Molasses on Snow Candy

To celebrate today's snowfall (as meager as it turned out to be in Brooklyn), I decided to make molasses on snow candy from one of my very favorite childhood books, Little House in the Big Woods. 
"Laura and Mary each had a pan, and Pa and Ma showed them how to pour the dark syrup in little streams onto the snow."
Growing up, this candy was the stuff of dreams to me; I couldn't imagine how the snow magically turned into candy.  Well, as an adult I discovered it doesn't.  The snow is used simply as a way to quickly harden the liquid candy.  Still, it's a lot of fun to make and for all its simplicity -- only three ingredients, molasses, brown sugar, and snow -- the taste is complex.  Or, as my friend Jay would say, it's delicious "on every level."

Molasses on Snow
1 cup molasses
1/2 cup brown sugar
fresh, clean snow


Fill a couple of pie tins with snow, and leave them outside while you make the candy.
Boil molasses and sugar together, stirring often until it reaches the hard ball stage, or about 260 degrees.
Turn off the fire, fetch the pans from outdoors.  Transfer the candy into a glass measuring cup and carefully pour it over the snow.  When the candy is hard, remove it to a clean towel.   Enjoy!

The Ingenious Cub Cake (German Coffee Cake)

It was freezing cold here in New York last Saturday morning and to keep our drafty brownstone toasty warm (us lacking a wood burning stove in the kitchen), I turned the oven to 350 degrees. And not wanting to waste all that good heat, I decided to whip up this recipe. Plus DH loves a good coffee cake, especially the crumb topping.

This is a delicious cake, and practically ingenious -- no need to make a separate mixture for the crumb topping, The topping is simply part of the cake mixture (removed before the wet ingredients are added), reserved and sprinkled atop the cake before baking. 

This cake speaks to a time when baking short-cuts (like this unusual all-in-one topping) saved time without sacrificing wholesomeness, flavor or quality.  They allowed for home-baked goods from scratch -- not from a mix made of ingredients put together six months earlier in some factory in Iowa.

Cub Cake is one of those cakes that perfume the whole kitchen and is so easy to put together, that I imagine it was made often as an after-school (or after church) treat. Today, one might be tempted to add more butter, and perhaps some chopped nuts, to make the topping richer.  But then, one would miss the beauty of the simplicity of this "everyday" cake. And despite the recipe author's instruction to serve warm, it actually tastes better the day after it's baked, the flavors having a chance to marry. 

Pinkalicious!

I was going to write about Cub Cake, a German coffee cake I made on Saturday, but then I made this mile-high red velvet cake and it seemed ever so much more exciting.

A friend of a friend invited me to enter a red velvet cake in a contest at the Red Show to be held at the Brooklyn Historical Society on February 13th (see poster above) and tonight I decided to experiment with pink frosting and three layers. Not sure I'll go with this version, but it was a lot of fun to create.

So this is my "practice" cake (and one that will end its life in my office and dear husband's tomorrow). I used to bake lots of red velvet cakes for a couple of local restaurants but I gave it up a while back -- the thrill was gone when red velvet cakes were suddenly everywhere, even available in Duncan Hines mixes! -- so I figured I needed a trial run.

Next up: That Cub Cake, the Joy of (Children's) Cooking and more!

Hot Sugar: Adventures in Candyland

If cooking is an art and baking is a science, then candy making is nuclear physics. Unlike my niece Jessica, a science whiz headed off to medical school, I've always been challenged in that area. Nonetheless, I love to make candy, even though my failures (like today's) probably outnumber my successes.

