Gingerbread Cake...but where's the pineapple?

Seeing as we are on a bit of a roll with the 'bread cakes' as I call them, we chose Gingerbread Cake as our next challenge. It seemed pretty straightforward as far as ingredients go, although it did call for cloves which I left out. Don't care for them much. Here's the recipe in case anyone wants to try it:

3 tbsp shortening
1/2 cup sugar
1 egg
1/2 cup corn syrup
1 3/4 cup flour
1/2 tsp soda
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp ginger
1 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp ground cloves
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup boiling water

Cream shortening and sugar, add beaten egg, then syrup. Mix and sift dry ingredients, then mix them into batter thoroughly. Add boiling water last.

We had gotten to this point in the instructions and were going along quite nicely when we got to the last line on the card, which read, "Pour batter over Pineapple mixture and bake..." Wait a minute. Pineapple mixture? What pineapple mixture? Who ever heard of pineapples in a gingerbread cake? I read back over the ingredients just to make sure I hadn't lost my mind. No, no pineapples were mentioned. Hmmm. After a very, very short period of debate we decided to skip that line; pretend it wasn't there and forge ahead. There were two reasons for this: first, I had no pineapples in the house, and second, I wouldn't have a clue how to make the 'pineapple mixture'. So instead, we pretended that the last line of the recipe went like this:
"Pour batter into baking pan and bake 30-35 minutes in moderate oven (425-450)."

I don't know if you've noticed, but Grandma Bess (as I've decided to call her) is pretty generous in her definition of 'a moderate oven'. For pumpkin pie and banana cake, a moderate oven is defined as 375. One recipe says moderate is 400. Here it is 425-450, which seems 'more than moderate' to me. I had visions of turning out a black lump of a cake if I baked it at 450 for 35 minutes! Maybe if a pineapple mixture was involved this would work, but without it I didn't dare try. So I set the oven at 400 and baked it for just over 25 minutes, and it was perfect. We don't miss the pineapple at all. If you ask me, all this cake needs is a generous helping of whipped cream on top. We may have to buy some tomorrow and give it a try.

Tomato....cake?

Wow! I can't believe it has been over a month since my last post. Time flew through the holidays, and we are just now getting back into the swing of things regarding our cooking project. Still putting off the pie crusts....

Because of the great success we had with the banana cake, I searched for a recipe in the same 'family'. And I found it, but it was with some trepidation that I announced to my kids that our next project would be something called 'tomato cake'. Faces were made all around, but I reminded everyone (myself included) that our European friends react the same way when we mention pumpkin pie. To them, putting pumpkin in a pie is inconceivable. So we set aside our prejudices about the proper use of tomatoes and forged ahead.

Since starting this project, I have come to expect and even to look forward to the fact that some sleuthing will be required to figure out the recipes, and tomato cake was no exception. The recipe as it appears on the card is as follows:

Tomato Cake

2 cup flour
1 1/2 tsp soda
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp nutmeg
1/2 tsp salt
Sift together
1 egg
1 cup sugar
1 cup raisins
1 cup tomato soup
1-2 cup butter

And that is it. No instructions of any kind except for 'sift together'. No mention of oven temperature. Nothing. But I'm learning! With my kids' help, we sifted all of the dry ingredients into a bowl which we then set aside. (and by the way, 1 teaspoon of nutmeg doesn't seem like much, but wow the aroma! We almost had to put the bowl in another room till baking it was so strong.) We then creamed the butter and sugar together (impressive, I know) then added the egg and the soup, and finally, the raisins. One word about the tomato soup. I made a mistake here, which I will remedy the next time this recipe is used. I bought Campbells Tomato Soup. Two problems with that: one, it contains high fructose corn syrup, which I believe to be one of the evils of the world and two, the soup is condensed, which I did not factor in. This, as I figured out later, was what accounted for the batter being much thicker than your standard cake batter - it was more the consistency of brownie batter. Because of that I baked it in a square glass pan for about 24 minutes at 350 degrees. (Or in a 'moderate' oven!) It turned out all right. Actually, it was delicious and reminded us a bit of pumpkin bread (!). But I think the consistency is wrong, due to the use of condensed soup.

