A Year of Cooking Genealogically, Orange Cake

Welcome back!  Yesterday, March 21st was the first day of spring!  Today, because Ohio, it looks like this...So what better thing to do than bake? 

True Confession time - I hate baking cakes.  Detest it.  My children will probably end up being serial killers because I didn't bake their birthday cakes, or it's evil offspring, the cupcake.  All my love and money goes to Caroline Eder (a friend and phenomenal baker), Costco and Kroger for their contributions to my children's cakey happiness.  The thing is, my father, God rest his soul these past 29 years, was a phenomenal cake baker, like award-winning-from-scratch-mile-high-cake baker.  Towards the end of his life he could barely stand and yet he could turn out a triple layer walnut cake that would earn a handshake from Paul Hollywood!  You'd think I would have inherited the baking gene but dammit, nope.  Well, here goes nothing.

Ingredients
1 cup sugar
3 eggs (yolks)
1 cup flour
1 1/4 teas. baking powder
1 orange (juice)

Directions
Beat egg yolks until creamy - add sugar and blend thoroughly. Measure orange juice and add water to make {1 or 1/2} cup liquid.  Add flour and bak. pow. alternately to first mixture with orange juice.  Fold in egg whites.  Bake in layers.  You can use the third egg white to make a boiled icing.  This is a nice light little cake and can be make in no time.

Of course, 'no time' is what we've been given here, along with 'no temperature' - I chose the often used 350 degrees and am staring with 30 minutes.  I'm also completely stumped by her handwriting - should I add enough liquid to the squeezed orange juice to make 1/2 cup liquid or 1 cup?  Fair warning, I split the difference.  And even though the recipe didn't call for it, I beat the egg whites into stiff peaks before folding them into the batter.  I own no cake pans (I. Don't. Bake.), so I sprayed the hell out of a bundt pan (I do make coffee cake, which isn't really cake), poured the batter in, set the timer for 30 minutes and unlike the contestants in the Great British Baking show who crouch agonizingly by their ovens, waltzed in the living room, ignoring the cake completely. 

Imagine my surprise then when 35 minutes later, the cake was a lovely high risen golden color and smelled delicious.  Now imagine my total disgust when upon removing it from the oven, much like a deflating balloon, this lovely confection compressed itself into the size and shape of a hockey puck.  Seriously, an hour after I took this picture, it's gotten even flatter still.  Mind you, it smells wonderful.  And it tastes good, very orangey but it sure isn't light, per Kate's description.  So what went wrong?

Well, as near as I can research, this cake is a type of 'foam' cake called a sponge.  According to the website "The Joy of Baking" (what a ridiculous name and a total fabrication), "these cakes have a high proportion of eggs to flour and are leavened solely by the air beaten into whole eggs or egg whites.  They contain very little, if any, fat and have a spongy texture."  Well, darn - I thought she meant my sponge cake was supposed to resemble a flat dried kitchen sponge - nailed it!  What did I do wrong?

Well, the Joy of Baking says that 'Sponge Cake gets most of its rise from the air whipped into the eggs.' Problem 1 - I probably didn't beat the egg yolks enough.  It also uses an ungreased pan and I definitely sprayed the life out of the pan.  They recommend using an ungreased tube pan (think angel food cake).  And lastly, I'm still unsure of the water content, as it might have been too much.  

Finally, Kate did not include a boiled icing recipe in the book, so I will not make one.  Instead, I'll just dust thing with powdered sugar and drop kick it to the table.  Hubs will be so glad I baked, he might not notice the chipped tooth when he bites into it.  

Verdict?  Tastes delicious.  And it was relatively quick and easy to make.  But unless someone can figure out the correct proportions, I can only take so much failure in my life.  NEXT!

A Year of Cooking Genealogically, Sharp Sauce

Good morning!  It's March in Cincinnati, which means Ole' Man Winter is getting in it's last licks of cold and snow.  There's no better way to kick off a Monday than stay inside and cook.  Well, there might be way better things to do, but this is the best I could come up with.

