Making Milk Liqueur

There is a way to make a milk liqueur that you can add to acidic /fruity drinks, and it won’t curdle! Sure, this is mostly because it has already curdled, but hey! You still get a surprising amount of milky delicious flavour from it. So much so, that I am willing to bet that letting the milk infuse the alcohol for a long period of time allows many more of the alcohol-soluble flavors to leave the milk and go into the alcohol than you would get if you simply added whey to alcohol as a shortcut. You even get that miraculous milky velvety texture.

It is easy enough to make your own, you simply mix equal parts milk, sugar, and vodka together and let it sit for two weeks. Hopefully by then, the milk proteins will have denatured and separated out from the liquids and the alcohol. If this has happened, you should then filter out the curdled solids with a cloth or coffee filter, leaving a rich golden liqueur for sipping or mixing (discard the solids).

Some milk liqueur in progress.  You actually want/need it to separate like this. And it will get yellower as it ages.

I was lucky enough to get some separation doing it this way, but apparently this doesn’t always work. Some people suggest putting a lemon, orange, or other citrus fruit into the mix. The acid in the fruit will help denature the proteins and speed up the clumping process. However, I just wanted a pure milky flavour, without any overpowering citrus in the mix. Especially if I want to mix this into cocktails, I don’t want the extra complexity of orange in there. Don’t get me wrong, I can imagine that this could taste like a delicious Creamsicle. Just not what I was going for. Apparently, some people also put chocolate into the mix. Again, sounds delicious, but not the pure essence of milk that I want.

And here is the same jar of in-progress milk liqueur, 2 weeks later. Note the interesting separation pattern of solids, liquids, solids. Some pretty cool density separation going on here.

So is there some other way to make sure your milk will curdle correctly, every time? I guess you could use vinegar, but that would be even grosser than lemon. And then it hit me… why not use cream of tartar?

All you need is a more acidic environment to denature the milk proteins, and cream of tartar is a relatively flavourless acid – one that is often added to pastries which need acidity for the chemistry to work, without adding any offending flavors.

Seemed like it should do the trick, so to the second batch (which was about 2 cups total) I added 1.5 teaspoons of cream of tartar before sealing it up and mixing. This worked perfectly! By the second day I already saw loads of separation, and the alcohol/water phase continued to get richer and more golden as time went on. It was absolutely a better result than without the acid!

Now I can make drinks with shrubs (and other acidic flavours) in addition to milk liqueur, and not worry about it curdling and becoming gross.

Whiskey, cherry shrub, milk liqueur, and a cherry. It was surprisingly milky and delicious. How often can you taste these flavours together? Not very, since the milk normally curdles! This is a breakthrough.

I hadn’t considered this before making milk liqueur, but this could even the be the first time you get to taste milk mixed with acidic ingredients like lemon or shrub, because the 2 week infusion process brings all the milk flavours into the liqueur while also removing the curdling elements. So essentially this liqueur opens up all new possibilities. Delicious possibilities.

Glitch Art for Windows and Linux

Doc wrote up a pretty good Glitch Primer which was, unfortunately, really only applicable to Macs. So here is my write-up on glitch art for the rest of us!

THE COLOURS!
THE COLOURS!

Image files are encoded in binary, whereas most text files are in Unicode, so your basic text editor on your Windows or Linux computer is going to try and translate the binary into ASCII, with horrendous file-corrupting results (even if you just open the image in your text editor, make no changes, and save it; it will be corrupt, in addition to never being an image again). Oh Notepad and GEdit will try to open your .png, oh yes they will try. Notepad will open it and pretend like it did it correctly and hope for your approval as it silently corrupts your image, whereas GEdit will actually have the good sense to say, “Hey, WTF is this encoded with? This doesn’t make any sense and you will only end up corrupting your file if you continue.” But either way, you’re not getting any glitches out of those text editors.

