Extreme brewing: great and necessary

26 October 2012
Beer
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So I came across this article on The Kitchn yesterday: Extreme Beers: Are Brewers Going Too Far with High Alcohol Beers? and at first, I was just going to tweet it, but I decided I have Things To Say.

I own a share in BrewDog, and so I have had a few conversations on this subject, partially because they seem to be the target of a lot of the criticism on this and I think it’s easy to take shots at what you don’t understand, especially if you’re not a huge beer fan in the first place.

I don’t think everything BrewDog does is amazing for a start, but they make a solid line of really great beer, and they’re growing like mad. Their new Dead Pony Club is brilliant and a pretty awesome achievement. It’s a 3.8% California pale ale, but it tastes much, much stronger, like a lot of the beers I love but that are too strong to sit and drink all day. And while making a beer packaged in roadkill is perhaps questionable, the spirit of experimentation and innovation leads to knowing your craft better, and that leads to making the beers that keep you going and that keep people coming back regularly.

It’s silly to ask if brewers are taking things to far by trying to do something extreme – just as silly as asking if any profession is taking something too far by experimenting in any way. If you don’t push the limits, you don’t know what’s possible. And just because the extreme stuff isn’t for everyone doesn’t mean it’s not sometimes really good. Super high-alcohol beer is also not meant to be drank as you would a normal bottle of lager or something, and it seems that a lot of people don’t get that – that just because it’s called beer, it must be consumed in a certain way or it’s not worth it. But that’s crazy! I wouldn’t even drink my favourite Dogfish Head Raison D’Etre by the gulp, and that’s only 8%, so why would I slam back something that was 65%? If you don’t like it, you don’t like it and that’s ok, but some high-alcohol beers are really nice, better than a mediocre glass of wine any day.

I really want brewers to keep experimenting and trying crazy things, even when they don’t work. BrewDog recently did a competition with Flying Dog called International Arms Race to brew a zero IBU IPA. I’ve tasted Flying Dog’s (which was apparently declared the winner), and I thought it fell flat. I didn’t even finish the bottle (it kind of reminded me of this pine ale stuff I tried in Canada, but just not really for me). But I still love that they tried, and I will even go buy BrewDog’s entry because I’m curious. Trying new things is ALWAYS a good plan.

This is not to say that all brewers have to do crazy things all the time, but when they do, even if it’s a bit flashy and marketing-y, I think it should be applauded as long as the motivation is right. I mean, what historic human even figured out that beer was a thing you could do to begin with? I’m sure a bunch of people were like ‘Ferment this stuff and drink it? What?’ but then it was awesome and people have done all sorts of mad things with fermentation and we have a lot of lovely, lovely booze for their troubles. And plenty of people think beer ice cream sounds ridiculous, but you know what? It’s amazing and tasty. And no one would have known that until someone tried their bonkers idea to make it in the first place.

Read This!

24 October 2012
Read This!
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The interweb is big, and I read and see loads of good stuff on it every week, so I figured I should attempt to spread it around. I will make semi-regular attempts at this. I couldn’t decide what to call it, so ‘Read This!’ won, because it’s what my blogroll menu on my bookmark toolbar at work is called, and I retreat into its comforts regularly.

I am stealing this idea from Yes and Yes, by the way because Sarah Von is brilliant!

(Also, I owe this blog some cakes. Numbers 9, 10, and 11 to be precise. They are coming!)

Anyway, awesome things from this week are:

Paradise With An Asterisk – Outside magazine
I read The Bomb by Theodore Taylor, a fictional account of the nuclear testing at Bikini Atoll, when I was in high school and became fascinated by the early nuclear weapons testing and all the stories around it. I don’t remember if this was before or after I saw Infinity, which is about Richard Feynman’s early life and participation in the testing at Los Alamos and his relationship with his wife Arline, but it was definitely after my obsession with Albert Einstein, and I knew about the hesitation of scientists to use this new technology or even test it. This stuff stuck with me, and when I ran across this article (linked from The Hairpin I think) it reminded me what a mess it all was. Science is amazing and powerful, but in the hands of non-scientists, or just non-sensible people, it can be horrifying across generations. It’s sad that the US can’t/won’t sort this out for the Bikinians, but it seems so far beyond being sorted out by anyone at this point. I’d still love to see Bikini someday.

