Staying with the Cake Motif

I used to do decorated cakes all the time but haven't done much of that lately. But my dear sister-in-law asked me to help her with her daughter's wedding cake a few years back and since then I've helped with a few other food-related jobs.

This is the baby-shower cake for the same daughter a couple of months ago.  I keep all my pastry bags and couplers and tips in a white tin and throw that and some favorite spatulas into a bag when we're headed down to her place.

My personal preference is for a more dense and robust cake but I certainly enjoy wielding the pastry bag full of shortening/butter/powdered sugar icing.

Birthday Cake

I love old Grange cookbooks. I have one that is called "Our Favorite Grange Recipes" and it was compiled in the late 1960s. The cover features a drawing of a smiling farmer with a bushel basket of vegetables. The sub-title is "a Collection of Rural Recipes Which Have Made Grange Cooking Famous Throughout the West Since 1870."

That pretty much says it all.

The cake recipes run the gamut from what we'd call in the South "white-trash cooking" (lots of processed ingredients thrown together in a "creative" way) to old-school deliciousness. I chose Midnight Cake for my birthday and made a double recipe for four layers.  Here it is--

1/2 C butter
1 1/4 C sugar
2 eggs
1 t. soda
1 C hot water
1/2 C cocoa
1 1/2 C cake flour
1/2 t. salt
1 t. baking powder
1 t. vanilla

Cream butter, add sugar gradually, beat well. Add eggs and beat one minute. Add hot water to cocoa and mix until smooth. Add cocoa mixture to eggs and sugar. Sift together dry ingredients and add to creamed mixture, beating well. Add vanilla. Bake 20 mins at 350.

I used regular cocoa for the first batch and dark cocoa for the second which gave it a subtle variegated look when stacked. It is a very tender cake and you would be wise to let the cooked cake rest in the pans for 5 minutes of so and then cover your cooling rack with parchment or waxed paper before turning the layers out.

The icing also came from this book. It is the last icing recipe in the section.

Chocolate Fudge Icing
1 C light brown sugar
1/4 C milk
3 T butter
3 T cocoa
Boil the above ingredients for 3 minutes, remove from hear and add 1 1/2 C sifted powdered sugar and 1 t. vanilla. (and I needed an extra  T. milk to make the icing the right consistency). Beat until firm.

Then you have to ice the cake fast.  It took three batches to get the level of coverage I like for a four layer cake.  I'd do one--ice like a maniac.  Do another, ditto. And again.  Serve stingy little slices because it is very, very rich.

It is a very firm frosting--a good keeper,as they say. The taste is extraordinary--so unlike the crap frosting on grocery store cakes or the garbage that comes out of a can.

Next time--and there will be a next time--I'm going to do a sour cherry filling for the layers. Same icing. A slash of whipped cream on the slice, as you serve.  On the photo above, I rolled out some little dabs of this firm frosting and stuck them in a circle on top of the cake.  I broke up a bar of crystalized honey infused organic chocolate and stuck a piece in each dab.  Sifted a little powdered sugar on the top and it looked a little like a stone circle in a light snow.

Tamales and Candy

I have always loved tamales--from the time I was a wee child and my mother would buy Hormel tamales in that curious red sauce--the ones in a small glass jar?

Later I discovered that I could order tamales at Mexican restaurant, even if they weren't on the menu.  That was very good to know.

My best tamale experience until last week was at a small Latino Episcopal community in a neighboring county.  I knew the priest and we cooked up this idea to do a combined Day of the Dead/Samhain event with our two communities.  The event would be focused on sharing food and crafts, and building an altar together.

The church had a wonderful cob oven in their side yard and we built a fire to cook bread, pizza...and tamales.  They were incredibly delicious and the whole event was a fun learning experience.

My daughter is home from college and we decided last week to make some tamales.  We have lots of meat in the house from the holidays and we got a bag of masa and read the directions.  Instead of steaming them properly, we found a recipe that allowed us to stack the husk-wrapped tamales in a baking dish with 1/2 inch of water.

It didn't take long to make them or to cook them or to eat them.  They were pretty darned yummy and really easy but we determined that the masa mixture needed lard or some other animal fat for maximum taste.  We're going to try it again tomorrow with some rendered pork fat.

On now to candy.  My family traditions around the holidays always included odd, old candies--seafoam, boiled fudge, marzipan fruits.  My cousin Evvie--she of the Cold Oven Pound Cake (which I insist on called the Old Coven Pound Cake)--always made chocolate-covered bonbons.  I remember one year she got into a time crunch and I went out to help her with her candy.  It was a fun time--she was one of my favorite relatives ever.

After her death, I took on making these bonbons.  This year, I was doing so much baking and making that the bonbons never got their chocolate coating.  They are still bright and delicious. And this year, I finally rolled them into small enough balls to not get too much of their richness.

Here's the recipe--

14 oz coconut
2 boxes 10X sugar
1/2 C unsalted butter
1 can condensed milk
1 t vanilla
chopped pecans (optional)

Cream together butter, sugar and canned milk. Mix all the other ingredients by hand and roll into dime-sized balls. Dip in melted dark chocolate.

Easy. Fast. Surprisingly yummy.

What? Where?

Did I starve last year?  Was there no food about which to write?

Erm.  No.  I published a book in June and started a blog about that.  I got a new blog platform at Witches and Pagans and did that.  I gardened like a maniac.  There were several deaths.

Blah blah. Blah.

I'm going to attempt to revive this little blog and be true to it. Because cooking and food preparation is so important to me and to all of us, I will also write about Appalachian cooking, subsistence farming, water, food sovereignty and other things that will fall loosely under this umbrella of Pagan Foodies.

I am hoping to inspire Peg to also return and to maybe add some more writers so we have a little more diversity of outlook.

Anyway, it's 2013.  Time to get serious about food, I reckon.

What are you cooking today?

coconut cake with a cooked frosting

Why Must Everything Be Soup?

Don't get me wrong--I love soup.  I write poems about soup.  I sing praise-songs to soup.

And I seemingly can't not make soup.

I had a packet of chicken quarters taking up too much room in the freezer, so I thawed them today for supper tonight.  They went into a baking pan with orange juice and some spices and baked in a slow oven until they were crispy.

The smell is wonderful. And the chicken is very tender and flavorful. I de-boned some of it and then I couldn't throw the bones away.

I couldn't--I swear!

They went into a pot, along with the juices--the pot likker--from the baking pan.  All that simmered for a while and now it is cooling before I refrigerate it. Because tomorrow, it will be soup.  A lovely soup for the midday meal.

I can't help it.  I don't believe in sin but if I did--wasting food would be at the top of the list.

Speaking of Green...Nettles

I'm sure you were all so good as to not drink green beer last weekend.  Beer, yes,perhaps.

There are some yummy green things you may drink to your healthy advantage, however. One of those is a rich green tea made from fresh stinging nettles.

O, come on, don't be a baby.  Yes, they are called stinging nettles for a reason and you must be very respectful in the harvesting of them.

But when they are immersed in boiling water, they get soft and safe.  I filled a cookpot with fresh nettles and poured boiling water over them from the kettle. Covered them and let them steep for a couple of hours and then strained the tea through cheesecloth and put it in a half gallon mason jar.

I drank some hot, with a bit of honey from the Lost Hive.  And I drank it cold all day yesterday and some today.

It's a great spring tonic and a deliciously verdant drink.

Here they are, with the tongs that made them safe to handle. Blessed be the tongs!

For the love of Brigid, don't drink green beer or eat bad soda bread

Yes, tomorrow is St. Patrick's Day.  You will be asked to drink green beer or possibly flat Guinness.  You will be offered dry and humorless soda bread. You may be told to have fish and chips for lunch.

Please, my friends, please don't.

Begin your day with a nice fry up--eggs, toast, bacon, beans, tomatoes, whole meal soda bread, mushrooms, strong tea.

That will set you up for whatever may come your way.  With any luck it will be a dollop of Bushmill's Black Bush.  If you must put it in creamy coffee, then you must. I won't judge you.

Here's what we may eat for supper, in two separate pans in these pics, but I often cook them up together.  Cabbage and potatoes.  Serve this was soda bread and sweet butter.