Gingerbread Nativity

So I think I'm a convert now to gingerbread.

I used to always use the Joy of Cooking recipe at Christmas for all my cookie cutters, and while it keeps its shape and is ok, it just didn't have the kick of ginger snaps or really much of anything going for it. I voiced this opinion and was told by a super secret person that they had a super secret recipe that I should try before giving up on gingerbread.

That recipe sat in my inbox until this week. To be fair, I got it in January, and I really don't get a hankering for gingerbread until at least Hallowe'en (I have spooky cookie cutters) or usually Christmas season. So I pulled it out, stocked up on molasses and gave it a whirl.

Naturally, it started, as all good recipes do, with lots of butter and sugar.

I wasn't in the mood for hand creaming this, so out came the electric beaters.

I decided this was blended enough for me.

Then in went an egg. It was on the last day of its life according to the box, but I wasn't too concerned.

After another egg was added in the mixture looked a bit curdled, but not so much as to worry me.

In went sticky, sweet, blackstrap molasses. High in iron, doncha know. That's why you can find it in health stores here, but will struggle to find it in supermarkets and most food stores. I also added in "sour" milk. I was supposed to add just a half cup, but I put in a whole cup. At this point I had not realised this. Oh, and some orange zest went in because I've always put it in gingerbread before and it felt strange not to.

Only when it looked like this did I figure it out. Oops. Time to improvise.

I asked myself, what would Robert do. He answered by licking the beaters of sugar and butter. Hmph. And yes, we do have a classy advent candle holder there in the background. It's proper fancy.

So I just decided to put an extra cup of flour extra into the flour, spice and leavening mixture and give it a whirl.

I started to panic a little as it was a very, very sticky dough compared to other rolled cookie doughs I've encountered. But when I looked back at the recipe, it said that even if you actually follow the directions and measure the ingredients correctly it is a fairly sticky dough.

So I said a small prayer and put 3 blobs between sheets of greaseproof paper.

I flattened them down a bit and placed them in the fridge overnight. I hadn't meant for it to be overnight, but life happened.

This morning I took it out and it looked like this. Not a perfect mixture, but if you are just baking for family and friends, who really cares?

A sprinkling of sugar went on before cutting out the cookies. Sparkles!!!

They were admittedly quite difficult to extract from their cutters, but they made it to the cookie sheet looking like this. It's a nativity set I got last year for Christmas - word of my baking hobby has spread.

A mere 8 minutes later I took them out and they had puffed to extreme proportions. I guess Joseph, Mary, and the kings just had too much salt in their diets. Hmmm. Normally I wouldn't mind too much but as the whole point here was they they were supposed to look like shapes that all related to each other I decided to do something extreme.

I cut them AGAIN while they were still warm. I saw them do this on the Great British Bake off and it seemed to work. The good things were I got to have the shapes I wanted as the end result and I got to taste the trimmings. The bad things were that all the cookies lost their lovely crunchy/chewy biting edge and I will now have them instead as a moment on my lips lifetime on my hips.

But I did it anyway. My son helped with the cut-offs.

Because they were amazing. Seriously the best gingerbread cookies I've had. I left the stable as it was, and ended up with this to greet the kids when they came home from school today.

So, without further ado, the super secret recipe...shhhhhhh....

Gingerbread Cookies!
1 Cup white sugar
1 cup butter, softened, of course
2 eggs
1 cup molasses
1/2 cup sour milk (or add 1 tsp lemon juice or vinegar to the milk)
4 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp baking powder
2 tsp cinnamon
2 tsp ground ginger
1/2 tsp ground cloves
5 cups flour

Blend the butter and sugar, add the eggs one at a time. Then add other liquid ingredients and mix.

Sift together the flour, rising agents & spices and add gradually to the batter.

This is the only cookie dough that I find really needs a stand mixer or a mixer of some sort, because it gets very stiff with all the flour.

Even for being very stiff, it's still quite a sticky dough right after the mixing. Wrap the dough in wax paper or plastic wrap, in sort of flattened discs, usually 2 or 3, and refrigerate it. The flattened discs are in preparation for rolling out the dough after it's chilled. I usually make the dough the night before and let it chill overnight, but I'm sure an hour or two would do it. The dough also keeps very well, if you make it and only roll out part.

Roll out the dough like you would any other cookie dough or pie crust, but fairly thick - about a 1/4 inch. We always sprinkle the dough with regular white sugar, and go at it with your cookie cutters.

Bake at 350 for 8-10 minutes. The cookies should puff up quite a bit and should still be a little bendy when you take them out of the oven. It also helps to store them in an airtight container with a piece of bread, so they stay soft.

Liz Hoosier's Sweet Potatoes

I am a relatively recent convert to the side dish of sweet potato casserole. As kids growing up, we were only ever served sweet potatoes as a boiled vegetable, served with nothing but their own steam as sauce. My friends would all rave about their Thanksgiving marshmallow-topped sweet potatoes, something that sounded hideous to me.

