Fresh From the UnderMooreWood Test Kitchen

Culinary antics and sugar laden shenanigans of
 B.A.MooreCox and Uranium J

I mentioned last week that FishForest Family friend, Carl-Os is preparing to leave on a Magical Mystery Tour. It also came to my attention last week that his birthday is right after he departs.  This made me really sad, as I am a sucker for birthdays. The idea of him sitting in some tin can on the other side of the world with no cake and no one making a fuss over him was too much for me. So, I offered to make him a cake and have an "Un-Birthday Party" over the weekend. He brought some homemade kielbasa (sp?) and sparkling cider while I made the cake and some pierogies.

For the uninitiated, these are pierogies. Source

It would behoove me to remember that when I offer to bake someone a cake, they are most assuredly not going to want whatever sort of cake I have in mind. I think Carl-Os is kind of a foodie and the notion of me baking a boxed mix was nixed as soon as it came out of my mouth. Alright I though. Surely a cake from scratch isn't that hard to make. I am happy to say that it wasn't. The only monkey wrenches came from the fact that Mr. Os knows carrot cake. He gave me a list of vital ingredients, and I couldn't find one recipe that contained them all. So, I did what great cooks have been doing since Prometheus brought us fire: I improvised. Here's the recipe I came up with: 

Uranium J's SuperDense Carrot Cake

(Patent Pending)

• .5 cup molasses

• 1 c butter

• 4 eggs

• .5 cup Meyer's Dark Rum

• .5 cup brown sugar

• 1 tsp vanilla

• 2 cups flour

• 2 tsp baking soda

• 1 tbsp cinnamon

• 1 tbsp allspice

• 1 tsp baking powder

• .5 tsp salt

• 3 cups finely shredded carrots*

Mix molasses, butter, eggs, rum, brown sugar, and vanilla in a large bowl. Stir together dry ingredients in a smaller bowl. Slowly beat dry ingredients into wet mixture. Stir in carrots. Pour into 2 greased, round, 9 inch cake pans. Bake @ 350 for 35 minutes.

* I recommend using a cheese grater. It's a pain and it takes forever, but I think it makes for a better texture.

The only issue I found was that the cake didn't really rise. I think that's OK though - it was dense and very moist, but not overpowering. 

After the cake was done, I decided to work on the cream cheese frosting. This is where things started to go awry. Apparently, unless you have a flipping stand mixer, you have to let your butter and cream cheese almost melt before beginning to work it.

I did not do that. 

I tried working with semi-softened butter and cream cheese. 

I broke my hand mixer. 

The beaters all but went whirring by my head. 

This was at 3AM Saturday morning, so I threw in the towel for the time being in favor of sleep. 

Of course, you know this happened. Source

At 8AM, I got up and got back to work. I set the butter and cream cheese out on the counter to soften and began working on the pierogies. I was quite nervous about this task since I was basically going up against Grandmother Os's cooking, and I had never made the things before. Turns out, other than being somewhat labor intensive, pierogies are not so hard to make. There are just a lot of steps and it kind of takes forever. 

I used this recipe and my only piece of advice about the recipe is this: 

Make your dough and filling the day before, cut out all your dough first, then fill and seal the dumplings, and boil all the dumplings at once. I made the dough and while it was in the fridge, I boiled the potatoes and made the filling. Then, as the water was boiling, I was frantically rolling dough, cutting dough, stuffing dough, and sealing dough. I had six pierogies in the pot at a time and I was constantly turning back and forth from making more in order to check the ones that were already cooking. It was very inefficient. If you're going to do this, do it in steps. Also, after they are boiled, make sure they are good and dry before pan frying them. It makes a difference. 

Although I had a harrowing first encounter with pierogie making, I am pleased to report that Carl-Os was impressed with my efforts. There's no better compliment than a happy dinner guest. 

Because Uranium J still believes in the right to privacy.

After the piergie ordeal, it was time to figure out what to do about frosting the cake. My friend the internet told me that it is possible to make frosting without an electric mixer. Well, of course it is. Otherwise, how would they have frosted cakes in olden times? I grabbed a sturdy wooden spoon and set to work. 

It took me about five minutes and a lot of elbow grease to cream together the butter and cream cheese. This wouldn't have been so bad if not for the fact that I had grated 3 cups of carrots by hand less than 8 hours before this. My wrists were crying mutiny, but I trudged on. I added a liberal amount of vanilla extract - creamed some more - and then began adding the powdered sugar. This is where the real endurance test came in. See, when you add dry to wet in this way, before it becomes something fluffy and good, it's sort of like a cement paste. I struggled to pull my spoon through the mess. Finally, 15 minutes later, I had something that looked like frosting. 

But it was too thin. So the process began all over again.

Half an hour and almost a whole bag of powdered sugar later, I had frosting. It was lumpy, and there was no way I was going to decorate with it, but it would cover the cake which is really all that mattered. 

The Final Product: Uranium J's SuperDense Carrot Cake

I was exhausted. I sent that Sprout to take a nap and I took a shower. Then, since j^C had gone to play rugby that day, I sat around in my bathrobe and talked to Mojo Jojo for an hour before deciding that maybe I had ought to clean the kitchen. 

Long story short: I got dressed and made the house presentable and it was j^C who Carl saw fly by the doorway window in the nude when he rang the doorbell. We ate, drank, watched bad sci-fi movies, and were merry. I did not complete everything I wanted in order to evoke the "Un-Birthday" milieu  but there will be time. Cards and gifts and Secret Squirrel Stuff is in the works. Tra laa!