What “Gangnam Style” Really Means – From Someone Who Lived There – xoJane
I hadn’t actually heard Gangnam Style til I was getting my hair cut a few weeks ago, because despite being aware of big stuff on the internet, I am usually late to the actually seeing or hearing it party. Anyway, I knew what it was the minute I heard it, and I was all, ‘yeah, this is pretty catchy’, but then I forgot about it for a while. Until this article popped up on xoJane, which is awesome. I love when stuff from other countries makes it big all over the world, and the fact that it’s social commentary without people even realising it is hilarious. I often wonder how long it’s going to take for non-English pop songs to get so popular that English speakers will learn the words to them without completely understanding what they mean, as it so often happens in the opposite direction. That will be a good day. And this girl’s point about the fact that everyone seems to be willing to make an ass of themselves off the back of the song is great. Also, of course, there is Ban Ki-moon.

 

Tyrannosaurus’s forelimbs: Useful, though probably not for dancing – The Economist
T-reeeeexxxxxx! They say not for dancing, but you know they could have been doing jazz-hands all over the dinosaur place. I love dinosaurs. That is all.

Incredinburgh
WAHAAAA! Crustaceans! I don’t know why! But the lyrics are pretty brilliant. Did you hear what I Sedinburgh?

Cakes 6, 7, and 8, or I Have Been Baking But Not Blogging

7 October 2012
20 Chocolate Cakes, Baking, Beer
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So, at the start of October, I am behind on cakes. I just did number 9 on Friday, and number 10 is coming today. Those should have been done by the end of September if I wanted to be halfway through at the half time mark. But that’s ok. I can probably catch up. What I’m VERY behind on, obviously, is the writing about it part.

I’m kind of ok with this since the point is more the cakes than the writing. There has also been a lot of work going on in my kitchen and bombarding of my wallet in other ways, so I’m fairly impressed that I’ve managed to keep up the baking through it, which obviously requires the kitchen space, and perhaps less obviously, a fair amount of money. I guess the thing that suffers here is my commentary on the beers and even the flavour of the cakes, because it’s hard to write about that kind of thing weeks after the fact without notes.

In any case, I will give a brief rundown of cakes 6-8 so that I get something up here rather than never doing it at all, and hopefully I can then get back into normal cake writing starting with number 9. So: onwards!

6: Chocolate Ginger Beer Cake with *gasp* NO BEER!

I found a recipe for Chocolate Root Beer Cake on The Kitchn in the midst of the craziest part of kitchen work. It was a super easy recipe, which I needed if I was going to pull of any baking at that point. But I’m not a huge fan of root beer, so I swapped it for ginger beer and I did not frost the cake because there was so much sugar going into it that I guessed it probably wasn’t necessary. I was right. The cake surprisingly ended up not too sweet, but It was fine without frosting. It had a nice gingery flavour and was pretty light. However, it was also full of hard bits of flour, because I was slightly lazy about getting it all mixed in properly. So, slight disaster and not something I would bring in to work or serve to other people. But it was a nice thing to keep in the cabinet and snack on all week.

The plan had been to go find a beer with a hit of ginger in it to go with this, but I never made it to the beer store that week, and I was so busy I just ended up drinking wine or milk with it. I was a little annoyed with myself for not making the extra effort, but there you have it. I also don’t have a picture of this cake so you’ll have to trust I made and devoured it without proof. No one is perfect, especially me.

7: Chocolate Zucchini Cake with Cromarty Brewing Co. Red Rocker

Lovely cake, lovely beer, just not good together.

This cake was awesome! I think it may be my favourite so far, at least of the ones I haven’t made before. I had a bunch of zucchini in my veg box and I love zucchini bread and muffins, but I’d never done a chocolate version before so I googled it and got to work. I thought it would be appropriate to try the recipe from the blog actually CALLED Chocolate and Zucchini. I used olive oil rather than butter, mostly because I was almost out of butter. I didn’t have any coffee so I didn’t use that, and I had just under the right amount of chocolate, but it was fine, and it also had dried cranberries in it which was quite a nice touch for the cake in the end. It was an extremely easy cake to make and I will absolutely be adding it to my repertoire.

