Archive for the ‘dessert’ Category

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Key limes in the grocery store,

Sunday, March 7th, 2010

make Key Lime (or Mexican, or West Indies lime) pie. That’s just good sense. I use a recipe that someone cut out of a Gourmet magazine nearly ten years ago (it wasn’t me – I don’t cut things out of magazines).  I’ve long since memorized it, but I dug out the original clipping so that I wouldn’t steer you wrong. And yes, it’s the same four or five ingredients I remember, but I have made some adjustments over the years.

The recipe allows for using bottled lime juice, and even recommends a brand. Don’t do it! When key limes appear in your grocery store (or who knows – on the tree in your back yard), then you can make this pie. Absolute proof of this is the fact that you’ll need 1/2 C plus 2 Tbs of juice to make this pie, and that’s exactly how much juice the limes in that silly neon green one pound bag will produce. See? Cosmic.

So. Buy the bag. Allow the limes to ripen in a cool dark place for a few days, until some  are slightly mottled with yellow spots and the skin has thinned. Roll one under your palm on a flat surface to break some of the membrane, then slice off about 1/2″ from one end. Insert your wooden lemon-juicer, or your fingers, and allow the juice to dribble into a large, stable container – like your 2 C pyrex measuring cup. You don’t want to knock this over. Oh, and if you have any papercuts on your hands, or like me, having been pruning blackberry bushes lately, you’ll know. The juice will be pale, rather opaque green and smell wonderful.

For crust

  • 1 1/4 cups graham cracker crumbs from 9 (2 1/4-inch by 4 3/4-inch) crackers
  • 2 tablespoons sugar
  • 5 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted

For filling

  • 1 (14-ounce) can sweetened condensed milk
  • 4 large egg yolks
  • 1/2 cup plus 2 tablespoons key lime juice

Make crust:
Preheat oven to 350°F.

Stir together graham cracker crumbs, sugar, and butter in a bowl with a fork until combined well, then press mixture evenly onto bottom and up side of a 9-inch (4-cup) glass pie plate. Actually, these days I use an 8″ pie pan. They’re a little harder to find, but with the Boy at college I can stand to have less pie around the house. This recipe works well either way.

Bake crust in middle of oven 10 minutes and cool in pie plate on a rack. Leave oven on.

Make filling and bake pie:

Whisk together condensed milk and yolks in a bowl until combined well. Add juice and whisk until combined well (mixture will thicken slightly).  Pour filling into crust and bake in middle of oven 15 minutes. Cool pie completely on rack (filling will set as it cools), then chill, covered, at least 8 hours (or put it in the freezer for about half an hour after it is mostly cool. Keep checking to be sure it does not really freeze.)

Goes well with whipped cream, and an expectation of Spring.

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Somebody’s Grandma’s Banana Bread

Wednesday, February 17th, 2010

Occasionally I forget to look around the house before I find myself in the grocery store on lunch hour, wondering if we have bananas. And then we end up with too many bananas.

This is a terrific recipe for banana bread, but it’s not my grandmother’s. For one thing, no one in my family is “Grandma”. Women who’s children have children are addressed by their name, say “Martha”, or by their title and surname, as in “Grandma Burnham”. That goes double for recipe cards. The card for this recipe is so stained and creased that I’m not sure who wrote it but it doesn’t matter. This is the fix for when you’ve been to the store without a list. Again.

Grandma’s Banana Bread/Cake

Preheat oven to 350 and grease and flour a 9″ tube pan.

Toast 1/2 C walnuts or pecans in a frying pan until “sweating” and fragrant. Process them in the food processor until chopped fairly small. Don’t clean the bowl. Empty the nuts into a bowl and mix with 1 Tbs of the flour and spice mixture below. Sometimes I add 1/2 C raisins to the mix. Set aside. This recipe calls for 1 C mashed bananas. I regularly throw 3 into the cuisinart and process until smooth. I think you get more banana taste that way. Set aside.

Combine in a small bowl: 2 C flour (can be partially whole wheat), 2 tsp baking soda, 1 tsp cinnamon, 1/2 tsp salt, 1/2 tsp nutmeg, 1/2 tsp allspice (optional, but I like it).