I encourage you to try it yourself and let me know what you think! This recipe was the nicest surprise so far, as I have never encountered anything like it. Has anyone else made tomato soup? I'd love to know.

Happy New Year to all, and happy baking!

When in Doubt, Let them eat Cake!

I am avoiding the pie crust. It intimidates me. It reminds me of when I wanted to try Photoshop for the first time and kept putting it off. I'm sure that once the first crust is done, it will be fine, but until then... We did have pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving dessert, and I did use my 'box' recipe (I really have to come up with a name for my anonymous author. How about Sophie? That used to be an old-fashioned name, but it seems to be back in vogue. Hmmm. Have to think about it.) But I used the store-bought crust. Time that day was not on my side, and I think I need to be calm before I tackle crust. But the pumpkin filling was delicious, as always!

Then the plan was that we would bake this morning with my friend Anna who is visiting from Colorado. But she was running late and we had places to go in the afternoon, so the pie and crust recipes got moved to the back of the line and instead we made banana cake! For some reason, even though I haven't made lots of cakes, cake does not intimidate me. So when I suddenly realized that the recipe did not specify how much sugar to use - it's not even given in the list of ingredients and then suddenly she writes to mix 'eggs and sugar and soda together till creamy', leaving out when to add the butter altogether, I felt no panic at all. My meager cooking experience taught me that the butter goes in with the eggs, sugar and soda until creamy. For the sugar, I pulled out my cheat sheet in the form of the Better Homes cookbook. I had much more luck with cake instructions than with their doomsday measuring guidelines for pie crust! Based on their banana cake recipe, I decided that 2/3 cup of sugar would be perfect. Oh, and I also had to guess on the amount of flour to use. In fact, rather than continually try to explain it, here is the recipe exactly how it reads on the card in my box:

Banana Cake:
2 eggs
2 ripe bananas
1/2 cup butter
1/2 tsp soda, dissolved in a little water
1/2 cup nut meats
Flour enough as to thicken for batter

Beat the eggs, sugar and soda to a cream. Add the two bananas, which must be cut into very fine pieces. Then the nut meats and last, beat in the flour slowly. Bake in a moderate oven about 45 minutes.

Slightly cryptic instructions for the cooking impaired! But we filled in the blanks with great success this time, using just under one cup of flour, chopped walnuts for 'nut meats', the aforementioned 2/3 cup of sugar and cooking at 350 for just 30 minutes. (Oh, and using a round 9" cake pan - also not specified). Maya sliced the bananas into slivers that practically melted away in the batter and the results were amazing! So moist and yummy... I might have to revise my stance on cake!

The continuing saga of the crust of pie

Because of the Thanksgiving holiday, our schedule was thrown off a little and instead of making the banana cream pie and accompanying crust yesterday, my idea was to delay banana cream until next week and instead make the pie crust for the pumpkin pie tonight and then bake the pie in the morning. (I bought a pie crust at the grocery store as a backup in case mine was a complete failure) Prior to this year I had always made the pumpkin pie recipe with a store bought crust. When I pulled the recipe out this evening, I realized that what it actually says is "Fill pie plate that has been lined with pastry". Lined with pastry sounds like the crust is not baked first. So I pulled out all the pie crust recipes in the box, and found that the crusts for the cream pies always give instructions to bake the crust first, but the strawberry pie crust is described as a pastry dough and is not cooked until the filling is in. There is no specific crust for the pumpkin pie, but due to her use of the word 'pastry' in both the pumpkin and strawberry pie recipes, that is the one I'm going to go with. Which means that I won't be making it till tomorrow morning.

Still being a little intimidated by the whole process, especially the 'cutting in' of the lard, I grabbed the Better Homes cookbook and took a look at a book on a hook... No, wait, that's the Nook! (Sorry, I couldn't resist. And for those of you who are now thinking I have completely lost my mind, that was a quote from Dr. Seuss' One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish.) Anyway, Better Homes says to use a pastry blender (which I don't have) to cut the lard into the flour until the pieces are the size of small peas. I'm sure I can manage that with a knife. Then I read their "pastry know how" section, which says, oh so helpfully, "Measure accurately. Too much flour makes pastry tough, too much shortening makes pastry greasy and too much water makes pastry tough and soggy." Wonderful! What a confidence builder when I am using recipes that almost always call for "1 to 1 1/2 cups flour" or "1/2 to 1 cup lard". Measure accurately? Easy for them to say.

