Rum cake... or is it a daiquiri cake?

Hellooooo everybody! The Fresh Pioneer is back with a tasty recipe guaranteed to warm up your January!

First, my favorite purchase (sorry, Boris, we're still getting to know each other) of the season. Mr. Coffee Latte maker. AWESOME. I'm in love. I'm going to dedicate my next book to Mr. Latte. (He needs a better name, I agree.) You put in the coffee, water, milk in the carafe, a handful of chocolate chips, and you've got hot mocha. The frother workers perfectly. And QUIETLY, which is bonus as I run up to a big deadline.
                                                              
Yeah, Me and Mr. Latte have been meeting in the kitchen, late late at night.
  My friend Mindy brought over her big book of recipes and a big bottle of... RUM. Ok, we only used about 2 TBS of the rum, so what will she do with the rest? Hmmmm, inquiring minds want to know!  Seriously, she said it would take her years to get through that bottle, which tells me she needs to make MORE RUM CAKE.

 So, recipe:
4 eggs
1 cup butter
1 cup sugar
3 c flour
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 baking powder
1 tsp rum

 There, see? Milk, sugar, rum. That's pretty much the basis of all good recipes, right?
No? Fine...
It's the start of THIS one.

 Flour, etc.

 Vroom, vroom.
We brought out Boris. I was just telling Mindy a funny story about the time I turned the mixer on a bit too high, just after my daughter had put in the eggs. I reached around, blindly, to the other side of the mixer and flipped the switch all the way to the OFF. Except... it wasn't the right direction.
 Tip of the day, even 3 seconds at super high speed can coat your kitchen (and yourselves) in egg yolk.
As I'm telling her this story, I did the SAME THING.
  She laughed, but I'm pretty sure she was making notes to call the local brain doctor in the AM. Durrrrrrrr me. I'm going to make myself a poster to place over Boris: POWER MIXER, DO NOT EVER CHANGE SPEEDS BY TOUCH INSTEAD OF BY SIGHT

Anyway, mix the ingredients (without managing to splatter yourselves). Add rum. Sip rum. Swig rum from the bottle. (No, no, no. I have a deadline and she was driving, so no sipping or swigging allowed.)

 We made a double batch so, imagine one cake here... Pour into a greased bundt pan. Smooth the top.

Put in the oven at 350F for 90 minutes. (That's what her recipe said but we checked it at 60 minutes and it looked good, so we took it out. I think older recipes have longer cooking times to make up for cooler ovens.)

While the cake is in the pan, start poking holes in it with a knife. All over. Feel the anger and dissatisfaction in your life.

Don't have any? Congratulations. 

Now fake some. Poke, poke, poke, poke.

Now, the sauce:
1 cup sugar
1 tsp rum
1/2 cup water

Bring to a boil, 5-10 min. No tasting to "check". Therein lies madness, my friends.

Spoon the sauce over the cake, letting it soak into the holes.

 Poke, poke, poke, poke.

 Spooning, spooning, spooning.

 (One cake is right side up, and one is upside down because Mindy was headed to a party. See? That's why she's popular. She's invited to a party and she brings RUM CAKE.)

 Do not lick off the glaze. Inhale deeply, but do not lick.

 Mine is sideways. Must be the rum. Everyone's having a good time. PAR-TAY.

 I thought this was a delicious pound cake recipe with the added bonus of rum. As I was eating my (first) slice, I thought of rum and what traditionally goes into rum drinks, and had a brilliant idea.

I bought some of this to make homemade Italian sodas on New Year's Day. And I had a lot left over. Rum and lime is part of what makes a daiquiri, right? So, I added a small amount of sugared lime juice and then fresh blackberries.

MMMMM. I do think this now a daiquiri cake.

    I hope you all enjoyed this recipe and I hope that January is passing quickly for you! Here, it's dark when we get up and dark when we go to bed and grim gray day in between. Wishing you clear skies and bright sunshine!

 Meanwhile, Mr. Latte, Boris, Edna and I will look for more recipes to share. Until next time!

(Here he is, reading for pleasure. Not spinning food all over, like he seems to do when we cook together.)

Christmas Table Topper and Easy Sugar Cookies with Stained Glass Windows

Hello everybody! Merry Christmas EVE! Of course, by the time you read this, it will be Christmas, but for me, right now it's.... time to prepare for the Christmas day feast!

First, the table topper. We put all the leaves in the table and it seats ten. (Still not enough, but we'll stick the kids somewhere nearby.)

