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by bakersroyale

Endless Poptails: Mango Maui Mai Tai

Now that we’ve been blending and freezing poptails for a few weeks we decided it was time to open up the….er bar, and put your requests to work.

First up is the Mai Tai. Poor Trader Vic, here is yet another iteration on his classic creation. We figured everyone has been getting bastardly with his drink, that well, we need one to claim as our own.

We started with a Maui Mai Tai, from there we stayed true to keeping our poptails budget friendly by skipping the orgeat and kicking up the sweet and sour combination by going au natural with some fresh fruit. What we didn’t skip: the rum, more accurately, the three rums.

Mix. Lick. Enjoy.

Mango Maui Mai Tai

Extreme Simmer: The SousVide Supreme

So after hearing me bitch for the last two years about how everyone on Top Chef gets to sous vide but I don’t, someone finally decided to throw me a bone. The folks over at SousVide Supreme, the first legit sous vide machine aimed at home cooks, sent me over one of their $450 contraptions to test out for a few weeks. Woo-hoo!

For those who need a recap: sous vide cooking involves vacuum sealing ingredients in plastic bags with this neat little contraption:

That’s actually the most fun part, watching all the air get sucked right out of the bag. Then you submerse the bag in a thermal hot water bath that’s designed to remain at an exact pre-set temperature, down to the degree:

Cupcake Rampage: Hummingbird Cakes

_{I know what you’re thinking: Hummingbird cake? WTF? That’s okay, I’d never heard of it, either.}

You could call this the third leg of a twisted Triple Crown of Southern-style baking, following the Kentucky Derby day mint julep cupcakes and the beloved red velvet ones before that. To carry the analogy further, if red velvet is Man o’ War, and mint juleps are Secretariat, then hummingbird cake would be Seabiscuit.

Get it? Of course you do.

Hummingbird cake is another creation peculiar to the Deep South with an even more convoluted and obscure history. Also called “granny cake” and “cake-that-doesn’t-last,” some sources claim the original recipe hails from Australia, where it’s also popular for some reason, while others say it started in Jamaica and was bastardized into its current incarnation along the way. The oldest recorded appearance of hummingbird cake is 1978, when it appeared as a reader-submitted recipe in Southern Living magazine. However, Jamaican newspapers have mentioned something called “Doctor bird cake” as early as a decade before that. The national bird of Jamaica is the red-billed streamertail hummingbird, also called the Doctor bird because its long tail feathers and top-hat-like crest makes it look…kind of, sort of, maybe if you squint and pretend it has a tiny birdie stethoscope around its neck…like the nappily-dressed Victorian doctors of old.

What all this has to do with a cake, no one seems to know. The Jamaica story is a stretch, at best. It could just be called what it is because this cake is so sweet, thanks to sugar from three separate ingredients, even a hummingbird would be attracted to it. However it came to be, the recipe is after the jump…