A brief interlude from knitting:

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the Kitchener Bitch’s Margarita Cupcakes

These are the decidedly non-vegan bastard stepchild of this admittedly already delicious-sounding recipe from Isa Chandra Moskowitz’s Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, and the White Velvet Butter Cake recipe from my favorite baking book, The Cake Bible … with a few added tricks of my own. I’ve been reading blogs about baking and specifically about cupcakes lately, and I fear I will gain 756 lbs just by thinking so much of exotic sweets. But I had to make first chocolate cupcakes, and then these. The coconut is an optional touch, or you can use colored sugar or jimmies as your sweet tooth dictates.

Velvet Lime Cake

Have at room temperature:

4 1/2 egg whites (about 4 full liquid ounces/135g)

1 liquid cup milk minus 2 tablespoons (8 ounces/+/-242 g)
2 tablespoons fresh lime juice (18g)
1 teaspoon lime extract (4 g)
1/2 teaspoon orange extract (2 g)
1 teaspoon vanilla (4 g)
1 tablespoon grated lime zest
3 cups cake flour (10.5 ounces/300g)
1 1/2 cups sugar (10.5 ounces/300g)
1 tablespoon + 1 teaspoon baking powder (19.5 g)
3/4 teaspoon salt (5 grams)
12 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened (6 ounces/170g)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Line muffin tins with twenty-four paper liners. In a medium bowl, lightly combine the egg whites, 1/4 cup of the milk, and the vanilla. Set aside. Mix the remaining milk with the lime juice and the lime and orange extracts. (The milk will thicken and curdle a little; don’t freak out, this is okay.) In a large mixing bowl, combine the zest and the dry ingredients and whisk together to combine. Add the milk-lime mixture and the butter. Mix on low speed until combined, then on high speed for 1 1/2 minutes to build structure and aerate the cake. Scrape down the sides. Add the egg mixture in 3 batches, scraping the sides of the bowl down and mixing for 20-30 seconds after each addition. Scrape down the sides. Fill paper liners two-thirds full. Bake 12-14 minutes or until tester inserted near the center comes out clean and cake springs back when pressed lightly in the center. The cakes should start to shrink away from the pan edges only after removal from the oven. Let cool in pans for 10 minutes, then transfer to a rack. Frost with Margarita Frosting.

Margarita Frosting

1/2 oz. tequila

1/2 oz. Triple Sec or Grand Marnier

1 oz. lime juice

1/2 teaspoon lime extract

1 tablespoon lime zest, grated

1 oz. milk

8 oz. butter, softened

Confectioner’s sugar

Cream the butter using a hand mixer. Add the milk, liquors, lime juice, zest, and lime extract and blend. Start adding in confectioner’s sugar until the frosting reaches a spreadable consistency. After the cupcakes have cooled completely, spread this frosting thickly over the tops. If desired, roll edges in colored sugar, coconut, or jimmies.

More unfinished flotsam and jetsam in my project pile, that is. These are the works in progress that have been rotating in and out of my knitting bag these days:

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The Very Late Baby Sweater. Intended for Zellie, CBear’s truly wondrous brand new baby girl; destined to arrive probably somewhere around baby’s Week 4 at this rate. This is based on a vintage surplice sweater pattern that I’m updating with new yarn, simplified stitch pattern, new gauge, and new closures (to make it easier to get baby in and out without unnecessary acrobatics.) The pattern will appear somewhere, once I finish writing it.

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The Even Later Birthday Stole. Yes, it was back in May that I told my friend Lisa that I was starting her stole. Fast forward eight months and this is how far along I am. Yikes! (I started over twice, in three different yarns, and I’ve only recently regained interest in making this project stop haunting my knitting basket - but still.) It’s coming along nicely, if a tad more slowly than the last time I made a stole from this pattern and yarn. Or maybe I wasn’t quite so flea-brained then as I am now. Who can remember? Not me, that’s for sure.
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The Furtive Sock Project. Now did you really think I wouldn’t have a sock stowed away someplace? This is my sock for riding in the car, for waiting at the auto body shop, for standing in line at the grocery store. It’s Great Adirondack Soxie - pros: it comes out awful pretty, and it makes a nice soft fabric; cons: it is DYEING MY HANDS PURPLE. I fear that I’m going to have Barney-colored ankles after every time I wear these.

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The Class Sample. I’m teaching a Beginning Lace class at Loopy right now, and all of the students chose Branching Out out of all the free patterns they could choose from. I had one I knit for myself to show them, but I wanted to be able to do it along with them so I could show them how stitch by stitch. Hence this sad little stub of a scarf. I think this one might never get finished - I might just pull it out to use as a demo whenever I teach this lace class again.
Who knows which project will get done first? And will I ever actually finish anything after all? Tune in to find out…

Doggedknits tells me that “today is National Pie Day, y’all.”

