The Root Of All Of The Devils Problems, or: Build-A-Cake Workshop

There are a lot of questions surrounding the Devils these days, but none more pressing than “how is it that a team of professionals can be this confused about how to play hockey?” Gentle Reader, it won’t surprise you that we, being the intrepid reporters we are, have gotten to the bottom of this story and discovered the reason the Devils are so fucking fucked up right now. It starts, as all things do this season for us, with the Flyers. Bear with us, Gentle Reader — this is going somewhere.

Apparently Flyers head coach John Stevens is somewhat renowned for his creative, unorthodox, and totally cheesy approach to instructing and motivating his hockey charges. And at least once (possibly twice — it was hard to say based on the article we found this in) he has employed this amazingly brilliant team-building tactic with professional hockey players:

Stevens held a team meeting at his Washington Township, N.J., home and instructed each player to bring an ingredient. Eggs, flour, sugar, frosting – they were going to bake a team cake.

The idea, as Stevens said the other day, “is that all the ingredients by themselves aren’t that appealing. But when you mix them with some fire you come up with a better product in the end. That’s kind of who you are.”
(Philadelphia Daily News – Thursday, May 8, 2008)

How awesome is that? We can just see how that would play out… The big guys would be there with their cool-kid ingredients, Richards with the flour, Carter with the sugar, Hartnell with the eggs — no, that’s a disaster waiting to happen… Hartnell with the butter, Knuble with the eggs, Biron with the vanilla, Lupul with the baking soda, Coburn with the salt, and so on and so on. Each guy would solemnly add his unappealing-on-its-own ingredient, contributing to the once-it-gets-mixed-with-fire-it’s-delicious dessert treat, and then, when it’s all done, Riley Cote would be like, “Cool cake, Coach! This was a really great team exercise. But, um… when do I get to put in my ingredient? You told me to bring raisins.” And Coach Stevens would say, “Well, Riley, that’s an important part of this exercise, to show that some unappealing ingredients don’t belong in a cake.” And Cote would be like, “Uhhh… Are you trying to tell me something?” And then Danny Carcillo would pipe up, “I brought what you told me to bring and we haven’t used it yet, either. It’s, um,” and then he’d read the label from the bottle he’s holding, “T-U-R-P-E-N-T-I-N-E. When do we add that?” And Stevens would sigh, “That’s to teach us all that some unappealing things aren’t ingredients at all.” And Carcillo would be like, “*Crickets chirping*”. It would rock.

We have NO DOUBT that the Devils have decided to take a crack at the “Let’s Bake A Cake Together” trick themselves recently, perhaps a “Let’s Bake A Cake Together To Celebrate Marty’s 552nd Win” exercise, even. Clearly Sutter has decided he can’t trust his veteran players to be able to do their jobs with pride and self-respect, and instead has to resort to the creative, unorthodox, and totally cheesy. In any event, this is the cake they made.

SANDRA LEE’S KWANZAA CAKE

For those of you who are at work and can’t watch videos or something, here’s what the recipe the Devils are working from is all about.

1 (10 to 12-ounce) purchased angel food cake
1 container (16 ounce) vanilla frosting
2 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder
2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 (21-ounce) container apple filling or topping
1 (1.7-ounce) package corn nuts
1/2 cup pumpkin seeds, toasted
1/2 cup popped popcorn

Special Equipment: Kwanzaa candles

Using a serrated knife, cut cake horizontally into 2 layers. Place bottom cake layer, cut side up, on a serving platter. Mix frosting, cocoa powder, vanilla, and cinnamon in large bowl until combined. Spread about 1/4 of the frosting over top of cake layer on platter. Top with second cake layer, cut side down. Spread remaining frosting evenly over top and sides of cake to coat completely. Spoon apple pie filling into hole in center of cake. Place candles atop cake. Sprinkle top of cake with some corn nuts, pumpkin seeds, and popcorn. Sprinkle remaining corn nuts and pumpkin seeds around base of cake.

Zach and Travis are tasked to bring several angel food cakes, so there would be enough finished product to go around. Patty, Paulie and Langer draw frosting. Madden, Greene and Rolston are assigned to bring the cocoa powder. Sutter tells Whitey and Iron Boar to bring vanilla. Rupp and Oduya are told to bring the cinnamon. Zubrus, Gio and Holik are instructed to get the pie filling. Havelid and Shanahan are assigned corn nuts. Mottau and Clarkson draw pumpkin seeds. Marty and Weeks are told to bring the popcorn. And Pando is assigned to bring the turpentine.

