A Week and a Half Later...Or, The "Cake"

Wow! Time flies when your internet browser, where your blogging page taunts you every time you log into it, cannibalizes itself and you are no longer faced with the Blogger logo because you now use GoogleChrome. Are you with me so far?

Time also flies when you accidentally assume that you told all twelve of your readers (but now you're down to 2 readers because you deprived the readers of your brilliance for 1.5 weeks) about the "cake" already, because you told them in your mind. Then crazy (non-blog-related) things happen like you guard the cash box for the multicultural club's talent show, you learn that someone died, the cops show up, there's a windstorm, and then you have to log 4 hours of at-home Promethean lesson design, and then...

According to the French proverb, "He who makes excuses accuses himself." I also found a good Aldous Huxley quote that goes like this: "Several excuses are always less convincing than one."

This will be my last post about the sometimes-brilliant, sometimes-dingbatty Emily Thacker. It is a call to action and a cry for help. You see, when I was in college, I attempted to make a souffle. It came out of the oven more a cracker than a souffle.

In The Vinegar Book, Emily Thacker includes recipes for flavored vinegars, stuffed peppers, and one for something called, "Cherry-Pineapple Vinegar Cake," which goes a little something like this:
1 cup milk
3 tablespoons vinegar
1 teaspoon soda
3/4 lb. flour
3/4 c. butter
3/4 c. brown sugar
1 tsp allspice
1/2 lb. candied cherries
1/2 lb. candied pineapple

Here are the directions, right?
"Stir the vinegar into the milk, add the soda and stir briskly. Cream butter, sugar, and flour together and add the fruit and allspice. Fold in the milk and beat well. Bake in well greased pan at 350 for 1 hour."

I made the mistake of following these directions in the order that they were printed.

I also made the mistake of attempting the stirring-soda-into-buttermilk (because everybody knows that milk+vinegar=homemade buttermilk) step...in a cereal bowl. Here's what happened:

*stir*stir*stir*
LARGE WHITECAP OF FROTHY FOAM PROPAGATES QUICKLY FROM CEREAL BOWL.
Me: AAAAAAARGH! [runs to the cabinet, pulls out LARGE mixing bowl, pours in fluffy goodness.]

Lalalala butter+sugar+flour *mix*mix*mix*

+fruit
+spices

Then, I look at the formerly-fluffy-frothy buttermilk mixture, and it's liquid. It was not at all fluffy or frothy anymore. I suspected that my "cake" would fail when the directions said "fold," but I no longer had anything to fold, so I poured.

Then I beat it like it was the proverbial redheaded stepchild.

I'm just not good at folding ingredients into other ingredients.

Result: cherry-pineapple-vinegar cracker.

Fail.

PLEASE try this at home. But save the whitecap step for last. And then tell me what happened. In the meantime, I will look around for some blog fodder for you for next time.