Easy Dune Cupcakes

Spice Cake and Chocolate Sietch.  Note the edible glitter spice blow.

Arrakis.  Dune.  Dessert Planet.

I'm a huge Dune geek.  I love Star Wars and Star Trek, and have great respect for Stargate, Doctor Who, Ray Harryhausen and the like.  But in my heart of hearts, Dune is where my geeky little soul truly lies.  I've read all the books, played the board games (both versions), the video game and heavily compared and critiqued the David Lynch movie version to the SyFy series.

So when one of my oldest friends asked for Dune cupcakes for his birthday, I was compelled to oblige.  My friend is a pretty avid fan himself and when he once called my then-new-boyfriend a geek, the bf simply replied, "He had a collectible sandworm figure in the original box, and then had a second one to play with.  I'm not too concerned with him calling me a geek."

Occasionally, I run across really great Dune-themed cakes. 

See this? It's awesome. Yeah, I can't make that.*

That cake is amazing but impossible for a mere mortal. Instead, following are cupcakes that any Fremen can make in his sietch. 

Arrakis Spice Cake with Spice Frosting

Spice Cake
Any spice cake recipe will do.  I used the America's Test Kitchen recipe and it was delicious but crazy complex so I recommend just using a mix.

Many, many ingredients.

Make the cupcakes about 2 hours ahead of time so they have plenty of time to cool.  
It's best if your cupcakes have flat tops, not domed ones.  Makes 'em easier to decorate.

Flat Tops.  They're not just for the 80's anymore.

Spice Frosting
2 8-oz packages Cream Cheese, softened
1/2 Cup Unsalted Butter, softened
2 Cups Powdered Sugar
1/2 tsp Salt
2 Tbl Cinnamon
1/4 Cup Real Maple Syrup
2 tsp Maple Extract

Cream the butter and cream cheese together.  Add the sugar and cream until smooth.  Add the syrup, cinnamon, salt and extract.  Set the bowl in the fridge for about 15 minutes to set up.

Toppings
Shai-Hulud: Gummy Worms (or any kind of edible wormy thing), cut to fit on the cakes
Sand: Vanilla Wafers or Shortbread Cookies, crushed into cumbs
Rock: Bulk Chunk Chocolate, smashed with a hammer into small chunks
Spice:  Edible Gold Glitter, available at specialty baking shops

Sietch Signs
Make tiny flags for the cupcakes by writing or printing the names of the sietches, cutting them into small flags and gluing to toothpicks or party picks.

Sietch Abbir

Sietch Gara Kulon

Sietch Jacurutu

Sietch Tabr

Tuek's Sietch

Windgap Sietch

Assembly
Frost the cupcakes by hand.  You can carefully sculpt dunes if you're good.  I'm not, so mine were flat desert.

We'll never reach the safety of Chocolate.  Well, maybe that small Chocolate.

 Sand: Either roll the cupcake tops in the cookie crumbs, or sprinkle the crumbs from the top.
Rock: Carefully poke in some of the chocolate shards to resemble a sietch.
Worm: Gummy worms don't bend well, so get creative. Shai-Hulud won't mind.
Spice: Sprinkle a little glitter around the worm. The worm is the spice.

Tasty enough for the Kwisatz Haderach!

**

*Courtesy of Jana's Fun Cakes.  Click the photo to see the source post.
**Courtesy of setphaserstolol.com.  Click the photo to see the source post.

Skyrim Food: Apple Cabbage Stew

Pardon me while I stop mid-fight to eat 20 bowls of Stew.

Apple Cabbage Stew.  Sounds tasty, yeah?  Well evidently in Skyrim the only seasoning anyone uses is Salt.  That's fine if you're living in a fantasized medieval Nordic land, but for the rest of us non-Stoics with more than 2 tastebuds who don't actually like eating raw dog meat and mammoth snout, getting this recipe to the Tasty Place was tricky.

The more posts we do, the more Gwen and I feel like what makes our site special is our overwhelming (some would say unhealthy) obsession with canon.  A lot of food blogs are written by cool, well-balanced people with interesting interpretations on recipes.  We're not those people. 