As a fail safe measure, I have decided that since the pumpkin pie recipe actually makes enough filling for two pies, I will make one in the store bought crust, and one with my attempt at crust. That way, if I fail and wind up with tough or greasy or soggy crust, we'll still have dessert.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Pie Crust Paranoia!

This week, probably Tuesday, we will be making pie, and the recipes for pie crust are intimidating. First of all, she has different crusts for different types of pie. And I don't mean graham cracker crusts as opposed to 'regular' pie crusts. These are all variations on a theme. Some are made with lard, others with shortening. The lard is kneaded in, the shortening cut in. Ice water for lard, but just water for shortening. More salt or less. There are no instructions about how long to cook the crust. She basically says "put it in a hot oven till it's done." AAAAAGH! I feel like I need to decipher 60 year old, "been cookin' since the day I was born" cooking code, and no one gave me the decoder ring.

My grandmother made great pie crusts from scratch and I know she used lard. They were light and flaky and the best tasting things on the planet. I have visions of mine coming out as something hard enough to break teeth. Are nightmares about cooking common? It's just dessert, after all. Right?

Mixed Results

When we left off on Wednesday, I was debating what to do about the whole lard issue. Then my friend Anna sent me a message reminding me that there is indeed a place in New York where real, non-hydrogenated, must be refrigerated lard can be found. Schaller & Weber, of course! This is a German grocery located on the Upper East Side. Being a West-sider now, I usually only go to the East Side when museums are involved, but a trip to Schaller & Weber is worth it, even without the lard. Word to the wise, however, do not go there if you are hungry! The mountains of German chocolate scream at you from the shelves and it takes incredible willpower not to scoop it all into a basket and run for the check out. I managed to escape with two pounds of lard and one bar of Milka. Then it was back to the West Side on the cross town bus at rush hour, a trip into Zabar's to buy cake pans, and finally a stop into Fairway to buy cocoa for the cake. As I was going into Fairway I gave my Mom a call, because when reading the Devil's Food Cake recipe earlier in the day, I noticed that what I first thought was 3/4 cups of cocoa was actually written 3-4 cups... I thumbed through the other recipes, and my anonymous author was always very consistent, writing 3/4 with a slash, not a dash. And there are other of her recipes that call for 2-3 cups of sugar and it's clear that she means 2 to 3 cups. Now, I'm no great cook, as I said before, but 3 to 4 cups of cocoa? That seemed like a lot for one cake. Especially considering that it only called for 1 1/2 cups of sugar. I've made brownies from scratch with cocoa and it takes a lot of sugar to sweeten that stuff up! Which is why I called my mom, and she nearly fell on the floor laughing to think of putting 3 to 4 cups of cocoa in one cake, and so with most of the clientele in Fairway wondering what was so funny (my Mom's laughter is contagious, so I was wiping tears from my eyes once I found the aisle with the cocoa) the decision was made to go with 3/4 cup and hope for the best.

This morning everything was ready and it was time to bake. During a last minute read-through, I realized the recipe also called for sour milk, so a quick phone chain from my Mom to my Aunt Delores confirmed that adding a bit of vinegar to whole milk would do the trick. Mixing the ingredients was pretty straightforward - even my son Ben got into it, as you see in the photo, mostly because this recipe involved chocolate and the promise of licking the fork and/or bowl once the cake was in the oven. Two of the rather vague instructions, including "bake in layers" and "bake in a hot oven" had been interpreted before we began, and so we baked the cake in two pans and set the oven at 375, and all went well. The cake smelled good, looked good and took exactly 21 minutes to bake. And then we made the frosting...

