Winged Winner Cake

In 2009, I invented and tested and finally submitted a recipe to an Ocean Spray cranberry recipe contest. The recipe didn't win, but it should have.

This winter, I was in a hurry to make a tasty dessert for company, and I decided to make what shall henceforth be called Winged Winner Cake. I was in such a hurry that I didn't bother digging up the old finely-tuned cranberry contest recipe. Instead, I found a simple applesauce chocolate cake recipe online and replaced the oil with butter and reduced the amount of fat, added two eggs and spices and an apple and pecans and chocolate chips and cranberries, and reduced the amount of applesauce only because we didn't have enough on hand--basically, I winged it. Turns out Winged Winner Cake is way easier than my original 2009 recipe, because nothing has to be precisely measured, so I'm putting it here for future reference. 

The recipe for the carefully crafted, very fussy non-winged version follows below the winged version. It tastes fabulous, but what a pain to make. The winged version takes maybe 20 minutes to throw together (if you remembered to pick up a jar of applesauce the last time you were at the food Co-op and don't have to add in time for a shopping trip), vs. I dunno, way longer for the un-winged version.

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Winged Winner Cake

1.5 cups sugar 

1/2 - 3/4 cup melted butter 

2 eggs

1.5 - 2 cups unsweetened applesauce

2 tsp vanilla (to taste)

1 T ground cinnamon (to taste)

1 tsp ground cloves (to taste) 

1 tsp salt 

2 cups flour 

½ cup unsweetened cocoa powder 

2 tsp baking soda (not sure this actually does anything, since it's a pretty dense cake regardess, but I haven't tried making the cake without it yet)

2/3 c. ground pecans (this is the amount that comes out when I fill the top of our nut grinder)

1 apple, whatever variety you like, grated (don't bother peeling)

1/2 c. semi-sweet chocolate chips (or more, or less)

2 cups whole cranberries (that's what's in a bag, right?) (or more, or less)

Y'all, you know how to make cake batter. Mix all of the ingredients together, but don't overmix. Yadda yadda. Pour/spoon into a spring form tube pan and bake ~350oF until knife or toothpick emerges without goo (which tends to be ~50 minutes plus hmm, maybe 10 more minutes, plus hmm, maybe another 10 minutes. Just keep a casual eye on it.). Best served with homemade whipped cream, but also tasty without.

Update 5/4/25: For perfection, coat this baby with the fudgy ganache my mom used to make with unsweetened chocolate and sweetened condensed milk: 1 can SCM, 2 squares unsweetened chocolate, pinch of salt if desired, cook on low-med heat on stovetop until thick, thin as needed with a little milk or water. Oh my.

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Non-Winged non-Winner Cake: The Ur-rezept

Cranberry Chocolate Apple Cake 

1/2 cup unsalted butter, softened 

3/4 cup white sugar 

3/4 cup brown sugar, packed 

3 eggs 

1/2 cup unsweetened applesauce 

1 tablespoon vanilla 

2 1/4 cups flour 

1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder (preferably "natural," not "dutched") 

1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda 

1 tablespoon ground cinnamon 

1/2 teaspoon ground cloves 

1/2 teaspoon salt 

3-5 Granny Smith or other tart apples (aiming for about 1 1/2 cups lightly packed grated apple, see instructions below) 

1 cup semisweet or bittersweet chocolate chips 

1 cup broken pecan pieces 

2 cups fresh or frozen whole cranberries 

Preheat oven to 350oF. Grease and flour a Bundt pan. Cream butter; add sugar and eggs and beat 3-4 minutes or until smooth. Add applesauce and vanilla; beat until smooth. In a separate bowl, combine dry ingredients and spices. Peel apples. Using a cheese grater or food processor, coarsely grate apples, discarding cores and seeds. You will need 3-5 apples, depending on the size of the apples. The water content of the apples affects the cake; juicier apples will produce a denser, moister cake, while drier apples produce a "cakier" cake. If the apples release a lot of juice while you're mixing other ingredients together, drain off the juice before adding the apples to the cake. Beat the dry ingredients into the butter mixture until combined. Stir in the grated apples, chocolate chips, pecans, and cranberries. Spoon into Bundt pan. Bake 75-85 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean; it may take a little longer if the cranberries were frozen. Allow the cake to cool before removing it from the pan; it will tear if it's too warm. The cake is good served slightly warm with whipped cream (lightly sweetened and with a little vanilla added), but it improves with age and is great cold.