Everyone assembles at the set time in Coach Sutter’s kitchen for the big baking exercise. The first thing everyone notices is that this recipe is chock-a-block with unappealing ingredients, but since no one was told to bring candles, it is very short on fire. Sutter agrees that when the cake is assembled, they’ll grill it. Because as Coach Stevens would say, that’s kind of who the Devils are. Then they set to making the cake. Zach has brought his share of ingredient, because he’s nothing if not dutiful, but Travis, when called upon, has to admit he didn’t bring any cake.

“I watched the video, Coach,” he explains, “That lady didn’t use corn nuts. She said she was using acorns. I made sure we had acorns.”

Sutter tries to keep his temper in check, because this is a nurturing learning exercise and all. “That’s nice, Travis,” he says slowly, “But we already have nuts. Corn nuts. Havelid and Shanny brought them.”

Havelid squirms uncomfortably in the back of the room.

“You brought corn nuts, right Havelid?” Sutter tries not to snarl.

Havelid grimaces, showing his missing teeth (on the top and bottom), then sort of dumbly looks around at everyone else. “I didn’t get them.”

Sutter: “Why not?”

Havelid: “I dunno. I just didn’t.”

Sutter groans inwardly, then asks, “So who was it again who was supposed to bring corn nuts if not Havelid?”

Zach pipes up eagerly, “Shanny! Shanny brought them!” Pause. “Where’s Shanny?”

Sutter sighs, “I gave him a maintenance day today.”

The other guys all start grumbling jealously, except Travis, who happily exclaims, “Good thing I brought the acorns then, you know…”

Sutter looks impatiently at his wristwatch. “Fine. Fuck it. We’ve got one cake and no corn nuts. Whatever. Next step. Frosting. You sad fucks brought icing, right?”

Patty steps forward and proudly hands Sutter a can of frosting. “You bet I did. It’s Funfetti! Super-colorful!”

Zach pipes up urgently, “NO! Coach, the recipe says vanilla frosting! We can’t use Funfetti!”

Glaring at the ceiling, Sutter reluctantly agrees. “Funfetti’s going to make our cake look like ass, Elias. Can’t you follow the simplest of instructions? Fuuuck. Who else brought icing?”

This draws an angrily furrowed brow from Langer, who steps forward and growls, “I did, Coach. And as captain, I am going to step up now and get the job done.” He then pulls a can of vanilla frosting from the grocery bag he’s holding, makes to toss it across the kitchen to his waiting coach, winds up, and throws the can ten feet wide, right out the window and into an open dumpster outside. A long, awkward silence follows, which is finally broken by Langer mumbling, “I’m working hard enough. I mean, I’m doing what I’m supposed to out here…”

Sutter: “Good thing Paulie also brought frosting.”

Paulie looks up from the can he’s been intently digging in for the last half hour. “Yup. It was delicious.”

Sutter: “Pando, go outside and get Langer’s can out of the dumpster.”

Pando grudgingly does as he’s told, but the guys nearest the open window can hear him grumbling the whole time.

“Okay,” Sutter says through clenched teeth, “This is going great. What a fun team-bonding experience we’re having here, right? What’s next?”

Zach chirps, “Cocoa powder, Coach!”

Sutter: “Right. Fucking cocoa powder. Tell me we have fucking cocoa powder here. Greene, I figure you fucked this up somehow, but Madden and Rolston, you guys are vets. I can trust you to do this, right?”

Greene, Rolston and Madden all stand mutely in front of their coach. Very slowly, Greene lifts an extended index finger to silently point to Rolston, who meekly points his own finger at Madden, while Madden is quietly pointing back at Greene.

If you listen very closely, you can hear the clot that Sutter is about to throw. But he manages to maintain a stoic facade as he snarls, “Fine. Fuck that. I hate chocolate anyway. Cinnamon then. Please tell me we have cinnamon.”

Rupp steps forward enthusiastically, “Of course I brought cinnamon! You tell me what to do, Coach, and I do it. I, um, didn’t have a lot in my house, but I brought what I could.”