I first had sweetened sweet potatoes at my sister-in-law's house. My family was amazed by them, all the men going back for more, and when we asked for the recipe, the mother just looked at us as if we were aliens. "Just lots of butter and brown sugar." And she meant it.

I made them that way a few times, but then while wasting time on facebook one day, I saw this recipe appear on my friend's wall and I knew I had to try it.

It's not so sickening as the marshmallow topped varieties of casserole, instead opting for brown sugar and pecans on top, but it is still fully capable of giving you a heart attack. A Thanksgiving dish for sure, one for special occasions.

I've adapted it only slightly, adding in more sweet potatoes than in the original, but don't worry - you'd never guess it had been made "healthier". Trust me.

The first step is simple, and easiest to do the night before. I chopped up a few large sweet potatoes (the orange kind) and steamed them.

There's no point in peeling them first, because once they are cooked the peel comes right off. I let them cool overnight for easier handling.

As it was Thanksgiving, and I was going to be cooking a LOT of different things in one day, all by my gosh darned self, I also measured out the rest of the ingredients. Look - I even used metal prep bowls like a tv chef! Do you think they get theirs at Ikea too?

The next morning, the peels slid off as I plopped the sweet potatoes into a bowl for mashing.

And in went some nice healthy ingredients: butter, sugar, eggs, condensed milk, and vanilla.

Once it was a glorious, happy mix, I put it into two dishes. I used two to make it easier to microwave later to reheat it.

On top went a mixture of butter, brown sugar, flour, and pecans.

Then into the oven for a while and this crunchy topped glory is ready. Everyone will thank you. And they will widen their eyes in horror when you tell them what's in it, but they'll still go back for more.

You can see why. Liz Hoosier, I salute you. 

Liz's Hoosier Sweet Potatoes:

3 large sweet potatoes 
3/4 cups butter
2 eggs
1 cup sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 cup condensed milk

Steam sweet potatoes until soft. Mash together with eggs, sugar, butter, vanilla and milk. Add to potatoes. Place in greased 9 x 13 pan or two smaller dishes.

Topping:
1 cup brown sugar
1/3 cup flour
1/4 stick butter
3/4 cup pecans

Mix together sugar, flour and butter. Place on top of potatoes. Cover with nuts. Push pecans down into potato mixture. Cook 45 minutes at 350 degrees. Serve hot.

Super Salad

"Soup or salad tonight?" I asked my husband.

"Yes!" he answered.

I looked at him, confused.

"That's a great idea! Super salad!"

So I improvised with what we had around plus a couple things I picked up that day. I roasted a pack of mushrooms, a pepper, some brussels sprouts, and a courgette then once they came out added in some sliced tomatoes, parsley, and kidney beans. I made a lemon garlic dressing and put some mixed greens on the side along with some sliced "country loaf" from our local bakery and voila! Dinner.

Super salad to the rescue!

Carrot Cake

When my brothers and I were little people, my mom used to cook and bake for us a fair amount, making a variety of different dishes and treats. As the years passed, and she returned to full time employment, she continued to cook regularly but the baking, well the baking held little interest for her anymore. She had other things to get done, quite frankly. 

But there was one treat she used to make occasionally, and never from a box mix: carrot cake. Oh, we tried the box mix, but it was far too inferior to the real thing to consider even calling it by the same name. The carrot didn't look like real carrot, and it certainly wasn't real cream cheese in the icing. A poor imitation to be sure.

Whenever my mother's rota came at work for her to bring in a treat for the staff room she always made this. We were always slightly resentful of this fact, because she would slave and swear over it, being out of the habit of baking now, but we would rarely get to taste it. The completed dish would be put in the fridge overnight and whisked away to the teacher's lounge at her school the next day. She would bring the empty carcass of a dish home the next day, smiling triumphantly. "It disappeared within a couple hours!" she would boast as she put the pan into the dishwasher. We vultures hoping for crumbs would slink away upstairs, cursing the teachers who had stolen what we considered to be OUR cake.

The recipe was from a battered old book from my nursery school, a fundraising effort by the mothers when they asked all the mums to contribute their favourite recipe. A slim volume, we lost it several times but eventually found it again. When the 21st century arrived, I made sure to have this recipe emailed to me so as not to ever lose it again.

I have adapted it over the years, but at its core it remains the same. I added pineapple where none existed originally and spiced it up a bit further, and I do have to adjust it slightly to fit UK ingredients. The original recipe works great in North America, but we are unable to get block cream cheese here so more butter is necessary in the icing in order to ensure it does not end up too runny, I also find it ends up denser here with UK flour than in in the USA - I have no idea why. 

On this occasion I was making it for a church gathering, so my 9 X 13 dish was more suitable to make it a tray bake like affair, but you could make it in a couple 8 inch round pans and stack them on top of each other. The choice is yours.

