Bacardi Rum Cake From Scratch

The holidays are coming up and there's nothing like a moist and yummy cake to share with friends or give as a gift. This cake is a doozy, whether you make it via the box mix recipe, or from scratch. I prefer to make it from scratch.

I pulled this recipe from the web ages ago, and don't recall from where. Whomever it was that put this recipe together, I thank you!

BACARDI RUM CAKE (from scratch)
3 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/2 cups granulated sugar
1/2 cup packed light brown sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup (2 sticks) butter, room temperature
2/3 cup milk
1/3 cup Bacardi Gold Rum
3 eggs
1 cup chopped pecans
Rum glaze (recipe follows)


Preheat oven to 350°F. Grease and flour a 10-inch Bundt pan. Combine flour, sugars, baking powder, and salt in the bowl of a mixer. Add butter and mix on low speed until butter is worked in completely; the mixture will have a sandy appearance.


In a small bowl, combine milk, rum, and eggs. Whisk to blend. With mixer on low, add milk mixture to dry ingredients and beat on medium speed for 3 minutes. Stir in 1-1/2cups pecans. Pour batter evenly into pan. Bake 55 to 60 minutes, until top of cake springs back when touched.


When cake is done, remove from oven and let cool 10 minutes in pan. Invert the cake onto a rack with a large plate underneath.

Rum glaze

1/2 cup Bacardi Gold Rum
1/2 stick butter
1 cup sugar
1/4 cup water

Melt butter in saucepan. Stir in sugar, water and Bacardi Gold Rum. Boil 5 minutes, stirring constantly. Remove from heat. Prick top of the cake with a fork. Spoon and brush glaze evenly over the top and sides. Allow cake to absorb glaze. Repeat until all glaze is absorbed.

Place about a half cup of pecans on top of cake for good looks and charm!


Note: The cake can be baked and soaked several days in advance; store it wrapped in plastic wrap.

Making Sausage

We spent this weekend working for ourselves, starting on Friday by putting down 15 gallons of our home-made wine “House Red.” Right now, all three five-gallon buckets are bubbling away converting sugar to wine; wine which will be ready to drink in about a year (earlier if we want something a little ‘spirited’ to drink). Age is the ticket with wine.

The remainder of our weekend, Jay was cutting up free wood, to heat our house, greenhouse and wood fired hot tub, while I was making about 40 pounds of sausage. It was a fine and productive weekend.

All three projects made for wonderfully cheap and useful items; wood to heat, wine to drink and sausage to enjoy for the entire year. This entry I’ll speak of sausage; the ease in making it and the money saved by making it ourselves; not to mention the fact that we know exactly what is in it… no creepy additives, preservatives and coloring to make it look good in the grocery store cooler!

Later, I’ll talk about how we make our wine and where we get our free wood, along with information about our wood fired hot tub. Now on to some sausage talk!

At our local Cash & Carry, I picked up three nice packages of pork butt, for 99 cents a pound, along with pork belly or fat back, as some folks call it; both the main ingredients in most sausage recipes. I ended up with 30 pounds of pork and 3 pounds of fat back per 10 pounds of sausage; ratio needed to make good sausage, as pork alone is too lean. By the time I was finished, our sausage cost us about $1.20 per pound, as opposed to nearly $3.00 a pound at the store (Navy Commissary). I’d say, that is a fair savings!

Out of the pork and fat back and about 6 pounds of beef, we made Bratwurst, Italian Sausage and two different kinds of breakfast sausage. I put about 10 pounds by of the breakfast sausage loose, to use as patties; the rest was stuffed into casings, as were the brats and Italian sausage. Why more people don’t make their own sausage, is beyond me, as it saves quite a bit of money and frankly, is fun to make.

To start, as I mentioned above, you need about 3 pounds of fat back to every 10 pounds of pork butt for a good sausage base. Any less fat mixed in with the pork butt makes for dry and crumbly sausage. The brats call for veal, but it’s hard come-by and is really too expensive, so I use a cheap cut of beef.

