Maple Bacon Stout Chocolate Cake

Ok darlings, this is the one I promised you.  I made this while we were down at the beach, which means I was working in a less-than-stellar kitchen that was mid-grade when it was made in the 80's.  Aside from the insanely tilted burners, the poor calibration of the burners (no matter what, I couldn't get stuff to not burn on the bottom of the pan!! grrrr...), and the "lacking" of enough stuff it is actually a decent little kitchen.  What I'm trying to say here is that whenever I make something good at the beach it is automatically entitled to an "Oh DAMN!! That is GOOD!!" status just because of what I'm (literally) working with.

Every year at the beach we have a birthday night.  It started because one of our friend's birthdays tends to be that week but we decided we were ALL worthy of having our birthdays celebrated since we aren't able to get together the rest of the year.  Really it may just be more of an excuse to party bigger.  So ... birthday night gets planned and executed by me because I have a nearly 20 year history of fixing birthday cakes at this beach, in this kitchen.  (*Brief history flashback - this is where I would turn to the camera and we'd do an awesome photo montage - we stay in a timeshare that belongs to my Dad.  One of my brother's birthdays tended to also fall on a day we were at the beach and, because I am so awesome and my stepmother could boil water [though in that kitchen I couldn't blame her], I made his cakes.  They rocked.  They set me up for a groovy career path for a while.  Someday ask me about the bikini cake.*)

Being the beer snobs that we are we stopped at a local beer store down there before checking in.  What we found was enough to make me literally "EEK!" and grab up two bottles.  Rogue's Voodoo Doughnut Bacon Maple Ale.  You can only get this in North Carolina or Oregon.  The clerk advised eating something that was either a maple doughnut or bacon when you drank it - hence the idea for this cake.  (*PS - dear awesome clerk lady from Chip's Wine & Beer Market in Moyock, I dedicate this to you!!)  She knows her stuff and without further rambling here is my much promised recipe.

Maple Bacon Stout Chocolate Cake
Ingredients:*1 Devil's Food box mix cake (ok, you know I don't normally use box mixes, but it is the beach and you already heard about the kitchen so give me a break, will ya?)
*10 slices bacon
*1/4 cup + 2 TB maple syrup (NO Mrs. Butterworth's!! Get the real stuff!!)
*1/2 cup oil
*1/2 cup water
*1/2 cup Southern Tier's Imperial Mokah Stout (also scored at Chip's Wine/Beer)
*2 eggs
*One 16 ounce tub Duncan Hine's Creamy Homestyle Milk Chocolate icing (again, give me a break for not making it from scratch)


Here's what you need.

Directions:
1) Mix up the cake batter pretty much as it is called for, adding the 1/4 cup maple syrup and beer (which is not on the back of the box!).  Instead of using 1 cup water I used 1/2 cup water and 1/2 cup of the awesome Mokah Stout.  Truth be told, if I hadn't already drank the rest of that bottle, I would've used 1 cup Mokah Stout and no water, but it is hard to hold onto a beer like that for cooking with.2) Cook up your slices of bacon.



See??  Even with my "from home" pan the bacon is trying to burn.  Stupid beach burner.

3) This is actually worthy of being a separate step - don't let your bacon get all crispy!!  I'll be honest that this was something I wasn't sure on till after it was all said and done, but you want your bacon chewy, not crispy. 
4) Grease up your 13x9 inch pan.  Since I didn't want to use olive oil and since we were being supremely decadent, we actually used some of the bacon grease to grease the baking pan.  We simply dipped a paper towel in it and rubbed it around like you would do with Crisco (though it wasn't laid on that thickly).  It worked perfectly and before you decide to freak out remember, this cake is not for wusses.
5) Pour cake batter into pan.  Break-up/chop up bacon, leaving pieces that are 1 - 1 1/2" long (roughly the size of your thumb from joint to tip).   This may seem big but you'll appreciate it when you eat the cake.
6) Bake per directions on box.  Which, was something like 325 or 350 degrees for 30 minutes.  Read the box, I don't have it here with me to remember.  Cook till a toothpick comes out clean from the center.

Out of the oven & covered in icing!

7) Now for the icing!  Ok, you're using store bought icing which is a snoozer, but here is where we're going to make it fun.  Let the icing warm up some under those stove lights and mix in the extra 2 TB maple syrup.  It'll be yummy.  Spread it on the cake while it is still warm and it will melt out deliciously.

Here is the finished product, with the beer to go with it.  The lady from Chip's Wine & Beer Market was right, you definitely want to eat and drink at the same time.  If you have a piece of bacon in your mouth while you're drinking the beer all the better.  The beer is REALLY smoky.  Like "I think I might be drinking a campfire" smoky.  But it was good, and it was awesome and how often are you going to get to have both of these???

The cake itself was awesome enough that I brought it down to the beach to share with our lifeguard friends.  It isn't fair that they have six packs and great tans and get paid to sit on a beach all day, so I must tempt them with insanely delicious Maple Bacon cake. 



