So I've been talking about making something along these lines for a year now, and I finally found myself bored outta my skull enough to finally do it.
I haven't baked a cake since I was about 13 years old, so I didn't go into this filled with confidence at how it would turn out. Especially not since my ingredients were... a little unusual.
Yeah, the name is basically a drunkenly assembled portmanteau combining three things I fucking LOVE: cinnamon, bourbon, and Mastodon. Since I couldn't get a hold of any of Brent Hinds' every-drug-under-the-sun-infused blood (I suck at being a stalker), the first two alone will have to suffice.
So first up, seperate out your various measures of ingredients:
• 5oz self-raising flour
• 4oz caster sugar
• Stork margarine
• 2 eggs
• 2 large tbsps of cocoa powder
• Cinnamon (add to taste)
• A very, VERY generous splash of bourbon. I went for Southern Comfort, the wimpiest, but sweetest, brand I know.
So firstly, grab a pyrex bowl, pour in all your dry powder ingredients first, then add your margarine, then your eggs. Grab a whisk (I'd recommend electric, because I'm a lazy motherfucker, and you're guaranteed a better consistency with a little high-powered assistance), and bury it right deep in there, and start mixing!
Once it's mixed together pretty well, you can start splashing in some bourbon 'til you get the correct texture. I don't really know what that is, not being a cake/bake expert, so I just kinda played it by ear. Or sight. Or taste. Whateverthefuck sense is applicable here.
Add some extra sugar, bourbon, and a liberal sprinkling of cinnamon, all to taste.
[Insert photo of finished, whisked product here. Or don't, if you're an idiot who forgot to take one.]
Divide your mixture up between several cake... things. What are they called? The wee paper... skirts.
Cake skirts.
Fuckit, that'll have to do.
Anyway, divide it up between a lot of 'em, or just a couple, depending on how big you want the finished product to be. I went for big-ass-motherfuckers, as I believe is the correct industry term.
Once thats done, pop them into a pre-heated oven (gas mark 3) for between 15 - 20 minutes.
If you're feeling particularly limber, try and air-drum to anything from Blood Mountain. I pulled every single muscle in my arms doing so.
Once the time has passed, take 'em out of the oven and poke one with your finger. If it raises pretty quick, they're done. If it stays poked, then they're either not quite baked, or you've added FAR too much bourbon.
Guess which I fell victim to?
So now that your cakes are ruined, it's time to make the icing.
I didn't realise how fucking annoying it was to whip up some simple chocolate icing! Goddamn!
Dump your butter into the dry ingredients, and basically just... fuck around with a fork trying in vain to integrate the ingredients. Eventually lose the rag with it and say "fuck this!", storm off in a huff for 15 minutes, then grudgingly return and have another shot.
If you're still completely inept, boil up a tiny amount of water, and splash that in there, to help break up the chunks of sugary butter, and continue whisking it into something resembling dog shit.
It tastes marginally better than it looks.
Spread it out over your terrible cakes, and attempt to make it at least halfway presentable by swirling the icing around to little points. God they look awful, don't they? Sprinkle a little cinnamon over the finished products, and try to muster up some faux-enthusiasm at the prospect of eating all of them by yourself...
For about a year now I've been talking to my mate Luke about the idea of having a proper chilli cook off. We spent hours discussing all the weird, wonderful, bizarre and disgusting stuff we could put into chilli, stuff that would make it so close to inedible, but we'd eat it anyway, no matter how fucking awful it turned out.
About a month ago, after I actually ventured back into society and saw him again, we decided we'd 'set the date' so to speak, and decided on 2nd October. I've spent about 3 nights since we set that date working on my chilli recipe, so I had a pretty universally lovable chilli, with none of the weird ingredients, or even the stuff that some people aren't into, such as kidney beans, red pepper, that sorta stuff. The plan was to use this as a back-up, incase I really did create something so unholy that it rotted someone's stomach lining away.
Anyway, enough bullshit. Here's the fucking epic mass of ingredients:
To feed four people, you're looking at about 1lb of minced beef there. You can also use chunks of steak, in a similar way as you would in a stew, but as you'll learn later this can be tricky to get right.
As with just about every damn thing I make for this blog, this has goddamn fucking red onions in it. I don't know why I keep doing it to myself, or why every damn dish needs onion, but I guarantee if you ever see me cook, I'll be weeping more than a teenage goth when they accidentally stab themselves in the eye with their eyeliner pencil.
So, dice up those motherfucker onions, cut up a couple of small pickled chillies, and very thinly chop your clove of garlic (consult Goodfellas for tips on that one). Set those aside, and grab your red pepper. Decapitate the top of the pepper, and scrape out the seedy innards so none remain. Then divide into sections, slice, and chop it so it has about the same consistency as your onions.
