Grandma Helen was born in small-town Indiana in 1920, the child of immigrants from Bohemia (part of the modern Czech Republic). Carol recently found a recipe for kolaches handwritten by Helen on a card. These are not the kolaches we got used to in Texas, which are yeast buns, traditionally open-faced with a sweet filling, Read More …
This improbably simple dessert won third place in a cooking contest in Scouting magazine in 2005. Essentially, it is an extremely simple bread pudding. The brown sugar and cream bake into a caramel which coats the biscuits. I made a batch of 20 on last weekend’s campout at Henry’s Farm. Twelve were baked in a Read More …
This is a retro recipe for a sponge cake with a caramelized coconut topping and is very tasty. This version is adapted from Serious Eats. It makes one 9 x 13 inch cake and takes about 90 minutes, mostly elapsed time. For the cake Non-stick cooking spray 4 Tbs. (half a stick) unsalted butter ¾ Read More …
From Carol’s childhood, we have a hard-to-read handwritten recipe for gum drop cookies. We made a batch today following the original instructions. One of these days, we will update them to weigh the flour, etc., but not today (Christmas Eve)! A batch makes 5-6 dozen cookies. 1 cup Crisco (vegetable shortening) 1 cup light brown Read More …
True puff pasty starts with a block of butter encased in dough which is repeatedly rolled out and folded to create many thin layers of butter encased in many thin layers of dough. The result is a flaky pastry. A less time-consuming method of creating a flaky pasty is the “Rough Puff” in which small Read More …
For the cookie table at Amanda’s wedding we made several batches of 7-layer cookies, using 2 different recipes which primarily differed on whether the sweetened condensed milk was an early layer or a late layer. This version, adapted from allrecipes.com had the milk added late to help glue everything together. This version will make one Read More …
We have been looking around for a variety of cookies to make for the cookie table at Amanda’s wedding. This is an adaptation of a recipe I spotted in Jessica Merchant’s book Easy Everyday. One improvement we made was to cut the caramels into smaller pieces so that they naturally distribute more evenly across the Read More …
Lina made this mousse last week based on a recipe in allrecipes.com. It was easy to make and tasty. It took about 1-1/2 hours in total, most of which was chilling time. The quantities below are for 4 servings. 3.5 oz. dark chocolate (ideal is 62@ cacao) 1 Tbs. unsalted butter 2 large egg yolks Read More …
Carol made this dessert for Father’s Day based on a recipe in www.thekichn.com. An enhancement she made was a glaze for the top of the cheesecake. This was a very tasty and easy dessert which made 10 servings. Work time is very short, but it does need a few hours in the refrigerator to set Read More …
Amanda made a Brazilian carrot cake from a British website (ashbaber.com) and told me about it, and I decided to make it. As she described, it is nothing like an American carrot cake and is very easy to make since the carrots and several other cake ingredients are ground up in a blender. The icing Read More …