I set out to make Butterscotch Candy from a c. 1940s recipe card. As you can see in the picture above, I had three candy thermometers and each registered a different temperature! (Part of the problem is that the numbers next to the mercury had peeled off, making reading the temperature very difficult.) When the sugar syrup got to 284 degrees on one of the thermometers, I poured it into the prepared pan. I sensed immediately that I had overcooked it and just abandoned the whole thing. That, I learned was my mistake. The candy was fine -- if it was meant to be hard candy (and not of caramel consistency). But by the time I figured that out, it was too late -- I didn't cut the candy into pieces when it was still warm and somewhat pliable. So now, I have a whole mess of butterscotch candy that's either too big or awkwardly shaped to really eat (though I've been enjoying it all day -- tastes like the gold cellophane wrapped Schraft's candy, without the chemical aftertaste). All I need is one of those machines that tumble rocks into smooth stones, and I'd be all set.

The candy apples, pictured above, were a success this past Halloween, but made from a modern day recipe available (for a couple of bucks) at BetterBaking.com, a site run by Marcy Goldman, a wonderful baker and writer.

Gold Cake: The Best Ever

This is a lovely, moist and flavorful cake -- the best of 2010 yet. The recipe's author calls it Gold Cake, giving a somewhat richer name to what most would call yellow cake. I call it the Lipitor Special -- it has FIVE egg yolks. This is simple to make (though the technique is a bit odd) and I used vanilla for flavoring, as I didn't have any lemon flavoring.

I paired it with mocha cocoa frosting (from a 1934 Hershey's cookbook) because I had all the ingredients and that recipe said to spread the frosting on a warm cake. It was getting late and I didn't want to wait for the cake layers to cool, so it was perfect! (You can see my "whoops" moment, in the photo above, when part of the cake and frosting collapsed. I simply removed that piece -- ate it -- and frosted over the error until it disappeared.)

Note: The tiny bit of salt in the frosting really enhances the flavor -- this must be an early reference to today's ubiquitous marriage of salt and chocolate.

On the subject of war, and baking

Even if you don't give your child toy guns, there's a good chance he'll find weapons -- and often right in the kitchen. I doubt my son Peter (pictured above at 10, but who is now nearly 21) was channeling his inner baker when he gathered several of my rolling pins, struck an offensive pose and declared himself "Rolling Pin Man."

Unfortunately, his early exposure to rolling pins, and all manner of things cooking and baking at home, did little to further his own culinary skills. These days, he favors takeout pizza and all-you-can-eat sushi!! I did do one thing right. Took him to the legendary Difara's Pizza in Brooklyn, and he often makes a pilgrimage there when he's home from college.

Up next in the kitchen adventure lineup: Either Magic Cream Pie, Moonlight Cake or Chocolate Pudding -- all from a housewife's recipe collection I bought last year at an estate sale. Hope you'll stay tuned!

Canada War Cake (WW I)

Even though the United States is fighting two wars at the moment, there's no evidence of it in our local supermarkets. That wasn't the case during both World Wars, when food (like sugar) and other goods were rationed, here and in Canada (which, during WW I, sent more than 600,000 troops to battle).

Wartime rationing created a cuisine borne of economy and necessity. Canada War Cake is a perfect example -- "no eggs, no butter, no milk!" -- or casualty, since it was the only thing I've made this year that wasn't worth the calories. It was rather dense and heavy and looked like a brick.

This version of Canada War Cake -- and there are so many others as to almost have its own genre (chocolate cakes, pound cakes, war cakes -- who knew!) -- was printed in the c. 1970s South Street Seaport Museum cookbook, where it was renamed Pioneer Cake, after the museum's historic schooner, pictured below in a sketch by maritime historian Frank Braynard. (Off topic, but I encourage everyone to experience NY harbor aboard this lovely vessel -- she sails from spring to fall; check the museum website for details.)

M.F.K. Fisher, the prolific food writer and essayist, included a War Cake recipe in her 1942 book, How to Cook a Wolf , and Sunmaid Raisin (quick to capitalize on a cake whose main ingredient is raisins) developed a three layer Canadian War Cake, complete with icing.

The hardest thing about this cake (aside from the texture) was trying to find mace (the spice, not the weapon) in one of the many bodegas and little markets close to my house. (I finally copped a jar, but I'm sure it's from the last century.)

My experience with Canada War Cake is just another reason to wish for peace on earth (and cakes made with eggs and butter).