Because we had two egg whites left over from the cake, we searched through our box and found a recipe for "Star Icing", which required two egg whites and seemed to fit the bill nicely. The ingredients were simple and it should have taken only about 15 minutes to make, but after 40 minutes the icing was still as thin as soup, and spreading it on the cake was out of the question. So I added cornstarch. LOTS of cornstarch. Then I re-heated it. Stirred it for a few more minutes. Got completely exasperated and put it in the freezer, and after 5 minutes of deep chill, it had thickened enough to keep some of it on top of the cake rather than all pooling at the sides (although from the picture you can see that there was still a substantial amount of pooling). I have no idea what went wrong. The recipe called for the ingredients to be stirred over boiling water (like in a double boiler), and as far as I can tell, I did everything right. So in the hopes that someone else can figure this out, the Star Icing recipe is written as follows:

Star Icing
Put 1 1/2 cups sugar, 1/2 cup water, 1/8 tsp. salt, 2 unbeaten egg whites to cook over boiling water. Beat constantly 7 minutes while icing is cooking. Remove from hot water. Add 1/2 teaspoon vanilla. Beat until thick enough to spread. Frost cake.

I'd love to know if anyone can do this and have it thicken enough to spread. If you can, please comment and let me know the trick! Mine, without the cornstarch, was definitely not a spread but a pour.

Despite the troubles with the icing, Maya and I liked the taste of it better than the cake. I'm not much of a cake person, and this one was a bit dry for my taste, and Maya's as well. Ben loved it, however, (it was chocolate, after all) and it got a good review this afternoon from our friends who we forced to try it. If we could get the icing right, I'd make it again and use sour cream instead of sour milk...

But before that, there is a banana cream pie in our future!

The Search for Lard

Today we went looking for lard. Our next recipe calls for it, and rather than wimp out and use butter, we decided to try and find the real thing. Not Crisco or the other shortenings that are nothing more than tubs of hydrogenated oil and that can sit on the shelf for years, literally, without going bad. Something about that really makes me want to avoid putting it in my body. They say that the only thing that would survive a nuclear holocaust are the cockroaches; my guess would be that they'd not only survive, they'd wind up getting fat on all the Crisco shortening sitting around, still as 'fresh' as the day it was made.

So we wanted lard. Lard, in case you don't know, is made from rendered pork fat. It got something of a bad rap starting in the 1960's due to its' having a decent amount of saturated fat, though not as much as butter. So of course the 'experts' replaced it with chemically altered vegetable shortening - hydrogenated oil - which as it turns out is much worse for you than a little lard ever thought of being. (Ok, so the 40% saturated fat isn't great, but it also has 45% monounsaturated, or 'good' fat. This according to food writer and lard afficionado Corby Krummer)

Still, try going into most supermarkets and asking if they sell lard. In the first supermarket the manager looked at us as if we'd just asked for fried cow dung. At the second, the first guy I asked, who worked behind the meat counter, just let his jaw drop open and then looked very concerned, as though I was planning to use it to harm the two young children smiling and standing innocently next to me. (my kids, not someone else's). Finally a young Hispanic man smiled and gave me an enthusiastic 'Yes'! while pointing across the aisle at the packaged meats. And there it was: LARD

At first I could hardly believe my luck. We scored on the second try! But then I picked up the package and read "Lard 40% - Hydrogenated Lard 60% Needs no refrigeration". Well, crap. I debated for a minute and then bought it anyway. I figured some lard was better than none, and anyway, we might not find anything else. Back home, I went on line (thank god for Google! What did we do before the internet when we wanted to research something?), and looked for lard. There was a lot of information about it, and a great article by Pete Wells written for Food & Wine about how he wound up making his own lard (uh-oh) after reading a Times Op-Ed piece by the above-mentioned Corby Krummer in which Krummer extolled its' use in baking and frying above all other forms of shortening. Pete Wells couldn't find real lard anywhere, and apparently he is not alone. There are a ton of websites with instructions on how to render your own lard, and none on where to buy it already rendered and non-hydrogenated. So this leaves me in a conundrum. Despite my deciding to purchase it, I REALLY don't want to use hydrogenated lard, but rendering my own lard in my tiny New York City kitchen (not to mention procuring the fat to do it) is out of the question.

Any suggestions out there? We bake on Friday, so the decision will need to be made. I'll keep you posted!