Cakes of Light recipe
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@KRVB MMShCh said
"7-10 drops Abramelin
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(b) galangal root is in fact quite spicy"Personally, I like galangal though I don't find it to be as spicy as you suggest (I'm grinding up slices of the root in my coffee grinder), and with only 7-10 drops, I usually don't taste the oil specifically at all--I can barely notice the wine leavings.
As a side note I just use them for XLIV and because of my lack of spare blood I don't add blood when I make them (it being added in the ritual) so maybe thats making some kind of difference.
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this is different!
lib.oto-usa.org/agape/agape.9.3-4.pdf
...see essay Cakes of Light and the Buzz about Beeswing by Sister Beth Kimbell on page 8
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@Metzareph said
" I am also looking for a kick {@$$} abramelin oil. (the real stuff)
thanks again."You can get some really nice abramelin oil from Sekhet Bast Ra Ordo Templi Orientis Oasis, nice quality and not very expensive.
You can find it on the "sbr store" page of our website, (there's a link on the front page) www.sekhetbastra.orgI can vouch for it, I've got a huge bottle of it
Makes wonderful cakes too. -
I recommend reading the Anal Retentive's Guide to Oil of Abramelin
www.horusset.com/RIKB/abramelin.pdf
One point: Crowley's recipe (which many Thelemites tend to favor) is not Oil of Abramelin. He mixed essential oils based on the weight of the original ingredients. Since the different ingredients release widely different amounts of oil, this makes the Crowley oil much more cinnamon-laden.
Also, on the toxicity of Calamus: one must use their own sense. However I believe the toxicity has been greatly overstated. It was based on rats getting cancer from huge amounts of daily Calamus. Note that this study was done using Indian Calamus (the jammu variety), which has a different chemical composition than American and European Calamus, which has, according to a 1980s study, much lower toxicity. Calamus has long been an ingredient in the original recipe of many perfumes and liqueurs, from Absinthe, Bitters, Chartreuse, to Benedictine.
Given that one a cake of light may contain less than a single drop of Oil, and only a fraction of that is Calamus, I think it's unreasonable to rule it out over claims of toxicity.
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Hi there! I find it interesting to taste the cake of light. Can non-members of your religion eat that too, especially if ingredient X is mixed with it? I understand that Cake of Light is your Eucharistic host and I don’t think I can have a taste of them because I presume they are not sold in the market. Chinese people also have special breads for their celebrations. Their moon cake is also delicious. I have full respect to every religion and culture.
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Hmmm i was under the impression "bodily" fluids went into the receipe prodominantly..?
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The original recipe is in Liber Al III:23-29
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@AvshalomBinyamin said
"The original recipe is in Liber Al III:23-29"
That's barely more than an ingredient list. Far from a recipe
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I posted this on another thread ... thought it would be good to repost here:
93
As a professional winemaker, I am hoping to set the record straight on perhaps the most mysterious and controversial Cake of Light ingredient ... and no we are not talking about blood. Blood certainly is the most complex liquid matrix on the planet, but I would like to focus on the second most complex. That is, wine. Liber AL vel Legis (III:23) states:
For perfume mix meal & honey & thick leavings of red wine: then oil of Abramelin and olive oil, and afterward soften & smooth down with rich fresh blood.
In The Law is for All, Crowley did say in the New Comment that "... leavings: the “beeswing” of port should be good..." to use in the making of Cakes of Light. Many have been mostly correct to point out that beeswing is actually cream of tartar, or in other words a bitartrate salt, specifically potassium bitartrate. Tartaric acid and its salts occur naturally in wine grapes, although winemakers will add the acid to the fermenting juice if the pH is too high. In fact, grapes are the largest natural source of tartrates.