We actually debated making a common version of this stew that exists in the real world.  There was discussion about things like chicken stock, onions, thyme, red wine; ingredients that would make it conventionally tasty and easy to make. 

Easy?  Conventional?  Non-Canon?  BLASPHEMY!!

I  have a giant monkey brain that I use to think through creative problems.  Three ingredients?  No seasoning but salt?  No problem.  Chicken stock is for the weak.

Liberties were taken with the quantities and preparations of the three main ingredients, but no additional foods or seasonings have been added.  The final redaction is a riff on traditional Northern European sauerkraut dishes.  Sauerkraut (preserved cabbage) would be a very likely preparation in Skyrim.

Ingredients: Apple, Cabbage, Salt.

• 3 or 4 Sweet Apples, like Honeycrisp or Red Delicious
• 2 lb Salt-Cured Sauerkraut, Canned sauerkraut won't do.  Get the naturally cured stuff in the refrigerator section at the store made with Cabbage and Salt.
• 4 Cups Apple Juice or Apple Cider, The sweeter, the better; you're not going to add any sugar.
• Salt to taste

Found these authentic Skyrim apples in a barrow. They look like they'd been there for a couple millennia.

Directions

1. Empty the sauerkraut into a strainer, rinse and drain well.  Squeeze out extra moisture with your hands.
2. Dice all but one of the apples
3. Add the drained sauerkraut, apple juice and diced apples to a large pot and simmer over low heat for 3.5 hours
4. Dice the final apple and add it to the stew
5. Simmer another 30 minutes or until the stew is a nice dark golden color.
6. Salt to taste

It's actually pretty good - it's a crunchy sweet-n-sour hot dish that can double as a side to pork. It's also vegan.  The sauerkraut absorbs up the sugars from the apples and apple juice and it mellows out the tang of the kraut.  The longer you cook it, the more caramelized the stew will become, and the sweeter and darker it will get.

May Wine

NOTE: This post was originally posted in 2011.  It's such a great recipe and so timely for the season that we're giving it a bump.

For a number of years, Lexi and I have made our own variation on May wine as a way of heralding the arrival of spring. Traditionally associated with Beltane or Mayday, it's a light, white wine infused with the fresh flavor of sweet woodruff.

Galium odoratum, Sweet Woodruff

Sweet woodruff is a perennial ground cover with bright green leaves. It grows well in shady, moist soil, and will take over your garden if not kept in check. Every year, sometime around the end of April, it puts out little stalks with lovely, sweet-scented white flowers, which stay in blossom through May. The plant smells like fresh cut grass, due to the presence of coumarin (the same stuff that gives vanilla and lavender their own fresh smell).

Both Lexi and I have quite a bit of sweet woodruff growing in our respective gardens. This year, my plants had the fortune of blooming first, so I brought a few sprigs down to the beach house to mix up a bottle of May wine.

May wine

INGREDIENTS
A few flowering sprays of sweet woodruff (more flower than leaf, though a few leaves are OK)
A bottle or two of dry White wine (rhines or dry rieslings work well)
Honey (optional)

Don't wash the flowers, even if they have aphids on them. Use flowers that haven't been sprayed with pesticides or grown too close to a highway since you won't be washing them. The pollen is much of what gives this drink its flavor so you don't want to wash it off. Filter the wine through cheesecloth before decanting to get rid of any unwanted detreius or bugs.

DIRECTIONS
Mix 1/2 cup of honey into each bottle of wine at room temperature. (I usually drink a half glass of the wine, both for quality control and to make enough room to add the honey and mix right in the bottle.) Add 4 or 5 sprigs of woodruff flowers to each bottle. Cap or recork and refrigerate overnight. Serve in a smallish glass, 1 or 2 oz. Best served the next day, but will keep in the fridge for 4 or 5 days.

WARNING: Sweet woodruff may be toxic at high doses due to the coumarin. As with any recipe or food mentioned in this blog, CONSUME AT YOUR OWN RISK. When in doubt, throw it out.

Do not let the plants sit in the wine for more than 12 hours; be sure to filter and decant within 12 hours to prevent the coumarin level from getting too high.

A light, flowery drink that goes well with light, flowery snacks: seasonal fruits, small cakes, creamy, herby cheeses, and spring salads.