Any excuse

spiral 2, a photo by Sesser on Flickr.

It would seem that, lately, I am using any excuse to bake.

March 13th is a friend's birthday and March 16th is my niece's birthday, so I made Guinness cupcakes AND Chocolate peanut butter cake (both from Smitten Kitchen) two weekends ago. Last weekend, I made chocolate cupcakes (a recipe from Canadian Living Online) with sprinkles to take to brunch at a friend's house. Because cupcakes are a very brunchy item.

This weekend, amidst the general insanity that follows taking two days off work to stay home with a sick kid (ear infection and the new "no antibiotics" protocol), my SIL called me to remind me that I had volunteered my baking to a good cause.

My SIL is a volunteer fundraiser for Bayside Camp, a local Baptist summer camp which has recently been rebuilt. My MIL was the camp director back 20 years ago, so it's an important cause to the family.

Last year they held a fundraising dinner for the camp and I made Chocolate Blackout Cake (another Canadian Living fave) for the dessert auction. It sold for the highest dollar amount of any dessert there!

So this year, it's not a dessert auction, but they are still having the fundraising dinner.

I had bigger aspirations than cheesecake, but since they really don't take much time to make, and they really are delicious, I went for easy. There are so many times when people have said to me, "Oh, I've never made cheesecake. Is it hard to make?" and while it would be tempting to lie and say, "It took me years to perfect and hours to make," well, the truth is, they really are easy. There are some tricks, though, that help:

Steph's Cheesecake Tips:
1. The Pan: When putting together a springform pan, be sure you put it together properly. The bottom is meant to look like a platform. If you put it together with the ridge up, getting your cheesecake out of the pan is going to be more difficult.
2. The Ingredients: Always make sure your cream cheese is at room temperature. If you need to speed up the process, cut it up into smaller pieces on a plate.
3. The Crust: I cut back on the amount of butter in the crust because it always seems to seep out of the pan.
4. Protect Your Oven: On that note, be sure to put a cookie sheet under the cheesecake in the oven. This will prevent your oven from sending smoke signals.
5. Undercook: Yes, you read that right. You want the cheesecake to be just a little bit undercooked, just a tiny bit "jiggly" in the centre. If it is too well done, not only will it be dry, but it will crack as well. My recipe calls for 1hour and 30 minutes. I usually cook it for 1 hour 15.
6. Cooling: I always seem to be making cheesecake when the kitchen is chaos, so I often just turn off the oven and open the door. After a while, I put it on a cooling rack and then when it is nice and cool, I put it in the refrigerator. If you cover the pan in plastic wrap and condensation starts to form, you've likely not let it cool enough. The water will drop on top of the cheesecake and leave spots.
7. Cutting & Serving: I find cheesecake best when it is made the day before being served. When I cut the cheesecake, I either rinse and wipe the knife blade between slices or, if it's family dinner and they really don't care about presentation, just about getting cake, I just wipe the knife on a plate. And my FIL insists on getting that plate. ;)

When it came out of the oven, I realized that I didn't want the Ladies at the church to have to serve this with whipped cream (it's quite sweet, so I usually serve it with whipped cream to cut the sweetness), so I made a cream cheese, sour cream topping (sweetened a little). I reserved some of the topping and mixed it with melted chocolate chips, then piped it on the top.

It's not a professional job, but I think the effect was nice. When my SIL picked it up, she had three other cakes in her car and this ended up riding in the trunk. I hope it made it to the church ok!

This recipe is from an old Company's Coming cookbook. It wasn't until just this very minute that I remember how many times my mom made it for church dinners back home. My friend Liz and I would position our teenaged-selves next to the desserts so that we were sure to get a piece. I don't think Mom ever brought home any leftovers.

This is also the cake that ensured me a place in my FIL's heart. I made it and took it to the family cottage the first summer Andrew and I were dating. It was a huge hit. When we invite my FIL for supper now, he almost always asks if there will be chocolate cheesecake.

What about you? Do you have a recipe that gets rave reviews, despite the relative simplicity of making it?

Family Recipes

Oatmeal cake, a photo by Sesser on Flickr.

*My apologies for the inconsistent colours of these photos.  Mr. Happy acquired a new camera in November and I am just getting familiar with it. These photos were all edited in Snapseed. The photo above was taken in the evening in my wee little pantry, the photo at the bottom was taken in the same pantry but with obviously different lighting conditions. 

January and February have always been the two months of the year in which we see very little of my sister-in-law and her family. No biggie, really, especially after spending the Christmas holidays together, we don't really notice it.

This January, however, my father-in-law, feeling the wanderlust in his bones, set off on his first solo adventure since the passing of my mother -in-law. He visited friends in both Hawaii and New Zealand. Not bad places to visit when the Maritime January wind is chapping your cheeks and making you dream of blueberries and idyllic days at the cottage.

With his conspicuous absence, those of us left behind, noticed, for this first time, how quickly January can fly past without a family gathering. It's been 11 years this spring since my sister-in-law and her family moved home to the Maritimes, and this is the first time we all felt strange about not seeing each other during this, the month of endless basketball tournaments.

Now, normally, my birthday in February is when we all gather around a table again to break bread and more importantly, eat cake. This year, however, we were all so busy that my birthday festivities were postponed.

This week I realized that my father-in-law had been home almost a whole month and we had not yet all been around a table together since his return. Finally, on Friday, I thought, "Enough is enough!" I called my SIL and told her that they should come here on Sunday night.

I had decided to try a new recipe for roasted red pepper pasta. I made it, but I don't believe I'll make it again. It was fine, but not something I would bother to write down in my recipe book.

Speaking of recipe books, thankfully for my family's palate, I had been thumbing though my mom's recipe book on Friday night and decided that we needed a cake for tonight's meal. Oatmeal cake, to be precise.

Oatmeal cake is not so fancy that it pretends to be birthday cake (heaven forbid I make my own) but it's not so plain as to be considered coffee cake (which would relegate it to afternoon guests and not family dinner).

Oatmeal cake, my friends, is a moist, dark brown cake made with brown sugar and cinnamon. The icing(?) is brown sugar, butter, milk, vanilla and coconut. It's made on the stovetop and poured one the cake while it's still warm. It eventually hardens and is the kind of stuff you scrape out of the pot with a spatula and eat while hiding in the pantry.

My mom made this cake quite a few times when I was a teenager. There is a note on the page that it came from Jean West's school. My great-aunt Jean was a schoolteacher in Devon, New Brunswick until I was about seven. My mother has quite a few recipes from Jean and her counterparts at the school. I imagine those ladies now as pleasantly plump and enjoying their bridge games with dainty plates of treats and squares sitting next to the bridge table.

It's comforting to realize that I can flip through my mother's recipes and know that each one is connected to her, to a friend, to a story, to a memory. I realize that this is not everyone's experience. Not everyone is fortunate enough to have a library of dog-eared and vanilla-stained recipes. In fact, that was not my own mother's experience.  Her own mother didn't teach her to cook. Her mother, well, let's say, liked to be on her own in the kitchen, so my mother learned to cook when she got married. She did have her mother's recipes, but she hadn't had the same experience as I did, of sitting on the counter next to the mixer on Saturday mornings, or of reading the ingredients to her mother, or of having her mom show her how to do the many things she showed me.

So, I count myself lucky, blessed, really, to have the memories, to have had the lessons and to have family nearby with whom I can share these recipes, to introduce them to bits of my mother (my SIL never knew her) and to add another memory to this recipe.

To the invisible footnotes for this recipe, I now add the memory of a February night when we all finally gathered again, when we noted how much the kids had grown, when we heard wonderful news of my niece's provincial JV basketball championship and her upcoming summer opportunity, AND when we all tried a new pasta recipe together and were saved by dessert.

