Gobs

Gobs are a chocolate cookie that my grandmother usually makes and freezes around Christmas time. They're one of my favorite cookies in the whole world: a thin white layer of crispy, sugary icing sandwiched between two soft chocolate cookies. Sometimes I eat them layer by layer: gnawing the cookies off until only the layer of icing remains. Sometimes I just eat them like a normal person. when I'm really feeling decadent, I dip them in hot cocoa. Any way I've tasted them, they're reliably fantastic, and sure to please family members of all ages.

The other amazing property of these cookies is that they freeze amazingly well, and can be kept for several months that way. Give them fifteen minutes or so to unfreeze, and you can have amazing chocolaty goodness for quite a while. We usually eat them all before the freezing time is a consideration, though! I've never seen a batch last for longer than a week. Usually if we're freezing them, we've made two or three batches at a time. Their name is appropriate because once you've tasted one, you just want gobs and gobs!

Gobs

2 cups granulated sugar
1 cup butter, melted
2 eggs, beaten
4 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa (regular, not dutch process)
2 tsp salt
1 cup soured milk (Yes, you read that right. Leave a cup of regular milk out at room temperature for an hour or so.)
2 tsp baking soda
Vanilla icing (you can use store-bought, but I prefer to make my own with a simple vanilla icing recipe)

Preheat the oven to 350F.

Combine the sugar, butter, and beaten eggs in a large mixing bowl and mix thoroughly. Stir the flour, cocoa, and salt together in a smaller bowl, then add the dry ingredients to the wet ones in the large bowl, alternating with the sour milk. Add the baking soda to the dough, then mix until everything is combined.

Drop spoonfuls onto a greased cookie sheet (try to get them all a similar size, since you'll be making sandwiches) and bake for 10 minutes. Cool on a wire rack, then form sandwiches by spreading a thin layer of icing between two cookies.

Grandma's Teacakes

When I first started this blog, a few months ago, one of the first recipes was my Grandmother's take on Carrot Cake. Well, this recipe is from my other grandmother, the one on my dad's side.

When she was much, much younger, my dad's mother actually ran a bakery out of her home. She catered events in the small town they lived in, and people would come by their house to buy all sorts of baked goods. The front door on the house actually opened into the kitchen, so the front of the house doubled as her storefront.

By the time I was born, Grandma was far too old to still be baking, but people still talked about her legendary potato salads and pound cakes. My father's favorite recipe was her teacakes, a cookie that was very soft, almost pillowy, and only barely sweet. The recipe to these cookies had been lost, and when I was young my mother tried all sorts of recipes to try and approximate the storied teacakes, but none measured up to what my father remembered. They were all too crunchy, or too sweet, or doughy instead of soft.

It wasn't until we cleaned out her old house after my Grandfather's (her husband's) death that we found the recipe. It was on a card, tucked away on a high shelf under an unused flour container. My mother made the recipe to try it, and it turns out these cookies deserved every bit of their reputation for being addictive. The barely-sweet nature encourages you to eat lots of them because hey, it can't be that much sugar, right? And truth be told, I've never felt guilty about gobbling these. I keep some frozen for when I get cravings, or when my nightly tea just won't be complete without a little something special. I think that in a lot of ways, I like these better than chocolate, and that's saying something!

Grandma's Teacakes

1 1/2 cup flour
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
6 tbsp unsalted butter, softened
3/4 cup sugar
1 large egg
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 tsp lemon
1/3 cup buttermilk

Preheat the oven to 350F.

Whisk the dry ingredients (flour, salt, baking soda) together and set that bowl aside. Using a mixer and a large mixing bowl, cream the butter. Add the sugar, and beat that in until the mixture forms pale yellow, curd-like lumps and you can no longer see free standing sugar in the bottom of the bowl. Add the egg, and beat that in. Add the vanilla and the lemon juice, and beat some more. Add about 1/3 of the flour, and mix until that's incorporated. Add half the buttermilk, and beat that in. Add the second 1/3 of the flour, and beat. Add the rest of the buttermilk, beat, then add the rest of the flour and mix the whole thing for a minute or so to make sure it's creamy. At this point, the batter should be pale, smooth, and fairly soft.

Cover a baking sheet with parchment, and use a tbsp to drop cookies onto the sheet, about 2-3 inches apart (these will spread quite a bit). I can usually fit 12 cookies onto a standard size baking sheet, in four rows of three. Bake for 11-15 minutes, until the bottom edge of the cookie has just begun to turn brown. Do not be tempted to leave these in until the tops of the cookies brown. The tops should be very pale, and the bottom edge of the cookies should have just a very fine rim of brown. When this happens, remove the cookie sheet from the oven and let it sit for two minutes, then remove the cookies to a cooling rack to finish their cooling process. Repeat the cooking process with another cookie sheet, until you've used up all the batter (this recipe usually is perfect for two sheets with me).

