Karen Sandler

Tag: baking

  • Something Yummy for Those Holiday Potlucks

    Total cheat on my blog today. My schedule is stacked high with “to-do’s” so I haven’t the time for a thoughtful post. So here are a couple of my favorite recipes you might want to make for that upcoming Christmas or New Year’s Eve/Day potlucks. The first is a cobbler recipe that was given to me by my late neighbor, Connie. She was an accomplished cook.

    Fruit Cobbler

    Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

    filling:
    6 cups berries or pared, cut up fruit such as apples or peaches
    ¾ cup sugar
    1/3 cup flour

    Combine berries or other fruit with sugar and flour. Mix well and pour into 8×8 inch pan. Note: If strawberries are used, add ¼ cup of tapioca. Note: chopped up crystallized ginger goes well with peach cobbler.

    topping:
    1 cup flour
    1 cup sugar
    1 teaspoon baking powder
    ½ teaspoon salt
    1 egg, beaten
    ½ cup butter (1 stick)

    Combine flour, sugar, baking powder and salt and mix well. Add beaten egg to dry ingredients and stir until mixture is moistened but still crumbly. Spread topping evenly over berries/fruit in baking pan. Melt butter and drizzle over the topping. Bake 40 minutes or until topping is golden and fruit is bubbling.

    This is a Finnish recipe that I got from a fellow student in a chocolate class I took a few years ago. Very unique and marvelously good. She translated it from a Finnish Chocolate book, hence the metric measurements.

    Chocolate Cake with Graham Crackers

    200 g (7.055 oz.) dark or semisweet chocolate
    250 g (8.82 oz.) coconut butter (or regular butter)
    2 eggs (or pasturized egg equivalent)
    3 dl (about 1.5 c.) powdered sugar
    graham crackers
    milk (you can use Kahlua or Creme de Cacao instead)

    Melt chocolate and coconut butter (or plain butter) in double boiler hot water bath. Let cool down. (I melted the butter in microwave and added chocolate into the warm butter which melted the chocolate. Be sure to mix well to a smooth mixture).

    Beat eggs and powdered sugar until light in another bowl. Beat chocolate/coconut butter mix slowly into egg/sugar mix.

    Line a meat loaf pan with parchment cooking paper. Spread about .5 inch layer of chocolate mixture on the bottom. Set a layer of graham crackers (any other type of sweet cracker that you prefer) on the chocolate mix. Brush with milk (or any liquor). Cover with another layer of chocolate mix. Repeat layering 3 to 4 times ending with chocolate layer.

    Chill 2 or more hours. Remove from pan and remove the parchment paper. Dust with cocoa powder. The cake is ready to eat.

    The cake keeps well in the refrigerator and ages well. Because of the raw eggs it is safer to keep the leftovers refrigerated unless you use the pasteurized eggs.

    Enjoy & Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Felicitous Kwanzaa!

  • Pumpkins & Dressing & Yams, Oh My!

    It’s time for that annual Thanksgiving ritual of the cooking & baking frenzy. I’m not even hosting the feast this year and I’m still in a tizzy over my culinary chores. I’ve signed on to bake a pumpkin pie, make a pan of dressing (it’s not stuffing unless it spent some time as turkey innards) and whip together a yam casserole.

    Of course, I can’t just pick up one of those pre-made pie shells at the market. My step-dad, Harry, who taught me the finer points of perfect pie crusts, would be spinning in his grave at the thought. Yet I have this love-hate relationship with pie dough. You’ve got to get the shortening cut in just right. You can’t add too much (or too little) water. And if you muck about too much with rolling it out, you’ll end up with a tough, hardtack mess. I barely even look at my pie dough after it’s mixed, and I roll it out so gently, it never even feels the rolling pin.

    Then there’s the pumpkin for the filling. Yes, I could get the canned stuff. But it is so cool to bake an actual pumpkin, peel it and moosh up the pulp, then throw that into the pie. Can anyone tell the difference after you add milk, eggs, spices and a ton of sugar? Well…what does that matter, anyway? With fresh pumpkin, you get bragging rights. People are that much more impressed with your pie.

    If I’m using fresh pumpkin for the pie, I’ve got to use real yams for the yam casserole. Not that my grandma, a fabulous cook, ever did. She’d buy those canned yams and she wouldn’t even mash them the way I do. She’d dump them into a baking dish as is, throw on some brown sugar and butter, shove them in the oven until they were hot. Then she’d top them with marshmallows and call it good.

    I, on the other hand, lovingly bake fresh yams, peel & moosh (see pumpkin, above), then mix in orange juice, cinnamon, ginger and brown sugar. I spread the mooshed yams into a casserole dish, heat them through, spread miniature marshmallows on top…then the real fun begins. Do you know how long it takes for miniature marshmallows to burn when you put them under the broiler? About 1.2 seconds. One moment you’re looking at white marshallows, the next, they’re black and about to burst into flame. It’s a real Thanksgiving tradition, the burning of the marshallows. One year, it took three applications of marshmallows before we got golden brown instead of black. No lie.

    But the dressing should be easy, right? Well, mostly. Other than having to bake a pan of cornbread for crumbs. And cutting up bread into cubes (store bought bread–I’m not a complete masochist). Chopping celery, onions, apple. Cooking sausage. Sauteing the vegies with some fresh sage plucked out of my garden. Then mixing the whole mess together. No marshmallows required, burnt or otherwise.

    That’s my day. Spending crazed hours in the kitchen. Ain’t I got some fun ahead of me?