So, I've been holding out on you, as far as this little recipe journal is concerned. If you've been reading any of the last blog entries, none of the recipes have been too weird, right?  Lacking instructions maybe, and some funky names and methods but the results have been surprisingly tasty.  But in all truthful honesty the journal has an entire section on vegetables.  Now, you're probably thinking to yourself, nothing wrong with veggies, right?  And you'd be correct.  Except Kate's veggie recipes all feature 'gelatin' prominently.  Yes, you guessed it, the dreaded vegetable salads of yesterday.  I didn't quite have the fortitude or copious amounts of gelatin to tackle a vegetable salad today, so the first recipe up is Sharp Sauce.

Ingredients and Instructions
Chop pimientos, white onions, 1/2 green pepper, some celery and a dill pickle.  Pour over this French dressing and let stand a day.  Garnish with stuffed olives. This is nice with cold meat that's rather insipid.  It gives it pep and helps with the leftovers.

So, well, okay.  There's a LOT to unpack here.  Once again there are no measurements, other than 1/2 of a green pepper.  Though her handwriting is a bit garbled, I'm reasonably confident that the first ingredient is pimientos.  In case you're wondering, "a pimiento, pimento, or cherry pepper is a variety

of large, red, heart-shaped chili pepper that measures 3 to 4 in long and 2 to 3 in wide. The flesh of the pimiento is sweet, succulent, and more aromatic than that of the red bell pepper." Fortunately, pimientos come pre-chopped in a jar now.  I decided to cut vegetables into roughly a similar shape and quantity as the pimientos, roughly 1/3 to 1/2 cup.  I did not have a whole dill pickle, but I did have some tasty Zesty Garlic Pickle chips in the fridge, and I figured the addition of some zestiness couldn't hurt.  After chopping all the vegetables, I set them in a colander to drain a bit so that the finished sauce wouldn't be watery - hey, I have to taste this stuff!  The final addition is the electric neon orange french dressing - I used about 8 ounces - and Voila! Sharp Sauce.


Now to the discussion of 'meat that's rather insipid'.  Merriam Webster gives this definition:

in·sip·id – adjective = lacking flavor.
synonyms: tasteless, flavorless, bland, weak, wishy-washy; lacking vigor or interest.

You might be wondering why anyone would make or serve insipid or tasteless meat. Not to be flippant, but I think it boils down (no pun intended) to two things - members of my family tree were on the poorer side, and secondly had a strong British ancestral heritage.  Boiling meat, after all, is cheap and easy, so it's closer to the diet of farmers than royalty. Boiling, stewing, poaching and roasting works well on tougher, cheaper cuts of meat.  And I'm quite sure there was little availability of exotic spice blends to 'pep up the leftovers'.  My mother and grandmothers could cook a roast to within an inch of it's life, so to speak, AND my dad didn't like spicy food, so trust me when I tell you I've eaten my share of insipid meat.  

That's where Sharp Sauce comes in.  The website Foods of England describes it as "a sharply-flavoured sauce for fowl, game and red meat. Eaton 1822 has simply wine vinegar boiled with sugar. Soyer 1845 has chopped onions with chilli vinegar, vinegar, caramel and water. Francatelli 1852 uses chopped mixed pickle with breadcrumbs." It's listed as a 'lost food' of English cooking (if anyone's looking, I found it). And randomly, believe it or not, Baked Haddock with Sharp Sauce was served on the Titanic, albeit in second class dining. The very same Baked Haddock with Sharp Sauce was also a featured dinner on Downtown Abbey.  William Shakespeare even refers to it in Romeo and Juliet during the banter between Romeo and Mercutio in Act 2, Scene 4:

MERCUTIO
Thy wit is a very bitter sweeting (apple). It is a most sharp sauce.
 ROMEO
And is it not well served into a sweet goose? 

Verdict?  I love Romeo and Juliet, but I'm not cooking goose anytime soon.  Side note: if you've ever wondered about the phrase 'your goose is cooked' consult World Wide Words for an interesting, time wasting, somewhat mind enriching exercise. As for sharp sauce?  Well, we'll have to wait a day to find out.  As for insipid meat, I'm thinking a plain turkey burger should suffice.  I have no intention of boiling anything any time soon, though fair warning - in future recipes, Kate does call for boiling meat.  You should know however, stuffed olives, sliced or whole, will NOT be added to this sauce, as DH detests olives with the same intensity as beets.  However, he had no problem inhaling almost the entire pan of brownie like Pawtucket Fingers!

A Year of Cooking Genealogically, Pawtucket Fingers

Welcome back - and back to baking we go!  But before we do, just an update on the beet salad.  As I suspected, SIL is finishing up the 2nd container that was supposedly meant for his brother - oops, sorry there Tony.  In more spectacular news, DH sampled a forkful again, as he did not taste the revised version with sugar added, and pronounced it 'better'.  He did not, however, go back for a second sample.  It appears 'better' is relatively equal to 'I still ain't gonna eat beets'.  But I digress.

The name of this recipe is what intrigued me, and I wondered what backstory the recipe has. More exciting is that the instructions contain an actual baking time, woot-woot!

Ingredients
1/2 cup melted butter
1 cup sugar
2 1/2 squares chocolate*
3 eggs
3/4 cup flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
salt**
1 cup chopped walnuts***
1/2 teaspoon vanilla

*I used unsweetened baking squares
**I used 1/2 teaspoon salt
***no walnuts, so I used pecans

Directions
Bake about 30 minutes in a moderate oven.  Cut in fingers while hot.  These are nice with afternoon tea, or in the evening with ice cream.

While I am grateful to Kate for serving suggestion, mixing directions would have been lovely.  I decided to approach this recipe much like Tollhouse Chocolate Chip Cookies - cream the sugars and fats, added the liquid, followed by mixed dry.  I melted the butter and chocolate in the microwave (yeah, yeah, I know, authenticity and all that), then beat in sugar, followed by eggs and vanilla (with my KitchenAid mixer - authenticity only goes so far when the rain is making your arthritis kick into high gear).  I added the mixed dry ingredients last and folded in the nuts at the end.  A quick finger dip into the batter (admit it, y'all taste test sweet batters with your finger), and as I suspected, this tastes a lot like brownie mix, albeit with a fluffy cake like consistency.

With no suggestion as to baking dish size, I used my trusty 8 x 12 x 2 ceramic baker, and with an abundance of caution, I sprayed it down with non-stick spray.  Since Kate provided the baking time, I judged a 'moderate' oven to be 350.  I popped it in and began checking after 20 minutes.  Kate was spot on the money as at 30 minutes a toothpick came out clean and the surface provided that slight spring back.  As I suspected Pawtucket Fingers are really light chocolate nut brownies.

But I was still curious about the name, so it was off to quiz the Google.  Unlike Matrimonial Cake I found exactly 3 listings.  The first recipe had this attribution...

"This recipe was given to innkeeper Anne Gi Conte by Helen Marsh when her family came for dinner. It has been a real favorite around the Sugar Pine Farm Bed & Breakfast ever since."

Two of the three recipes on Google cite Sugar Pine Farm Bed & Breakfast as the recipe source, and admittedly their recipe is incredibly similar to Kate's recipe.  But the attribution above states that the Inn didn't create the recipe, but merely used it. The other recipe from Google is listed on Recipe Genius, and is labeled as Brownie Fingers - note, there are many recipes on Google for Brownie Fingers, but none reference the distinct name of Pawtucket.  Interestingly, both the Sugar Pine Farm recipe and the Recipe Genius entry have the added step of rolling the 'fingers' in powdered sugar.  But since Kate didn't specify that step, I've left it off.  And I know my Pawtucket Fingers look a little stumpy, but hey, the Lord blessed me with snausages for fingers, so my brownies look the same.  

After spending a half hour or so putting my computer wizardry degree to hard use via the internet, I came up empty as to the recipe name's meaning.  While Pawtucket is a city in Rhode Island, the only connection I can find to the recipe is the Sugar Pine Farm Bed & Breakfast mentioned above in Quechee, Vermont, only a whopping 182 miles apart.  However they didn't create the recipe and unfortunately, there is no other information on the Bed & Breakfast, so that appears to be a dead end.  Additionally, a lovely woman on Facebook named "Betty" posted a picture of her Pawtucket Fingers in 2011, describing them as "basically light chocolate brownies and very simple to make - Baker's chocolate, margarine, sugar, flour, salt, baking powder, vanilla. Recipe goes back at least to my grandmother."  However, when asked in the comments as to why they're called "Pawtucket Fingers", she had no idea about the source of the name either.  

So, it does appear that the reason these brownies are labeled "Pawtucket Fingers" is lost to history.  If you have any guesses or info, I'd love for you to weigh in!  As to DH, I think he's stopping by UDF for the suggested ice cream...my verdict is that we would probably make these again.