 Ha! Love my little guy's expression here. "Mom, stop taking my picture!"

 Greenery from outside, dollar store candles, some silk flowers chopped up, and paper punch snowflakes are just about perfect.

Love those red berries!

I put in a silver snowflake ribbon and had another ready, but it just didn't look right to me.

 Maybe it looked like a fire hazard!! What ever it was, I decided we should use that somewhere else. I set the candles on upside down ramekins so they might be a little farther from the greenery.

 Here it is, all finished. Total cost? $10 of Dollar Store materials! I love Pinterest. It made it really so easy to find a look I wanted for the table.

 Speaking of tables, my friend Mindy brought me a gift. It's a replacement of a  bowl I broke earlier this year. Another friend, Barbara, had given me a 'Fruits of the Spirit' fruit bowl. It was really special to me, and when it broke I was so sad! You can imagine my surprise when I opened this! My little guys said, "Hey, she fixed your bowl!" Ha!  I'm definitely thrilled to have this sweet reminder of the Holy Spirit on our table again.

So, before the table topper, we decorated a premade gingerbread house. MMMMM.....

Found these really sweet gingerbread men at the grocery store and decided we had to have them. Usually, there are not enough 'figures' for a family our size. We just make do. But hey, there were enough for each one of us AND a few friends!

 My brother likes to post pictures of his recent climbing expeditions and the kids put one of the gingerbread men on the roof and called it 'Uncle Conrad'.

 A Lego man crept in here somewhere. I think it's 'Pirates of the Caribbean' plus the Lone Ranger's hat. Poor little gingerbread man to the left is holding on to his gum drop for dear life.

Thrift store candle holders for .50 and that awesome paper punch plus some mod podge = some pretty votives for my kitchen! I'm all about the teal right now.These keep me company when I set up to work at the counter in the middle of the night. 

Some of these deadlines have come hot and heavy right on top of each other. What's a girl to do when she just can't sit at that desk another minute? Why, pull a Mrs. Gaskell (author of North and South) and write in the kitchen with wee children underfoot. I usually don't write during the daylight hours since our kitchen is a bit of a superhighway, but I've learned to edit with one eye on the crazies.

We put out our luminaria on Christmas Eve. We didn't get a chance to put up lights this year so it was nice to have an outward sign that we're celebrating!!

So,  my friend Barbara (she of the fruit bowl fame) asked us if we'd come sing carols at the nursing home on Christmas Eve. Of course we said yes, because we're always up for a good party! We also wanted to bring cookies, so it was a good time to try out a giant batch in the new mixer.

What you see there is 15 cups of flour, 12 eggs, 4 1/2 cups of butter, 6 cups of sugar, 3 tsp vanilla, 3 tsp salt, 3 tsp baking powder. 

Edna was watching with bated breath. She had never seen so many ingredients put in one bowl. 

Boris handled it like a champ.... except for one small incident. Apparently, he is ticklish. I had just put in the 12 eggs, the 4 1/2 cups melted butter and the 6 cups of sugar. I started him up, and thought it was a bit too high so I felt around his ribs for the little lever... He started to twitch and giggle, and I somehow pushed it all the way to the right.

Eggs, butter, sugar.... EVERYWHERE. Boris has power, no doubt about it. It took us 20 minutes to clean it all up. My daughter and I were laughing at how far we found globs of goo. A whole egg yolk was on the opposite side of the kitchen! Ok, once we changed, we started on the cookies...

 Stained glass window cookies are made by cutting out a regular cookie, then making another cut out inside of the first. Break hard candy like Life Savers or Jolly Ranchers and fill the hole. Bake as normal at 350F for 8-10 minutes, on a cookie sheet with tin foil.

When you take them from the oven, let cool on the counter for a few minutes. Then put them either in the freezer or leave them on the counter for ten minutes. Since we only have two cookies sheets, I put them in the freezer for 3 minutes or so to save time. 

I want to wish you all the merriest of Christmases! I read this quote the other day and thought it was just lovely. May the peace of the Christ child be with you all! 

“And when we give each other Christmas gifts in His name, let us remember that He has given us the sun and the moon and the stars, and the earth with its forests and mountains and oceans--and all that lives and move upon them. He has given us all green things and everything that blossoms and bears fruit and all that we quarrel about and all that we have misused--and to save us from our foolishness, from all our sins, He came down to earth and gave us Himself.”  ― Sigrid Undset