Mmm…. pie. Let’s all pause and reflect, shall we?
Nah. Beat you to the fridge. Ready? Set? GO!

…of what hopefully (at y’all’s request) will be a surge (can I still use that word without grimacing?) in posts. In the last week there’s been so much to tell you that I could barely type for the sound of my head spinning. (I’ve gotten some requests to blog more often, and I’m going to try to oblige!) First, let me say a very belated thank you to Laura22, who left me utterly speechless when I came home to this in the mail:

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What a wonderful RAK! There were more goodies than I can even list here, and certainly more than I deserve. Hats off to this lovely Texan lady.

Now for a confession. There’s something I’ve been hiding from you. I have a million projects in the hopper, as you know, but what was I to do when this hit me by surprise? I was doing my usual drooling over Aquaknits‘ latest FOs when I ran across it and knew I had to make it on the spot. I dug in the stash for a recent closeout of Karabella Aurora 8 from YarnHut, and cast on immediately. …I can’t quite say why I didn’t tell you about it! There was something distinctly naughty, I suppose, about casting on for another sweater when so many projects languish unloved in my knitting basket. But I just had to do it. And here it is, unassembled but all knitted save a buttonband, half a sleeve, and a hood:

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It’s the Central Park Hoodie from Knitscene. It’s no feat of cable-dy bravery - it’s just a simple 6-stitch clock cable, run in different directions - but it’s a quick knit, unless (as both Aquaknits and I discovered) you get obsessed with socks in the middle:

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(Those are my completed Fleece Artist socks in garter rib, designed expressly to distract me from the hoodie!) …And since we’re down here in the UFO pile, I’ll introduce you to my Socks That Rock experience to date (alas, the truth is out, I’m not a STR virgin and couldn’t participate in January One’s shockingly popular contest):

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One lone sock, awaiting its mate, in Socks that Rock medium weight, color Lover’s Leap. The pattern is vintage and will show up here sooner or later. I love this yarn - soft and beautiful and lovely to look at and lovely to hold. …I just want to say that I’m appalled by the recent debacle in which Blue Moon Fiber Arts’ bank shut them down because they supposed that so many people couldn’t possibly be interested in sock yarn. These women should sue for damages, and I think it’s a testament to their grace under pressure that they have not released the name of the bank to people like me. Because I certainly wouldn’t have been so classy.
Patterns! Soon! I promise…

(p.s. Yes, I was a Twinkie Marauder (or at least I hope it was the same group of twinkie marauders, because it scares me to think there was more than one set!) , no, the twinkies were not still in their wrappers - they were just eerily pristine after a Chicago winter duct taped to a lamppost, Freaks is indeed freaky, and of COURSE I’ll bake you a wedding croquembouche, Kathy!)

Alimum tagged me for this meme, which requests six weird things about me. For once I’m going to respond to the electronic equivalent of a chain letter - here goes:

1. Once upon a time, I was an experimental puppeteer. As in, I actually drew down a salary to make gigantic puppets for street performances and theater gigs, and traveled around Eastern Europe on a series of grants to set up artist exchanges.
2. When I was sixteen I quit school and hitchhiked around the country for two years.
3. I have seen literally hundreds of movies from the 1930s and 40s. Hundreds. It used to be that I was interested in film noir from the 40s and in the musicals of the 30s, but it has now bled over such that I will watch ANY movie made between 1927 and 1949, no matter how bad or obscure. The shorts are especially trippy, people, trust me.
4. I’m an avid amateur baker and cook, and I make a mean croquembouche. (Should you have any pressing need for a four-foot tower of cream puffs held together with a web of spun sugar, drop me a line!)
5. On an unrelated note, I once carved a replica of the White House out of a slab of Spam, and I also once participated in a roving gang of teenagers who taped Twinkies to lamp posts. What can I say? Six months later, the twinkies that hadn’t been taken down were in perfect condition. Scary!
   
6. To borrow a phrase from Charlton Heston, I have more sock monkeys than I need, but not nearly as many as I want. I’ve got something in the high two figures… but oh there are so many more to collect. (Unsurprisingly, I go for the old ones rather than the new, overly cute ones - I just love the way they walk the line between cute and creepy.)

…I won’t tag anybody, because it’s too much PRESSURE on these poor knitters… but if you do it on your blog, leave a comment here and let me know!      I’d love to have a look-see.