Santa Brought A Head Cold for Christmas

The Wino tried to pretend she didn't have a head cold on Christmas Day. She popped some cold pills and cleaned the kitchen, took out the trash, made breakfast, and opened a bottle of bubbly (a Paul Zinck Cremant de Alsace if you must know). It was only while opening gifts that she gave into the reality of her illness - a reality that could be measured in the number of times she had to sneeze and the height of the soggy tissue pile that was building up next to her. She spent the next two days glued to the couch. She tried to drink a glass of wine or two but her inability to breath through her nose turned her tastebuds to toast.

The Wino hopes that you were not sick on Christmas. But in case you were, here's to being sick during the holidays!

Cheers!

Brandied Peaches

The Wino is health conscious. She likes to eat fruit. Fruit is healthy—all filled with vitamins, fiber, and crap like that. It will come as no surprise to you, fellow boozers, that The Wino especially likes fruit cured in booze.

The Wino's Brandied Peaches
4 Cups Brandy
2 Cups Sugar
2-4 lbs fresh, slightly under-ripe peaches (or however many it takes to fill three, one-quart canning jars), pitted and sliced into eighths.

Dissolve the sugar in the brandy (stir prudently boozers!). Lightly pack jars with peach slices. Pour brandy-sugar mixture into jars until peach slices are just covered. If you are feeling super-awesome, The Wino suggests adding a slice of lemon to each jar for a hint of cheery brightness. (That's right, The Wino said, "cheery brightness." Deal with it.) Let the peaches macerate for 6 weeks in the refrigerator.

Serving Suggestions: If one is not drinking wine, The Wino would like to encourage her obsessed readers to try a brandied peach in a Manhattan cocktail instead of the usual maraschino cherry. In summer, add 1/2 cup peach brandy to two bottles Pino Grigio wine with 12 halved and pitted Bing cherries, one sliced peach, one sliced lemon, and one sliced orange for simply the best sangria ever (serve over lots of ice and garnish with mint). Or, serve the brandied peaches over vanilla cake and top with whipped cream.

This recipe is best executed while drinking a few glasses of El Chaparral, De Vega Sindoa, Old Vine Garnacha.

Cheers!

P.S. And if you are wondering where The Wino came up with this brilliant recipe, she is willing to admit that she modified it from one she read for brandied cherries on the Sauveur.com Web site.

A Confession

The Wino spent the better part of July in Greece. She roamed the streets of Athens, explored the cliffs of Santorini, swam in the Agean Sea, got lost in Mykonos, and ate the best food that she can ever remember.

To her shame, she drank very little wine. She tried, really. At least three times. And at least three times her efforts were rewarded with a wicked, wicked, wicked hangover. Fellow boozers, trust The Wino, exploring the Acropolis with hangover is not a pretty adventure.

It's true, The Wino should have attempted drink a higher quality of Greek wine. She should not have drunk so much of the "house" wine (i.e., the cheap stuff) - e-hem - in one sitting. But it was hot. Terribly hot. So swirling, sniffing, and sipping just wasn't at the top of her priority list when it came to any beverage in Greece. Any liquid she got her hands on she guzzled. That's right fellow boozers, large, greedy, unladylike gulps. Needless to say, that manner of drinking didn't lend itself to wine tasting or wine drinking in general.

In short, The Wino stuck with beer while she was in Greece. Lots and lots of cold beer. Her favorite was Alfa. An icy mug of Alfa is especially nice served with a plate of salty black olives....and even nicer if consumed on a hot Greek island.

Boozers, you are asked, once again, to judge The Wino's un-Wino like behavior for yourselves.

Cheers!

The Wino's Champagne Cake

It's simple, fellow boozers: The Wino loves booze. The Wino loves cake. The Wino loves to make cakes with booze.

Today, she will share her recipe for her Champagne Cake with her boozy readers. The Wino's Champagne Cake is a divine, boozy cake. It's dense and tender like a pound cake, with an intense butter and vanilla sweetness that is balanced by rich floral and yeasty champagne flavors. It is also an impressive cake to behold, with three, fat 9-inch layers and mounds of white champagne-flavored butter cream frosting.

The Wino had her first slice of champagne cake at the Kingfish Cafe in Seattle in 2002. Or was it 2003? In any case, it changed her life. Well, maybe not her entire life, but it most definitely changed her life as it related to cake. The Kingfish version of champagne cake was pure, delicious insanity. Layers and layers of white, moist, faintly boozy tasting cake slathered with gorgeous fluffy frosting that had hint of butterscotch flavor. As you may know, the size of the cake slices at the Kingfish are truly obscene. Regardless of the gargantuan size, which is far too much for any single person to consume, The Wino could not stop shoving bite after bite of that delicious champagne cake into her mouth. Her stomach hurt, but it did not matter. All that mattered was the cake and eating as much of it as possible.

Obsessed with the cake from the Kingfish (she suspects it was laced with crack), The Wino set out to find a recipe so she could make it herself. It wasn't easy. Getting the recipe from the Kingfish was out of the question. Shortly after The Wino had her first decadent slice, The chef who made the champagne cake died and took the recipe into the afterlife with her (or so the Wino heard). The Kingfish subsequently stopped including champagne cake on their desert menu. Talk about tragic!

From there, she scoured the Web. Unfortunately, many of the recipes she found involved dyeing the cake pink and serving it with marshmallows or pineapple, or both. And several recipes suggested a boxed cake mix combined with champagne. Yeah, The Wino wasn't having any of that nonsense.

