fuck 2011

here's my last post of this horrid, horrid year. i will now bid it goodbye with the middle finger that i broke after falling down the stairs. i mean it, fuck you 2011. fuck you kindly. fuck you very much.

such a rancid string of days does not deserve a recap. instead, i will tell you what i'm gonna' do in 2012.

1) learn to curse more effectively. malcolm tucker is my new role model.
2) spend as little time in washington state as possible

that's it. if i keep my expectations low maybe, just maybe, i can break the string of shit years that i've had since moving out to the hinterlands of the pnw.

i do have one request of everyone regarding 2012. can you all PLEASE SHUT THE FUCK UP about mayan prophecy bullshit?! you're all ruining precolumbian art for me AND I HATE YOU FOR IT!!

see you in the new year! fuckity bye!

last week, huh?

since i was still on vacation last week, i did a whole lot of not much. i mean, i ate some little sandwiches with leff

and i got a lovely package from groc which contained smarties and racing royals!

but not much else occured other than daleks planning to take over our living room.

oh, and excheckered posting.

that blog will be continuing throughout 2012. not so with pax which finishes today with a bulldog painting.

sometime in january i'll be starting a new daily sort of thing called jessica sketcher. details forthcoming.

hybrid british xmas

holiday greetings, blah, blah, blah. remember that xmas pudding from earlier this month? here's what it looked like after i unwrapped it today.

it smelled so. good. also satisfactorily scented? the brandy butter.

the pudding required a bit of work before we could eat it. namely, reheating via steam,

and covering with brandy.  glug, glug, glug.

brush, brush, brush.

and then?! FIRE!!!

i am going to cover more of my food with alcohol just so i can flame it. doritos? check. i'll use beer or something. maybe tequila!

anyway, back to the pudding. here is a naked slice complete with a soylent green piece.

here it is again covered with brandy butter.

absolutely, wonderfully delicious. i can't believe that i made it! i should get automatic british citizenship for that! (i got a contact buzz offa' it, that's for sure.)

we haven't found the pound coin yet though.

in addition to the pudding, we also had turkey with cranberry sauce and buttered brussels sprouts with bacon and chestnuts.

those sprouts are fucking incredible. (i subbed yogurt for the cream and it was still fantastic.) make them tomorrow. thank me later.

happy some holiday. have a comma splice.

earlier this week i started thinking. i thought to myself, i thought "you know what this world needs? another gin based drink." and so i set out to create the comma splice.

i'm not sure if you know this but it is difficult to come up with a new drink. it is even more difficult to write about it when you've been hungover for two days. so in the interest of brevity and keeping my breakfast down, i'm not going to show you all of the failed cocktails we imbibed. instead, here are the simple ingredients that you will need to make a comma splice.

i'm not brand endorsing. use whatever. just know that you will need gin, a citrus soda of some sort, a cucumber, some sort of grater so that you can do this to the cucumber

(that video goes on for a bit. apologies. we had had a smidge to drink by this point and i didn't feel like video editing.

result: )

and some paper towels through which to strain the juice from the cuke pulp.

you might want to make that two paper towels instead of just doubling up on the one. or, hell, use a strainer. whatever. just get the cucumber juice over ice. maybe do this before you're semi trashed.

after that, add gin and soda (pick your proportions. i tend to go heavy on the gin. surprise.) stir. garnish with cucumber slices and drink the fuck out of this shit.

ed note:  if this is already another named drink somewhere, i don't want to know. i did "due diligence" google research and found similar but not the same recipe.

the post where i finally make brandy butter

with five days left until i resteam the xmas pudding, douse it with brandy and then LIGHT IT ON FIRE, i thought that it might be a good idea to finally get around to mixing together the very reason i made xmas pud in the first place. yeah, time to make the brandy butter!

i used shed's mum's recipe which goes a little something like this: "unsalted butter, icing sugar, brandy. equal weights icing sugar and butter. brandy to taste. try 5oz each of butter and sugar, 1oz brandy." shed said that his mum doesn't really measure the brandy but added a glug to the sugar and butter mixture.

anyway, ingreds.

that cognac is naaaaasty on its own. there's some cinnamon flavor? whatever, it tastes like college and by that i mean goldschalger shots which is worse than ipecac, if memory serves. STILL! it works well in foodstuffs which is its primary reason for residing in our casa.

here is a puddle (4 tbs?) of it waiting to be stirred into the 8 tbs of butter and, idk, roughly 1 1/2 cups of powdered sugar that i mixed.

and this is the result!

i think it will probably look a bit more like the prepacked brandy butter that i google imaged after five days in the fridge. however, if it doesn't I DON'T CARE because it is FUCKING DELICIOUS!! many gazillion thanks to the shreds for getting this recipe!

is it really monday again?

grrrrrrraaawwwpbbbbbtmugwumps. is it really time for another weekly scheduled post? fine.

last week i...

mailed off four boxes worth of baked goods and stuff,

bought all of the eggs,

repeatedly watched the new "robinson" movie

painted a goofy "tie ger"

collaged a dog,

and gave the land o'lakes lady a pair of tits.

it's what leff has referred to as "the advent calender of boobs". as i said on plus, merry xxxmas.

by next week the worst of the holiday shit should be over. hooray. it will be a titsmas miracle.

mince pies

since it's, what, less than a week until xmas, i thought that i should get around to making the mincemeat pies that i've been talking about.  so after watching leff play "skryim" for about an hour, i made some dough and filled it with the mincemeat that's been marinating on my counter.

these smell *so good* when they're baking. they also heat the house quite nicely too as they bake in a fairly hot oven. check out how sizzly they were.