In order to have everything in grabbing distance, I assembled the goods. This isn't a recipe I make on a whim, as I usually don't have sufficient carrots, cream cheese, and pineapple to make it without shopping specially for it.

First I made up the flour mix. I used to skip this step, wanting to save on washing up by just adding the dry ingredients all together later and stirring them into the egg mixture. However, occasionally I encountered an unsavoury problem: green carrot. After a day or two, some of the carrot in the cake would go green, making it look slightly alarming and toxic. This would happen even when I stored the cake carefully in the fridge. Eventually, thanks to nigella.com, I learned this is what can happen if you have either too much baking powder or it isn't distributed evenly into the mixture: it's just a chemical reaction between the raising agent and the carrot, nothing poisonous, just freaky looking. So now I make sure to be real careful like when measuring the raising agents for this, and I do the flour mix ahead so I can be sure to mix everything together. So in went flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and a few spices, one of which was allspice. I find it confusing that allspice and mixed spice are both sold and are completely different. 

Once I'd mixed that I set it aside and thought I'd be real clever by putting the pineapple through the small grater on my food processor. This was not as smart an idea as I thought:

So I put in the blade to mash it up a bit more. You could just buy a small shredded pineapple if you are stateside, but I've not found it here so it becomes a DIY job.

That's better. I then put it into a measuring cup. No, I didn't rinse the cup out first.

Then I peeled and shredded carrots until I had 4 cups of shredded mixture. It's important to get your five a day.

Finally it was time to move on to the oil and sugar. For some reason it looks like a gooey green monster here.

I added four eggs.  And yes, stir them in one at a time, because in a controlled experiment Cooks Illustrated found it was actually better for your cake to do so. Here went the first.

And then went the others followed by just a touch of Costco vanilla.

And then in went the flour mix to be folded in.

Last but not least went in the carrots, pineapple, and some sultanas that I tried to, er, chop with the food processor. I managed to chop some of the shredded carrot still in the food processor but not the sultanas. Oh well, at worst they all sink to the bottom of the cake.

Some people put nuts in their carrot cake. They are wrong.

It makes an ungodly looking mixture, but baking will make it better.

It might be necessary to repeat that to yourself a few times as you put it in the pan. I put loads of paper up the sides to make it easy to pull out and slice later.

See, it looks better now, doesn't it?

The next morning I made the icing. I would have liked to do at soon as the cake was cooled, but there wasn't room in my fridge to put the completed product in overnight, and I didn't want the icing sitting out overnight. I did, however leave the ingredients overnight at room temperature, as coldness is the enemy of this icing. You'll soon see why...

All I did was combine icing sugar, butter, cream cheese, and vanilla and stir them with my hand mixer.

And look what I got! A lumpy mess. I have come to realise this is a result of things not being quite warm enough. Even left overnight, my kitchen was too cold for things to happily blend together. Into the microwave it went for a ten second blast.

My adoring fans looked on.

After that quick burst of heat, it blended up all creamy like. I had a LOT of lumpy batches of icing over the years before I figured out that trick.

"Mama, you one clever lady!" is what he meant to say. It came out as "AAAM!"

Now time for the two parts to meet. As you can see, the cake came out of the tin easily in one quick lift.

Which made it easy to cut into slabs.

And easy to lift these slabs into their tins en masse. Here they are, nestled inside.

Now I could have iced them, then cut them and put them in, but that ends up a bit messy. So instead, once they were in the transportation tin, I put the icing into a ziplock bag.

And then put a blob of icing on each of the pieces. It could have been prettier, to be sure, but I had to make a batch of cardamom buns as well so I was in a bit of a rush. Anyway, it means they transport easily and are easy to remove without sticky hands everywhere.

There were no survivors. I get a LOT of requests for this recipe, so here it is:

CARROT CAKE

Cake:

2 cups plain flour

1 1/2 tsp baking powder

1 tsp baking soda

1 tsp salt

1/4 tsp allspice

1/4 tsp ground nutmeg

pinch ground cloves

1 tsp cinnamon

1 1/2 cup caster sugar

1 cup vegetable oil

4 eggs 

1/2 tsp vanilla

1/2 cup shredded pineapple

3 1/2 cups shredded carrot

1/2 cup sultanas

Icing:

225 g cream cheese

140 g unsalted butter

2 cups icing sugar

2 tsp vanilla

Preheat oven to 180C/350F and position rack in centre of oven. Line a 9"X13"pan or alternatively line two 8" round cake tins. Sift flour, baking powder, soda, salt, and spices together and set aside. In large bowl, beat sugar and oil together. Add eggs one at a time. Add vanilla. Fold in dry ingredients then stir in carrots, pineapple, and sultanas. Pour into pan and start checking at 30 minutes, though it may need as much as 40. 

Once cake is cool, blend icing ingredients together with electric beaters if possible and spread on cake as desired.