You'll see from the picture above I bought smaller chilli peppers/haloumi/bacon again, you can consult the Mummified Bacon Bomb post on what I did with those.
Once all your veg/chilli is prepared, light a flame under your casserole dish, and pour in about 2 tablespoons worth of sunflower oil. Just for the sheer fun of it, rummage your hands around in your bowl of mince while the dish pre-heats, and imagine you've just killed the animal with your bare hands, and must now skin, gut and strip the edible flesh from it's bones. Yeah, I'm a morbid cunt.
Add the mince into the dish in stages, stirring it, and breaking it up with a big-ass fork so it has a decent consistency, and isn't just a giant clump of flesh. When it has browned nicely, you should have a decent water-y beef stock in your dish. In order to keep this for cooking your veggies in, remove the mince from the casserole using a slotted spoon, and drain any excess liquid back into the dish. Once all your mince is on a side plate, dump in your onions, chillies, garlic, and let that cook, and soften for about ...7 minutes?
Boil up about 800ml of water, as you'll need this to make even more beef stock. Add in a tablespoon of plain flour: this partly determines how thick your sauce will be, so if you fancy something with the consistency of spicey tar, add in as much flour as you like. Once your stock cube has dissolved in your water, mix it in slowly using your stirring fork/spoon/spork/fpoon, and add in a small tin of tomato puree. If you don't have a tin let's say... about 2 tablespoons of puree will do it. Mix this all up for another 5-10 minutes, until it boils.
If you're weird enough, feel free to cackle, speak pidgin-Latin, and pretend you're some sort of culinary Witch/Wizard as you stir this. Yes, I'm that much of a fucking nerd.
When this has started to boil, when there are bubbles rising your cauldron, re-insert your meat. Dodgy turns of phrase aside, keep stirring for about another 5 minutes, so it all develops the same rich iron-brown consistency.
Pop your oven on at about Gas Mark 2, cover your casserole with it's heavy lid, and place it in the oven for around an hour and a half. While this is cooking, you can prepare any sort of side dishes you want to have with this. As I mentioned, I made the Bacon Bombs again: these only take about 25-30 minutes overall.
I doubt any of you will actually try this, but even if you do, I doubt you'll need to go through the next pain-in-the-fuckin'-ass steps as I did. Since for some bizarre reason, we were not having the cook off in my much larger, better equipped kitchen, I had to somehow find a way to transport all of this stuff up to Luke's for the final stages. I won't bore you with the myriad problems I encountered, and the burn marks on my hands as a result, but safe to say it was NOT an easy process.
Upon arrival at the venue for this spicey showdown, I divulged my plan of action to my cookery nemesis. I was to outdo whatever he had to throw at me by splitting my casserole into FOUR smaller bowls, and cooking four different varietys of chilli, each with different ingredients, sides and tastes, so that I would have ALL bases covered. Yeah, I know, I'm a fuckin' genius.
Here are my four varieties:
Chilli 1: The Universal Chilli
Basic chilli, taken straight from the casserole
Kidney beans
No chilli peppers
No hotsauce
Served with a side of boiled basmati rice
Bacon Bombs on the side too
Chilli 2: Nasty Nacho Chilli
Basic chilli
Add minimal amount of kidney beans
Add ONE variety of hotsauce, for extra bite
Small amount of chopped chilli peppers (seeds removed)
Served with tortilla chips, sour cream, grated cheese and guacamole
Chilli 3: Ch-Ch-Chilli
Chilli
Chocolate
Cherries
Chilli 4: Nuclear-strength,oesophagus-scarring, colon-rotting CHILLI CON CARNAGE!
Basic chilli
Add in a tub of extra chopped red pepper
Add a chopped chilli, with seeds intact
Add in lashings of 4 different varieties of hotsauce: Louisiana, Tabasco, Nandos HOT Peri Peri and Dave's Inanity Sauce. Yeah.
Serve with a warm cerveza, because water is for fuckin' pussies
Incase you're not as hip to hotsauce as I am, may I present:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave%27s_Insanity_Sauce
Basically, using these four weapons of choice, I fucking annhilated the competition. Not that there was much.
Luke had decided to go for the rather bizarre combination of using beef steak chunks, and instead of beef stock, he used a pint of Dark Chocolate Stout beer, by Brooklyn Brewery. He also slow-cooked it the night before, for far too long, as he thought that would tenderise the beef? The boy ain't right.
His own sister charmingly described his chilli as looking like 'when you take a shit when you're hungover'. So ladylike. But yeah, it really did:
As much as I enjoyed making all of this stuff, and as amazing as it all tasted (no ego, it seriously was damn good!), it was kinda spoiled by the fact that only 2 other guys showed up, and they had both eaten already, despite the fact they knew we were cooking for them.
I also got called gay for having a food blog. The great Steve Hughes says it better than I ever could:
