The Pleasure of Showing Some Baking Tricks

Over the holidays Sweetie and I were blessed to have not only our wonderful daughter at home, but also her Sweetie and his 10 year old son, Raine. The whole time together was a delight, but I particularly enjoyed showing Raine some baking tricks and skills.

He was an enthusiastic companion in decorating gingerbread cutouts and also in making the pastry for Christmas morning. In particular, we made choux paste and he produced the lightest choux paste topping yet. Next time we'll do eclairs.

His part was stirring the butter into the water and bringing it to a boil, then adding the flour and stirring until a ball of the paste formed and a film coated the bottom of the pot. He seemed fascinated with the process and watched carefully as I gradually added some egg to the slightly cooled paste until it was just the right consistency...which left some of the egg unused. I think that may have been my mistake in the past...using too much egg. I really got a kick out of his interest and questions and skill building. Everyone enjoyed the Christmas pastry so much that there was only one piece left by the time breakfast was over.

Here is a photo of the plate showing some of cookies we decorated. I particularly like that the gingerbread girl turned into an angel. I look forward to further cooking and baking adventures with Raine.

The recipe links can be found HERE for the pastry and HERE for the cookies.

The One With Christmas Cookies

As we continue through the food memories journey, it seemed right to think about Christmas, since it comes close on the heels of Thanksgiving.

It's still a bit early to make Christmas cookies, although pfeffernusse  (look below the Lane cake recipe) can be made this early to let the flavors blend. Still, making Christmas cookies with my Mom and decorating them with my siblings and leaving some for Santa on Christmas Eve (with a glass of milk) are all strong food memories. It's also a cherished memory from raising my own children. We started when they were young and my daughter and I still decorate cookie together each Christmas as time allows. I like to make rolled Gingerbread cut-outs.

The classic Christmas cookie was a vanilla flavored rolled out sugar cookie that we cut with an assortment of cutters...there were stars with wavy edges, a sweet bell, a Santa in profile with a bundle of toys on his back, gingerbread boys and girls,  snowmen and an angel. A round cutter could be used to make Christmas balls, which allowed for a lot of creativity in the decorations. In the early years I think that we used Royal icing and colored sugars and jimmies, and later the icing was tinted, too. In time I remember using some already made colored icing from the grocery store. I loved the gold and silver tinted tiny dragees because they added sparkle and shine...but were hard on teeth if bitten into. Not sure if they even make them anymore.

To decorate a lot of sugar cookies with a Christmas theme in a short time, you can cut the shapes out of rolled dough and put them on the cookie sheets, then sprinkle red and green colored sugars at appropriate spots, press the sugar lightly into the cookies, then bake. When baked the colors will have spread out a bit, but there will still be that festive red and green look...no extra time needed for decorations, although to gild the lily you can still add more icing, sugar, jimmies, sprinkles, small candies, etc.

My favorite, and the cookie that continued to be baked by Mom well past her 80s, was the pecan crescent cookie. She would ship them all over the country for each of her children to share with their families. They had lots of butter and margarine and ground or finely chopped pecans and were shaped like a crescent moon. Baked cookies were rolled while still warm in some confectioners sugar or the sugar was sifted on top through a small tea strainer. Here are photos I took of Mom's hands as she made a batch one year.

Another family favorite was rum balls. You could start making this one pretty soon, too, since these little nuggets taste better when they have had time to ripen. Crushed vanilla wafers and finely chopped nuts and cocoa are the main ingredients, but there is real rum, too. By the time you eat them the alcohol has evaporated, so you get a nice rum flavor. These are another time-consuming hand-formed treat. Each little ball gets rolled in granulated sugar and them put in an airtight container for a few weeks so the flavors meld.

We also baked spritz cookies, the kind that you squish out with a cookie press. My favorite shape was the heart, followed by the dog. I also love the flower shape. You can either tint the dough or decorate with sprinkles or icing after they are baked.

My daughter's favorite is Santa's Whiskers, a refrigerator cookie that has pecans and candied cherries, both red and green. The whiskers are shredded coconut, but we have skipped that part for quite a while, so I call them Shaven Santas. The lovely thing about them is that you can keep the dough log in the fridge and only bake a few at a time...perfect when unexpected guests show up at tea time.

Rolled Sugar Cookies

1 cup butter or margarine
1 cup sugar
1 egg
3 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
¼ teaspoon nutmeg
    With butter or margarine at room temperature,  beat in sugar and egg. Sift dry ingredients together and add to first mixture. Mix well. Roll dough to 1/8 inch thickness, cut with cookie cutters. Place on lightly buttered cookie sheets. Bake in a 4000 F. oven for 7- 8 minutes. If dough sticks while rolling, chill briefly. Cookies can be sprinkled with colored sugar before baking or, after cookies have cooled, can be frosted & decorated as desired. Makes 5 - 8 dozen cookies.

Crescent Cookies

1½ cups butter, at room temperature
¾ cup granulated sugar
3 cups all-purpose flour
1½-2 cups pecans, finely chopped
1½ teaspoons pure vanilla extract
Confectioners sugar
Cream the butter until light. Add the rest of the ingredients except confectioners sugar, and mix thoroughly. Chill the dough. Shape dough into 1” x 3” crescents on a buttered baking sheet. Bake for 20 -25 minutes in a 3000 F. oven. Cool cookies on a baking rack. Roll cookies in confectioners sugar. Store in an air-tight container. Makes 4 dozen. MOM’S NOTES:  Can sub ½ cup light butter or margarine.

Rum Balls

1 cup vanilla wafer crumbs
1½ cups pecans, finely chopped
1 cup confectioners sugar
2 tablespoons cocoa
2 tablespoons light corn syrup
3 tablespoons rum (may use bourbon)
Combine the first four ingredients. Add syrup and rum. Mix thoroughly with clean hands. Shape into small balls and roll balls in confectioners sugar or super fine sugar. Store in air-tight container. Mellow for a week - then open and enjoy! Makes about 3 dozen balls.

Spritz Cookies
For making with a cookie press
recipe from the Christmas Cookie Deck by Chronicle Books1 cup unsalted butter, at room temperature
3/4 cup sugar
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp almond extract
2 cups plus 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
dash of salt

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. In a bowl, beat the butter until creamy. Gradually add sugar and beat until light and fluffy.
Mix in egg and vanilla and almond extracts. Add flour and salt mixing until smooth.
Pack dough into a cookies press fitted with a star or ridged tip or any desired design. Press out dough onto greased baking sheet.
Bake for 8 to 10 minutes or until edge are lightly browned. If a 1-inch wide ridged cutter is used, immediately cut strips crosswise on the diagonal to make 1 1/2 -inch-long cookies. Transfer to racks to cool. Makes about 6 dozen.

Shaven Santas

1 cup softened butter (2 sticks)
1 cup sugar
1 teaspoon almond extract
2 1/2 cups sifted all-purpose flour
3/4 cup mixed red and green candied cherries
1/2 cup pecans

Cream butter and sugar in a mixing bowl. Add almond extract and beat until creamy.

Mix in the flour until well blended. Dough will be stiff.

Spread cherries and pecans around top of batter.

Stir in fruit and nuts. Mix well. Form dough into two logs on pieces of plastic wrap.
Wrap well and refrigerate up to one week or freeze up to one month.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Remove dough logs from fridge or freezer. If frozen let thaw a bit.

With a serrated knife, cut crosswise into 1/4 inch thick discs.

Bake on ungreased cookie sheets about 12 minutes or until edges are golden. Cool on rack.

Makes 4 or 5 dozen. Note: To make as Santa's Whiskers roll logs in coconut before wrapping to refrigerate or freeze. Proceed as written with rest of recipe. Make sure not to burn coconut when baking.

Almost Entenmanns

It might seem like I'm a great baker of breads and pastries and that I always have been, but during the 20 years or so when I was most involved in raising my kids, keeping the household going, and holding down a job, that really was only true in a very limited way. Cookies and birthday cakes were about it. For Christmas I would buy a Raspberry Danish pastry from our local bakery outlet Entenmanns. The pastry itself was a fairly flat rectangle in a foil pan, about 6 inches by 10 inches. It had two strips of raspberry jam running down the long way and a dense white drizzle of confectioners sugar icing over the top. My kids loved it! I liked it too, especially because it was easy to heat up in the toaster oven and easy to serve.

This Christmas my daughter wanted that pastry for Christmas morning breakfast, along with our usual fruit bowl and scrambled eggs. Although the local bakery outlet has been closed for about a year, I went online and saw that there was one about 20 minutes away, and promptly forgot all about it. On the Monday before Christmas I looked up the outlet location again and saw that it had been closed. No biggie, right? Went to the Entenmann's site and put in the produce, thinking that I would just buy it at a grocery store. Well, that was wrong. It isn't carried by any store in our county, even though they do carry Entenmann donuts and other products. Whoops! Another search on the internet...don't you just LOVE how easy it is to find out so many things so quickly online?...led to a recipe for a clone of the Entenmann's Raspberry Danish, so I could just make the darn thing. It wouldn't have that certain something from the abundance of chemicals found in the original, but we would just have to put up with a Danish that tasted good.

Knowing that a laminated dough like Danish takes some time, I began making the dough in the morning of Christmas Eve. A butter block (a combination of butter and flour, combined and shaped into a rectangle, then chilled until firm) is essential for achieving the many layers of dough that provide the flakiness characteristic of Danish pastries. The soft, rich dough is wrapped around the butter block, then it is beaten with the rolling pin to break it up a bit, then the dough is rolled out and folded up like a letter. The dough is then chilled. The process is repeated a number of times, each time adding more layers to the dough. Eventually the dough is homogeneous and more turns are taken.

I was also preparing a holiday dinner for special guests that day. By dinner time the dough was done, so I divided it into three long rectangles, set side by side as the recipe directed, in a jelly roll pan.  I missed the part of the directions saying this was for 1/2 the amount of dough; with my experience of major rising, I probably should have divided the dough into four pastries instead of making one. With the warmth of the kitchen as dinner finished cooking and during the meal, the dough rose up mightily! After dinner I quickly turned on the oven and put the raspberry jam down the indents between the dough rectangles, but it was still a monster pastry! As soon as the oven was hot enough I baked it, fearful that it would fall before I had a chance to bake it. When I removed the golden brown, gorgeous (if huge) pastry from the oven I knew that it would be better than anything Entenmann's had ever made. Overnight it flattened out some, which was fine, but it was still a super Danish. I made up some glaze in the morning to drizzle over it (leaving out the apricot glaze) and cut narrow slices. I loved it, but Sweetie and my daughter preferred the grocery store version that Sweetie had found at Raley's on Christmas Eve afternoon, just in case. I guess it did taste and look more like the Entenmann's version, but I loved the buttery, flaky, raspberry good Danish that I made. Next time I'll make four smaller ones and freeze the other three, just for those who appreciate it.

Homemade Entenmann’s® Raspberry Danish Twist

Danish Dough (Makes enough for 2 Loafs):

Primary Dough-

16oz. AP flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 1/2 oz. sugar
2 eggs
1 Tablespoon butter, cold
1/2 cup water
1/2 cup milk
1 1/2 Tablespoons yeast

In a saucepan, heat milk and water to 180 degrees. Allow to cool to 110 degrees. Add yeast and whisk to dissolve.

In the bowl of your mixer add flour, salt and sugar. Using paddle, mix to combine. Cut in butter to evenly disperse. Mix in yeast mixture until barely combined.

In a small bowl, whisk eggs to break up. Slowly add eggs to dough until barely combined. Mix using dough hook, on speed 4 for approximately 4 minutes, until dough is elastic. You will need to stop halfway through to peel dough off the dough hook. Dough will be firm but slightly sticky.

Let sit at room temperature for 30 minutes.

Butter Dough-

8 oz. butter, room temperature

2 oz. AP flour

Cream butter and flour together. Form into rectangle shape. Let chill in refrigerator until hardened.

Roll primary dough to 1.5 times the size of butter dough. Encase butter dough in primary dough (as seen in cartoon). Do 2 total turns, chilling the dough from 45 minutes in between each turn.

Apricot Glaze-

2 Tablespoons apricot butter

2 Tablespoons corn syrup

Mix together.

Sugar Glaze-

1 cup confectioners sugar, sifted

pinch of salt

1 tablespoon milk

Mix together. 

Assembly (Using 1/2 of dough):

Roll dough into 8″x4″ rectangle, 1″ thick.  Cut vertically into 3 long strips. Lay each strip close to each other, barely touching on a sheet pan covered in  aluminum or parchment.  Turn on oven to 200 degrees for 3 minutes with a cake pan filled with hot water on bottom shelf. Turn oven off. Put sheet pan  with Danish dough into oven and close the door. Do not touch for 60 minutes. (This is how I turn my home oven into a ‘proofer’.)(Note from Elle: my kitchen was so warm that I didn't need to do this...just sitting on top of my microwave was all that was needed.)

After 60 minutes remove tray and cake pan filled with water. The logs that were barely touching should have puffed up.

Fill 1/2 of jam in each crevice between the dough rectangles (logs).

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Beat 1 egg in a small bowl. Brush egg on danish dough.

Bake at 375 degrees for 20 minutes. Lower heat to 350 degrees and bake another 10 to 15 minutes until caramel brown.

While warm brush with Apricot Glaze.  Let cool to room temperature. Drizzle with Sugar Glaze.

Yuletide Treat

When my Mom was a child the family would gather at one of the aunt's homes and the dessert highlight at Christmas was plum pudding with hard sauce. When I was little we always had lots of cookies, but the highlight of Christmas dinner was the Lane Cake. Lane Cake is a layer cake with a plain white cake for the layers and a rich, fruity, bourbon-laced filling and frosting between the layers and on the top and sides.

We used to start making the Lane Cake the day after Thanksgiving to give the concoction time for the bourbon to mellow and mingle with all those dried and candied fruits. Coconut was fresh and grated by hand. The raisins were put through the meat grinder and came out in long black snakes. The candied cherries were bright red and green and had to be cut up by hand...a sticky business. Pecans were chopped, too. It was a good thing that we had lots of willing hands to help out with all the prep. Mom baked the cake layers and I think Dad assigned us the different prep tasks. The most difficult part was getting the filling just right. Cook it for too short a time and it would slide down the sides and cook it for too long and it turned grainy. You served it in thin slices since it was so rich.

When I had children of my own I made Lane Cake once to carry on the tradition, but found that I was the only one who enjoyed it, so it really wasn't worth all the work. I found that gingerbread, both as cookies and as houses, was what my family wanted for Christmas...and cookies, too.

Last spring when I was working on the Classic Comfort Foods Cookbook I found out that my niece Mandy had become the family Lane Cake maker and that she had changed the recipe a bit, especially by using dried natural cherries instead of the candied ones. The family had also discovered that the cake was fine if you only made it a week ahead of Christmas and also that you could just put the filling between the layers and on the top (but not the sides) which made the consistency of the filling less of an issue.

This year we were thrilled to have Mandy's sister T with us for Christmas. I was thrilled that she made and brought a Lane Cake. I even had the pleasure of being consulted by phone on baking tips the day she made it. It was perfect...moist and flavorful and just a bit boozy. Gorgeous to look at, too, like T herself. We took our portion home and had it with some hot cocoa. It brought back sweet childhood memories for me. Thank you T!  Maybe next year we can bake the cake together?

XO Elle

Lane Cake
from Classic Comfort Foods


Prepare 4 cake pans by greasing them and lining them with waxed paper. Preheat oven to 375 degrees F.

Ingredients
1 cup butter at room temperature
2 cups sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
3¼ cups flour, sifted
3½ teaspoons baking powder
¾ teaspoon salt
1 cup milk
8 egg whites

Cream butter; add sugar and vanilla. Sift together dry ingredients. Alternately add dry ingredients and milk to butter mixture. In separate bowl, beat egg whites to soft, glossy points, but not dry. Fold egg whites into batter until incorporated. Divide into the 4 prepared pans. Bake 2 pans to each rack, for 15-20 minutes in preheated oven. Cool 3-5 minutes, loosen edges, and turn out to cool. Remove waxed paper and turn right side up carefully. Set aside while preparing the filling/frosting.

Filling/Frosting
1½ cups seedless raisins
12 egg yolks
1¾ cups sugar
½ teaspoon salt
¾ cup butter
½ cup bourbon whisky
½ cup pecans, coarsely chopped
½ cup red and green candied cherries, quartered - or try modern version (Mandy’s) below
1½ cups coconut, shredded (fresh or frozen)

Cover raisins with hot water, let stand to plump. Drain and dry. Chop or grind (Note: Dad used to grind the raisins in a meat grinder, but they can be chopped with a knife, too.) Put egg yolks in top of double boiler; beat slightly. Add sugar, salt and butter. Put over simmering water. Cook, stirring constantly, until sugar is dissolved, butter melts, and mixture thickens. Do not overcook. Mixture should be almost translucent and should mound when small amount is dropped on waxed paper. Remove from heat; add bourbon. Beat 1 minute with a beater. At this point, mixture can be transferred to a bowl. Fold in nuts, cherries, coconut and raisins. Cool. Spread between layers and on top of cake. (Sides optional) Wrap cake in plastic wrap and mellow one month (or less, about one week, for less stale cake). Serve in thin slices. Serves 20-24.

Niece Mandy’s Modern Lane Cake: “I made the cake the same as the recipe directs; I just did the cakes in 2 batches of 2 pans. 8” this year and 9” last year.

For the filling/frosting, I did a few things differently:

Rather than using 1½ cups raisins and ½ cup candied cherries, I did about 1 ¼ cups dried Traverse City cherries (I’m biased) and ¾ cup other dried fruits (this year was just raisins, but last year I also used currents). I also soak all of these in a combination of freshly-boiled water and a few splashes of bourbon. Just enough liquid to cover the fruit. I then ground about half the fruit and very coarsely chopped the rest, leaving a few whole.

When at the step of combining the eggs, sugar, salt, and butter on top of the double boiler (or bowl over boiling water, like what I used), note that it will take about 30-45 minutes to thicken.”