In a large bowl cream 1/2 C shortening (I use melted butter, but anything goes here), 1 C sugar. Add two eggs and 1 tsp vanilla and beat well. Use neighbor-lady eggs if you can get them.

Add the flour mixture, then the bananas, then the nuts and stir everything together. Dump it into the tube pan and spread evenly. Bake for 45 minutes, or until the bread is quite browned on top and firm to the touch.

I’ve frosted this bread with orange cream cheese frosting (which is delicious), but more often I serve it with butter and jam for tea.

I had a friend, years ago, who couldn’t stomach the tiny pieces of flour that occasionally stick to the walnuts and raisins in this cake. I found him picking them out at the dinner table one night, and thereafter mixed the nuts with cocoa so it didn’t show. I have no idea how wide-spread that affliction may be, so use that information if you have to, down the line.

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Mom’s pound cake

Thursday, January 28th, 2010

Tonight I wanted to use the rest of the eggs that Carrie sent up from Portland. We’ve been doling them out, enjoying the bright yellow color and “stand up” quality to the white that are particular to cherished backyard poultry. We buy very nice eggs in the market, but they’re just not the same. Time to make Mom’s pound cake recipe.

This recipe is entirely easy. It requires one bowl, your mixer (hand or stand, doesn’t matter), common ingredients and is always dependably delicious. It does require one “secret” ingredient (lurking in the background of this photo) – 8 oz of soda. My mother’s recipe lists Fresca, but I’ve used Mountain Dew, Cherry Coke and, in this case, a pony can of Sprite that happened to be hiding in the pantry.

Ingredients
  • 1 1/2 C butter (Yes, I know. It’s a pound cake – it’s going to have butter. And the recipe says “softened” but you know butter wouldn’t soften in my house in January without a blowtorch, so melted works fine.)
  • 3 cups sugar – Put all the ingredients in bowls so you can pour them in while mixing.
  • 5  eggs – Really good ones from your friend’s chickens if possible.
  • 1 teaspoon almond extract
  • 1/2 tsp lemon extract (although you can go nuts here. Orange? Anise?)
  • 3 cups all-purpose flour
  • 1/2 tsp salt
  • OPTIONAL If you’re not sure about your soda’s fizzy quotient, it is not cheating to add 1 tsp. baking powder.
  • 1 cup Sprite, 7-UP, Or Sierra Mist, or anything fizzy and sweet

Preheat oven to 340 degrees.

Dump the melted butter in a large bowl. Add the sugar, 1 cup at a time, mixing after each addition. Add eggs, 1 at a time, mixing after each addition. Add  extracts and mix well. Add flour, 1 cup at a time, mixing well after each addition. Add soft drink, then mix together until combined.

Pour into a greased bundt pan and bake for 1 hour to 1 hour 10 minutes, until the cake is browned on top and fairly firm.  This is a lot of batter, but has never overflowed my bundt pan – I do put a cookie sheet on the rack beneath just in case.  Remove cake from oven and invert pan until cake drops out.

Occasionally I add fruit to this recipe. Tonight’s version has dried strawberries for the yum.

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Hardy Ancestors – Mincemeat

Monday, December 28th, 2009

68 adams rdI grew up in this house. There were cows wandering the first floor when my parents bought it in 1955 shortly after I was born. My father had adventures and tetanus shots ripping off the decrepit front porch and flipping the huge old floorboards over to hide the damage from the livestock. The house was built in 1770 – or thereabouts and had been updated last around 1800. He did extensive renovations before my grandmother would allow my mother to move in with the new baby.

The Institute Cookbook’s recipe for mincemeat “has remained unchanged for quite some time”. The book dates from 1800 and the editor is prone to understatement so I imagine a cook in my childhood home might have made it the same way in 1770. My father told me once that his grandmother made mincemeat with woodchuck, but he too was prone to understatement and I would keep to the “lean beef” mentioned in the recipe, myself.