To get this ingredient some people have used cooked down ruby port, some others cream of tartar from the grocery store, some people have even suggested the lees from winemaking. If you really want wine leavings, and you are using Crowley's suggestion of beeswing, you will not use any of the substances mentioned. First of all, cooking down port makes a reduction, good for some delicious sauces, but probably not containing much in the way of bitartrates (more on this later). I believe the cream of tartar in the store is derived from grapes, but am not 100% positive. Whether or not this is the case, it will go through an isolation and purification process that will take the product far away from "thick leavings of red wine". Sure, wine lees can contain some bitartrate salts, but again this is not the actual ingredient suggested by Crowley. Lees contain mainly dead yeast hulls and cell wall constituents, usually some grape solids, a mixture of salts, and other things.
The true and best wine leavings by this definition are from a process that winemakers use called "cold stabilization". In the usual process, you chill your newly vinted wine that has been racked or filtered off the lees until enough bitartrate precipitates out that the wine will pass a cold stabilization test, meaning that the consumer will generally not see bitartrate crystals in their wine even if they chill it in the fridge. This practice is done in reaction to consumers who freak out when they see bitartrate crystals, thinking they are glass shards (even though they could dissolve them in hot water if they wanted to test that theory … I have yet to find glass that is water soluble). As potassium bitartrate crystallizes out of wine, it can capture various constituents of the wine like anthocyanins (color molecules), other polyphenols like tannins, polysaccharides, proteins, and many other wine-related chemical compounds. In general, the faster the precipitation process, the more "dirty" the bitartrates will be with these other wine constituents, although even the cleanest crystals almost always have some of the smaller molecules, e.g. anthocyanins. This, therefore, makes bitartrates crystallized from wine different from the purified cream of tartar that you find in the store.
My suggestions to you to get authentic wine leavings for your Cakes of Light:
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Find a cool winemaker like me and do nice things for them until they give you more wine bitartrates than you'll know what to do with.
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I guess you could "cheat" by dissolving as much cream of tartar in warm wine as you can, chill (or even freeze then warm in the fridge) said wine, let sit chilled for as long as it takes to form potassium bitartrate crystals, and then filter the wine to retrieve your wine leavings. This process is rather close to the cold stabilization process mentioned above. If you can get the temperature of the wine to 29F , you are doing well. Wine generally won't freeze at this temperature due to the ethanol content, but supersaturated potassium bitartrate should crash out of solution readily. I would suggest the following wines to give you the best chance for "dirty" beeswing (roughly from best to not as good): cheap Ruby Port, any dark red wine that claims to be made "unfined and unfiltered", Petite Sirah, the darkest cheap wine you can find of any other variety, inexpensive tawny Port.
Of course, this is only if you buy into Crowley's interpretation of wine leavings. Another reasonably sound interpretation of The Book of the Law is to use the lees. I personally am not completely convinced that he was fully fluent in the fine art of enology and so perhaps he didn't differentiate between lees and tartrates. After all, he did come from a brewing family!
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EricPS I would start your experiments with a small amount of wine and a large amount of cream of tartar. You can add in wine until the powder just dissolves. If you start with a whole bottle of wine, it might take more cream of tartar than you would initially suspect!
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@Eric said
"If you can get the temperature of the wine to 290F , you are doing well. Wine generally won't freeze at this temperature due to the ethanol content,"
93 Eric,
I was hoping to get a clarification on the above. Did you mean 29 degrees? I'm assuming the zero was meant to symbolize "degrees", as 290 is well past freezing range, but I wanted to be sure.
Thanks for the instructions, I'll definitely be trying this out.
Best,
Thom -
93 Thom,
Yes that was a cut-and-paste formatting issue. I have corrected it. Thank you for calling my attention to it.
While we are on the topic, I can expound upon it. If you are using a high alcohol wine, say a 19% alcohol Port, you could probably go down to 23F without it freezing up. Anyway, play around with it. Dropping out ice is not the end of the world. The more water that comes out of solution, the less soluble the bitartrates will be, i.e. more "beeswing" should drop out. Experiment with it and get back to me with your results!
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Eric