Pecan bars

Below is the recipe for the best pecan bars ever. I'm putting it here in case my paper copy spontaneously combusts, or I need to make pecan bars on a road trip, or something. It's from the March 1999 issue of Gourmet Magazine, but to make it my own, and because I prefer a higher pecan to goo ratio, I increased the amount of pecans. And because I only make this recipe for crowds, I doubled the recipe.

1. Shortbread base

1.5 c. (3 sticks) cold butter 

4 c. all-purpose flour

1 c. packed light brown sugar

1 tsp salt

Preheat oven to 350oF. Cube butter. Whap everything together in food processor until it begins to form small lumps. Dump on big parchment-paper-lined baking sheet and compress evenly onto bottom. Bake 20 minutes, while you prepare...

2. Pecan topping

6-8 c. pecans

1 c. (2 sticks) butter

2 c. packed light brown sugar

2/3 c. honey

4 T. heavy cream (or whole milk; water would probably be fine too)

Coarsely whap pecans in food processor.

Heat butter, sugar, honey, and cream in large heavy-bottomed pot. Let simmer ~5 minutes, stirring occasionally. A minute before shortbread is done, mix in pecans (rewarm briefly if caramel has stiffened). Pour over hot shortbread and spread evenly. Bake another ~20 minutes until bubbly.

Let cool completely, then lift entire sheet of pecan bars out of pan using the edges of the parchment paper. Cut into small bars (a little goes a long way). Makes enough to sustain 10-20 people over a long Thanksgiving weekend.

Tau Day, peaches, and paleo

Tau Day (6.28) was this past Thursday, which required baking pies. I went around in circles on how many to make, because I couldn't decide whether to represent tau with one or two pies--would two pies be four pi, or two tau, or what? I ended up making three pies/three tau/six pi, then called for help to eat them. One friend wanted to come a fashionable 6.283185307179586476925286766559 minutes late, but he was off by a factor of e.

I made chocolate cream pie, blueberry pie, and peach custard pie. N thumbs up.

The chocolate cream pie filling was adapted from here, using two 70% dark chocolate bars and reducing the sugar a bit. Yum.

The blueberry pie is my mom's recipe, made with freshly picked farm-share berries: 1/3 pie volume fresh blueberries, add a little water and sugar; bring to boil, add lemon juice to taste, then add some cornstarch in water to thicken; remove from heat, add 2/3 pie volume fresh blueberries, dump in prebaked crust. Yum.

The cream of the crop was the peach custard pie--a last-minute entry made from this recipe. I used Greek yogurt instead of sour cream, 4 egg yolks instead of 3, chopped candied ginger instead of cinnamon (not because I didn't have any cinnamon, but because ginger is the absolute most appropriate spice for peaches), and two layers of peaches instead of one, because four medium sliced peaches wouldn't fit in a single overlapping layer. I used one ripe peach and three crunchy peaches (thus my hesitation), because that's all that was available from OUR VERY OWN BACKYARD PEACH TREE (screw hesitation).

We bought the tree as a sapling three years ago at Costco. A friend asked what variety of peach we got, and all I could tell her was Kirkland.

This is the first year the tree has borne fruit that has survived into the summer. There were so many peaches on one branch that their weight snapped the branch.

Our neighbor J warned us to beware of local fauna getting to the peaches before we could. When I checked on the tree on Thursday, I saw this:

so I picked these:

I like that I can see wee tooth marks in the nibbled peach, and I like thinking about a squirrel (or raccoon?) sitting in the tree enjoying fruit, or having a peach party with its buddies. Peaches are so much tastier than acorns or compost; imagine the revelry! Nonetheless, a friend has offered to lend me her slingshot and arsenal of dried chickpeas.

The Tau Day pies left me with a bunch of leftover egg whites. Usually I'd make an angel food cake or meringues, but it was too humid for the latter, and I wanted to try something new. Googling yielded dozens of websites that recommended turning them into two-ingredient "Paleo" banana egg-white pancakes. "You'll never believe how good these are!," recipe blog authors joyfully claim--recipe blog writers who care about fitness and body image and, I am convinced, have tastebuds numbed by years of eating protein powder just like our prehistoric ancestors never did. So as a public service announcement, I offer the following observations:

1. These pancakes are not anything any sane paleohuman would have ever cooked, because no one who had prehistoric bananas and chicken eggs around in the same place at the same time would have sacrificed either for these.

