Best Beer Ever!

What did you get for Christmas?

I got beer.

Jealous yet?

You may not think beer to be as cool and sexy as say, an ereader tablet (I got one of those, too), or the one pound Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup (yup).  And you might think beer might not be the best gift for a DIY homebrewer, but you’d be totally wrong.  I love beer, and I’m always on the lookout for new beer styles and better beers.

And this year, I might have gotten the Best Beer Ever.

Aren’t you just dying to know?

It’s not what you think.  It all depends on individual taste.  My Best Beer Ever is probably not your Best Beer Ever.  And it has almost nothing to do with the beer itself.

Sometimes, the Best Beer Ever is a Bud Light, served in a plastic cup, alongside a hotdog with extra mustard, while sitting in the bleachers of Fenway Park.  Or it could be a bottle of Rheingold’s served in a Romanian steakhouse in NYC during one of my best friend’s bachelor party.  Sometimes, it’s the beer you made from scratch, with your own two hands, idiot grin on your face as you add bacon and coffe to the brew.  (More on that later.)

In other words, the very Best Beer Ever is not just a beer, it’s also a situation, a setting, a slice of time, in which beer and happiness meld together, forming a kind of perfection.

This Christmas, I got to spend the day with my family, watching my daughter open presents, helping my wife cook a ham dinner, eating and drinking, with some of the Best Beer Ever (a spiced winter ale, by the way, and it was fantastic).  And now, with my brother-in-law in town for just one more night, I’m planning on splitting a geuze lambic with him before he leaves.

I have a feeling it might be the Best Beer Ever.

On a slightly different note, even the Best Beer Ever might not be the best present I got this year.  My personal fav might just be a bottle of floor cleaner.  It's called "Dave," is eco-friendly, and has the silohette of a man holding a child on the bottle.  Check it out:

Best Floor Cleaner Ever.

Happy New Year, everyone!

Princess Cake Construction Company, Inc.

Christmas is right around the corner (lurking in the shadows, ready to pounce, like a jungle cat), and there’s so much left to do.  Tree decorating, cookie baking, present wrapping (ahem, present shopping).

But no time for that now, I have a birthday cake to construct!

Yep, I said construct, not bake, because when you have a birthday for a princess, you need a castle.  It’s a rule, or possibly a law of nature.

I started off some days earlier, with two boxes of cake mix (yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, but it saves so much time, and I got to hand it to Betty Crocker, she makes a tasty cake), and two boxes of pudding mix.  You should always mix pudding into your cake batter.  It makes all the difference.  I baked the layers of cake (three of them, two large, one small), let them cool, then moved them into the freezer.  After a brief digression to make a test batch of chocolate stout beer cupcakes, I let the cake layers freeze hard while I went out and bought ice cream cones.

On party day, I took the cake layers out of the freezer, and whipped up the frosting, pink, of course.  I frosted the top of the two larger layers and stacked the layers on top of each other, putting the small layer on top.

Next, I carved out circles at each corner and one in the middle, fitting an ice cream cup into each hole.  Then, I frosted the rest of the cake.  I put the ice cream cones upside on top of the ice cream cups, using a small amount of frosting as glue to hold the cones in place.

Finally, I put on the finishing touches.  I put a border of frosting around the bottom and around the top layer, around each cone (covering up irregularities on the holes I cut in the cake), and a drop of frosting on top of each cone.  Then, I made a batch of blue frosting to lay down around the castle, making a moat.  My wife and daughter helped by adding candy and mini-marshmallow touches all around the cake.  The result: magnificient!

I’m also available for weddings and bar mitzvahs.

Now, some of you might have noticed me mention something about chocolate stout beer cupcakes.  This is a recipe I’ve adapted from the Coca-Cola chocolate cake recipe which can be found here.  I used Young’s Chocolate Stout (and jotted down a chocolate stout recipe to make myself at some point).  I mixed up a chocolate stout frosting to go on top.  The results were quite yummy, with a strong taste of the component beer.  I’m jiggering the recipe a little to make it a little richer, but the stout frosting is simply fantastic.  Want to try it at home?  Here’s the recipe:

2 cups sugar

2 cups flour

½ cup butter

½ cup vegetable oil

3 tablespoons cocoa

8 oz. chocolate stout

1 teaspoon baking soda

½ buttermilk

2 eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

½ cup chocolate pudding

Mix together, pour into cake pans or cupcake holders, bake at 350 degrees for 30-35 minutes.

For the frosting, mix together with an electric blender:

½ cup butter

3 cups confectioner sugar

3 tablespoons chocolate stout

3 oz. melted baking chocolate