I made it to Cornelius this time and I grabbed Cromarty Brewing Co‘s Red Rocker, which they call a ‘red rye hop extravaganza’ on the label. It’s 5%, hoppy as promised, and on it’s own, quite a lovely beer. Unfortunately, it did not match the cake. This may be the first real match fail. It’s hard to remember specifics from a few weeks ago, but I remember thinking it was bringing out all the wrong parts of the zucchini flavour in the cake and just not playing nicely with the rest. I put it down until I finished the cake and then happily drank the rest afterwards.

8: Black Bottom Cupcakes with Williams Bros. 80/-

Good all ’round.

I have made these many times, and I’ve even written about them here before, so the recipe already exists on this blog. They’re so easy and I happened to have everything in the house to make them when Kristina, who loves these cakes, was coming for dinner around the time of her birthday, so what better excuse, really!

We were drinking wine that night but for the beer match a few nights later, I went and grabbed some Williams Bros. 80/-, mostly because it’s just really good beer and I wanted some (I love Williams’, easily one of the best breweries in Scotland). These cakes have a bit of cheesecake in the top so I was wondering how it would go, because I keep thinking cheesecake is going to be the hardest to match. But here, it didn’t seem to be any kind of interference. The lovely dark beer went well with the richness of the chocolate cake bit of the cupcakes, and the tang of the cheese seemed to work ok with all of it. So this was a happy, easy match, which is great because now I know what to drink with black bottom cupcakes.

5: Hershey Chocolate Cake with Knops California Common AND Beer Ice Cream!

2 September 2012
20 Chocolate Cakes, Baking, Beer
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I made this cake about 3 weeks ago now, but it’s been chaos around here. There was some re-doing of the kitchen, so I had no sink for about a week, and things were dusty and discombobulated. Great for drinking beer, but not for making lots of cake. I’ll soon get back into the swing of things, but first I have to write about cake number 5 and its accompaniments, because YUM.

SO MANY TASTY THINGS IN THIS PICTURE. I can’t even handle it.

The Cake

This cake is the cake on the back of the Hershey Cocoa container. This cake is the cake my Mom made for birthdays and frosted with all sorts of different things. This cake is so incredibly easy it should probably be illegal, and no one ever believes it’s easy when they taste it. Everyone who tries this cake loves it and I can throw it together in about 10 minutes with my eyes closed. Whether you’re a baker or not, you can make this cake. This is THE ONLY CHOCOLATE CAKE YOU WILL EVER NEED.

Ok. It’s good cake. Got it. But seriously, I tell people this is like a homemade boxed cake, because it sort of is. You do it all in one bowl and there’s no fancy business going on. You literally just throw all the ingredients together and beat them, then add the boiling water at the end. It’s moist and dense and adaptable if you want to try new things with it. It’s not super fancy and it doesn’t require expensive ingredients. It just works, and it’s good, and I was so excited about it this time that I even forgot to put the dinosaur sprinkles on that I planned. But that’s because there was ice cream. More on that later.

You can frost this cake with anything, and my favourite is mint flavoured homemade whipped cream. My Dad used to make this into a multi-layer Christmas tree cake for my Mom’s birthday with mint whipped cream dyed green. I think my Grandma used to make it for her. It’s even what I requested for my high school graduation party minus the Christmas tree shape (aaaages ago, yeesh). But this time I frosted it with the chocolate frosting that goes with the cake recipe. It’s also super easy because you just melt the butter rather than beating it with the sugar from solid.

So without further ado:

Hershey’s ‘Perfectly Chocolate’ Chocolate Cake

2 cups sugar
1-3/4 cups all-purpose flour
3/4 cup HERSHEY’S Cocoa
1-1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1-1/2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
2 eggs
1 cup milk
1/2 cup vegetable oil
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 cup boiling water

Heat oven to 350°F (175°C). Grease and flour two 9-inch round baking pans.

Stir together sugar, flour, cocoa, baking powder, baking soda and salt in large bowl. Add eggs, milk, oil and vanilla; beat on medium speed of mixer 2 minutes. Stir in boiling water (batter will be thin). Pour batter into prepared pans.