Making the sausage is very easy: grind meat, add spices, and stuff into a casing… that’s it. No secrets and no hocus pocus. If you don’t have a grinder, buy ground pork from your butcher; it costs more, but not that much more. I grind our sausage with a cast iron hand grinder (you can usually find one of these at your local St. Vincent de Paul, Salvation Army or local junk store, for a couple of bucks. If you have a Kitchen-Aid mixer, you can buy a grinder/stuffer attachment.

Some sausage can be left loose, such as the Italian and breakfast sausage and cooked as patties or made into meatballs. The brats, on the other hand, need to be stuffed in casings. For this you need a sausage stuffer. You can use the attachment for the Kitchen-Aid mixer, but it tends to turn the sausage into a pasty pâté-like substance. It’s better to use a stuffer that uses pressure instead of an auger to push the sausage into the casing. I use an Enterprise cast iron sausage stuffer. If you can find one, it’s a jewel. It doesn’t do much of anything except stuff sausage, but it does it beautifully. If you’re lucky and find one with a basket in it, it also works as a fruit press. Look on e-bay or in a junk store. If you find one for $100, consider yourself lucky, as they go for around $550 new. If you’re truly lucky you inherited one.

To stuff the sausage into casings, you obviously need casings; we use natural hog and sheep casings, which we buy on-line from Butcher & Packer Supply Company, because we can’t find them locally.

Once you have these items, you are ready to roll. Again, even if you don’t have a sausage stuffer, try one of these recipes and don’t bother stuffing the sausage into casings…you’ll be glad you did.

Recipes:

Breakfast Sausage
10 pounds pork butt
3 pounds fat back (or substitute bacon)
2 tablespoons curing/canning salt
4 tablespoons rubbed sage
2 tablespoons coarse ground black pepper
3 teaspoons ground cloves
1 teaspoon thyme leaves
1 teaspoon ground allspice
3 medium onions chopped fine or ground
4 full heads of minced garlic

Gourmet Country Sausage
(This one is based on a recipe I dug out of an old issue of Mother Earth Magazine)
10 pounds pork butt
3 pounds fat back (or substitute bacon)
4 teaspoons brown sugar
3 tablespoons curing/canning salt
8 tablespoons rubbed sage
2 tablespoons coarsely ground black pepper
2 teaspoons paprika
2 teaspoons nutmeg
3 whole heads of fresh garlic, minced

Italian Sausage
10 pounds pork butt
3 pounds fat back (or substitute bacon)
2 tablespoons curing/canning salt
2 ½ tablespoons coarse ground black pepper
2 ½ tablespoons ground coriander
4 full heads fresh garlic, minced
2 tablespoons crushed red pepper flakes
½ cup paprika
1 cup dry white wine (don’t use cooking wine-if you won’t drink it out of a glass, don’t cook with it)

Bratwurst
6 pounds pork butt
4 pounds veal or beef
3 pounds fat back (or substitute bacon)
4 ½ cups red wine (don’t use cooking wine-if you won’t drink it out of a glass, don’t cook with it)
3 tablespoons curing/canning salt
1 ½ tablespoons onion salt
1 ½ tablespoons ground white pepper
1 ½ tablespoons marjoram
1 ½ tablespoons parsley flakes
¾ teaspoon nutmeg
¾ teaspoon celery seed
2 teaspoons ginger
2 teaspoons mace
2 teaspoons cardamom (or substitute same amount of cinnamon and ginger)

These are just a few recipes to start with, and are ones we use. Look around your local library or check out recipes on the web for an outstanding variety of sausage recipes.

Enjoy making your sausage. Now, I’m off to cut apart all those links of sausage, and get them packaged and in the freezer!

