Showing posts with label cooking. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cooking. Show all posts

Monday, 9 August 2010

RUM: A few home hacks

Hello again! This is a story all about rum - how a bunch of us drank it and had some fun - so I'd like to take a minute, just sit right there and I'll tell you how to make some effing gorgeous alcoholic beverages!

Needless to say, this idea started out (as many great ideas do) under the influence of alcohol. There was a rum-tasting event at the Saint James Tavern on Tuesday, my friends and I had a couple of shots of some rum infused on the premises with a special concoction of yummy things and the words "how hard could it be" may well have been uttered.

Needless to say, once the words "how hard can it be" have been uttered, life simply cannot continue until an answer has been found, so the next day we dragged our aching heads up to ASDA and bought the following:
  • Rum (Morgan's Spiced)
  • 2 Coconuts
  • 1 Pineapple

On returning home, we proceeded to hollow out the coconuts and the pineapple (saving the coconut juice in a glass), and stuff the little pieces of fruit and nut we were left with into a spare 2 litre Coke bottle. Having made a bottle of fruit, we poured in the coconut milk and the rum, shook it all up and left it overnight.

The following morning, we awoke bright-eyed and excited like young children on Christmas morning, eager to taste the fruits of our labours.

IT. WAS. AWESOME.

Needless to say, the bottle didn't last us very long.

So, we bought another bottle of rum and refilled our fruit bottle, reasoning that much like a teabag it was good for more than one use.

It was. On our second attempt we decided to filter the fruit-infused rum using coffee filters, as our previous batch had a tendency to settle after a while. The result, dear friends, was an amber nectar that was sweet and refreshing and damned tasty to boot.

Then someone discovered a recipe for making rum liqueurs.

How hard could it be?

We mixed 8oz (225g) of sugar into half a pint of water over a low heat. Once it started to take on a slightly syrupy texture we removed the heat and added half a pint of our fruit rum, left it to cool and decanted the whole thing into a bottle and left it in a safe place, where it shall stay for the next calendar month (or until next week, if we get bored). We tried a little bit of the cooled rum-sugar-water mixture before laying it to rest and it was GODLIKE. I shall let you know how the finished version turns out.

On a sidenote, I tried to repeat the liqueur experiment today by mixing dark rum and coffee to make a coffee rum liqueur.

It's not gone well.

I may have gone a little overboard with the coffee, so the stuff we have at the moment is not something I'm particularly fond of.

My girlfriend likes it though.

Fucking miracles.

'Til next time then, toodle pip!

Disclaimer: Some of the facts in the above account have been altered to make the story more interesting, and to protect the innocent. Messing about with alcohol is almost certainly not a good idea, and has been linked to speech deformities, bladder weakness, domestic violence, the spread of STI's, cancer, the Watergate scandal and Jedward. Don't say I didn't warn you.

(EDIT: I made some extra syrup and added it to the coffee rum yesterday evening. It tastes better now.)

Thursday, 22 July 2010

Brownies in a mug. I sense obesity coming on...

I've heard from a couple of different people at a couple of different points that it's possible to make brownies in the microwave. In a mug.

Well, wouldn't you?

A quick Google search turned up the following recipe, which I include below for your delight and delectation:


Microwave Brownie in a Mug

4 T flour (I used whole wheat pastry flour, but any will do)
4 T sugar (I used powdered, but again, any sugar will suffice)
2 T unsweetened baking cocoa (I used Hershey's Special Dark)
1/2 t baking powder (if you prefer fudgey brownies, leave this out)
dash of salt
1 T vegetable oil
3 T water
1/4 t vanilla extract
1 T mini chocolate chips

In a large coffee mug, mix flour, sugar, cocoa powder, salt, and baking powder (if using) with a fork or whisk.

Add wet ingredients and mix well. It will look like mud. Stir in chocolate chips.

Place in microwave and cook on high for 1 minute 30 seconds.


I decided to give it a bash, but there was one slight problem:

MY KITCHEN HAS BUGGER ALL IN THE WAY OF INGREDIENTS!

Out of all the ingredients listed for the above recipe, I could find (and I also had a cheeky search through my housemates' cupboards, just to check):
  • Flour
  • Water
  • Vegetable oil
Bugger.

I decided to improvise. I figured that since hot chocolate powder is basically cocoa powder and sugar anyway I could use that instead of the two ingredients. My recipe was as follows:

Put 4T flour and 6T hot chocolate powder in a mug. Mix them together. Add 1T vegetable oil and 3T water. Mix it all together til it looks like mud (I needed to add more water to dissolve all the powder, you might too). Stick it in the microwave on full for 90 seconds, and enjoy.

I'm going shopping tomorrow, so will be picking up the ingredients I need to try out the proper recipe (including chocolate chips, yum). I'll let you know how it goes.

For the sake of fair play, here's the link to the blog where I obtained the recipe. Many thanks for putting this out there:
http://community.livejournal.com/picturing_food/4200173.html


Disclaimer: Brownies will be hot when first removed from the microwave. If you burn yourself eating or handling them after following advice from my blog, it's your own damn fault for being a numpty, and don't come crying to me. Also, I may or may not remember to let you know how my recipe goes, depending on how busy I am.