Oduya beams as he produces from his pocket a little spice jar as well. “I brought all of my cinnamon, too.”

Zach leaps up and snatches the jars from both guys, and eagerly measures it out. “Uh oh, Coach,” he quavers, then whispers tearfully, “Neither one of them brought enough. We only have 1/4 teaspoon here and we need a full teaspoon!”

Sutter slumps onto a chair and runs his hands through what little hair he’s got left. “Well that’s just tickety-boo. Who wanted this to be cinnamony anyway? We’ve got vanilla to make up for that.” Without looking up, he waves one hand defeatedly, “Whitey, Sal, give Zach the vanilla.”

The Iron Boar looks sheepish. “I, um, don’t have it,” he says softly.

Sutter is just silent.

Iron Boar continues sadly, “I was on the PK, and everything was going fine, and then all of a sudden… I was just throwing the vanilla over the glass. I couldn’t help myself. I just love throwing things over the glass.” Pause. “Sorry.”

Whitey rolls his eyes and hands over a tiny bottle to Zach. “I brought mine,” he rasps.

Zach looks at the label at the bottle, then his gaze, wide-eyed, sad, and tearful, shifts up to look at Sutter. “Uh oh,” he swallows hard. “Did you say your eye still makes it tough for you to read, Whitey?”

Whitey shrugs, “Sometimes.”

Zach wordlessly hands the bottle to Sutter, who reads it aloud, “Sardine Extract”.

The guys groan nervously.

Sutter suddenly gets a happy glint in his eyes. “Well, we finally have an ingredient here. Add the extract Zach.”

Zach looks horrified. “But… but… without vanilla, it won’t have that homemade taste!”

“Zach,” Sutter snarls, “Add the extract.” With shaking hands, Zach does exactly that.

Several happy moments follow as the team cuts and frosts the cake. It’s like craft time for little kids, but tiptoeing around the high-grade explosives that is Coach Sutter. When their little cake is assembled and iced, everyone stands at attention again, ready for the next round of ingredients.

“Okay,” Sutter looks at the recipe, “Where’s the apple pie filling?”

Holik defiantly declares, “I don’t like apple pie so I didn’t bring any.”

Gio and Zubrus hastily try to cover for him, and they say nearly in unison, “Don’t worry — I brought mine!”

But Sutter just smiles happily at Holik, “That’s my boy. Don’t ever change, Bobby. I love that spirit of yours.”

Burning holes through the back of Holik’s disobeying head, Zach heaps a few spoonfuls of pie filling into the center of the cake, then snaps primly, “Clarkie and Motts, you guys have the pumpkin seeds?”

Mottau just shrugs, “At this point you didn’t really think I would, did you?” and Clarkson insists on applying the seeds to the cake himself. Needless to say, this involves him running around behind the cake, trying and failing to cut a tight corner, wiping out, and tossing the seeds everywhere but on the cake.

Sutter sits in place, staring in disbelief. “What in the fucking fuck?” he mutters to himself. “Never in my wildest dreams did I think I’d have a team like this. Never.”

“Don’t worry, Coach,” says Marty, “It’s not like we had any popcorn either. I ate it all on the drive over.”

Sutter just stares into space.

Travis then pipes up happily, “Well, I’ve got the acorns. Maybe if I put them on the cake now, it’ll look good…” He puts them on the cake, and it doesn’t.

Pando then speaks up, “Well, I’ve got the turpentine. I’m sure it would make the cake look great, especially when we grill it, but you know what? I’m not sharing.”

Sutter: “This is the last time I ever take John Stevens’s advice when we’re at a coaching workshop.”

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For A Case Of Tastykake

Eagle-eyed Gentle Readers around here may have noticed two recent trends in our thinking: one is that we are vaguely obsessed with the Flyers, and the other is that we’re incredibly obsessed with Tastykakes. Now, we’ve lived in the outlying Philadelphia region for the better part of our lives, and up until this very day, our only exposure to Tastykakes was those shockingly vile pictures of them on billboards along I-95 on the way back from the airport and/or sports complex in Philly. But ever since finding out that the Flyers and Tastykakes go together like, well, some sort of iconic unholy combination, it has been our sworn mission to immerse ourselves in the Tastykake experience. If our beloved Tranny Brides actually officially score goals for cases of Tastykakes (to be donated to children’s charities), we simply must know what that case of deliciousness is really like. Seriously, Gentle Reader, this is what motivates Mike Richards when he’s breaking away shorthanded; don’t even try to tell us he’s not thinking, “Dude, you just gotta score here — there’s Tastykakes on the line.”