2. Banana egg-white pancakes are gross. Do not eat them.

3. Re. optional toppings: what kind of trade routes and prehistoric succulent refineries do Paleo fans think would have ever put bananas, agave syrup, and peanut butter in the same vicinity? Oy.

4. See #2.

Next time, angel food cake.

Banana bread recipe revised

The winning recipe from the epic Banana Bread Taste Tests of 2015 is still the recipe we use. I've been going to the source for the recipe, but it always bugs me that the order in which ingredients are listed is not the order in which they're used in the recipe. So here's a revised version that fixes that.

Champion Banana Bread

Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C), and butter a 4x8-inch loaf pan. [Or use muffin tins, or a glass baking dish, or whatever. You have enough baking experience that you don't need to feel bound to the 4x8-inch size.]

Mash:
3-4 very ripe bananas, peeled [The recipe actually specifies "peeled." I haven't ever tried it with unpeeled bananas.]

Mix in:
1/3 cup melted butter [Hooray for melted butter. This is what makes this recipe is so easy.]

Mix in:
1 teaspoon baking soda [Seems like a strange order, but it works.]
Pinch of salt

Mix in:

1/2 cup sugar
1 egg, beaten
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Mix in:
1 1/2 cups of all-purpose flour

Optional:
1/3 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips and/or
1/3 cup pecans, shelled [I wrote "shelled" to keep the "peeled" bananas company]

Bake 45-50 minutes or until done.

Banana bread taste tests

Introduction

The second annual Durham County Pottery Tour is just two weeks away, so I should be posting more pictures of pots in progress; and Hallowe'en is tomorrow, so I could be posting videos of Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, which I'll be playing on Sunday (on a much smaller organ)--but instead, I'm writing a post that gives the impression that I have a lot of free time for baking. Trust me, it's less about baking and more about being obsessively methodical. But who knows; now that I have found The Best and Easiest Banana Bread recipe, maybe I'll bake some for the pottery tour. Nov. 14-15, folks; hope to see you there!

Background

In early September, at work, I ate a slice of homemade banana bread that was (by my personal banana-bread standards) perfect: dense and moist, with a strong banana flavor, without being too sweet, and visually pretty with flecks of banana seeds throughout. Unfortunately, I didn't think to ask the baker for the recipe. But a week or so later, with bananas ripening on my kitchen counter, I did the next best thing: I sent a post out on Facebook asking friends to recommend recipes. Several recipes came in, each surprisingly different from the next. Seeking to establish a long-term banana-bread recipe relationship, I decided some taste tests were in order.

The gory details, part 1:

Oct. 1, 2015: The experiment began. I tested three recipes: R1, R2 (see below), and R3. When recipes had noticeably different flavorings (e.g. cinnamon, nuts, no vanilla), I left the spices and nuts out and added vanilla, so that we could compare texture and banana flavor without distractions.

I mashed 9.5 limp, brown, overripe bananas into ~3.5 cups of pulp. I used one cup of bananas in both R1 and R2, which called for 2-3 bananas and 1 cup bananas respectively. I used 1.5 cups of bananas in R3, which called for 4 bananas.

R1 called for 1/2 to 1 cup sugar, depending on desired sweetness; one recommender said she routinely uses 1/2 cup, supplemented with chocolate chips, so that's what I used. For fair comparison, that meant adding chocolate chips to R2 and R3. This could have gotten in the way of the taste test, but who (except my mother) doesn't like chocolate chips? They were a good addition; 1/3 cup went into each recipe.

None of the recipes was complicated to make, although R1 was definitely the easiest (see discussion below); and because R1 made a noticeably smaller quantity of batter, it baked faster and more evenly, with a softer exterior.

After letting the three banana breads cool, we had a family taste test. E preferred the texture of R2 and R3 over R1 because he likes a softer, springier bread; S and I preferred the denser, moister texture of R1. Regarding flavor, R1 had the strongest banana flavor; R2 was less intensely banana flavored; and R3 had a strong banana flavor but a surprising baking-powder or -soda aftertaste. (R2 contained baking powder as well, without the aftertaste; R1 used baking soda, with no aftertaste). S immediately voted R1 his favorite; E decided flavor outranked texture and went for R1 too; and I also preferred R1.