1 lb suet, 2 lbs lean beef, 1 quart chopped apple

1/4 C candied orange peel and 1/4 C candied lemon peel, 1/2 lb citron, 3 C seeded raisins and 1 C currants

Juice and grated rind of 1 lemon and one orange

1/2 C molasses, 1 C sugar, 1 tsp cinnamon, 1/2 tsp allspice and cloves, 1 nutmeg, grated (about 1 tsp)

2 1/2 C sweet cider (as opposed to hard cider)

Let the meat simmer slowly in a covered kettle until tender (insert my father’s story about sampling the meat cooking on the back of the stove, finding it fairly lean and good, and then being told it was ‘chuck). Run the meat and then the suet through a meat chopper and mix well. Add the other ingredients, chopping the peels and citron before adding. Put in a stone (ceramic) crock and let stand several days to ripen. Bake in a plain or half puff paste double crust pie.

I should add that I’ve had vegetarian versions made with beets and dried apples instead of meat and suet – not the same, but not bad.

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Plum Duff

Friday, November 27th, 2009
plum duff

Normally I wouldn’t start a post off with a picture, but “Plum Duff” isn’t really going to tell you much all by itself. And the Wikipedia article will re-direct to “Spotted Dick” and then you’re REALLY going to need a picture. It’s a dessert, people. A lovely, delicious, traditional dessert created by people for whom the term “Spotted Dick” was a fond endearment.

For this recipe you’ll need a few specialty items. I always hate running across that in a recipe I perhaps haven’t read closely before starting out; “You’ll need a flugelhorn!”,  announces the author, brightly. “These days you can find one easily on Amazon!”.  So, advance warning, for this recipe you will need a pudding mold or basin with a lid or cover, a metal trivet to rest the mold on the bottom of a pot, either tall enough to enclose it, or close enough that a collar of aluminum foil will do the trick.

My Great Aunt Margaret’s Plum Duff

  • 2 large eggs
  • 1/2 cup melted vegetable shortening
  • 1 cup firmly packed brown sugar
  • 2 cups cooked prunes
  • 1 cup all-purpose flour
  • 1 teaspoon baking soda
  • 2 tablespoons cold milk plum duff 1
  • Beat eggs well.
  • Dissolve brown sugar in hot, melted shortening and whisk in the eggs slowly, so they don’t cook.
  • Add cooked prunes that have been drained and mashed with fork*.
  • Sift flour and add. Dissolve soda in milk and add last.
  • Fill greased pudding mold 2/3 full, cover lightly and steam one hour over rack in large cooking pot.

    • * This used to be a very messy process – cutting the prunes with a sharp pair of sewing scissors, cooking and then mashing the results. Now we can throw the cooked, drained fruit in the cuisinart and have done with it.

    Now mix in the prunes, add the flour. . .

    plum duff 2

    And spoon the whole mess into the greased pudding mold. Now would be a good time to mention that the pudding is going to be a solid mass in the bottom of this mold after you’ve cooked it and allowed it to cool. It will look like it is solidly glued in there, but no – set the pan in very hot water for a few minutes and then invert over a plate. It should fall right out – if not feel free to repeat the process. It’s not like this stuff is fragile.

    plum duff 4To the left in this photo is my aluminum trivet, useful for keeping the mold off the bottom of the pot. It is stamped “1820 Cincinnati” on the bottom, so hey – an antique! I expect modern trivets would work just as well. Also, please ignore the Goya Black Bean Soup can. I’m not making anything from this product placement – the can was there for our supper of huevos rancheros later on that night.

    I didn’t think I had a photo of the pot with its aluminum collar, but here it is. Evidently I’d thought I’d blog my recipe for huevos rancheros, because there’s all the fixin’s, but thought the better of it. Everybody already has a favorite recipe for those.  But waaayyy in the back there you can see how to make your stew pot a steamer for your pudding mold.

    plum duff 5Steam the pudding at a low to moderate temperature for about an hour. You shouldn’t be able to hear it boiling madly, and check about half way through to see that the water level still comes close to 3/4 of the way up the mold.Add more hot (from the tap) water if you’re getting low. The temperature may drop below simmer for a minute but it’s not going to bother your Duff.

    Cool the pudding in the mold overnight in a cool place, then unmold it and decorate for the season. I used horehound, lavender and geranium because this is Thanksgiving and you can never tell when someone is going to eat the garnish – better to make it all edible.

    Now go check out all the interesting steamed dishes out there, like The Bitten Word’s Persimmon Cake (which they did w/o a pudding mold).

