Adventures in baking

Hello Readers!

One of the things I love to do most is bake.  However because I’m single and live alone I don’t do it often because I can’t have a lot of sweets around. I have no self-control what so ever with sweet things especially if they contain chocolate.

I have relatively new friend who is about to celebrate an anniversary with her husband and asked me to help her make a cake to surprise him with.

Being the baker that I am I said sure why not?

The cake she wanted to make was a chocolate irish stout cake with irish cream cream cheese frosting.

Well this is something you don’t know about me dear readers. I don’t drink alcohol. The closest I’ve come to drinking is when I drank some sacramental wine at a communion service and I didn’t even know it was wine until it was too late. In my little innocent mind I thought it was white grape juice. Then when the minister said come drink of the cup and it burned on the way down I didn’t know what to do.

Well anyway back to the original story I was telling.

So we are going through the recipe adding butter, sugar, and the normal cake ingredients when she asked what was next I told her the alcohol was next. I opened a bottle and pour in 3/4 cup of some liquid into the batter. It turns out I poured in the Irish Cream she then asked me so when do we add the stout?

I turned around and asked what do you mean didn’t I just add that? She looked at me and burst out laughing. No that was irish cream. I was like oops well then that wasn’t supposed to go in the cake then.

Not knowing what to do we decide to add the irish stout in on top of the irish cream as well as the rest of the ingredients.

We baked the cake and it came out just fine so we assumed the extra alcohol didn’t mess up the cake too badly.

Well as every cake baker knows you have to level off the layers on a layer cake so that they will stack straight. So while my friend is slicing off the extra cake to make for flat layers I decide to taste the scraps.

Purely for scientific purposes of course.

But of course you can’t try the cake without some frosting on top so I put a little on and tried the whole thing together.

It was really good! In fact it was so good I kept eating the scraps and putting frosting on top. Eventually I started to feel a slight buzz.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen I got a little tipsy from the cake!

Now if that doesn’t show you how much of a light weight I am I don’t know how else to prove it to you.

I have decided that I am definitely not meant to drink.

I did have fun though and I had a story to entertain you all with.

Smooches,

Shineka

Be a tourist!

Hello Readers!

This weekend was my weekend off and for the most part I took full advantage of that fact.

As you can tell from the subtitle of my blog I call myself a Southern Belle.  I currently reside in Augusta, GA.

Of course now a days my little city is known for being the Home of the Master’s Golf Tournament but there is so much more to this town of mine that I had forgotten I even knew.

This epiphany came about because the setting of the book I’m writing is Augusta and I come to the scene where my two main characters were about to go on their first date.

Since this is fiction I was wracking my brain trying to figure out a unique first date but I was at a lost as to what to do.  I mean we have lot’s of chain restaurants and some movie theaters but that seemed so typical and mundane. Then I remembered our downtown area and the Augusta Riverwalk. The area is quite pretty but it had been so long since I had been there that I didn’t really remember what was down there.

So Saturday afternoon, I became a tourist in my own town.

It was absolutely a blast. I went to the Augusta History Museum and looked and played with all kinds of exhibits.  I mean where else can you find a full World War I Soldiers uniform and a Teddy Ruxpin on display?

Then I walked along the Riverwalk and enjoyed the Savannah River with all the families walking around and the children on the playground. The day was gorgeous with a clear blue sky and trees full of leaves.  The temperature wasn’t bad either. Not too hot or too cold.

After the Riverwalk I went to a nice little restaurant called Boll Weevil Cafe and Sweetery.

Let me just tell you that Jesus was so there!  Their desserts are all made right there and they were glorious! They had a chocolate cake that was 7 layers but if you ask me it looked like it was about 30 layers! I had their Turtle Cheesecake Crunch which had a layer of fudge in the middle of the cream cheese filling!

(sigh) The deliciousness ended way to quickly!

I took lots of pictures and just soaked in the atmosphere from the area. To think I’ve been living here with all of these things for years and had been missing out on so many fun and unique things.

I plan on never doing that again and I hope you all will take the time to be a tourist in your hometowns and see what is special and unique about your area.

Smooches,

Shineka

http://www.augustamuseum.org/

http://www.augustariverwalk.com/

http://thebollweevil.com/