My Mother's Cake

When I was about seven or eight, I began to teach myself how to bake from recipes in the original Betty Crocker's Cookbook. The paperback culinary bible was so old, so worn out, some of the pages disintegrated between my fingers upon turning. The whole thing had to be held together with a pair of crisscrossed rubber bands.

I made a yellow sheet cake first. I didn't understand the concept of creaming the butter and sugar together. It turned out like sweet cornbread. My mother said it tasted good, though. Guess she wanted to encourage me to keep trying. And so I did.

She used to come home from work every afternoon and ask me what I had learned to bake. Looking forward to tasting whatever it was. It must have been summer for I wasn't in school. And there I was heating up an already hot kitchen with a child's experiments. She never once complained. Eventually, I figured out the art of building a cake from scratch that was moist and light and downright sinful. I perfected an old fashioned burnt sugar caramel cake and then had the nerve to figure out how to make hand-churned caramel pecan ice cream to go with it. The combination became my mother's favorite and most requested dessert.

Yesterday, I made my mother's cake for the first time since August 2001. I wanted to be with her for Christmas to see how she's faring since receiving the news that she's now facing a mortal challenge in her bone marrow. Still too exhausted from the year, I wasn't able to make that happen. So I made her cake instead. Talked to her over the phone just as I was spreading the batter into the pans. Because of her diabetes, she can't have any sweets anymore, but she sounded pleased that I was building her heaven anyway.

We hosted a dinner at the farm for six. Before devouring my mother's cake (alongside a warm apple pie in a pâte brisée to die for), we indulged in a dinner of crab bisque, grilled lamb chops, roasted rabbit in Dijon cream (a repeat from Thanksgiving too good to wait another year for), wild black and mahogany rice, and steamed haricot vert tossed in sesame oil and orange zest.

Hope your Christmas celebrations included friends, family, peace, and lots of love.

Burnt Sugar Caramel Cake



For the burnt sugar syrup:
3/4 cup granulated sugar
3/4 cup hot tap water

Dump the sugar in a skillet over medium-low heat. Shake the pan to spread the sugar and then let it melt, shaking again to keep the syrup browning evenly. Once it becomes the deep bronze color of an old copper penny and begins to smoke, gradually add the hot water. The sugar will get all bubbly and smoke even more. If you stir the syrup, use a metal spoon and stir just enough to mix the water so all the sugar dissolves, which takes about 8 minutes. Remove from heat, set aside, and let cool. They syrup will thicken as it cools.

For the cake:
3 cups unbleached cake flour, sifted
1 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
2 1/2 teaspoons double acting baking powder
3/4 cup butter, softened
1 1/2 cup sugar
2 eggs, separated
2/3 cup burnt sugar syrup
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1 1/2 cup sour raw milk or buttermilk, room temperature

Preheat oven to 350. Sift together flour, salt, soda, and baking powder. Set aside.

In a separate bowl, cream butter, adding sugar gradually until light and fluffy. Add one egg yolk at the time, beating thoroughly after each addition. Add the vanilla. Stir in cooled burnt sugar syrup.

Alternately mix the flour and the dairy into the batter, beating gently until smooth.

Beat egg whites on high until stiff but not dry. Fold into batter.

Spread batter evenly in two 8-inch greased and floured cake pans. (I add a circle of wax paper to the bottom of each pan to ensure a moist texture.) Bake for 30 - 35 minutes until the centers rise and a toothpick comes out virtually clean. Remove from oven and cool on wire rack for 5 minutes. Invert pans on rack to remove cake. Let cool completely.

For the caramel frosting:
3/4 cup butter
2 cups light brown sugar, firmly packed
Dash of salt
3/4 cup heavy cream
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
2 1/2 cups confectioners' sugar, sifted

Mix butter, brown sugar and salt in a saucepan over medium heat. Bring to a boil. Let bubble for 15 minutes, stirring constantly. Mix in cream and cook for another 10 minutes, stirring.

Remove from heat, stir in vanilla. Transfer to a stainless steel bowl. Beating at high speed, gradually add confectioner's sugar until it comes to a spreading consistency. Sparingly add more cream if necessary.