R2 and R3 improved with age. The next day, three friends across the street tasted slices of each bread; all three tasters preferred R1.

The winner, part 1: R1, unanimously (6 tasters).

The gory details, part 2

Oct. 25, 2015: The experiment continued. I tested three recipes: R4 (see below), R5, and R6. Where recipes had noticeably different flavorings (e.g. lemon rind, nuts, dried apricots, no vanilla), I left the additions out but included vanilla, so we could compare texture and banana flavor without distractions. The exception was unsweetened coconut in R5; I left it in because the source text said "the coconut in this adds a certain something, but it's not an overpowering coconut flavor. Don't leave it out, but don't expect a tropical tasting bread, either."

I mashed 9 just-beyond-ripe but not overripe bananas into 4 cups pulp--half a cup more than before with half a banana less. The consistency was visibly starchier than with the overripe bananas, although this didn't have an obvious effect on the results. I used ~1.3 cups of bananas in each recipe; R4 called for 1-1.25 cups pulp--the only recipe to acknowledge that bananas are imprecise units of measurement--while R5 called for 3 bananas and R6 called for 2-3. Interestingly, R4 called for 1-2 eggs, perhaps hearkening back to days of yore when backyard chickens laid eggs of varied sizes. I used one large egg.

As in part 1 above, I added 1/3 cup chocolate chips to each recipe.

None of the recipes was complicated to make, although R6 was definitely the easiest (see discussion below); and because it made a noticeably smaller quantity of batter, it baked faster and more evenly, with a softer exterior.

I took samples of all three breads to a block party and asked tasters to rank them. I assigned 3 points to first place, 2 points to second place, and 1 point to third place. All three recipes received rankings in first, second, and third place, although R6, and only R6, was listed by itself twice. R4 received 25 votes, R5 26, and R6 39, making R6 the clear winner.

The winner, part 2: R6 (clear but not unanimously, ~20 tasters).

Discussion and areas for future research

The next logical step would be to compare R1 and R6. Conveniently, R1 and R6 were the same recipe, so that's already taken care of.

That leaves but one to-do: comparing R1=R6 with the holy grail of taste tests, the Cook's Illustrated recipe. Unfortunately, this would require microwaving 5 ripe bananas, saving the liquid, boiling it down into banana essence, and adding it and the nuked bananas to the bread, then thinly slicing a sixth banana to adorn the top, and sprinkling it with sugar to caramelize it in the oven. Compared to R1=R6--which is not only the tastiest but the easiest of the recipes I tried--nuking and boiling and slicing and adorning sound like a hassle. A friend who has made the Cook's Illustrated recipe reports that "I can definitely say it is delicious, but not definitely say it is worth the extra effort." (For better or worse, he adds, "you should try it at least once.")

So what makes R1=R6 the easiest recipe? No room-temperature butter to cream. No waiting for fridge-cold butter to arrive at room temperature, and no nuking frozen butter, partially melting it in an attempt to get it to arrive at soft room temperature so that it can be creamed. Nope. R1=R6 calls for melted butter--and just 1/3 cup of it. No creaming necessary.

Interestingly, two friends recommended the Joy of Cooking recipe, one via a website and the other a book. The recipes differed. The website recipe is here; the cookbook recipe (R4) is below.

Conclusion

Easiest to make and tastiest to eat, R1=R6 is the recipe I'll use from now on.

Appendix: Recipes

R1=R6: The winner in both taste tests, http://www.simplyrecipes.com/recipes/banana_bread/

2-3 very ripe bananas, peeled
1/3 cup melted butter
1/2 to 1 cup of sugar (can easily use 3/4 cup, or drop it down to 1/2 cup if you want it less sweet) [I used 1/2 cup sugar--Ed.]
1 egg, beaten
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon baking soda
Pinch of salt
1 1/2 cups of all-purpose flour

Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C), and butter a 4x8-inch loaf pan. In a mixing bowl, mash the ripe bananas with a fork until smooth. Stir the melted butter into the mashed bananas. Mix in the baking soda and salt. Stir in the sugar, beaten egg, and vanilla extract. Mix in the flour. Pour the batter into your prepared loaf pan. Bake for 1 hour to 1 hour 10 minutes (check at 50 minutes) at 350°F (175°C), or until a tester inserted into the center comes out clean. Remove from oven and cool completely on a rack. Remove the banana bread from the pan. Slice and serve. (A bread knife helps to make slices that aren't crumbly.)