    2 large eggs
    1/2 cup melted vegetable shortening
    1 cup firmly packed brown sugar
    2 cups cooked prunes
    1 cup all-purpose flour
    1 teaspoon baking soda
    2 tablespoons cold milk
    1. Beat eggs well.
    2. Dissolve brown sugar in hot, melted shortening and add to eggs.
    3. Add cooked prunes that have been drained and mashed with fork.
    4. Sift flour and add. Dissolve soda in milk and add last.
    5. Fill greased pudding molds 2/3 full, cover lightly and steam one hour over rack in large cooking pot.
    6. Serve hot with Rum Sauce or whipped crea

    2 large eggs

    1/2 cup melted vegetable shortening

    1 cup firmly packed brown sugar

    2 cups cooked prunes

    1 cup all-purpose flour

    1 teaspoon baking soda

    2 tablespoons cold milk

    1. Beat eggs well.

    2. Dissolve brown sugar in hot, melted shortening and add to eggs.

    3. Add cooked prunes that have been drained and mashed with fork.

    4. Sift flour and add. Dissolve soda in milk and add last.

    5. Fill greased pudding molds 2/3 full, cover lightly and steam one hour over rack in large cooking pot.

    6. Serve hot with Rum Sauce or whipped cream.

    1. m.

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    Apple Brown Veronica

    Wednesday, October 28th, 2009

    Apple Brown Betty is a wonderful concoction that always involves bread crumbs; a deep-dish, homey dessert that involves bowls and spoons and oftimes a little vanilla ice cream. This weekend I wanted something more portable. I ended up with a hefty shortbread crust, a layer of very thin-sliced apples and the ubiquitous bread crumbs drizzled with butter – something that I could eat out of hand, wandering around the yard with a cup of tea. I explained to The Man that it was almost Apple Brown Betty, and he suggested that I name the new dessert after the other girl, hence, Veronica.

    This is a wonderful recipe if you have a food processor. Put the ingredients in and process, one after another, and don’t bother to clean it between times. I love this recipe.

    Apple Brown Veronica

    • 6 slices firm white sandwich bread (I use anything here – sesame baguettes, english muffins, dinner rolls, even cinnamon raisin bread.)

    Shortbread

    • 1 1/2 sticks (3/4 cup) cold unsalted butter (Did I mention this is not a diet friendly recipe? Don’t skimp, and don’t substitute, or it won’t be Veronica.)
    • 2 cups all-purpose flour
    • 1 cup packed light brown sugar
    • 1/2 teaspoon salt

    Apple filling

    • 1 stick unsalted butter
    • 2 lb tart apples (4 large, seven small-to-middlin)
    • 1 cup granulated sugar
    • 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
    • Spices – go nuts. Allspice, cloves, lemon rind, anise, cinnamon and five-spice powder – whatever.

    Preheat oven to 350°F.

    Grind bread to fine crumbs in a food processor (and don’t bother cleaning it). Spread in a shallow baking pan and toast in middle of oven, stirring once, until golden, about 5 minutes. Leave oven on.

    Cut butter into 1/2-inch pieces, then pulse in a food processor with flour, brown sugar, and salt until it begins to form small lumps. Sprinkle base into a 13- by 9-inch baking pan and press evenly onto bottom. Bake in middle of oven until golden, about 20 minutes.

    One of the things I love about this recipe is that it makes a good, thick layer – no desperately trying to push crumbs into the corners of the pan while the middle gets holes.

    While the shortbread is baking melt butter and keep warm. Peel, quarter, and core apples and thinly slice with the slicer attachment in the food processor. Stir together sugar, spices and flour in a small bowl.

    Sprinkle half of sugar mixture over hot shortbread, then top with apples and sprinkle with remaining sugar mixture. Top with bread crumbs and drizzle butter over them.