Bake 30 to 35 minutes or until wooden pick inserted in center comes out clean. Cool 10 minutes; remove from pans to wire racks. Cool completely before frosting.

THAT’S ALL. Can you believe it? Everyone can make this cake. I promise. Oh, and the frosting:

1/2 cup (1 stick) butter or margarine
2/3 cup HERSHEY’S Cocoa
3 cups powdered sugar
1/3 cup milk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Melt butter. Stir in cocoa. Alternately add powdered sugar and milk, beating to spreading consistency.
Add small amount additional milk, if needed. Stir in vanilla. About 2 cups frosting.

(Obviously you don’t need to use Hershey cocoa for this. You don’t even get it in the UK so I just use whatever.)

MAKE IT. LOVE IT.

The Beer AND The Beer Ice Cream

So I’d been planning on making this as one of my cakes from the start, but since it’s such an easy one, I wanted to do something fun with it. I really wanted to try making beer ice cream, and I thought this cake would be perfect for a kind of cake and ice cream and party beer type thing.

The original plan was to use Cooper’s, because it’s the sort of thing I could see bringing a six-pack of (‘merican style) to a party. But Cornelius was out when I went to find some, and there were whole lovely cases of Knops beer sitting there waiting to be loved. As I mentioned in the intro post, I’ve been planning to use Knops at some point anyway, because my friend’s brother makes it and it’s fantastic. So I picked up a few bottles of California Common (which I can also imagine bringing a six-pack of to a party, if only there was such packaging here) and brought it home to meet its party partners.

This match wasn’t so much about the taste as the theme, but regardless of that, the beer worked well with the cake. The cake doesn’t have a complicated or sophisticated chocolate flavour, so it would probably go fairly well with anything that doesn’t have some sort of insane flavouring or hoppiness going on, but party cake and beer match was achieved! And California Common is a great drinkable party-time type beer in the best of ways. It’s not terribly strong at 4.6% so you can drink it all night (or all day at a barbeque) and it’s got a lovely flavour that complements a lot of different things.

Now, the ice cream. I’ve never made beer ice cream before of course, but the California Common worked so incredibly well, and beer ice cream might just be the best thing ever to have with Hershey chocolate cake. OH MY GOD. People. Try it. I got the ice cream recipe on the Awl.

It’s super simple. I don’t even have a proper ice cream maker, I just put it in a stainless steel bowl in the freezer and took it out every 30 minutes to mix the hell out of for about 3 hours. Then I put it in containers to freeze solid. Then I ate it with chocolate cake and beer. And man, was it good. I’m actually just thinking now I should have tried a beer float. THE POSSIBILITIES!

But anyway: Beer ice cream! Do it! When you first taste it, it’s kind of weird because it’s not what you expect. Then you have another taste and you’re like, DAMN! Why did I not do this before? Every day of my life?! I now have a reason to get a proper ice cream maker. Many different varieties of beer ice cream!

Also, everyone go get some Knops! Drink it with the only chocolate cake you’ll ever need, then make ice cream with it, then drink some more.

LOST High School

21 August 2012
Entertainment, TV
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So last night I had this dream that was basically the show LOST. Same characters and actors, same crazy drama, same everything, except instead of being on a bizarre anomaly of an island, they were just in high school.

Somehow, I felt, this would work.

It certainly did in the dream, anyway.

They are clearly on an unkempt football field here. Come on. No need for new publicity shots!

I still haven’t gotten all the way through LOST. I only started watching it for the first time a few months ago because it was on Lovefilm instant for free, there’s a lot of it, and it’s a good thing to take up 4-5 hour chunks of time when you would rather eat lots of snacks and turn off the sensible part of your brain than, you know, participate in civilised society.

It’s not horrible TV, some if it’s even good, but it gets crazier and crazier as the seasons march on, and I’m only at the start of season 4, so who knows what kind of insanity awaits. At the root of it all though, it’s just the same personal relationship schmaltz that goes on in Hollywood’s overblown versions of melodramatic high school situations. And that’s why it’s such a pleasure to watch, I guess.

Anyway, given that things like ‘Snog, Marry, Avoid’ actually get the amount of viewers necessary to stay on the air, they could re-set LOST in a stranger-than-usual high school and it would easily get ratings. EASILY.

