Category: conjure cookbook

Pecan Cream Cheese Pound Cake: When St. Expedite Wants a Little Better Than Sara Lee

Tradition has it that St. Expedite loves his Sara Lee pound cake. Some devotees will even say he prefers it to homemade pound cake. I don’t know about all that. But I do know a few things.

One, you should try to be as specific as possible when working with St. Expedite.

Two, you should give him your agreed-upon offerings when you see specific movement congruent with your petition. You can’t always get *everything* you want all the time in a hurry – recognize that he did work for you and acknowledge what he was able to do. He’s not a surly teenager whose allowance needs withholding until he gets a work ethic and moves out of your basement. Give him his damn flowers.

Three, he is not gonna get mad if you give him a homemade pound cake instead of that tasteless, pale yellow brick of stuff you can buy at the gas station. Plus you can impress the currently-living and not-yet-sainted with this pound cake. This is a family recipe from my mother’s side of the family.

1 1/2 cups butter
8 ounces cream cheese, softened
3 cups sugar
6 large eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 teaspoon almond extract
3 cups cake flour divided
1 cup chopped pecans
Preheat oven to 325. Lightly grease and flour a 10-inch tube pan. In a large mixing bowl, mix cream cheese, butter, and sugar until fluffy (about 5 minutes). Add eggs one at a time, beating between each. Add vanilla and almond extracts. Mix. Reserve 1/4 cup flour; dredge pecans in it. Add remaining flour a little at a time, beating on low speed. Fold in pecans.

Pour batter into pan and bake 1 1/2 hours or until cake begins to come away from the sides of the pan. Let cool in pan before removing cake.

Feast of St. Expedite

St. Expedite’s feast day is the 19th of April, and I set lights and began work on his altar for the community altar work last night.

But there are still spots left if you’d like to jump in – you can find out more at Seraphin Station.

Saint of the Month Box

Finally, St. Expedite is the saint for this month’s Saint of the Month box.

Standard box includes, at a minimum, a bottle of oil, a candle, a holy card or mini prayer booklet, brief history and recommendations for working with the saint or spirit, and a charm, medal, or curio. 

Deluxe box includes, at a minimum, a bottle of oil, a fixed, blessed, dressed, and decorated vigil candle, a holy card or mini prayer booklet, brief history and recommendations for working with the saint or spirit, and a handmade chaplet, rosary, or necklace.

Learn more or order now at Seraphin Station.

More St. Expedite resources in the education section’s index of rootwork topics.

Love/Lust Truffles (aka how to get your personal concerns in their food)

I posted a version of this to a list on I’m on the other day and figured I’d share.

This is a recipe for truffles if you are using the sneaky-tricks-via-food to work on somebody for love/lust situations.  Everybody loves chocolate.  If they don’t like chocolate, you need to find somebody else to work on, ’cause that’s just a bad sign, man.  Seriously, though, this will often work when the old coffee or marinara sauce or mulled wine tricks won’t work, ’cause really – everybody likes chocolate.

You start with your basic truffle recipe. There are a million online if you don’t have one, but here’s a good basic one at kitchn, and here’s one at Simply Recipes. (Don’t worry.  It’s *really easy* to make truffles.)

Whatever recipe you’re using, be sure to heat your cream in its own saucepan.  When it’s just about to boil, remove from heat and add pinches of some or all of the following:

  • damiana
  • ginger
  • cubeb berries (these are spicy, kinda like the love child of allspice and black pepper, so be aware)
  • sampson snake root aka echinacea (it’s a little, er, zingy, so go light)
  • cardamom
  • cinnamon
  • rose petals (unsprayed/organic)
  • orange zest
  • hibiscus flowers
  • split vanilla bean

How much you need will depend on what you’re using and your batch size, but if you wanted these to taste like orange and ginger, for instance, and you were using 8 ounces of chocolate and 1/2 cup of cream, you’d use about 1/2 TBSP of ginger and about 2 teaspoons of orange zest, and add just a pinch of anything else since it’s going in there for magical and not flavor purposes.

Let herbs sit for about half an hour.  Then scoop the herbs out, reheat the cream almost to a boil, add your bodily stuff (skin scrapings or whatever), stir, and pour the cream over the broken up chocolate. Proceed with truffle recipe. You cannot screw this up.

Pray or speak your petition, aloud or mentally, as you’re adding your herbs and stirring in your personal concerns. Call your target’s name and be fervent. Remember hoodoo goes where you send it. You don’t want to be putting the mojo on the wrong person if somebody busts into your truffle stash, so tell it where you want it to go as you’re working. If you can and want to, you can get all fancy with some candle work while you work, but you don’t have to – the process of cooking a dish, especially for a specific purpose and with full conscious awareness, is legit a magical rite all on its own.

In terms of taste, you have options. You want spicy, go for more cinnamon, ginger, and/or cubeb. Or use candied ginger, dice it very finely, and add it after you scoop everything else out.

You want it to taste like roses, put a handful of rose petals in there. Or put a tablespoon of sugar and a couple of handfuls of rose petals into your food processor, grind them to pretty pink dust, and use that to coat your finished truffles.

Your target a coffee fan? Add a tablespoon of instant coffee or espresso and a scant handful of cracked cardamom pods. Get creative with liquers and coatings along the same lines. Two tablespoons of Grand Marnier can take the place of your orange zest – just stir it in when combining your chocolate and cream. You can vary the herbs depending on your goals — just make sure you’re using edible herbs. The good news is that there are tons of edible herbs out there that are useful in love work.  And since everybody loves chocolate, you can do some real damage with this recipe.

And with a little imagination, you can modify it, or similar candy or cookoie recipes, for other situations – anywhere where you can get people to eat your food, you can do a sneaky trick.  Got work problems and dreading that office potluck? Bring dessert.

(I used to work with a guy who had it in for office potlucks.  He would always make the hottest hotwings on the face of the earth – hotwings that would melt your face off, hotwings you had to handle with tongs.  He made a batch at my house once, and my eyes watered when I went into the kitchen. He would talk the wings up for a few days so all the billy-badasses would feel honor-bound to try them.  It was funny as all hell to watch people try to eat those things.  They were nuclear.  But this sort of thing gives you the idea, I hope).