Once a month I venture over to the nearest Costco, located in the sleepy hamlet of Livonia, Michigan, to stock up on life’s necessities. Diapers, baby wipes, 80 pound bags of Goldfish crackers, and beer. What’s that you say, “but Jeremy, they don’t sell Hoegaarden at Costco?” Very true. I actually never really thought about buying beer from Costco, as I find the store to be an indecipherable maze. But lo and behold, one day I got lost somewhere between the storage shelves and water purifiers, and found stacks upon stacks of beer. I waded through the cases of Miller Lite and Moosehead hoping to find some version of Samuel Adams, every store or bars default good beer. After winding through a maze of beer cases more confusing than the hedge maze in The Shining, I eventually stumbled upon my old drinking buddy Sam Adams. At $21.99 for a pack of 18, I was pleased with the deal Costco was offering and ready to grab a box when something caught my eye.

The sign read, Kirkland Signature Beer Variety Pack, $18.99. For those that don’t shop at Costco, Kirkland is their in-house brand, and usually makes pretty decent products for the price. Included in the case were four six packs, an Amber Ale, Pale Ale, German Lager, and Hefeweizen.

Kirkland Signature Beer

Unable to pass on what promised to be an interesting experiment, I decided to grab the case and give it a shot. I am pleased to report, dear Epic Portions readers that Kirkland Signature beers are quite tasty and a real bargain at the price, which averages out to approximately $4.75 per six pack. I’m not going to get into a review about which beer has citrus notes, but I will say that each one is a legitimate effort that deserves praise. My favorite is the Pale Ale, and I did find the Amber Ale to be a little disappointing, but hey, I’m used to Bell’s Amber which is truly magnificent.

Curious about where the beer comes from, I did a little investigating. On the bottle, it says that the beers are from the New Yorker Brewing Co. in Utica, NY. If you google that, you basically get a whole lot of nothing. I talked to the highest ranking manager willing to indulge me while I was at Costco and got a blank look. Finally, through hidden camera work and telling people I was Chris Hanson, I was able to learn that Kirkland Signature Beer is subcontracted to Gordon Biersch. If this name is familiar to you, which it probably isn’t, Gordon Biersch is responsible for providing many of the specialty beers that sit on the shelves at your local Trader Joe’s. This made perfect sense because usually a beer from TJ’s is, as my man from the High Life commercials says, “a good honest beer at a tasty price.” (I love the High Life guy, he hawks a terrible beer, but the commercials are quite funny).

Miller High Life Guy

All in all, if your travels take you to Costco you would do well to give the Kirkland Signature beers a try. You will be pleasantly surprised.

Hello, Epic Portions readers!  My name is Megan, and I’m new around here.  I’ve joined up to talk about baking.

See, I believe in baking creatively.  It’s not really enough for me for something to just taste good.  I think it needs to be creative, either in concept (I like to make up my own recipes based on inspiration), or execution (I like to bake things in the shape of other, more ridiculous things.)  I mean, think about the idea behind baking: take some sugar, and some butter, and some other stuff that tastes good (chocolate, fruit, peanut butter, whatever…) and mix it all together, and try not to burn it too much. It’s generally difficult to manage to bake something that tastes bad. The challenge, for me, is not only making it taste good, but making it interesting.

So, I submit for your consideration my latest creation, a birthday cake for my friend Jeff, who (at 27, mind you) is kind of obsessed with gerbils.

Last year, Jeff (a physicist) got a Periodic Table of Cake for his birthday.  That was made of two different kinds of cake (lemon-creme and chocolate-covered-strawberry) cut into individual square cupcakes, frosted in a rainbow of colors, then assembled and decorated to look like a mini periodic table. (Extra effort: the frosting on “arsenic” was laced with well over 1/4cup of cayenne pepper. Spicy!)

Jeff really enjoyed the lemon-creme from last year and asked for it again this year, so the gerbil cake started as a four-layer 9″x13″ lemon-creme cake with fresh lemon frosting.   My lemon cake is so easy it’s very nearly cheating: boxed lemon cake mix, lemon pie filling, and fresh lemon juice.  Too easy, and so delicious!  The fresh juice tempers the over-sweetness of boxed mix, and gives it a bright, tart lemon flavor.  For frosting, when using lemons I like to keep it simple to let the flavor shine: butter, confectioner’s sugar, and fresh-squeezed lemon juice.   For this cake, it was four 9″x13″ layers of cake and three layers of frosting holding it all together.

Once baked and layered, I carved the assembled cake (admittedly, with a little bit of help from my roommate, who was better at achieving the curves) into the shape of an adorable little gerbil.  I frosted it with more lemon icing, (tinted a light kraft-brown with icing dye), and added a lemon-end nose, lemon-slice ears, and a lemon-garnish tail.  I used black decorator’s icing to add details – nose, eyes, stripes and claws – and, voila!  Gerbil cake!