    Bake, pressing down on filling with a metal spatula halfway through baking, until apples are very tender and bread crumbs are golden, 50 minutes to 1 hour total. Cool 20 minutes in pan on a rack. It’s important to reach in the oven and press the mixture down – the bread crumbs and butter become one with the apple mixture and don’t flake off when you’re eating one outside, over the winter turnips.

    apple brown veronica

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    Our Hardy Ancestors II

    Wednesday, October 7th, 2009

    twin-lakes-68

    You know what all these guys had in common? (Well, besides a gene pool and a fish dinner.)  They all liked cake. And, they all liked bacon. These “Hardy Ancestors” posts are dedicated to recipes that had their best days a lifetime ago, with my great-grandfather (an HA if there ever was one)  at the far left on the sofa. Days when food was abundant if you didn’t mind the lack of variety, and work was hard and long enough that you didn’t. And then there was dessert.

    My father liked a “planned dessert”. I don’t think my mother had ever heard of such a thing growing up, but it was an ongoing topic of discussion at the dinner table all their married lives. A planned dessert implied something thought out and prepared long before the meal: apple pie, butterscotch layer cake or bread pudding studded with raisins and served with hard sauce. The category did not include ice cream, store-bought cookies or instant pudding. Occasionally there would be a recipe that would satisfy both husband and wife – the perfect blend of yin and yang for ingredients, formality and ease of preparation. I give you:

    Cinnamon Bacon Sponge

    1 egg, beaten, 1/2 C sugar, 1/2 C molasses, 1/4 C melted bacon fat, 1/2 C boiling water

    1 tsp soda, 1 tsp cinnamon, 1/2 tsp salt, 1 and 1/8 C flour (a heaping cup)

    Mix the bacon fat with the boiling water. Stir, and when slightly cooled add the egg and sugars. Add to the dry ingredients and mix well. Place into a greased 8 x 8 pan an bake 35 to 40 minutes at 350. Serve with whipped cream.

    I like to add chopped apples or raisins, and I use the pan drippings from our best pepper bacon for extra kick. Bon appetit!

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    Raspberry redux

    Wednesday, August 5th, 2009
    Yummmmmmmmm.

    Yummmmmmmmm.

    We have a lot of raspberries, even in the worst year in memory for any kind of produce. They are soft – almost too fragile to pick – and seem to progress from hard pink to overripe in a matter of hours, but there are plenty of them. I’m sure part of the reason is that I have two hives of local pollinators who managed to get the job done even through near constant rain and below-average temperatures.

    Today I went out immediately after work and picked about 2 C before the rain caught me out. I actually heard the wall of water rushing through the trees, but didn’t make it to the house before I was soaked through and the bowl of berries was wet. I didn’t have enough for a batch of jam, so I mixed in some blueberries and made:

    Martha Louise Miller Barnard Synder’s Berry Delight

    1/4 C butter, 1/4 C flour, 3/4 C brown sugar, 1 C white sugar, 2 Tbs lemon juice, 1/4 tsp. salt, 4 C berries (divided) Adjust the proportions up or down for the amount of berries you have on hand, and feel free to add a dash of allspice or cinnamon.

    Put all the ingredients except 2 C of the berries in a heavy bottomed sauce pan. I put all the ingredients in first and the berries on top, but I remember my mother and grandmother putting the berries in first. Cook, stirring often, until everything is melted together and the sauce is bubbling. Let it simmer for 3 – 6 minutes, depending on how thick you like your sauce. Empty the sauce into a serving bowl and let it cool slightly, about 10 minutes. Stir in the reserved berries and serve warm, over vanilla ice cream. Or use as pie filling in a baked crust, or just eat with a soup spoon over the kitchen counter.

    My Grandmother (Martha Louise) had a house on a hill in New Hampshire where we spent summers picking blueberries into peanut butter tins, collecting the brass casings from .22 ammunition and swimming in Newfound Lake. The mothers stayed up late doing laundry on the wringer washer and making pots of Blueberry Delight, which is also very, very good with raspberries.

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    Monkey Bread

    Thursday, July 23rd, 2009

    monkey-breadThis is a really ugly photo of a wonderful cake. Seriously, it’s so good it has been massacred by its fans. I have no idea why this cake is called “Monkey Bread” – oh wait, I could look it up. Wikipedia says the origin of the name is not certain, but it may have been the cake’s resemblance to the Monkey Puzzle Tree, an ancient conifer that evolved spiky leaves to prevent the dinosaurs from eating it before it grew out of range. The leaves are so sharp that the French name for the tree is “Monkey’s Despair”. Monkeys are not native anywhere in the range of the tree, however, so we’ll let this one go as “uncertain origin”. I love the interwebs. Here is the recipe. Make it for dinner-desert and birthdays for those under 12 and over 70.   Not such a hit at bake sales and tea parties.

