The BetsyG-Spot

Great. In my delirium, I forgot to click Publish last night, so I’m running a little late…I also have to confess that in the light of day, though feeling no better, I have fixed the many bad typos introduced last night.

I just chugged some Dimetapp, which I’m very sensitive to, but the nose is running, running, running. I buy the children’s elixir, because the full dosage knocks me right out and using the elixir I can take a half dose and still have some degree of coherency. So the first grand experiment is to see what degree of coherency I can maintain on Dimetapp. Enjoy watching me stumble along…

Today I baked a cake. I am not a baker; the fact that I handled flour twice in a week may bring on the apocalypse. But my son Alex and I watched Throw Down on the Food Network a few nights ago in which Bobby Flay challenged Cakeman Raven out of Brooklyn, NY to a Southern Red Velvet Cake throwdown. (For the uninitiated, Bobby Flay is a chef who finds whoever is best at a particular culinary feat and challenges that person to a cooking or baking duel.) Although Bobby Flay won, to his own astonishment, everyone was impressed with Cakeman’s beautiful, red cake. So Alex got it in his head that I had to bake one.

Cakeman’s recipe was on the Internet, and it’s fairly simple, except that I seem to have a little dyslexia between baking soda and baking powder that goes back a long time. My childhood friend Julie may remember the cookies in Home Ec that ran together and the muffins that were too salty because we’d mixed up those ingredients. Or maybe it was tablespoon and teaspoon for the salt in the muffins… (You can tell we are very old, because that was from a time when Home Ec was required for girls: baking for half the year, sewing for the other half of the year. Let’s not even get into what happened with the sewing project, but needless to say, I never was able to wear the set of shorts I was making.)

Today I had the usual problem with the soda/powder. I have taken to reading out loud the ingredients and the package to ensure I use the right thing, but today I was skyping with Paulette when I should have been paying attention to my baking. So I put in baking powder for soda, but I was able to remove it all, I think. It’s unclear to me if a few flakes of baking powder would have done any harm.

The recipe also specified that the buttermilk and eggs be at room temperature. Who the heck has time to wait for that? I thought it was enough of an accomplishment I’d softened the butter and cream cheese for the frosting. Would it make a difference if the buttermilk and eggs were still cold from the fridge?

I started to really worry about this once I saw the cakes come out of their pans. Here is the first layer after I started frosting it. I must say, though, my cream cheese frosting was fi-ine.

A little flatter than I thought it should be

From the top, attempting to copy Cakeman’s technique, the cake doesn’t look too bad, though I was little off-center so that messed up the pattern in the end.

Alex admired the decoration, even though it is off kilter

But when you look at it from the side, it is pretty sad.

The cake is supposed to be red. Not so much, huh? I used the teeniest bit of cocoa, and a lot of food coloring, but it still wanted to be brown. It was quite delicious in any case. Really, really good, I thought. That cup-and-a-half of oil will do it every time…Everything’s better with tons of oil.

Because I only had two cake pans and the recipe called for three, I finally used this weird cake pan my aunt gave me years ago. My aunt was always bringing home wonders from her local gadget store. For example, she loved her spaghetti cooker, which was a clear plastic tube in which you put the spaghetti, and then you poured boiling water into it. After letting it sit for a few minutes, the spaghetti was cooked, plus the gadget’s cover served as a colandar. She loved discovering these time-saving gadgets (”I just have to clean the one thing!”).

Here’s a picture of the cake pan my aunt gave me, cake removed. It is made of silicon and it is flexible. The cake in that pan cooked up just like the ones in the tin pans, but just a little faster.

Is it silicone or silicon? Whatever it is, this is a cake pan.

I’m afraid the Dimetapp is preventing me from doing my aunt justice, but she certainly had a lot of curiosity about the world and got such joy in discovery.

That is the story of my cake experiment. And now for something completely different.

Talk about your bleeding heart!

I read a news story this week that the oldest prisoner in Massachusetts, Nick Montos, had died at 92. He had quite a lengthy criminal record, one that got him on the FBI’s most wanted list not once, but twice. The crime that got him incarcerated for the last time involved robbing a local businesswoman, 73-year-old Sonia Paine, at gunpoint and tying her up. She managed to get free, grab a baseball bat, and give him a few good whacks, which led to his capture.

If you read the articles online, it appears he was clearly in the “bad guy” column. He is described by a prosecutor as “a criminal through and through.” Just read the rap sheet from the Chicago Sun-Times and you’ll be glad he was locked up. Yet this kook, Nancy W. Ahmadifar from a volunteer prisoner-advocate group, without even seeing his record, must have thought he was a sweet little teddy bear, because she thought he ought to spend his last days with his sister in Florida.

I am most definitely a bleeding heart liberal, and have been since I was a kid. I argued against the death penalty in fourth grade, knowing in the deepest way that killing someone is never right, even as a punishment for murder. People should not kill people if they can possibly avoid it. But this bleeding heart is beyond reason. Ahmadifar said Montos was “no longer a threat to a society” due to his physical condition. There are lots of people behind bars who are no longer a threat to society, but we don’t decide to send them on vacation out of sympathy. (Certainly the problem of reformed prisoners remaining incarcerated is a problem.) Anyhow given this guy’s past, would you really trust that he’s no longer a threat? There’s a little thing called the telephone and I would imagine that a career criminal might make good use of free access to one. Especially when he has nothing to lose.

I actually understood Dukakis’s answer about what would happen if Kitty were a victim of rape, would he want the death penalty for the rapist and he said no. That is how liberal I am. But this Nancy W. Ahmadifar and her group are, well, they’re stupid. They’re both stupid and working from ignorance, and they give liberals a bad name.

And with that little rant, I bid you adieu. Chills appear to be coming on, and the room is darkening before my eyes. Mouth dry, nose still running…OMG 1300+ words…And I have to get the cake batter off my Blackberry. Yes, skyping and texting while making a cake…

Have a wonderful, freezing cold weekend if you’re in New England, and thank you for reading.