Boomer is the most shameless of the three of us, so she willingly volunteered to go to the nearest gas station kwik-e-mart to stock up on our Tasty vittles. We weren’t sure how much would be available, so imagine our delight when she sent us an email this afternoon titled simply “yum yum” with this as the entire body of the message:

Mission accomplished. We were ready to spend this evening watching the Tranny Brides on tivo delay while enjoying our very own custom-built case of Tastykakes.

Here was the haul, divvied up:

It should be noted that we undertook this taste test without the safety net of a spit cup; it was just us and the Tastykakes. If the Flyers give them out to sick orphans, how bad can they be?

It should also be noted that when you sit for a few minutes next to a groaning platter of pieces of Tastykake, the smell is nearly overwhelming. And the sliced-open Jelly Krimpet will glare balefully through your soul.

The more we thought about it, the more terrible an idea this seemed to be. Because seriously, if the Flyers give these things away to sick orphans, there’s no way they’re edible. They are the Flyers, after all. The only thing to do is just to dig in.

Our methodology is to just plow through, and then rate them on Boomer’s proposed High Disgust Factor scale, ranging from Beaker to Boulerice (Beaker being not at all disgusting, Boulerice being, well, Boulerice).

First up: The Pound Kake Junior. It is just a little brick of pound cake. There is actually nothing junior about it, as it could probably feed a family of four for a week. This is really a manly lunchbox dessert, even by our standards.

High Disgust Factor: Knuble. It’s actually pretty likable, in a workmanlike way. It tastes not unlike microwave popcorn butter, but in cake form. Or rather, kake form.

We wash this down with generous swallows of Diet Coke (is it actually Koke tonight?) and gird ourselves for more.

Second up: Creme Filled Koffee Kake Cupcakes. We’re confused by the spellings — why aren’t they “cupkakes”? Schnookie’s especially eager for this kake, because her fondest elementary school snack memory is that one time in first grade that her class got Drake’s Coffee Cakes. To this day, when offered a free snack, she irrationally hopes it will be something like that, but she has never once, in all those years been rewarded again. This cupkake is a little blob of yellow kake with what looks like tan mouse droppings on top and a blob of gleaming white creme in the middle.

High Disgust Factor: Gagne. Almost — almost — good. But, like Gagne, it has a fatal flaw. Gagne’s is that he’s a Marty killer, and the Koffee Kake’s is that its lingering (and lingering, and lingering) aftertaste is strongly of coconut. Or Kokonut. But the mouse poops are surprisingly crunchy and delicious, and the whole thing tastes genuinely of cinnamon. If this was a free snack at some event we were attending, we’d be psyched. Until we finished eating it, and then we’d spend the rest of the event wishing the world didn’t taste of coconut.

Third Up: As Pookie puts it, “Should we get this Lemon Pie out of the way?” It’s a hard brown crust around a blobby glob of dull yellow goo.

High Disgust Factor: Asham. We expected profoundly disgusting, and as it turns out, it’s actually not vomit-inducing. In other words, pleasantly surprising. The filling is fairly lemony, and the crust isn’t as stale-tasting as we thought it would be. It’s doughy and fake tasting, though — kinda like Asham.

Fourth Up: “Tasty Treat”. This is Tastykake’s contribution to the premade Rice Krispie treat canon. When cutting these things into pieces, this one smelled the worst when first opened by a knife. How do Rice Krispie treats turn out like that? How is that possible? We were about to find out.

High Disgust Factor: Carter. Dude. This is the dessert that’s all blond hair and white teeth. It tastes like a rice krispie treat that has yellow cake mix (not kake mix) powder in it. It makes us want to make our own rice krispie treats with yellow cake mix sprinkled in, just to see if we could replicate this flavor, but in a wholesome, homemade way. Heh. We actually went back for more of this one.