These cookies are best eaten almost as soon as they're out of the oven, when they're warm and pillow-soft and amazing. They stay amazing for one day, and are perfectly fine the day after, but too much longer and they start to lose their delightfully soft texture. So if you don't plan to eat them pretty quickly, just stick them in the freezer. They never take long to thaw (five minutes, less if you've got a toaster oven), so that way you can have them whenever you want.

Servings: 20 - 25 cookies. It usually makes exactly 24 for me.

Stupidly Easy Angel Food Cake

Writing this blog for the past few weeks has helped me realize that I bake more than I thought I did. Previously, baking was a simple, experimental matter of throwing a few ingredients together and seeing what emerged from the oven, but now I make myself think about quantities in case I enjoy a recipe enough to end up posting it. I almost didn't post this one, partly because it uses two different mixes (Really, there's nothing at all natural in this recipe. It's shameful!) and partly because it's so stupidly easy.

But then I thought to myself, "Self, if you think that you occasionally deserve a break from the hours baking a cake can entail, don't you think others might appreciate the same?" So here's a cake you can throw together in less than five minutes. No kidding. Total prep time should hover somewhere around two minutes, and that's only if you have to go off and search for scissors to open your cake mix. It has exactly two ingredients (and like I said, neither of them is even vaguely found in nature), but if you find out that friends are coming over in a few minutes and somehow simply lack the willpower or supplies to do anything else, this recipe will see you through. It's certainly not culinary school material, but hey, even ambitious cooks sometimes need a guilty secret!

Stupidly Easy Angel Food Cake

1 box angel food cake mix (I like Duncan Hines, but Betty Crocker will do in a pinch)
1 can fruit pie filling (Cherry, peach, blueberry, it doesn't matter. They all work, so pick your favorite. I usually go with blueberry.)

In a 9x13 baking pan, mix together the angel food mix and the pie filling, stirring until they are roughly homogenous (try to get out all the lumps of dry cake mix). Ignore the cake mix box when it tells you that you need things like liquids, all you need is the pie filling. Cook your cake per the box's instructions about time and temperature.

Servings: 15? I don't know, it depends on how big you cut your cake pieces.

See? Wasn't that stupidly easy? I'll have to post something desperately fancy and a little difficult next time to make up for the fact that this is so easy.

Hamentaschen

My first experience of hamentaschen (say it "HA-men-TA-shen") came courtesy of my friend Nechama. Nechama has blue, pixie-style hair, fifteen piercings at last count, eight tattoos, and travels to India yearly to meet with the gurus of Anusara yoga, which she teaches back here in the States. She is the only woman I know who can honestly say she's been lost in a monsoon in the jungles of India. She is also Jewish, which is how she came to be serving me hamentaschen during a Purim party a few years ago.

Even though I'll always associate hamentaschen with Nechama's stories about her crazy travels, the rest of the world knows this little cookie as a traditional part of one of the most beloved Jewish holidays. Purim is a fabulous holiday, in which Jews are required (required, do you hear?) to eat, drink, and be merry. In fact, according to the Talmud, a person is commanded to drink until he cannot tell the difference between "Blessed be Mordecai" and "Cursed be Haman". My kind of holiday!

The villain of the Purim story is Haman, who was a greedy advisor to an ancient king, and who tried to have all the Jews killed way back when. This cookie takes it's name from the Hebrew for 'Haman's pockets', and supposedly the triangle shape represents Haman's three-cornered advisor hat. Much like greedy Haman in the stories, this cookie gets it's 'pocket' stuffed with something sweet: I prefer apple butter or strawberry preserves, but I've heard of people using anything from fig jellies to cherry pie filling (I think that'd be too sweet, but to each his own). Fun to make and with a fantastic history, hamentaschen are the kind of cookie I like to make year-round. They go great with a cup of hot tea for a late-night snack. I use whole wheat flour, and the dough turns out a little darker than in the photo above, so don't be alarmed if they don't look exactly the same.

Hamentaschen Cookies

2/3 cup butter or margarine, softened
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1 large egg
1/4 cup orange juice (get the kind with no pulp)
1 cup white flour
1 cup wheat flour (DO NOT substitute white flour! The wheat flour is necessary to achieve the right texture!)
2 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. cinnamon
A filling of some kind, be it apple butter (my fav) or some sort of jam or jelly

Cream the butter and sugar together using an electric mixer. Add the egg and beat until incorporated. Add the OJ and beat until mixed. At this point, you should have a very soupy butter mixture. Add the flour, 1/2 cup at a time, alternating white and wheat. Mix thoroughly between each. Add the baking powder and cinnamon with the last half cup of flour. The resulting dough should be fairly moist and sticky, and pretty dense. I always have to scrape it out of the beaters on my mixer, it tends to clump inside the beaters since it's so dense. Cover the batter and refrigerate overnight or for at least 4 hours.