my pies didn't end up looking very pretty (let's be kind and call them "rustic".) but they are DELICIOUS! even with the weird green pieces that come in american mixed peel. they would be even tastier with vanilla ice cream. is that heretical? whatever, i live in the new world, right? ice cream it is!

relevant recipes: mincemeat, pies

edit:  thanks to shed for the correction.

more baking and other assorted items

once again i have nothing much to report other than the seasonal baking and such you've been seeing all december. well, ok, i got some new converse.

that's something, right?

but back to baking. this weekend, i made two more kinds of cookies for seasonal gift giving. they aren't as sexy as the shaped ones but they more than make up for it with personality. the two cookies in question are a nutella variety (please ignore the fact that they are called, ugh, "smooches". *eyeroll*)

and a batch of almond butter.

the only other thing that happened in my corner of the internet was autoposting. excheckered 

and pax and ak, naturally.

the above painting is, of course, a unicorn. wow, i am terrible with the puns.

i won't be baking this week so i'm not sure if there will be any extra updates. check back? i might surprise us both.

the holiday foodstuff never ends

perhaps it's been a bit difficult to see how much i hate this time of year what with all of the festive baking and shit that's been occurring at my casa. let me just say this: i am in a weird place. a VERY weird place. it has been a fucking hard year and, for some reason, hybrid british xmas is doing it for me right now.

that's how i ended up making mincemeat. the ingredients were very similar to those used in the xmas pudding from earlier this week.

but instead of being steamed into some flour concoction, all the fruit and stuff gets baked for 2.5 hours in a low temp oven. this is the resulting mess.

it's strangely tasty and it's now in a jar waiting to be turned into mincemeat pies.

know what else i made? fucking mulled wine. ya know what additional booze i added to it? fucking cherry bounce that i made in feb.

that shit was dangaroose.  it was also exciting to make as you can see from this video. (warning:  camera dancing, possible chance of seasickness at the end)

i even got to crack out my beautiful carafe that wayne gave to me as a housewarming present 8 billion years and 50 zillion houses/apartments ago.

since i was a captain of industry industriousness, i decided to bake a bit as well. i made toll house cookies. (see, this is why we were laughing so hard in front of the toll house in cardiff. because of the chocolate chips and the jet lag. (mainly the jet lag.))

you know that warning about not eating raw cookie dough that came out yesterday? yeah, i ignored it and scooped some out for myself with another spoon.

i am such a bad ass.

anyway, here's a finished toll house cookie stack

and also a batch of crack brownies

both of which will be finding their way to europe and the uk. (i distinguish because of what cameron did on friday. oh. ho. ho. (seriously, brits. *call me about that. i'm interested in your opinion.)

today will probably involve more baking to keep sads at bay. i'm not kidding you, it's 10:03 in the am and the fucking light sensor spot on the garage is still on. fucking hate washington state. grrrrrr.

minifig cookies

the last of the seasonal geekery baking is upon us. er um, you know, i made the last cookie for my favorite geek boys. of course it's a lego cookie. how could i not?

it's raspberry flavored. the facial features have a bit of dark cocoa in them.

now to package these for shipping. (next monday? so expect parcels the week of the 19th, kittens.) here's hoping that they won't get caught in a clusterfuck of a snowstorm like last year's packages did.

jiji cookies

the third cookie for seasonal geekery is jiji from "kiki's delivery service".

this is a slightly different flavor than the others as i used dark cocoa powder to make the black. so, uh, they're dark chocolate raspberry.

here're two "behind the scenes" pictures.

extra bonus tueday post: nyan cat cookies

the second cookie from this year's seasonal geekery is a nyan cat.

yay! nyan, etc. want some behind the scenes pictures? here you go!

tuesday bonus post: xmas pudding

this past sunday i found out that there was such a thing as brandy butter. can you just imagine? brandy butter?! anyway, upon further investigation (erm, shed told me) i found out that it's eaten with xmas pudding!   so i tracked down a recipe (i'm not going to live my life without brandy butter now that i know it exists, am i?) that...wait for it...takes 20 hours and 45 minutes.

i had to make a lot of substitutions 'cause xmas pudding is a british foodstuff. and even though it feels like i live in a wee britain, i don't. (at least not yet.) so when the recipe called for mixed candied peel, i had to use the stuff that goes in fruitcake.

additionally, i swapped sultanas for golden raisins. this was just the tip of the trade out iceberg. what else had to be replaced?

well, we had no brandy in the house so i used bourbon.

suet is a main part of the recipe. i don't even know where to start looking for that in the states so i subbed frozen butter in its place.

btw, this is what frozen butter looks like after it's been grated. cheesy, non?

the last of the ingred subs involved swapping out mixed spice for pumpkin pie spice.

*whew*

once i had the ingredients sorted, it was time to start marinating fruit in booze overnight.

that was 12 of the 20 hours right there. the other 8 had to do with steaming the pudding. before i show you that step, i need to mention that there's a pound coin in this pudding.

tradition, right? it goes into the batter after everything is mixed.

ah! time to mention another substitution! i don't have a pudding bowl so i used my trusty green pyrex bowl that has served me so well in the past. i then placed this into a makeshift steamer that i made using my colander and stock pot.

you see the clock at 10:15? yeah, i didn't take the pudding off the heat until 5:15.  this is what it looks like after 8 hours of steaming.

and after a glaze of bourbon.

no, not what you imagine when you think "xmas pudding" but, well, i *am* making this in the colonies. heh.

after the pudding cooled, i wrapped it in wax paper. it now has to rest for 19 more days in a cool, dry place to sort of...meld.

xmas day though, i'm going to eat the hell out of it with SO MUCH BRANDY BUTTER! (i'll post photos of this a bit later, naturally.)

i'm not finished with baking! later this week i'll have more geek cookies to look at. check back soon!