Eventually, using a combination of several recipes, she came up with her own version. It is a simple recipe in terms of ingredients. However, the quantity of batter is huge, so be prepared. But an impressive cake both in flavor and in size is what makes this cake so amazing. Fellow boozers, assuming your friends aren't cake haters, The Wino promises they will be utterly wowed. Not only will you have produced a spectacularly tall layer cake, you will have combined the magical food known as "cake" with champagne, which is arguably one of the most lovely beverages on the planet. The combination, boozers, is sheer genius. Sheer genius! The recipe follows:

The Wino's Champagne Cake

- 5 1/2 cups flour
- 6 tsp baking powder
- 2 tsp salt
- 1 and 1/3 cups butter
- 3 cups sugar
- 12 egg whites
- 1 and 1/2 cup champagne or sparkling wine (an inexpensive but tasty sparkling wine or cava, such as Segura Viudas, will do nicely). You will need one bottle total to cover the cake, the frosting, and the glasses you will drink while baking the cake. The Wino does not recommend going upscale with your bubbly. The finer flavors of expensive sparklers won't be discernible.

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
2. Butter and flour three round nine inch cake pans
3. Using an electric mixer, cream butter and sugar together until white and fluffy
4. Whisk together flour, baking powder, and salt.
5. Add flour mixture to butter and sugar mixture alternately with champagne until incorporated. Batter will be very thick and stiff.
6. Separate egg yolks from the egg whites. Discard the yolks. In a clean bowl, beat the egg whites until stiff peaks form.
7. Fold the beaten egg whites into the batter, in thirds.
8. Divide batter between the prepared cake pans and smooth the tops.
9. Bake for 25 - 30 minutes. Layers are done when knife inserted into center comes out clean or with a moist crumb or two.
10. Let cake layers cool for 15 minutes. Carefully remove from pans and let cool completely on a wire rack.
11. Sprinkle 1 - 4 tablespoons of champagne over the top of each layer and let it soak in. (Many thanks to Alexis, one of the purse wine ladies, for this suggestion.)

For the Frosting:

- 10 cups powdered Sugar
- 1/2 cup of butter
- 2 tsp of vanilla
- 1/2 - 3/4 cup of champagne
- Fresh Strawberries for garnishing the top of the cake (optional; recommended only if strawberries are in season)

1. Beat butter with an electric mixer until smooth
2. Add powdered sugar and champagne alternately; adjust quantities as needed. You want a spreadable consistency that is a bit on the stiff side so you have a little support for the layers.
3. Beat in vanilla
4. Divide frosting in to thirds with one of the "thirds" slightly larger than the other two. Reserve the larger portion for the top of the cake.
5. Lay the bottom layer on a plate of cake stand and frost the top. Lay the second layer on top of the first and frost the top. Put the third and final layer on top and frost only the top, piling on the remaining frosting. The Wino frosts this cake in a "rustique," fashion, piling the frosting on top of the layers but not frosting the sides. In The Wino's opinion, it has a shabby chic effect that conveys a sense of decadent abandonment. It's also a heck of a lot easier and faster than frosting the sides of the cake in a way that doesn't look like a 5 year old did it. (Come on, it's not like The Wino is a pastry chef!)
6. Garnish top of cake with strawberries (optional)
7. Serve with a glass of Champagne (optional)

There you have it, fellow boozers. A magnificent booze cake.

Enjoy!

A Whole Week Off

The Wino has a week off. A whole week. She has a whole week off because she found a new job (FINALLY!). How she found a new job and resigned from her old, hideous, demoralizing one is a whole post in itself and The Wino will get to it another day. But at this moment, she is contemplating the next week where she will be, in effect, unemployed. Blissfully unemployed for a whole week. That's 7 whole days, or 168 whole hours. Whatever will she do with all that time? The possibilities are as endless as they are daunting. While she mulls over the myriad ways in which she can fill her time, she is sipping a glass of her current favorite cheap wine: Vin-Koru, East Coast Classic Dry White Wine 2008, New Zealand (available at Trader Joes).

Fellow boozers, cheap, delicious wine makes the world go 'round. And since The Wino has not had a New York book editor contact her and ask her to write a book because her blog is so super awesome (yes, The Wino is referring to the infinitely and annoyingly blessed Molly Wizenberg), she drinks moderately priced and cheap bottles of wine, saving the more expensive bottles for special occasions. Thank goodness there are many wonderful, inexpensive wines out there.

Cheers!

Motivation

The Wino is trying to muster some motivation as the clock ticks away on a spring Saturday. Too much wine and too little sleep have left her without an ounce of motivation and a whole lot of guilt for not tackling her never-ending to-do list. Too much laundry. Too much yard work. Too much vacuuming. Too many people to call. Too much on her mind. The clock is still ticking, mercilessly. It’s almost 11 and she’s still in her pajamas. The day is bleeding out.

Impromptu Pairing PASS

It's been a busy month. Not much time for The Wino to write. But, fellow boozers, The Wino has definitely been doing her part when it comes to drinking wine. So, there's no need to worry that she's given up alcohol. In fact, this very afternoon she had a glass of Nobilo Sauvignon Blanc with her tuna and crackers. She did not intend to drink any wine with her lunch, but she chopped up green olives and some crispy blanched green beans in her tuna, and then added a tiny bit of champagne vinegar to the classic mayo and mustard dressing. The tangy, salty combination just plain called for a glass of Sauvignon Blanc. And, she just happened to have an open bottle in the fridge, which made the impromptu pairing all the more convenient. Imagine that!

Prudent boozers, it was not fancy or high brow, but it was delicious.

Cheers!