A Penny Saved

The old adage, “A penny saved, is a penny earned,” coined (no pun intended) by Benjamin Franklin, means that by reducing your spending, you are increasing your income. It is a truth, to be sure. If you don’t spend the money in the first place, you don’t have to earn it again, to replace it.

There are so many ways to do this that it actually makes my head hurt that more people don’t do more to reduce their spending, when it is so easy. These folks certainly complain about the lack of money and how everything has spiraled out of their control, when in fact, they have let their spending spiral out of control and aren’t willing to do anything about it!

How many people do you know who don’t turn off lights when they leave a room? How many people let the shower run long before they jump into it and actually bathe, or leave the water running while they brush their teeth? You can probably name a few in your own home. It’s all money, literally, going down the drain.

If you are out of control in spending and think, “What the heck, we’re so far in the hole, what’s one more dollar here and there gonna make?” and then go out and spend more money so you feel better; you need to get a grip. Spending more money is not going to get you out of debt. You need to start saving and make it a habit.

An excellent start, is to pay yourself first. It doesn’t have to be much; just doing it is a great leap in the right direction; and most importantly, the beginning of a good habit.

Most of us have a checking account and a savings account. These accounts are usually attached to each other and you can transfer money back and forth at any given time; and for most folks, they can even do it on-line via home computer. If you happen to have this computer in front of you, which is likely the case since you are reading this on-line, go to your bank account right now, and transfer just $5 from your checking account to your savings account. Most of us can afford that much and won’t even miss it. Do it right now!

Okay, you now have $5 sitting in savings that will earn interest; maybe not much on such a small scale, but it will earn interest. Now, if you do this every week, at the end of the month you will have $20 in your savings account. If you do this every month for a year, you will have amassed $240.00 and it didn’t even hurt.

The second way to get spending under control is to not spend the money in the first place; and there are many ways to do that.

Consider this; do you go out to lunch every day at work? Odds are you are spending at least $5.00 for your lunch. Instead of eating out, make your own lunch, or better still, toss the leftovers from the previous night’s dinner in a container and eat that; you just saved $5 and gave yourself a nice little raise.

Each day, after not spending that $5 on lunch, go to your computer and move that $5 into your savings account; do that 5 days a week, and by golly, that adds up to $20 a week, which in turn, is $100 a month, and makes a total of $1200 a year. It adds up pretty quickly, doesn’t it?

A really easy and benign way to not spend money is to not consume as much, e.g. using electricity and water. Turn out that light and don’t let the water run.

If you are like us, you pay a pretty healthy water bill. We have good water where we live and the city thinks very highly of this water and as a result, charge a fortune for it. As soon as the tap is on, we’re spending money, so we make the most of it. We paid for that water and we’re going to use as much of it as we can before it goes down the drain.

Look out your window; see all those plants on your balcony or just outside the front door, or the plants on the shelf in your living room… they need water. Now, remember all that water that went down the shower drain this morning; a whole lot of it while you were just getting the temperature right to step in. Get yourself a nice little bucket or container and put it under the tap when you start the water running, and capture it. It’s clean, and it’s good for watering your plants. Why let it go down the drain? If it goes down the drain you will have to draw more water later to pour on your plants. You paid for the water; use it!

Did you know, you can also flush your toilet with a bucket of water? Take said bucket of water that you rescued from going down the drain, and instead of whipping around and whapping that flush handle, pour that bucket of water, all at once (not slowly), into the bowl of the toilet. Poof, the swirling action starts and down the drain it goes. You just saved money by not flushing the toilet using the tank water.

It’s not much, but you do this at least once a day and after awhile, you’re talking real money and it didn’t even take that much time; just effort.

Do you wash your dishes by hand instead of putting them in the dishwasher? Well save that rinse water and pour it on a bush in your yard or on your garden; don’t let it run down the drain. If you do use a dishwasher, make sure it is full before you turn it on; and then, don’t let it go through the electric dry cycle. Instead, just prop the door open and let the dishes dry on their own. By doing this, you’ve saved electricity and water, but you’ve also put a nice amount of moisture in the air.