Lifeguard Ben approves!!

So, give the cake a try and let me know what you think.  I don't think you'll be disappointed.  This cake even got thumbs up from one of our friends who declares that she hates sweets and cakes and chocolate.  So, if that doesn't seal it for you, what will. 

Cookin' up a Stingray

Yes, you read that right. This post begins & took place in Duck, NC. where we were on vacation. We had been fishing from the beach and a friend kept catching skates (not the type you put on your feet to wheel around under a disco ball!). As he was tossing one back he commented how unscrupulous restaurants "cookie cutter" the wings and pass them off as scallops. I pondered that if they tasted like scallops, why weren't we keeping them and eating them? Good point, he acknowledged, and then he agreed we would do so with the next one.

The next one however wasn't a skate. It was a stingray. With the poisonous barb tail. But, a quick look on the ole smart phone revealed they're just as edible as skates. So, he hacked off the tail, let the thing die, and brought it to me. In a cooler. This is my experience with a stingray.


First off, how do you get it out of the cooler without turning into a prancing girl?? I'm not known for being very girly-girl, but I'll admit this had me prancing & flapping about the kitchen like I was trying to fly.

The wings kept turning under. And this is something that can kill you when it's alive. Or when the tail is still on, which it wasn't, but still. Ewww.

I decided that first I should maybe just drain out the cooler.

And that's when the entire thing went sliding out of the cooler and into the sink & I ran, yelping, out of the kitchen. So, Step 1 was solved, it's out of the cooler. Now what?

Well, I was still prancing about. Those wings rolled like slimy tortillas making a stingray burrito. So, naturally, the next logical steps were:

*go ahead and clean the cooler, obviously it would be rude to leave it dirty and smelly, and we don't want to be rude .. so best to go ahead and clean it out

*wash hands, the "slime" seemed to be really clingy

*try to pick up the stingray, watch it fold and slip

*drop stingray back into the sink & then begin flapping around the kitchen

*wash your hands again.

This proceeded on for several long minutes, much to the amusement of friends who were now watching. Time to man-up. I poured myself a stout (more manly, ya know?). I bellied up to the sink, because that is a kinda manly thing to do too. And I faced off with the stingray.

What I had looked up online said to cut the wings off. It showed a nice graphic photo of how to do this which required another swig of beer. I have never prepared a fresh fish before. Never filleted one. Completely new experience.

One note (which was mentioned online) when dealing with a stingray (or skate for that matter) is to make sure you have a solid and stable surface to work on. These things are slippery!!

Another note, which is my own to add, is make sure you have a sharp knife. On vacation, in the rental's kitchen, there were steak knives of decent enough quality, but not so much for carving up this fella. I ended up using a paring knife.

The wings off, this is what the stingray now looks like. I read that you can use a couple other parts (the liver for example), but I'm not familiar with the anatomy of a stingray enough to desire messing around more than this with it.

So, the wings go into a bowl.



Where they are soaked in 2TB lemon juice & a good sprinkle of salt for 10 minutes or so.

The recipes I found online called for barbecuing the wings. Again, being on vacation and of limited kitchen I decided to line a dish with foil, put some bbq sauce (which I just happened to buy on the way down there when we stopped for lunch) both underneath and on top of the wings, fold it all up and cook it in the oven.

That's before the oven. I had the oven on 350 degrees. I had thought they would take quite a while to cook, as I read that cooking them in a pan takes longer than the oven. Luckily, while they were in the oven I happened to talk to one of my brothers and tell him about the experience and how I was "winging it" (get it?!?!). He quickly did a search online for me and found something that said to cook them for 10 minutes. They had been in the oven for 20.

Out of the oven after 20 minutes of cooking at 350 degrees.

Yup, I think it's done. Though I have to admit that the bbq sauce creeped most everyone out because it looked like blood.

Special Note - if you're cooking something like this for the first time, don't cook it in something the color of blood!!

On the plate and ready for trying. It turns out that, once cooked, the skin on this peels right off. VERY easy!! That was nice

A close-up of the now cooked wing. It was nice and flaky. We all tried it and agreed that it wasn't bad.
There aren't bones, which was nice, though there was cartilage, which was easy enough to avoid. In the end I could've likely used less bbq sauce, because the flavor of that was a little overwhelming. Though, the general flavor of the stingray itself seemed a little bland.

Nobody ate a lot of it though. Of course, it wasn't out of the oven and ready for consumption until 11pm, a time by which we had all already had dinner. So that was one reason. Our friend Jesse, who had caught the thing, and I both admitted though that there was a lot of anxiety (at least on our parts) about eating something that could kill you. Potentially. At some point in time. Something none of us had ever eaten or had experience in cooking with.

But, I can now say that I've cooked and eaten stingray. After all, you don't go on vacation to do (and eat!) the same ole stuff you can eat at home anytime, right?