Mary Helen’s Mother’s Coffee Cake

More years ago than I care to count, my oldest child, Colin, was enrolled in the wonderful and now long-gone TCU pre-school program. There was to be a parents’ program, and we were all assigned recipes, so that some brought the same entrée, others brought the same dessert. Mary Helen was one of Colin’s classmates, and I drew her mother’s recipe for coffee cake.

It turned out to be a Bundt cake, and I had never made one before. If you are of my generation though, you will remember all those cake recipes that incorporated box cake mix and pudding mix. This  was one of the best of those. I dutifully bought cake mix, pudding mix, and a Bundt pan. I’d been baking successfully since my early teens, so I had no qualms as I sailed into this fairly simple and straightforward recipe. After it came out of the oven, I let it sit on the counter to cool. When I took it out, half came out and half the cake stayed in the pan! Disaster!

I called a friend to moan about my bad luck, and she just laughed. But then she told me to let it cool no more than five minutes and then promptly take it out of the pan. I went to the store, bought the ingredients again, and made a cake that turned out fine. Ever after, Mary Helen’s father called me “the two-cake lady.”

But that recipe turned out to be a staple in our family, the kids favorite and something I always served at my annual tree trimming party. You can do it in as many flavors as you can find the necessary mixes—lemon and vanilla come to mind, but I did know a woman who made a strawberry version. We stuck to chocolate.

At the holiday season, this is great to have on hand for surprise guests or to give as a gift to a neighbor. I made the cake pictured above for a neighbor, but Jordan gets credit for its picture-perfect appearance. A Bundt pan is too tall for my toast oven, and even if I could squeeze it in, the cake would undoubtedly rise to burn on the coils. So after I assembled it, Jordan baked it in her oven and was therefore cautioned about taking it out of the pan correctly. I think she was a bit insulted that I thought she needed that instruction, because she frequently makes Bundt cakes of several types, including a wine cake. At any rate, we were both proud of the product, and she delivered it to a neighbor with four children.

Mary Helen’s Mother’s Coffee Cake

1 box cake mix

1 box instant pudding

½ c. oil

4 eggs

1½ c. sour cream

Sugar and cinnamon

Mix together everything but sugar and cinnamon. Grease Bundt pan with butter or solid shortening, being sure to get every bit of the surface. Mix equal parts of cinnamon and sugar (about tsp. each) and sprinkle on all sides of prepared pan. Add the batter, evening it out as much as possible (it’s a thick batter), and top with cinnamon and sugar. Bake at 350° for 50 to60 minutes (check with a long kebab skewer or something similar); it often must cook longer. Cool five minutes and remove from the pan. DON’T WAIT ANY LONGER. Run a knife around edges of pan and tunnel in the middle, and then top with a plate, invert, and gently shake to remove the cake from the pan.
You can drizzle icing over it if you want, but I consider that gilding the lily.

           

Holiday Cheeseball—and a caution on baking

What would the December holidays be without a cheeseball? It’s not too late to make your own delicious snack. This is the recipe that I remember from my childhood. Someone in the family still makes it every year--sometimes my daughters or DILs. This year I made one and divided it in two—one to go with Jordan and one for me to take to Tomball and Colin’s family.

A warning note: Cheese will mold if left in the fridge too long. I’d say a week is safe, so you can reshape the ball and freshen it with more parsley and ground pecans for New Year’s Eve. But if you have any left over after that, better freeze it. It freezes well—just defrost at room temperature.

Cheeseball

½ lb. Roquefort

1 pkg. Old English cheese (no longer available—I use 8 oz. of Velveeta)

l eight-ounce pkg. cream cheese

½ lb. pecans, chopped fine

1 bunch parsley, chopped fine

1 tsp. Worcestershire sauce

1 small onion, chopped fine   

½ tsp. prepared horseradish

Let the cheeses soften to room temperature and mix thoroughly. Add Worcestershire, onion, horseradish and half of the parsley and pecans. Mix thoroughly and shape into a ball. Do NOT do this in the food processor, as it will become too runny. Even a mixer makes it too smooth and creamy—wash your hands thoroughly and dig in, so the finished cheese ball has some texture and credibility. Roll the ball in the remaining parsley and pecans. Chill. Serve with crackers.

A cautionary note for those who bake in a toaster oven:

            I made old-fashioned gingerbread, from scratch, this week and learned a negative lesson about baking in a toaster oven. If a recipe has enough baking soda to cause it to rise, it will hit the top burner of the oven and burn. I could rescue my gingerbread by slicing off the burned—it was still delicious—but I won’t try that again. I don’t know if a gingerbread mix would work better or not. The recipe had 1-1/2 tsp. of baking soda.

Don’t forget: You can order Gourmet on a Hot Plate, print or ebook, from Amazon or several other platforms. The Amazon URL is https://www.amazon.com/Gourmet-Hot-Plate-KItchen-Recipes-ebook/dp/B07JC75FC5/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1545355410&sr=1-1&keywords=gourmet+of+a+hot+plate

Fruitcake: don’t hate it, bake it!

            A columnist attributes what he calls our “national obsession with hating fruitcake” to Johnny Carson, who once said there is really only one fruitcake. It just keeps getting passed around. On a web page devoted to why we hate fruitcake, a reader wrote that she thought it was made by a bored grandma who baked all day and just threw her leftovers into a pan and baked it. Still another voice suggested it is a holiday decoration and was never meant to be eaten.

The truth is that a lot of people secretly like fruitcake, but it’s one of those things you hesitate about admitting out loud.

When I was a kid, my physician-father had a patient who baked his cakes in late summer and wrapped them in bourbon-soaked cloths. Periodically, he “refreshed” the cloths. By the time we got the cake it was dark, rich, and very bourbon-y. I remember liking it a lot. Perhaps that’s why when my physician-ex-husband brought home fruitcake gifts, I didn’t hesitate to serve it to various groups of ladies who met at our house. And, yes, I had a stash in the freezer. But that was in the sixties, and fruitcake’s reputation has gone downhill ever since.

There may be several valid reasons people don’t like fruitcake: they’ve always had store-bought, never a good homemade one. It is too dense and sticky for some—there are complaints of it sticking to teeth. It can be labor intensive to make. Some people—my kids, in particular—don’t like English candied fruit.

I’m going to do something I swore I’d not do—share a recipe I’ve not tried. I haven’t tried it, because no one in my family will eat it. But I have it on good authority that this is delicious. It’s a three-ingredient fruitcake. I got it from a website about all things Scottish, though I don’t think this is native to Scotland. A good friend assured me it’s delicious.

Recipes for three-ingredient fruitcakes abound on the web—dried fruit, flour, and liquid. Surfing the web, I found recipes that called for orange juice, tea, coffee—but the one I liked uses chocolate milk.

Ingredients

4-1/4 cups dried mixed fruit

3 cups chocolate milk

2 cups self-rising flour

Preparation

Put the fruit in a bowl, pour the chocolate milk over it, and stir well. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate overnight.

Next day, heat toaster oven to 350^o F. Line a 9” square baking pan with parchment paper. Stir flour into the soaked fruit. Bake 2-1/2 hours. Test by inserting a skewer or silver knife into the center. Check frequently to make sure top isn’t burning. If it is getting too brown, cover with a square of brown paper.

Want a round cake? Use an 8” round pan.

Decorate top of warm cake with extra glace cherries if you wish.

This is so rich you’ll only want to serve tiny pieces, so one cake will serve a lot of people. (Somewhere I read 30 servings, but I can’t quite believe that.) If you try it, save me a piece—I really want to taste it.