Fifth Up: Tastyklair. Pookie: “So far we haven’t had one that makes me want to gack, but looking at the Tastyklair, I don’t think I can put it in my mouth.”

High Disgust Factor: Hextall. Ron Hextall gave us hours and hours of laughing-at-him joy while also being someone we could genuinely loathe. Likewise, this was the item that most delighted us while studying up on Tastykakes, and is also something we can genuinely regret having eaten. Pookie: “This tastes like a ‘treat’ I would have been given in Russia.” She doesn’t mean that in a nice way. Once again, it’s the doughy, dry crust, this time filled with cake-mix flavored cream and a crumbly “chocolate” topping. It’s iconically bad.

Sixth Up: Chocolate Cupcake. Tastykake totally dropped the ball naming this. It’s a dry lump of chocolate cupcake with a thin, sad layer of chocolate frosting over the top. It doesn’t look encouraging.

High Disgust Factor: Briere. We’d rather pretend this never happened. It was strangely crumbly, yet had a gummy mouthfeel. Schnookie: “This is the opposite of all the others, in that it started out revolting, then had a lingering aftertaste of just cocoa.” Pause. “No, wait. Now it’s revolting again.” Pookie: “Maybe we should rate this as a Terry Murray, because for you it was literally a choking situation.” ZING!

Seventh Up: Creme Filled Chocolate Cupcake. It looks less malignant than the plain chocolate cupcake because it has a flat smear of “white” frosting on top, and a gleaming blob or white creme in the center.

High Disgust Factor: Lindros. It’s an enigma. It doesn’t taste as bad as its non creme-filled counterpart, in large part because its cupcake foulness is broken up by that glob of sugared, whipped crisco. We rate it a Lindros because it was puzzlingly difficult to figure out what was going on with it — we couldn’t figure out what we were tasting, how bad it was, what its intentions were, and it would have been greatly improved by Scott Stevens smushing it into oblivion.

Eighth Up: Fudge Nut Brownie. Schnookie balked here, after struggling mightily with the chocolate cupcake. This is a very flat slab of brownie substance topped with a thick sludge of “frosting” studded with pieces of walnuts.

High Disgust Factor: Cote. Like Cote, this sucks at what it does, but it’s also kind of benign. That said, if Cote was a metaphor for this brownie, and picking Cote for a roster was a metaphor for choosing an after-dinner treat, then playing with an empty spot in the lineup would be our metaphor for opting to go dessertless. To spell it out. Pookie: “This tastes like brownie jerky.”

Based on our “observing the billboards along I-95″ research, we think Krimpets are the signature Tastykake. So we saved them for last.

Ninth Up: Jelly Filled Krimpet. This is perhaps the scariest item on the plate whose name doesn’t rhyme with “Blastyklair”. It’s a sponge cake with a squirt of red goo in the center.

High Disgust Factor: Forsberg. This is a surprisingly ephemeral dessertstuff, yet it packs an enormous wallop of grotesqueness. We each took eensy-weensy bites, and yet we still found ourselves overwhelmed by the powerful wretchedness that is the flavor of the jelly filling. It tastes like a fruit roll-up that goes on for miles. Like the Flyers-Era Forsberg, it’s not very substantial, but it’s also pervasively vile. Pookie: “I felt like it wasn’t actually playing in a game, but it was still calling a press conference during the action to tell me stuff it’s already gone over time and again before.”

Tenth Up: Butterscotch Krimpet. It’s sponge cake with a limp square of tawny “frosting” drooping over the top of it. It looks almost as bad in person as it does in its I-95 glamor shots, and we hoped it would be a Tastykake experience for the ages.

High Disgust Factor: Cechmanek. The Butterscotch Krimpet is a very puzzling experience. Pookie: “I couldn’t tell you what this tasted like. It’s like… a sugary… citrus… sawdust…” Schnookie: “It’s like Roman Cechmanek. It’s beamed into my life from a mysterious planet, it’s doing god-only-knows-what here, and then it’s going to beam back away.” Pookie: “But it’s going to leave me with great happiness like Cechmanek did, because my Tastykake tasting experience is now over.”

So there you go, Gentle Reader. Perhaps our Tastykake obsession is safely behind us. If there’s one lesson we’re taking away from this exercise, it’s that you really, really don’t want to be a sick orphan in Philadelphia.