I’m sure there are other shows you could do this with. Make your pitches in the comments!

4: Smitten Kitchen’s Heavenly Chocolate Cake Roll with Kaiserdom Dark Lager

19 August 2012
20 Chocolate Cakes, Baking, Beer
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The Cake

Heavenly Chocolate Cake Roll from Smitten Kitchen

Cake! So very, very nice.

I’m not going to paste the recipe here, because you should really go look at Smitten Kitchen and get hooked. Deb’s photography is WAY better than the crap I’ve got going on here, and you will find many, many lovely things to make. I will simply discuss my adjustments here.

This cake made up for the failings of the German Chocolate cake and then some. First of all, I love Smitten Kitchen. Everything I’ve ever made from there has been nothing short of amazing, and it’s even the source of my now-default brownie recipe. I will also take this moment to praise the slightly healthier carrot salad with harissa, feta and mint, because I’ve been craving it lately. As far as cooking guidance goes, I rate it right up there with anything by Jamie Oliver, because it never fails me. That’s about the highest praise I can give.

In any case, I chose this one because it was fairly simple, especially compared to the hell I’d just been through, and it looked like a good opportunity to tweak a bit without fear of disaster. Also: home-made whipped cream. Always a good thing. And a good excuse to try another one of Deb’s recipes.

Willie’s Cacao comes in satisfying, if slightly difficult to work with, round hunks.

The first thing I proved here was that using good chocolate really does pay off. I decided to go all out on the ‘good chocolate’ front and used Willie’s Cacao. Super damn expensive (£5.99 for 180g, which I needed all of for this recipe) but really worth it, and great for a simple cake like this one where the chocolate is one of few ingredients. Also, all of it is 100%, so no chance this cake was going to be too sweet like the sugar bomb I just made.

I chose the Madagascan Black 100% Sambriano Cacao, because the tasting notes said it had ‘juicy summer fruit notes’ and I was planning on getting some raspberry action in on this cake. And I’d say it worked perfectly.

The thing with this cacao stuff is that it doesn’t melt like something that is less than 100%, so I had to add a bit more coffee than the recipe stated to get to slightly more workable, and then I had to beat it into the egg mixture a bit at a time because it was too thick to stir in. But a little perseverance on that front paid off, so it was no bother. I was more paranoid about burning my fancy chocolate than anything, but I avoided it.

Also, I didn’t have the right pan for this cake, and because I’d spent so much on the cacao, I decided I couldn’t justify buying another new pan this time around. So I used a normal Pyrex dish and that meant the cake was thicker than I think it’s supposed to be. So despite rolling it up to cool, it still cracked in a few places. But no matter! I glued it together with raspberry puree and whipped cream and it tasted fantastic.

Speaking of raspberry puree, all I did was whizz up some frozen raspberries with a drop of water and a bit of sugar in a big mug. I slathered that all over the cake (and, er. in the cracks as glue) and then topped it with the whipped cream before rolling everything together and hiding the big crack along the top with more raspberry puree.

The final texture of the cake was almost like mousse. It was very, very dark, and the whipped cream ended up sweeter than I’d normally make it due to a slip of the sugar spoon, but it was ok because the cake was so rich it stood up to it.

Anyway. Make this cake. It makes bad days better. And it’s also gluten free, if you need that kind of thing, so bonus!

The Beer

Clearly this blog has shown that I cannot pour beer properly when it’s about to be photographed. But hey, cake!

I didn’t have a particular beer in mind for this one, so I asked Scott to pick something since he was going to Cornelius and I was feeling lazy. He presented me with Kaiserdom Dark Lager, which is 4.7% abv. Doesn’t have a super strong flavour, but has a bit of a chocolate note and I think it worked well with the cake, mostly because it complemented the raspberries very well. Also it makes me happy because it reminds me of staying at the Kaiserdom inn in Bamberg, and that would make any beer lover happy, really.

I guess I don’t have a ton to say about the beer in particular because I was so excited about this cake, but it matched well and did the job, so that’s all I can ask for.

3: German Chocolate Cake with Maui Brewing Co Coconut Porter

6 August 2012
20 Chocolate Cakes, Baking, Beer
1 Comment

The Cake

Very big, very full of sugar.