If you look around your house, you will find many a way to cut down on using electricity and water. Let’s move on to the laundry.

Another old saw goes “It takes money to make money.” One way to put this nifty little adage to work is to hang up your laundry to dry. We do this all year around. We put up a nice clothes line outside, and found a dandy of a clothes line to set up in the spare room, during the winter. Obviously, you are going to have to spend some money to do this, and it doesn’t have to be big money either. In the long run, you are going to save some serious money by not running the dryer. Even if you don’t like some of your clothing hung on the line, at least do it with the sheets, dish towels, socks and so forth. We dry everything on the line, save what needs to go to the dry cleaners. We haven’t used the dryer in so long, I can’t tell you if it even works anymore. I do use the top as a work surface, so it’s good for something.

Any one of the above methods isn’t going to result in you becoming a millionaire, but they will leave more money for getting those bills paid and getting out of debt, or increasing your savings.

Here’s another adage that covers the whole lot of the above drivel I’ve been spewing, “If you find yourself in a hole; stop digging! That’s the crux of it right there. If you’re not in a hole and you do the above, you will quickly find yourself atop a large pile.

If you think I’m living in dreamland here, think again. Not many years back, due to life and its twists and turns, ‘J’ and I were in that hole; and we stopped digging. It’s a long story, as good as anyone else’s, but in the end, like many other folks, that hole could have gotten a lot bigger and deeper.

At the end of 5-years, not only did we not have any debt, we had over $30,000.00 in the bank. That’s a ‘no shitter’ folks.

So, take a look around you and get to work. Use that elbow grease and a little time… it costs you nothing, and it will save you a lot.

To read a bit more about saving money by not eating out, follow this link. This lady has a good handle on the subject. http://www.notjustbeans.com/articles/stop-eating-into-debt.html

Pumpkin People

Each fall, we put up our 'Pumpkin People' in our front yard. We don't have many, if any, kids show up on Halloween, but we do live next to a park and there are a lot of walkers who enjoy the display.

The pumpkins are grown from last year's pumpkin seeds, and we get their clothes at St. Vinney's (St. Vincent de Paul). We have a marvelous time picking the outfits and then putting the people together. J, my partner in crime and in this life, built the frames out of 1"x2" boards... (the cheap ones you can get at the lumber store), and the frames are based on a stick figure drawing. One main stake about 3 feet long, pointed on one end and a small board on the top with inverted nails, to hold the pumpkins in place. This stake serves as the spine and gets pounded into the straw; the arms are cut in segments and held together with screws, so the arms bend. Next put the clothes on and stuff with straw. Poof, you’ve got Pumpkin People!

The really neat thing about the whole display is that everything is either used when we got it or will be used after the display comes down. The straw we get each year to cover our garden and flower beds for winter. It protects the garden as mulch and feeds the dirt as it composts through the winter. The stick frames were made from left over wood from another project and we use the same frames year after year. The clothes we buy at the thrift store, as I mentioned above. The thrift store makes money to help their cause, and we get neat clothes for the pumpkin people, which in turn, become cleaning rags. The pumpkins go back out to the garden as compost, while the seeds germinate and grow more pumpkins for next year! It really is a nice cycle that makes for no waste and is very cheap to do. Another goody is that if your pumpkins just happen to be sweet pumpkins, you get a pie or two out the deal as well.

Happy Halloween Folks!

The Set-up!

Today is my first day with this blog. I've pictures to take and thoughts to gather before I really get started. There are so many projects on my list to share and hopefully help folks out with saving a dime or two and have fun in the process.

We make our own wine and sausage, smoke our own salmon, make our own noodles, run a greenhouse, sit in a wood-fired hot tub, and make our way in this world without huge bills. It's an adventure worth sharing.

I hope you visit from time to time to see what we are up to.