PEGASUS and Cake, continued

 

I have entered a strange blurred post-brain space.  I was an hour and a half on the phone this morning*—me, the original phone-o-phobe—being interviewed**.  Then I pelted down to the mews for (late) lunch and pelted back to the cottage again for handbells***—faithful hounds at my side of course, or, more likely, straying afield to assault passers-by.†  I then tottered back to the mews—hellhounds at this point holding me upright—and have spent the evening finishing the next written interview.††  And there are more interviews and guest blogs to come, I just don't have the dates and particulars yet—only the sense of looming threat.

            So.  After last night's post from Black Bear we are clearly in the season for recipes suitable for a PEGASUS party.  Here's one.

 Iced Chocolate Cookies†††

 3 c sifted plain flour

2 tsp baking powder

½ tsp baking soda

pinch salt‡

½ c cocoa powder

½ c butter

1 c granulated sugar

2 eggs

1 tsp vanilla

½ c buttermilk or soured milk

Sift the dry and set aside, mush‡‡ the butter and sugar together, beat in the eggs, then the vanilla.  Add half the sifted dry, beat, then the buttermilk, beat, then the rest of the dry.  Beat hard.  Drop on parchment-paper-lined cookie sheets:  350°F about 12 minutes.  They'll still be softish, but the bottoms will be firm.  (They may also subside a little as they cool.  Don't worry.)

Before they cool completely, ladle some frosting on them.  Quantities and texture are up to you.  If you want them to be really decorative, make your icing thin enough to pour, put the cookies on a rack that will be easy to wash later, and pour over.  Finish the job with grated chocolate (after they've finished cooling).  I tend to prefer the less artistic but more graphic approach, which is to say lots of frosting.  I usually use about 3T butter, 3c icing sugar, 4 T milk and 1 ½ tsp vanilla. 

Don't forget the invitations. . . . 

* * *

* Um.  Afternoon.  Early afternoon.  My idea of morning.  I was only barely back from our hurtle, and still busy pouring caffeine into the system.  

** I forgot to ask if I could talk about it on the blog, so I'd better not.  But when it goes live and there's a link, I will certainly link to it, and then you will Know All.  Well, actually, I hope you won't know all.  I hope he'll edit the blah-erg-ums out, and if I'm very lucky, also the bits where I appear to be speaking English but am not in fact making any sense.  I've spent the rest of the day worrying about the range, frequency and extent of these bits.  And remembering all the things I should have said.  Why couldn't I have been a carpenter?^  I'm sure carpenters are allowed to be inarticulate.  Blah.  Erg.  Um.  

^ Possibly because I couldn't drive a straight nail to save my life.  I have told you about the exploding bookcase, haven't I?  You really only need to build one exploding bookcase to decide that your fate lies in another direction. 

*** Handbells were a fiasco.  It was almost funny.  I can afford to find it almost funny because I was on the easy pair (of bells) and wasn't having too awful a time.  Eventually we put me back on one of the harder pairs with a piece of paper with the lines on it in front of me and Niall and I dragged the other two through to the end of a plain course of bob major at last.  Ah, the power:  with the lines in front of me I can bark, Three lead!  Five and seven dodge!  and they have to do what I say.  Or anyway they better had, since I'm reading it off the page.  Although—and I've told you this before—the even funnier thing is that the ability to read and ring at the same time isn't a given.  In our group of four I'm the only one who can, and Esme, who with Niall taught me to ring bob minor on handbells in the first place, couldn't do it either.  It's a mixed blessing though, because the temptation is to keep using your cheat sheet.  And the dynamic of our present four is peculiar anyway, because Fernanda and Colin are tremendously experienced tower ringers, Niall is a little behind them but a handbell maniac . . . and then, panting pathetically several miles to the rear, am I.  Sigh.  At one point Fernanda was laughing and saying the only reason she could ring it at all was because she knew the tune.  Nice for you honey.  I've never rung it in the tower.  Well—I've rung the treble maybe twice.  I've never rung inside, and all I know about the tune is that it sounds a lot like bob minor—except that way disaster lies because you have to count to eight for major, not six.

† I shouldn't even be making jokes about this.  I can restrain hellhounds from greeting anyone who doesn't want to be assaulted by tail-wagging frenzy, but the people who encourage them are a problem, because I like my hellhounds to be appreciated, but my hellhounds' response to appreciation tends to be fairly radical.  Meanwhile . . . I think I've been undervaluing another category of truly terrifying dog:  not merely the aggressive crazies off lead, but the aggressive crazies on lead that the other end of the lead can barely hold on to.  I think I've told you about Superboy and Bizarro, the evil beagle twins.  They are usually on the other end of the lead from a medium-small woman who can, indeed, barely hold them—but yesterday they were out with who I assume was the medium-small woman's willowy twelve-year-old son, and we were getting into life-flashing-before-my-eyes territory as the baying, ravening red-eyed animals dragged him toward us—and our backs were against the wall, motherf—uh, never mind.  This was one of those occasions when hellhounds had enough sense to try and hide behind me, except there wasn't room.  This evening we were coming home across one of the little greens in the middle of a housing development and there was the most extraordinary noise . . . which I eventually traced to an Alsatian the size of a small grizzly being held by a big frelling bloke who pretty much had veins popping out on his forehead from the strain–the extraordinary noise was caused by the Alsatian self-strangling against the brake.   I don't like this.  And it doesn't seem to me to be the way things should be, you know?  When did pet dogs become the latest Nightmare on Elm Street? 

†† Blah.  Erg.  Etc.

††† I know it says PEGASUS and cake.  Is anyone seriously going to turn down cookies?  Hint:  Better hadn't.  It's likely to ruin your chances in the drawing.^

^ I am a whimsical hellgoddess, and I have my little ways.

‡ I have mixed feelings about salt.  It does heighten the chocolateyness of chocolate, but . . . salt is everywhere.  Like sugar.  And here we're concentrating on the sugar.  The original recipe calls for 1 teaspoon salt.  Good grief. 

‡‡ The more you mush, which is to say cream, the smoother the eventual result.  I find that beautifully thorough, cooking-school creaming is a bit wasted on cookies.  It's even more wasted on cookies that are about to be curdled by soured milk anyway.  Cream enough to produce something relatively homogenous, and don't sweat it.