I’m not falling behind on my cake making, just my cake writing. Cake 4 is actually cooling on the counter as I write this, so I’m feeling good about my pacing. But this bloody German Chocolate Cake was so exhausting it took me 24 hours to get around to eating it, and about 2 more days to try it with the beer. I didn’t want to write about it because I had to recover.

I’d say this was my first cake fail. Not because it was inedible or anything, but because I was pretty unhappy with it as a cake in general. It was super expensive to make, and I had been kind of excited about it because I haven’t had German chocolate cake in ages. And I usually like it when I have a good one! But I’d never made it so when I saw the coconut porter on the shelf, I thought it would be a good excuse to try.

I’m not going to copy the recipe here because it’s LONG, but the one I decided to go with was David Lebovitz’s German Chocolate Cake. Go have a gander at it. It’s really quite intimidating. I had a long talk with myself about taking things one step at a time and just chugging on through, much like difficult work projects and life in general.

And that was fine, but this really is fairly advanced baking. Not because any one thing is super hard, but there are SO MANY THINGS and so many different parts to put together. And cutting cake layers in half horizontally is never really my idea of fun. But I knew I could do it, so, I kept on and took my time.

OVER THREE HOURS OF IT.

For real. At least there wasn’t a scary Anglerfish at the end trying to eat me. But the cake I ended up with wasn’t something I particularly wanted to eat myself, which may be just as bad.

The cake itself wasn’t too bad, but it was also a fussy one to make for something not all that magical at the end. I knew this right away because my tins were too small, so I had to cut off the overflowed edges of the cakes and eat them right away (problem solving!). At that point I still had three other components to make and a whole assembly to take care of ahead of me, so I needed encouragement.

Finally about to come together. Look at all the stuff!

The coconut pecan filling was very sweet, and there was a lot of it, plus there’s this sugar rum syrup business, and that’s before you get to the chocolate ganache icing. The recipe says to brush every layer of the cake with syrup before spreading some of the filling on, and I think this ended up making it too stodgy. Add the weight of all that filling and the whole thing really condensed itself, which makes the lightness of the original cake seem sort of pointless.

I used liquid glucose in the ganache instead of corn syrup, because you don’t really get corn syrup here nor do I have the urge to have any in my house. I feel like I should have just left it out altogether, because between that and the so-so chocolate I used, the mixture kept splitting weirdly, and it only stuck to the sides of the cake with a lot of perseverance. Lesson: always use awesome chocolate even if it’s going to cost you twice as much, and skip the weird additives that are only there for shine.

After this marathon evening of baking, I could barely look at the thing I’d just finished. Instead I made some nachos, drank a glass of wine, and went to bed. The next day, when I hoisted the very heavy thing out of the fridge and cut myself a veeeeery thin slice, it was just too much. Too sweet, too thick, too many things going on. I couldn’t finish it, even with a big glass of milk. So now I had an enormous cake that could probably feed at least 20 people, and I didn’t really want it. But I’d have to eat at least a little more, because the beer! I was excited about the beer! More on which in a minute.

If I had known this cake would be so insane, I would have maybe tried to make it as a two layer cake with the filling only between the two layers, no syrup, and a thin layer of ganache over the whole thing (using better chocolate). But even then, I’m not sure I would have loved it.

The Beer

Hooray for good beer! And I told you I had tiny, tiny pieces of cake. It doesn’t even look very nice once it’s cut. Pfft.

This cake was made because I chose a beer I wanted to try to match, and happily that beer was great! Maui Brewing Co‘s Coconut Porter (in a can!) was something I’d been eying for a while. It’s 6% abv and brewed in Hawaii, so it came a long way to sort out this piece of cake. And it was a great match in that it actually made the cake slightly easier to eat. I still only had a teeny piece, but the flavour and richness of the beer balanced the cake’s insanity out enough to enjoy it a little. And the beer itself had just a hint of coconut under a lovely, dark, malty yumminess. I had some with spicy sweet potato fries as well, and that was heavenly. I will be trying their other beers. Plus their logo is a turtle, which makes everything better.

So anyway, cake fail, beer win! I’m ok with that. Especially as the next cake is way, way less crazy, so I’m looking forward to having a whole cake I actually want to eat again.

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