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The Show Us Your V: A Versus-Inspired Cocktail

Thanks to flex scheduling, we were lucky fans who got to see their team get picked up for an extra crappy Versus feed yesterday. On top of that, we’re staring down the barrel of another Versus game this coming Monday. How is a girl supposed to survive that? Two Versus treatments for the Devils in less than a week? It’s terrible!

Well, spurred on by Myra’s suggestion, we decided the only way to confront this situation is with a cocktail. And in honor of Versus, it should be a girly cocktail called “Show Us Your V”, and the crappier it turned out, the better. After some deep thinking, though, mixologist Schnookie decided that it should also be a cocktail we’d be willing to drink, since the point was to make this dreadful week of hockey more bearable, so we scaled back our ambitions of craptitude. Instead we decided to aim for something kind of Sandra Lee Semi-Ho.

The components of the Show Us Your V are vanilla vodka, Sailor Jerry spiced rum, 7-Up, pomegranate juice, and limes. Girly? Check.

Step 1. Fill a glass with ice. If you do this loudly enough, you can drown out the sound of Jones and Engblom during the intermission show.

Step 2. Add 1 1/2 oz. Sailor Jerry and 1 oz. vanilla vodka to the glass. If you were not able to time the ice clanking to drown out the intermission show, pour with a very heavy hand — you’ve earned it by watching Versus.

Step 3. Squeeze the juice of a whole lime into the glass, and pour in 1 oz. pomegranate juice as well. Don’t ever think we’re not health-conscious, as even our noxious cocktail has antioxidants and helps stave off scurvy. There’s way more nutritive value to the Show Us Your V than any of Versus’s programming choices!

Step 4. Top the glass off with 7-Up and stir. The Show Us Your V is ready to go before the intermission’s over, so you’ll be ready for the next period with glass in hand. It actually wasn’t nearly as sickly-sweet as we hoped it would be, what with the tart pomegranate and lime, but it’s certainly not a drink that’s going to put any hair on your chest. In other words, it goes great with MMA and bullriding. Cheers!

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The Spy Who Loved Me: A Devils Quaff

You may remember, Gentle Reader, that not too long ago we invented a couple of cocktails that captured our feelings about the Kevin Weekes and Scott Clemmensen Eras. You might also remember that we floated a theory that the Devils goaltending situation this season is going to follow the trajectory of the James Bond movie franchise. Well, keeping with that theory, today we had a cocktail that embodies what we’re feeling about Clemmensen’s play of late.

Behold: the The Spy Who Loved Me.

Sigh. We hate to have to say this — really, we do — but Clemmer’s been good lately. It’s eating at our souls. But we just can’t lie to ourselves anymore, and the fact is our goalie version of Roger Moore as James Bond is clearly in his The Spy Who Loved Me phase. And this drink basically tastes exactly like that.

The recipe is actually for a “Ballet Russe”, which, when topped with ginger ale becomes a “Russian Fizz”, which is only appropriate for The Spy Who Loved Me. It’s a sickly sweet mix of vodka, creme de cassis, lime juice, lemon juice and simple syrup. And because we didn’t have any ginger ale, we topped ours with ginger beer. Ultimately, it’s just like its movie namesake — a bit clumsy, a lot overdone, not really all that great when you’re in the moment, but overall leaves an extremely positive impression. The only thing its missing is that totally puzzling slow-moving chase scene with Jaws at the Pyramids.

So there you go. Our alcoholic way of saying that Clemmer doesn’t suck. Right now. This very moment. But we’re not worried — before too much longer we’ll be drinking Moonrakers.

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Happy Thanksgiving Observed

We’d do a post about things we’re thankful for here on the Friday after Thanksgiving, on which we’re celebrating Thanksgiving Observed, but really, you know us better than that, don’t you Gentle Reader? Instead, we’ll just keep our complaining to a minimum as we try to power through our turkey comas. Right this minute we’re watching a smorgasbord of non-Devils hockey while nibbling on caramel cream pie and trying to think of some way to tie our Thanksgiving dinner pictures into some sort of riotously funny Devils-themed post. And we’ve got nothing. So we’ll just leave you with this, a dish we hope graced the tables at all three of the Devils’ competing Thanksgiving dinner parties:

Who wouldn’t want to eat this with all their favorite Devils?

