PunkCake FABPOW

Today's post, and FABPOW, is brought to you with inspiration found from many forms.

First off It's Shrove Tuesday. Secondly, it's OpenIt this weekend, so I thought I'd start cracking a few early just to be cheeky. Thirdly, I got quite a bit of inspiration from Mark's FABPOW, and decided to make some pancakes and beer for myself. The last bit of inspiration comes from BrewDog's 'PunkCake' twittering ideas - I read some interesting ones and thought I'd make my own. Turns out I had the perfect beer to bring it all together too.

Anyone remember this one?

I guess it was bottled in 2008. That's one thing I do like - when a brewery puts a 'bottled on' date on their strong beers.

You get a massive earthy, woody coffee aroma from the beer. It pours quite flat, but it seems to still have a good amount of carbonation about it. More of the same in the flavour. Huge earthy coffee and loads of oak, with a long bitter chocolate finish - a fantastic drop.

It has a really long drying finish as well. While I thought about sweet pancakes, I didn't think this Imperial Stout would work too well with them.
    So the match this time was with a savory pancake. I've never really had savory pancakes before, previous Shrove Tuesdays where usually a competition to see who could get the most golden syrup on one pancake, so this shall be a little different. The best foods I've ever matched with Imperial Stout have always been strong cheeses, rich foods, stuff like that - so I didn't really know where to start when it came to making up my own savory pancake recipe.

In the end I thought I'd try my hand at making some Spicy Pork & Blue Stilton Pancakes.

There will be no photos here. It didn't matter what I did, I wasn't going to get an appealing photo of this meal... but you know what they say - sometimes the messiest meals are the best! I had it quite hot too so the creamy Stilton ran from the pancake. I didn't use too much though as I feared it might overpower the spicy pork, turns out it was just the right amount. The dry earthy coffee flavour in the beer went really well with the spicy meaty pork in my humble opinion, and the rich Stilton just topped the whole thing off into on decadent meal for the evening!

That was my FABPOW OpenIt PunkCake for the night. I'd love to hear what other people will be indulging in on this magnificent night of nights: Shrove Tuesday.