R2: a friend's uncle's recipe, adapted from a James Beard recipe

350 degree oven, greased loaf pan
3/4 c sugar
1/2 c butter
1/3 c sour milk or buttermilk*
1 c mashed bananas
2 eggs
 2 c flour
1 t soda
1/2 t salt
1/2 c chopped nuts or choc. chips or whatever strikes your fancy
*sour milk could be milk + 1t lemon juice. Let sit for 15 mins or so until curdled.

Cream together sugar and butter. Add the rest of wet ingredients. Stir together dry ingredients. Combine everything and pour into prepared pan(s). Bake for about an hour.

R3: adapted from The Foster's Market Cookbook http://cooking-books.blogspot.com/2008/10/secret-to-great-banana-bread-no-matter.html

2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon cardamom

To be creamed together:
1 stick unsalted butter at room temperature
1 cup sugar

Wet ingredients: 
2 large eggs, lightly beaten
4 very ripe bananas, crushed
1 teaspoons vanilla extract

Optional: 1 cup chopped walnuts

Oven preheated to 350, grease a 9x5 loaf pan

Combine the dry ingredients and stir. Cream together the butter and sugar until blended, add the beaten egg slowly while you continue to beat and finally add the bananas and vanilla and stir to combine. Slowly add the dry ingredients to the wet, stirring only enough to combine. Be careful not to overmix or your bread with be tough. Fold in the walnuts. Pour the batter into your prepared pan and bake for between 1 hour and 1:15 until it passes the toothpick test and the bread is brown and a bit cracked on top. Let the bread rest for 10-15 minutes before taking it out of the pan.

R4: abbreviated from The Joy of Cooking (1975)

Mix dry ingredients:
1 3/4 c. flour
2 1/4 t. baking powder
1/2 t. salt

Cream
1/3 c. shortening [I used butter--Ed.]
2/3 c. sugar

Add:
3/4 t. lemon rind
1-2 eggs
1 1/4 c. banana pulp
Optional: 1/2 c. nuts, 1/4 c. chopped dried apricots

Bake at 350 in greased loaf pan for 60 minutes.

R5: from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything http://cooking-books.blogspot.com/2009/10/favorite-banana-bread.html

1 stick butter
1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
1/2 cup whole wheat flour [OK, I confess--I just used 2 c. white flour--Ed.]
1 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
3/4 cup sugar
2 eggs
3 very ripe bananas, mashed
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 cup chopped walnuts or pecans (optional)
1/2 cup grated dried unsweetened coconut

Oven preheated to 350 F, grease a 9x5" loaf pan.

Mix together the dry ingredients and cream the butter. Beat the eggs and bananas into the butter, then stir this mixture into the dry ingredients. Finally, stir in the vanilla, the nuts if you're using them, and the coconut. Pour the batter into the prepared pan and bake for around 1 hour, but start checking earlier at about 45 minutes, until it passes the toothpick test.

Liquid bluing

Yowza, this has been a busy, busy summer, and I'm way behind on blogging. I have much to write about, but will begin with the most current event: E and I are growing a salt garden.

When I was 12, I had a homework assignment to design and carry out my own science experiment. In browsing books for ideas, I came across instructions for a salt garden, with a recipe for a liquid concoction that, when spooned over cut-up sponges, would bloom into puffs of salt crystals. The recipe called specifically for non-iodized salt. Since most readily-available table salt by then was iodized, a person really had to go out of his or her way to find the non-iodized variety, so I assumed there was a reason the recipe called for it. My experiment involved growing two salt gardens--one iodized and one non-iodized--whereby I discovered that non-iodized salt made no difference except for the challenge of finding a supermarket that carried it.

The even bigger challenge of that experiment involved obtaining another vital ingredient: liquid bluing. Liquid bluing is a colloidal suspension of blue iron powder (ferric hexacyanoferrate) in water, and it was already a rarity in 1979. When I finally tracked some down at a tiny, dimly lit, locally-owned grocery store across town, I became a hoarder: I needed a mere four tablespoons, but I bought two 8-oz. bottles, figuring I might never again have access to this relic of olden-days laundry whitening.

