.

Step 4. When the meats are done, ice those bitches! I slopped on a lot of icing but it still looked cute. I chopped shredded cheese into small bits to look like sprinkles.

Keep them warm, mashed potatoes don’t taste great when cold. Unless you’re serving them to kids. The kids at the party shoved the cold cupcakes into their mouths like rabid beasts.

I’m not a big fan of meatloaf but these tasted pretty good. My mom is asking me to make them for Thanksgiving!

Boxing boot camp is almost finished so I need something new to keep me active. Jabb boxing gym has similar classes that I might go to. I like boxing but I really want to run away and join the circus. OK, it’s not quite that kind of trapeze training but it’s still trapeze! My upper body strength has got slightly less sad since starting boxing but it’s still pretty pathetic. I’m hoping the aerial training class will help me work toward the awesome back I want. (Awesome back=showing off tattoos)

I didn’t do a pictorial like I usually do with new recipes but I made some really good granola just now. I’m taking spoonfuls while waiting for it to cool. I’m concerned how its going to clump when it cools. I used my friend’s family farm honey and expensive Irish oats that come in a tin. I didn’t use the wheat germ suggested in the recipe and my fruit is raisins, dried cranberries and dried cherries.

(Answer to the title is Yes. And there is a 5th,6th and 7th of July, too. Haha! Egocentric Americans!)