Redneck Recipe # 37 - Friday the 13th Microwaved Lemon-Pineapple Cake Donuts

Greetings to all on this Friday, the 13th of January, 2012.

Indeed, today started off as though it really meant to be one of those "Friday the 13th" sort of days. For starters, I am a "cold-hater" and a "warm-lover" - having grown both handsome and quite thin in my old age. With now a lack of nice insulating fat on my bones, it does not take much in the way of cold-front-induced temperature drops to give me a case of the shivers and to keep me awake when I should be sound asleep.

Add to that the caring ministrations of "Ma Bell" (now known as AT&T). I was sitting at my desk before bedtime when I reached atop my trusty old computer box for the old (really old) blue plastic telephone. It shares a cable connection to "Ma Bell's" vast collection of gadgetry, the one that some folks refer to as a telephone network. I was about to call the pharmacy so as to renew a medicine prescription. At the same time that I thought to do that renewing thing via "Ma Bell's" telephone things, I was looking at funny cartoons on the computer screen. Those were pretty good, too, and I like to go through the pile of them offered up by the JewishWorldReview.com Web site every weekday other than when its proprietor, aptly named Binyamin L. Jolkovsky, takes a break for one of the Jewish religious holidays. (A very serious fellow for someone who enjoys publishing funny cartoons...)

My computer communicates with the Internet over what is known as a digital subscriber line (DSL) that shares the connection with the voice telephone. When I stuck the phone up next to my ear in preparation for mashing phone buttons in an attempt to call up the pharmacy, there was no dial tone. The telephone, evidently, was kaput. Being a wealthy American thriving on little scraps of money and little need or desire for much of anything now that I have engineered my $1.79 a month savings rate, we have several additional telephones scattered around the house. (The dog has buddies, too.) Alas, all of them were dead, just like my little blue plastic telephone.

At the same time, the computer was happily hobnobbing with other computers on the Internet. Obviously, our telephone wires were still in one long piece, but something else had gone barfo.

To make this long, sad, telephone story come to an end, let it be noted that I had a horrible time attempting to communicate with "Ma Bell." She now has a machine to interact with us human types - "press 2 for no and 1 for yes and drop dead for fun." What a machine. We could end all of our problems with the terrorists by giving each of them several duplicates of that infernal machine. They'd give up their terrorizing muy pronto. Anyway, I finally got through to someone in that telephone outfit by going to their Web site on my computer - still DSL-connected. There was a lot of frustration in that contact, but there was also some amusement. For example, I filled out a form on the screen detailing my problem of having an inability to call out on the regular telephone. Their Internet form did not give me carte blanche as to my description of the missing dial tone problem, nor did it allow authorship of the wording. There was one little empty box that asked me to spell out (in 15 or so characters) how and where they could access my home if they needed to get inside the house to fix the problem.

That's where I asked them, " U turn off my phone did you???"

Anyway, they never answered my question, but when I finally battled their talking machine this morning and finally got through to a human person ("Robert") 1,800 miles distant from me way up there in Chicago, he was laughing about that question. They checked to see if, indeed, "Ma Bell" had pulled my phone plug from their wires, but that was not the case. When I told those nice people that I was trying to reorder some needed medicine by telephone, they actually sent a guy out here to mend their phone system.

Having been up and down all night long around here, unable to sleep in the cold and worrying about what could be ailing that foolish phone system that still halfway worked (DSL never quit...) I decided that today, Friday the 13th, was a great day on which to cook up some tasty cake donuts. Yes, I am still doing that as a part of my desire to add to my cake donut kit lineup.

Having had my fill of all of the sour notes from those telephone woes, I thought that today would be a great day on which to whomp up some sour-tasting snacks. I did just that. Here's the recipe. You can bake the things in your microwave oven if you like, or in the regular hot oven if you must. They work out OK either way.

I bake these cake donuts in little paper cups. When I bake them in the microwave oven at a setting of 550 watts of power (50%) for 5 to 6 minutes in batches of 6 cakes, I place the paper cups into little black plastic cups in order to hold them upright and to keep the paper cups from flattening. For hot oven baking, I put the paper cups into regular muffin pans to accomplish the same thing. In the regular hot oven I bake at 350 degrees, F. for about 12 to 15 minutes for up to 24 cake donuts at a time. So much for the baking part.

The ingredients are simple enough. The items for your home baking differ from those that I pack into my cake-donut kits, but they all serve about the same purpose.

For 12 cake-donuts use the following:

1/2 cup of granulated sugar
1-1/2 cups all purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 or 2 envelopes of "Kool-Aid" (or equivalent) unsweetened lemon drink powder
Mix the dry ingredients together in a bowl (or on the table if that is your desire)
Mix in 2 whole eggs. Put them in the middle and beat on them some)
Add:
1 or 2 tablespoons of lemon juice if you like the taste a lot
4 ounces of applesauce if you have some
About 1/3 cup of cooking oil (I used canola oil this time)
About a 1/2 cup of milk. (You could use water if you'd rather)
Beat on the batter enough to make you feel better on this Friday the 13th
Add:
1 or 2 little pieces of dried pineapple into each cup, or add them to the batter in each cup if you prefer
Fill:
I spoon about 3 piled-up tablespoons of batter into each cup, but you can pour the batter in or get it into the cups any way you like.

Then bake the cake-donuts.

I suppose that I had good luck on this Friday the 13th - got the telephones fixed and wound up with a dozen tasty lemon-pineapple cake donuts. Made me plumb thirsty, and so I also drank a can of cold diet Pepsi. Wish you could see the smile!