Over the intervening 33 years, every time I moved, I took my two precious bottles of liquid bluing with me, from Urbana to Tucson to Corvallis to Madison to Lawrence and finally to Durham. In Durham, the bottles remained undisturbed for twelve years in a plastic bag in a storage cabinet, until, during a recent cleaning frenzy, I rediscovered them and decided I had guarded them carefully for long enough. It was time to play.

E and I accumulated the other ingredients and on Sunday afternoon, we mixed everything together and started our garden.

Here's what it looked like on Sunday:

And here's what it looked like this morning:

Notice the crystals hanging over the edge of the bowl. They completed their escape this afternoon, and I expect to find them making their way off the countertop later this week.

Happily, we still have nearly two bottles of bluing left, so E can share this experience with his own kid(s) 33 years from now (by which time he will also be conducting an experiment on the stability of ferric hexacyanoferrate suspensions).

Here's the recipe:

4 T salt
4 T liquid bluing
4 T H2O
1 T ammonia

Mix together and distribute over cut up pieces of sponge. For colored crystals, dribble drops of food coloring on the sponges before adding the salt solution.

Compound cookies

Want to make Lebkuchen (a traditional German Christmas cookie*)? You need look no further for a recipe than in the classic Bayerisches Kochbuch (Bavarian Cookbook).

We have two copies: to the right, the 18th edition, published in 1938 in Fraktur (the same font as the cover text). The font, coupled with hindsight, makes the pre-war national pride in the introduction rather chilling: to paraphrase, "at the frontline stands the German Woman from the countryside and from the town, securing the national diet and health of the Volk."

Our other copy is the 54th edition, published in 1992 in assorted Courier-ish fonts. National pride has been replaced with more practical advice on the nutritive content and chemical behavior of common ingredients.

You might observe the stylish celebration of white-colored foods on the cover of the 1992 edition: white pork roast, white Knoedel (dumplings), white sauer Kraut (cabbage), and off-white beer foam. It's permissible to spruce up white food with the occasional ornamental vegetable, but unless you want people to eat the decorations, keep the color to a minimum with only a few parsley leaves and a single tomato wedge. Radishes, by the way, are especially useful, because they're white on the inside, so they match the rest of the food after you bite past the ornamental red skin.

But back to Lebkuchen.

When you look up a recipe in the index, you must draw on all your knowledge of the precise German language. Under Lebkuchen, you will find a mere three recipes: Lebkuchen --feine (fine), --mit Kunsthonig (with artificial syrup), and --Weisse (white). Looking for hazelnut Lebkuchen? Well, that's a compound noun, so you have to look under H for Haselnusslebkuchen. Look under E for Elisenlebkuchen, under G for Gewuertzlebkuchen, and under S for Schokoladenlebkuchen. What the heck, scan the whole index lest you miss some other variety.

I made Elisenlebkuchen I. Art (Elisenlebkuchen, version I). They're pretty tasty and would be even better if they could age in a closed container with some dried apples for a month or two. I messed up some of the measurements, so the Lebkuchen dough ran off the Bakoblaten (communion wafer-like rice-flour disks that keep the dough from cementing itself to the baking sheet). Fortunately, I had a silicone baking sheet, so I didn't need to chisel anything off the pan.

For more information on German baking, see this previous discussion on my Wadlstrumpf blog. Here, I'll simply point out the irony of recipes that tell you to weigh out ingredients in grams (a system supposedly more precise than American cup measures) and then to "bake slowly at, oh, I dunno, 150-160^oC, until done."

The Elisenlebkuchen I. Art recipe follows the footnote.

*At dinner last night, as I was talking about the cookies still in the oven, E kept asking excitedly, "what cookies? What cookies are you talking about?" And I kept saying, "what cookies do you think I'm talking about? Think." And E would say again, "you made cookies? What kind of cookies did you make?"--even though he was with me when I was making the Lebkuchen. "Dude: think!" I said. S kindly intervened and explained to E, "Mama calls Lebkuchen 'cookies.'" "Ohh!," said my son with sudden wise understanding. That just goes to show how much better E has internalized German than I have. The -kuchen part of Lebkuchen literally means cake, although no American would ever conceive of Lebkuchen that way. Once again, the perennial issue of cultural concepts for assorted foods rears its head: just as Germans have no mental file cabinet for concepts like pie, Americans have no data storage space that allows a Lebkuchen to be anything but a cookie.