Remove the dough from the fridge and grab the cookie trays you're using. I prefer a non-stick tray for this, since the dough is minimally easier to shape on this tray than on a normal tray. Flour the cookie sheet lightly, but don't skimp here. Again, the flour makes the shaping process easier. I find that flouring everything that's going to touch the dough is very important to making this cookie successfully, because the dough is very sticky, and pulls out of shape very easily if there's not a thin layer of flour to keep it from sticking. Scoop off a two-tablespoon hunk of dough (or a little bigger, you'll get a feel for size as you go), plop it on the cookie sheet, and use your floured fingers to press it into a 1/4 inch thick circle, about three or four inches in diameter. Dollop a generous teaspoon and a half of your filling of choice into the center of the circle. Using a floured silicone spatula, lift the edges of the dough off the tray and fold them towards the center. Do this three time, to form a triangle shape (refer to the picture above for an idea of how this is supposed to go, and what the final product should look like). Pinch the edges of the triangle to make sure that the 'flaps' of dough don't come unfolded during the baking process. Repeat to fill the cookie sheet; I can usually fit 6 cookies on one sheet.

Preheat the oven to 350F. Once the oven is at temperature, bake the cookies for 16-20 minutes. 20 min is perfect in my oven, and the goal is that the cookie should be a light, toasty brown, but the filling should not bubble over. Apple butter tends not to bubble over easily, but preserves are more prone to boiling just before the cookies get done. I've made these enough now that I time the cookies' doneness by the progress of the filling: when the strawberry preserves begin to bubble, but not bubble over, the cookies are done.

Servings: 15-20 cookies, depending on size.

Grandma's Carrot Cake (w/ Cream Cheese Frosting)

Some families pass down the secret recipe to a meatsauce. Some jealously hoard their special cookies, or perhaps a recipe for a magic dressing that improves even the lamest salad. In my family, we pass down carrot cake. In fact, even committing this recipe to writing is something of a heresy; my grandmother never wrote it down, and baked from memory each of the hundreds (or thousands) of times she made this cake. My mother used this cake as the recipe for her wedding cake, and even as Grandma baked twenty (!) of the cakes for the reception, she never told my mother what the exact ingredients were.

She passed it to me a few years ago over the telephone. I'd broken up with a boyfriend, and was consoling myself by baking like a madwoman. There's nothing like fresh bread and cookies to ease the pain of men. Anyway, Grandma chose that moment to give me the recipe for her special carrot cake, and I've made it ever since. I've always been a little scared that I'll lose the piece of paper jotted with notes on how to prepare it, though, so now it's going into this blog. I know that nothing on the internet is sacred, but I don't think it matters. Some recipes are special no matter what.

This cake is lighter in texture than any other carrot cake I've tried, and is faintly sweet but not sugary. It's in fact less sweet than I always expect it to be, which is perfect for the cream cheese icing. It's also perfect for letting me delude myself into eating lots of it, because hey, it's got less sugar and carrots! That's almost like it's healthy, right? Right?

Grandma's Carrot Cake

2 cups self-rising flour
2 cups sugar
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1 tsp cinnamon
1 1/4 cup vegetable oil
4 large eggs
3 cups grated carrot
1 cup nuts
1 tsp baking soda

Preheat the oven to 350F.

Mix all the dry ingredients (flour, baking soda, baking powder, sugar, salt, cinnamon) together. In a separate large bowl, beat together the eggs and the oil. Add the dry ingredients to the eggs and oil, and stir to mix thoroughly. Add the carrots and the nuts to this mixture, and stir until they're evenly distributed through the batter. Pour the batter evenly between two 9 inch cake pans.

Bake for 25 minutes or until a knife inserted into the center of the cake comes out clean (in my current oven, I bake it for 35 min at 375F, but then my current oven tends to run cool).


Cream Cheese Frosting

8 oz cream cheese
1 stick margarine (or unsalted butter)
1 box confectioner's sugar
2 tsp vanilla extract

Optional: 1 can coconut OR a handful of nuts

Soften the cream cheese and the margarine to room temperature. Using an electric mixer, beat together the margarine and the cream cheese. Add the confectioner's sugar (may want to turn the mixer down some, so that the sugar doesn't poof everywhere), and beat until the sugar is incorporated completely and the icing is smooth. Add the vanilla, and beat until that's incorporated. If you're adding other ingredients (I like this icing kept simple for this cake, but for other cakes coconut or nuts may feel more appropriate), add them here. Cover and chill the icing if you're not using it immediately.