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Devils vs. Capitals, 11/15/08

As we’ve come to the crushing realization that our Devils are, unexpectedly, going to really and truly suck this season, alix has been helpfully suggesting a way to make the long, miserable months ahead much more fun. Her recommendation? Invent cocktails and name them after the reasons why our fandom is such a terrible burden to bear. This is an activity we can totally get behind, and we kicked things off last weekend.

The situation was that we had half a bottle of red wine leftover from the night before, a hankering for mixed drinks, a limited number of ingredients, and a plan to name our cocktail of the day “The Kevin Weekes Era”. So Schnookie perused her library of mixology books and discovered a recipe for a noxious brew that combined a lot of gin with a little bit of the wine, some rum, and a dash of orange juice. The finished product was lovely (see above), but as nasty-tasting as you’d expect.

We hastily poured them down the drain and decided to drink vicariously through an episode of Semi-Homemade Cooking With Sandra Lee. Well, what do you know? That day Sandra was making things with wine, and her Cocktail Time concoction was a red wine spritzer. We still had most of that half a bottle of wine, so, inspired by Sandra, Schnookie mixed that up with seltzer, some brandy, and some Cointreau. It was considerably more palatable, but still not the finest beverage known to man. We decided the first drink should be renamed “The Scott Clemmensen Era” and the tastier one “The Kevin Weekes Era”.

Well, it turns out we were right the first time. The Kevin Weekes Era apparently sucks worse than the Scott Clemmensen one, but you know what? They’re both not as good as the wine would have been on its own. And the moral of the story is you should only subject yourself to either of these Eras if you have no choice at all.

On that note, let’s all sit back, have many drinks, and enjoy an open thread for tonight’s hockey.

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Applesauce and Acorns

Today, Mike “Doc” Emrick was given the Foster Hewitt Memorial Award from the Hockey Hall of Fame. We know there are a lot of people out there who don’t care for his call, but we think those people are idiots we can’t say anything about Doc that will change their minds; we also know there are a lot of people who think Doc’s the best in the business and know that this award is well earned. We will never, ever forgot Doc calling the overtime of an absolutely insane Devils-Flyers game back in the late ’90s. The action was the fastest, most furious stuff you’ll ever see and Doc kept pace as only Doc can. When ESPN showed the highlights later they didn’t bother doing their own analysis — they just shut up and played the entire overtime with Doc’s call. That’s Doc in a nutshell for us. We consider ourselves as lucky to have had him as our play-by-play man as we do to have had Scott Stevens on the blueline, Marty in net, and Pando leading the charge. (Shut up! We heart Pando!)

Speaking of nutshells, we decided to celebrate Doc’s Hall of Fame career by making a cake. A very special cake. A cake that answers the question: what happens when you combine Mike “Applemotherfuckingsauce” Mottau and Travis “Acorns” Zajac.

Forget JMFJ, AMFS is where it’s at!

Travis’s abacus.

That’s right, it was time for a little applesauce cake, baked in miniature acorn molds. (That’s right, when Schnookie said earlier that we were “cooking up an idea for a post” she meant it literally! Hahahahaha! We crack us up. Sigh. When does Marty come back?) After some furious mixing, stirring, and baking, we had a handful of adorable acorn cakes that were good but not great — like Travis! — and which needed a touch more spice — like Travis! — but were better the more we thought about them — like Travis! (In the end the consensus was the recipe has the potential to kick ass — like Mottau!)

The cakes were so much like their Waldorf Kid inspiration, we figured they’d be appropriate medium for testing Travis’s math skills.

Hey Travis, how many months is Marty going to be out?

Three to four! Right!

Hey Travis, how many Devils are on IR right now?

Very good! When Pauile Martin was added, that brought the total to six!

Hey Travis, how many goals are you going to score this year?

What?!? Two?? Come on, Travis! You don’t have to believe that bunk about you being a playmaking defensive center! You can score acorns! You can, you can! You can’t? Fine. If that’s the way you want to be. So, how many is Zach going to score?

More than you can count? Sweet! We’ll take it!

Hey Travis, overall, how’s the season going to end up?

Is that a hill of beans? Not funny, Travis! Not funny at all.

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