fighting fire with fire
carl goes to lunch with a regular group of guys from work. there is the pirate, the big kid and morse code. yes there are reasons why i gave them these nick names, but those are stories for another time.
one of the places they go for lunch is a pizza and sub place that brings out shakers of red pepper flakes. at one of their recent lunches, the red pepper shaker was full. they happen to use the big shakers that most places use for sugar. the big kid puts some pepper flakes on his food, then decides to be a smart alack and unscrews the top. the next person who decides to add red pepper flakes happens to be morse code. and with an unscrewed lid, he ends up with more red pepper flakes than he bargained for. a whole shake full. he shares these red pepper flakes with the big kid by dumping some of them on top of his food, but he is still left with quite a lot. carl says there was a bit of sweating while eating lunch that day. unfortunately it wasn’t one of the days i ate lunch with them so carl may have more details he can share later. he has some pictures of the pepper flake covered food that are quite pretty.
so that is a bit of back story for the part that i had a hand in. today was the big kid’s birthday, and at a lunch before the pepper flake incident, it was decided that i would make a cake for the occasion. i have a computer shaped cake pan so it seemed fitting that is what i would make for the cake. well after carl told me about the pepper flakes, i thought well we could get him back by putting pepper flakes in his cake. brilliant idea! but we wouldn’t want everyone to eat a red pepper flake laced cake. hmmmm what about cupcakes? even better idea. so for a couple of days i thought about the best way to spike the cupcakes. i knew i was going to have left over cake mix and would end up with a decent amount of cupcakes., but i needed to make sure i didn’t confuse the regular cupcakes with the hot cupcakes. different cupcake liners solved that. so how to put the heat in the cupcakes. i had two ideas and decided to try both of them. one was to mix cayenne pepper into the batter of one before it was baked. the other was to cut the top of the other off, pour in some hot sauce, then replace the top and ice it. carl and the girl helped come up with that idea. the hot sauce i used wasn’t your regular tabasco sauce. the girl likes spicy food so i let her pick out a hot sauce at the store last month that is made with habenaro peppers. that is the hot sauce that soaked into the cupcake. i iced them with plain white icing then dipped them in black sprinkles to make the tops look like part of a parking lot. i keep telling the big kid that he can be run over in the parking lot, so on one cupcake i put a little lego man running away and on the second one i put a match box car like looks a little like my car so it looks like i’m chasing him down in the car.
i delivered the cake and special cupcakes to carl’s workplace this afternoon but unfortunately i did not get to stay to witness the eating of the cupcake. however i am told that the big kid ate one of them in one bite. ouch. i burnt my taste buds just taking a little sample of the cayenne pepper batter. one of the other guys took pictures that i will hopefully see soon.
don’t unscrew the lid of red pepper flakes, you might end up eating something worse.