To confirm this claim, I nonchalantly said to S, as he walked by just now, "so would you call Lebkuchen 'cookies'?" and he frowned and said unequivocally, "no. Cookies are Plaetzchen; Lebkuchen are Lebkuchen." There ya go.

Elisenlebkuchen, version I

Beat together until thick and foamy:

5 eggs
500 g sugar

Add:

2 tsp ground cinnamon
3/4 tsp ground cloves
1 knife tip ground cardamom
1 knife tip ground mace (I didn't use any)
Peel from 2 lemons, juice from 1/2 lemon

Whap up in food processor:

100 g candied lemon peel (I used a 113 g container)
100 g candied orange peel (ditto)

Add to batter. Shell and then whap up in food processor:

500 (650) unshelled almonds or half almonds, half nuts. (Seriously? Like I'm going to count and shell 500-650 almonds? The authors provided no explanation of the parenthetical 650. I assumed they meant 500 g--not enough, which is probably why the dough spread off the Oblaten--and used 454 g toasted almonds and guesstimated an additional 150 g toasted hazelnuts.)

Add nuts to batter. Spoon onto Oblaten (you can skip this if you have a silicone baking sheet. Trust me, butter alone on a baking sheet will not do the job. The dough is like cement.) In theory, let sit for a hour. (I skipped that.) Bake slowly at, oh, I dunno, 150-160^oC, until done. (How about we say 325^oF for 20-30 minutes.)

Fourth of July hybrid cousin cake

Today is the Fourth of July, which of course means we're celebrating S's birthday. Germany doesn't give much attention to the occasion, so S appreciates the effort the U.S. puts forth every year.

No birthday would be complete without birthday cake. For S, I usually make a hybrid of assorted cakes, yielding what you might call a cousin to the Schwarzwaelder Kirschtorte (Black Forest Cherry Cake). But while the respectably admirable Schwarzwaelder Kirschtorte probably gets picked no later than third for the dodgeball team during recess, and usually lands a solid supporting role in the school musical every spring, the handsome Hybrid Cousin Cake is both team captain and the musical's protagonist, and still manages to get straight As and be so wittily gracious about it all that you have to like him even if you're a little jealous.

Today, the Hybrid Cousin is manifested as a four-layer toasted-almond sponge cake, each layer doused in rum, with raspberry jam and rum-soaked Ranier cherries atop the first and third layers, and Helen's whipped chocolate ganache atop the second layer and frosting the whole cake.

Helen is S's mom. I couldn't remember what proportions to use for the ganache, so I thought, "I'll just call Helen and ask." Of course, there's no better way to flatter and please your mother-in-law than to inquire about a recipe you want to replicate for her golden son.

My own mom did the same thing a few decades back, when she called my dad's mom, Zelda, to ask for her recipe for tongue. Personally, I think one reaps more direct benefit asking about chocolate ganache, but dietary habits have changed since the 1960s. Anyway, family lore says Bubbie Zelda's recipe was to "just put it in a pot with the ingredients" and cook it until it was done.

Helen said basically the same thing about the chocolate ganache: you just put the chocolate and the cream in a pot together and--

"How much chocolate?" I interrupted. "One of the big Milka bars, or one of the small ones?"--(the standard units of chocolate measurement in Germany)--"And how much cream?"

"Oh, I don't remember. Half a liter of cream, and then add the chocolate. Don't use chocolate with anything in it," she added, deftly evading the quantity question, "no nuts or anything like that."

So I winged the proportions: a pint and a half of heavy whipping cream from Maple View Farm in Chapel Hill, and one Swiss dark chocolate bar and two Swiss milk chocolate bars from Whole Foods. Melt, chill, whip.

Incidentally, another way to score points with your German mother-in-law is to make an impressively tall sponge torte. "My cakes never rise that much," she said a few years back, when we were visiting and I made three tortes for a party she was hosting. She nodded with approval at my egg-white-whipping-and-subsequent-gentle-folding abilities. Of course, the wise daughter-in-law knows to simply smile politely and not mention the two extra egg whites she snuck in as backup.