    You will need:

    1/2 C Brown Sugar
    * 2 sticks of butter (1 cup)
    * Bundt Cake Pan
    * 2 – 3 tsp Cinnamon

    2 recipes of your favorite buttermilk biscuits. Hint – if you’re doing this with children, or at camp, or even without any excuse what-so-ever, you can use three cans of those biscuits from the dairy case at the grocery store. Get the regular, non-flaky kind or they won’t fit in the bundt pan. And also, no one will be able to tell. There’s a reason they engineer this stuff – those are pretty good biscuits in the tube.

    1 C sugar

    1 pint blueberries or raspberries, or 1 C raisins

    Make the biscuit dough (or pop the tube – you know you want to). Cut the biscuits in to quarters. Put them in a plastic bag with the cup of white sugar and 2 (I use 3) tsp cinnamon and roll them around until coated. Pile the quarters in the bundt pan – try to lever the pieces up the sides and leave a tunnel in the middle for the fruit. Scatter the fruit and add the remaining pieces to cover.  I wish I’d taken some pictures during the process, but I had a load of laundry in, dinner at Aunt Y’s later in the day, weeds growing as I watched, you know the drill.

    Melt the butter in a saucepan and add the brown sugar, cook until “married”, as it says in my mother-in-law’s Joy of Cooking. Basically, the mixture will turn tan and bubbly. Don’t let it get too sticky, we’re not making candy here. Pour it over the biscuit pieces and fruit. Note that I didn’t mention greasing the bundt pan – I’ve never had this cake stick to any pan, no matter how fancy the shape. The dough is just no match for the half-tonne of butter we just poured over it.

    Bake at 350 for about 40 minutes until dark and shiny on top. Let it cool 15 – 20 minutes before you turn it out on to a generous plate – there will be a little extra sauce. Serve right then or store at room temperature for a day – I guarantee you won’t have it hanging around for longer than that. I like to serve this with extra fruit and whipped cream, because I hate my arteries.  Wonderful. Still no idea why they call it Monkey Bread.

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    Strawberry ganache birthday tart

    Monday, June 29th, 2009

    birthday-strawberry-tart1
    Crust

    • 1 cup all purpose flour
    • 3 tablespoons sugar
    • 1/4 teaspoon salt
    • 1/2 cup walnuts (you can actually use a cup or so of walnut halves)
    • 1/2 cup (1 stick) chilled unsalted butter, cut into 1/2-inch pieces
    • 2 egg yolks
    • 1/3 cup (generous) strawberry jam

    Filling

    • 1 C  whipping cream
    • 2 Tbs white corn syrup
    • 4 Tbs unsalted butter
    • 6 ounces bittersweet (not unsweetened) or semisweet chocolate, chopped
    • 1 pint strawberries, hulled, halved.

    Preparation

    For Crust:
    Combine flour, sugar and salt in processor and mix. Add walnuts; process until chopped. Add butter and cut in using on/off turns until mixture resembles coarse meal. Add yolks and process just until moist clumps form. Gather dough into ball; press into tart pan. Chill 30 minutes.

    Preheat oven 375°F. Bake until golden brown, about 25 minutes or until golden. The crust will “puff” slightly, but that’s OK.  Spread jam on crust.  Cool completely on rack.

    For Filling:
    Heat cream and corn syrup in heavy small saucepan over medium-low heat until tiny bubbles appear around edges. Remove from heat. Add chocolate and butter, shake pan to mix slightly. Then beat with a whisk until mixed, cool until mixture is room temperature and beginning to thicken but still pourable, stirring occasionally, about 50 minutes. Pour chocolate filling into crust. Refrigerate until filling is set, about 1 hour. (Can be prepared 1 day ahead. cover and keep refrigerated.)

    Arrange strawberries cut side down in concentric circles atop filling. Serve immediately or refrigerate up to 1 hour.

    Have dinner of Creole shrimp a la “po’boy” (recipe to follow, some day) with friends and eat tart with birthday present of Rain vodka. For whatever reason, this is a great life.

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