You won’t get around the fact that you’re going to need a hex editor if you want to glitch those binary files without destroying them. Mayhaps you already have one on your computer, from those days you spent editing your save files to cheat enhance your PC gaming experience. If not, then I can recommend something like Frhed  or Bless.

Once you have your hex editor of choice, go ahead and open any old image file. No need to change the extension, the hex editor has seen it all. It will probably look something like this:

Oh the saved game files I have edited in my day
Oh the saved game files I have edited in my day

The numbers in the far left-hand field are sort of like line numbers, to help you keep track of where you are in the file. Those aren’t editable. However they are in hex, so that is why they don’t look like ordinary decimal line numbers. If you are super curious to know what those numbers would be in decimal, and you don’t want to do the calculations yourself, you can use any number of hex conversion calculators. The way I made the GIF on the top of this post was saving several different versions of the image, where I glitched the exact same spot each time. I used those numbers on the left to make sure of this. Thus, I got three similar-but-different glitches. I think I changed a 66 to 22, 2e, and ee. Or something like that.

Unlike editing saved game files, you don’t really need to convert back and fourth between hex and decimal to make sure everything is done correctly (“OK, so how do I write ‘level 99’ in hex? How about a Str of 10?”). Done correctly is the opposite of the point in glitch art. But it might help to have a passing familiarity with how hex is written, and what their decimal counterparts might be. It uses letters to represent some numbers, because our numbering system is inherently decimal, and therefore it won’t do to just use those. Basically, 0 – 9 are the same while a – f are 10 – 15. But it is no big deal if you don’t like or understand non-base-10 numbering. As I mentioned, the comprehension required to glitch images is fairly minimal.

You might notice that the beginning and end of the file look a bit different from the middle. That is because they don’t encode the image, they encode things like what sort of file it is, what the thumbnail should look like, etc. For this reason, it is best to just edit the middle (otherwise you’re just going to corrupt that file all over again, and your hex editor would be for naught). You can get an idea of how far along the image you are, by where the glitches appear, and adjust accordingly.

Now you just go nuts. You can copy/cut and paste/insert large chunks of the file into other places in the same file; you can also copy from one file and paste into another file; you can change a ton of lines to just say ee ee ee ee ee ee ee ee ee ee ee ee ee ee ee ee ee ee ee ee ee ee ee; really whatever you want.

Glitched Doc: Dark

I also found this guide on how your image’s initial save settings can affect your glitches to be really helpful. That is how I made these glitches in this image:

Glitched Doc: RAINBOWS!

I specifically wanted rainbows, and I got rainbows. My work here is done.

To be honest, even if you are a Mac user, you should probably consider getting a hex editor to do your glitches. I don’t know what is going on with the open-images-with-the-Mac-text-editor deal, but my guess is that the Mac text editor is able to convert the binary into ASCII in such a way that, when you save it back to binary, it can somehow convert the ASCII back to binary in the… exact… same… way? Whatever the case, I think using a hex editor is much more informative and intuitive than using the Mac text editor. But Windows and Linux users don’t even get the option, so hopefully this has cleared up any confusion as to why your text editor is only capable of corrupting your files and not making beautiful glitch art.

I Made a Wedding Cake

My sister asked me to make the cake for her wedding (which was the 22nd). The 10th was Doc’s birthday, and I used that as an opportunity to test out all the cake baking/making/decorating techniques that I had read about online. His cake turned out moist, good tasting, and good looking; so I decided to go ahead and use the same cake and frosting recipes on my sister’s cake.

This is the finished cake that I made for my sister. She picked out the LEGO toppers for the cake, which I think was a very nice touch.

I wrote last week about the techniques of making crumb coats and freezing the cakes while still warm. I utilized all of these new techniques on the wedding cake, since they worked so well last time. Freezing the cakes truly does make them moister! I froze the sections of the cake that I was going to use, and ate the sections that I cut away without freezing them, and largely preferred the cakes which had been frozen. That being said, I also froze the cakes because that way I could make them ahead of time and decorate them at my leisure. Continue reading “I Made a Wedding Cake”