Bacon Cake

You know you want it. Yes, it's time for me to make a bacon cake. I'm going to Thanksgiving dinner at one of the grad students place. We've had many discussions about bacon, so it seemed just fitting.
I found a recipe online which sounded good and I had all the ingredients. Here it is.
Bacon-Brown Sugar Coffee Cake

6-8 slices bacon (regular or sugar or maple-cured, but NOT peppered or jalapeño or garlic or anything you wouldn't want in cake)
2 sticks butter, softened
1 1/4 cups sugar
2 eggs
1 t. vanilla extract
1 cup sour cream
2 cups AP flour
1 t. baking powder
1/2 t. baking soda
1/3 cup dark brown sugar, packed
1/3 cup uncooked rolled oats

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Grease and flour the bundt pan.

Fry the bacon slices until crisp. Set aside to cool and drain.

Cream together butter, sugar, eggs, vanilla, and sour cream. Sift together flour, baking powder, and baking soda. Stir in to creamed mixture and blend.

Crumble or chop bacon slices into little pieces. Add dark brown sugar and oats, and mush together with your fingers to get the bacon and sugar blended and clumped with the oats. It will be a loose mixture, but you want the three elements to be well-acquainted with each other.

Put half the cake batter into the bundt pan (you'll have to put globs of it in--it's a thick batter), then top with half the bacon mix. Put on the rest of the batter, and top with the remmaining bacon mixture.

Bake for 45 minutes to an hour, until done (test with a toothpick or your finger). Allow to cool for at least 15 minutes before eating. If you let it cool for a few hours, the cake itself seems to taste a little sweeter.


The preparation of the cake went pretty much as described. I cooked up a bit more bacon than called for, since I knew the cats were going to come and beg. (They did) The bacon/sugar/oat mixture didn't stick together like it said, but instead made a sort of loose bacon streusel mix.
There was a bit of collateral damage when I tried to remove the cake from the pan. The bacon struesel had stuck to the sides and the cake didn't pull out cleanly. I covered it with some frosting so it didn't look quite as bad.
The cake was pretty rich, and tasted sort of like a cake doughnut that had sat on a plate with some maple syrup and bacon. It was tasty, and the grad students liked it. As for me, I don't have the metabolism that I did when I was a grad student so I'd better just stay away from bacon cake as a matter of principal.

A Brief Snippet in Time

A Friday morning walk/jog around my neighborhood. The air was cold, the sun was just coming up, I was listening to my favorite new song, and one of the neighborhood dogs came over to greet me with doggy kisses. As I looked up I saw the first few snowflakes start to fall, and saw the golden sunrise on the horizon, and realized that I had passed through one of those moments when my little section of the universe is in perfect balance.

A Matching Set of Parking Tickets

That's what cowdude and I got while we were on our date today, courtesy of the friendly university parking folks. "A memento," he said.
Anyway, it went well, but in keeping with my general philosophy I'm not blogging much about it. Give me a call or keep an eye out for my email if you want the juicy details.

Lions in Winter

My cats think it is the bitter depths of winter now. This is not surprising since the weather is now similar to mid-winter in Sunnyvale. They do not want to stay outside for more than a few minutes. My dad wants pictures of them the first time they experience snow, but I am beginning to think that it may be impossible to get them outside then.
Luna is old and mellow and does not act very different than usual. Rugrat still has a lot of pent-up energy which she used to get rid of when she was outside. Now she is restless and high maintenance. I had tabled my plans to get another cat, because they seemed so happy during the summer and early fall, but now I think Rugrat does need someone to tire her out.

Grad student feeding experiment, part 2

My boss bought the grad students an air popcorn popper for the conference room. However, being graduate students, one of them brought in some popcorn, everyone ate it, and then no one replaced it. They are actually quite generous about bringing in food for birthdays, etc, but popcorn is not one of those things you think about at the grocery store.
As a joke, I told them I would buy them a big bag of popcorn at Sam's Club. However, it turns out that the bag is 50 lbs. I didn't think they could go through that much popcorn, but then they went through a 2 lb container in about a week. So when I was at Sam's Club this weekend I bought them the 50 lb bag. It was $18. I'm starting a pool about how long it take for it to get all eaten.
1 big bag = 630 servings
19 students and postdocs

I am guessing March 31.

Match.com upate: Very superstitious

As you may've figured out from the fact that I'm not blogging much, emailing much or playing Bejeweled Blitz very often, things are still progressing entertainingly with cowdude. I'm still superstitious so that is all I'm going to write on the matter.
I'm not superstitious enough to keep from using him as an excuse to stop emailing pinball wizard and Mr Player, however. In the end, I just didn't feel like meeting up with either of them, and took the easy way out.
I did sort of cyberstalk T on Match. I verified that he has a profile, and seems to be logging in often, but due to the non-anonymity of it, I didn't look at his profile. I don't really want to see what's in there, anyway.

Halloween 2010

In pagan lore, it is said that the veil between the worlds is thinnest on Samhain/ Halloween. I spent it in the air, flying back to Ithaca on the red-eye. I can’t say it was a mystical experience, but at least it was an uneventful flight. Now I’m in the Newark airport, which is probably as far as one can possibly get from a mystical experience.
In my own personal own biddy lore, in the last week the veil between my worlds was thinner than it’s been in a while. It was great to be back and see everyone, but at the same time I felt like it is no longer 100% my world. I’ve gotten used to my world in Ithaca and am glad to be going home.