Garnish frosted cake with pecans.

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Cross-posted to Annabessacook Farm

Fried Green Tomatoes

Slice thinly two or three fat green tomatoes. Season with salt and pepper, cover and leave alone for half hour. Less if time is tight. Heat a wide skillet with 1/2 inch olive oil. Crack a farm fresh egg, beat it, add a dollop of raw milk and blend. Add some dried herbs, some Old Bay and a little more salt and pepper and mix well. Dip tomato slices in the liquid and shake in a paper bag with just enough flour to cover them all. Drop slices into hot oil and cook on both sides till golden brown or darker if desired. Drain on kitchen towel and enjoy hot or cold. Serves two. Or one if you love them as much as I.

Sweet Potato Pie

About Sweet Potatoes

For my money, sweet potatoes are one of the most, if not the most, versatile foods you can buy at a North American farmer's market or grocery store. You can boil them, bake them, mash them, hash them; puree, roast, French-fry, scallop or candy them; bake them in muffins, pies, cakes, biscuits, bread, souffles and casseroles; thicken stews and sauces, sweeten greens, tenderize meat with them.

And, yes, you can grow them north of the Mason Dixon Line. If you can start them early indoors and keep the field plants warm with mulch and compost, especially during the early tuber initiation stage, you'll be good to go. Your best bet, of course, would be to cultivate a local variety. The plant, which looks like a bush bean variety, flowers like a morning glory, to which it's distantly related. Some varieties have deep purple leaves and are grown purely for ornamental purposes.

The plant is native to Central America and unrelated to the potato. In most European countries, sweet potatoes are hard to find unless the country boasts an immigrant population who traditionally eat the tuber.

Many folks in the United States refer to sweet potatoes as yams, but this is misnomer. Yams belong to a completely different plant species than the orange-, white-, yellow- or purple-fleshed sweet potato and remains an important crop around the world, especially in Africa and the Caribbean. They are rarely found in the States.

Select unblemished, firm tubers with small soft spots and no broken skin. Do not refrigerate them. Ever.

Sweet Potato Pie

4 large sweet potatoes, washed and scrubbed
1/2 stick (1/4 cup) butter
1 cup firmly packed light brown sugar
1 cup granulated sugar
1 tbsp cinnamon
1 tsp nutmeg
3/4 tsp. ginger
1/2 tsp. ground cloves
1/2 tsp. lemon zest
1/2 tsp. orange zest
1/2 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. cardamom
Splash of fresh squeezed orange juice
2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
1 1/2 cup (12 oz) heavy cream
4 large fresh eggs, room temperature
3 9-inch deep dish pie crusts

Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Place sweet potatoes directly on middle rack and bake until juices run and potato skins separate from flesh, about an hour. Place strips of aluminum foil on the bottom of the oven to catch the juice.

Remove potatoes from oven and let cool until comfortable to handle. Pull off peels and place potatoes in large boil. Add butter and mash. Add sugar, spices, zest, orange juice, and vanilla extract and mix well. For a smooth, custard-like pie, transfer filling to a food processor, puree for five minutes, and return to bowl. Adjust spices and sweetness to taste. (I prefer a sweet pie, so I tend to sweeten the filling to taste with pure maple syrup at this point.) Using a hand beater on medium high, slowly add cream and beat until smooth. Add eggs one at a time and beat until smooth after each egg. Pour filling into crusts and bake until center of the pie rises like a souffle and the edges crack, about 60-90 minutes depending on your oven.

Remove pies and place on racks to cool. Serve plain or with fresh whipped cream flavored with your choice of liqueur, essence, extract (all the above) or vanilla ice cream. Of course, if you want to be ghetto/country, you can always pull out a vat of Cool Whip and smother a slice with it, but I suggest you read the ingredients on the vat and stay as far away from that mess as possible.

Pies may be stored at room temperature for two days, in the refrigerator for 10 days, or frozen for up to 6 months. If freezing, wrap pies tightly with several layers of food plastic, place in air-tight freezer bags, and store in freezer as far away from the door as possible. The crust will separate from the filling on the sides when thawed out. You won't notice till you plate a slice.