Oatmeal Cake
(Jean West's School - Devon, NB)

Cake:
Mix together and set aside:
1 C oatmeal
1 1/2 C boiling water

Beat together:
1 C brown sugar
1 C white sugar
2 eggs
1/2 C shortening

Add oatmeal mixture to the sugar mixture and then add (I mix these ingredients together before adding them):
1 1/2C flour
1 t salt
1 1/2 t soda
1 1/2 t cinnamon

Bake at 325 for one hour in a tube pan. (I grease and flour the pan, mostly out of paranoia, not because the recipe says to do so.) Cool for 10 minutes in the pan, run a knife between the cake and the pan, then flip onto a cooling rack. (Don't forget that quick prayer to the flour gods that the cake doesn't break.)

Icing:
In a medium saucepan, cook to a soft boil:
1 C brown sugar
1/4 C butter
1/4 C canned milk (I used just a little less of whole milk instead)

Take off the heat and add:
1 t vanilla
1 C coconut

Pour over the cake.

Sneak into the pantry with a rubber spatula and the saucepan. Eat the icing when it isn't so hot it burns your tongue.

Allow time for the icing to cool before serving.

Bedtime

Bedtime, a photo by Sesser on Flickr.

I'm tired. It's a complaint that most mothers of small children hear coming out of their own mouths while at the same time, our children are insisting that they are not, in fact, at all sleepy. At almost 38 and with this particular handsome 2.5 year old running around my house, I feel it in my bones and it scares me.

You see, I hope, pray, wish that this tired that I feel is not the way I really should feel. Because this tired is too tired.

The Mogrunt goes to bed at eight o'clock or thereabouts and I crawl into bed next to him to help him get to sleep. It is our snuggle time, our reading time, our bonding time. It is precious time and I love it. And no, I'm not going to stop it because you or any number of experts think it is wrong.

But every night, for the last, oh, six months or so, whenever I pause for those thirty or forty-five minutes to listen to his breathing change as he drifts off to dreamland, I am pulled there with him. It's as if those precious naps of his infancy, when we would doze on the bed after a feeding, have taken on a new form.

The problem is, while I know that being a mom is going to tire me out, the tired that I've been feeling doesn't seem manageable.

When I lie down in that bed, it's as if I am held down by an invisible weight and I have no control over my eyelids. I've fallen asleep many, many times fully dressed, with my contacts still in my eyes, only to wake at midnight and stumble to the washroom to get myself properly situated for sleep.

In a typical week, i am in bed and asleep by 9pm about 5 out of 7 days. Those two nights I do stay awake are lovely and productive. One of them is my knit night and the other is usually either Friday or Saturday. Not both, never both. You see, I feel like the five early nights are the ones where I play catch up for partying so bloody hard on my two "late" nights.

So, last week, I went to the doctor. I'm having blood tests done for low iron (which I always have), thyroid (please, no!) and a number of other things, including sugars. I did my best not to cry in his office as he is a new guy. Yes, I am that frustrated with how I've been feeling.

I'm trying to get exercise back into my life. This from the woman who used to pride herself on biking to work 7 months of the year. It's hard to bike when you have to drop a small lad at daycare every day. We need a bike trailer or something.

I eat a pretty good diet, though I know I eat too much sugar, chocolate etc. so I'm working on that too.

But in the meantime, I'm focusing the energy I do have on that adorable man with the toothbrush.

Christmas 2011 - and Plans For 2012

Mom's gingerbread, a photo by Sesser on Flickr.

Every Christmas makes me sentimental.  I pull out old recipes and try to recreate the holidays I remember growing up in my small New Brunswick town. I don't know if I do it for the people around me or if I do it just for me.

This year, we were missing two moms: my mom, who passed away 14 years ago only a year after finding a lump in her breast and my husband's mom, who died this past fall after seven long years of struggling with Alzheimer's disease.*

With the two of them in mind, I turned to my mother's recipes and hopefully searched for my mother's gingerbread recipe. It's a dessert I hadn't had in well over 20 years, I'm sure. And despite the well-worn appearance of the recipe card and the faded writing (I retraced my mother's hurried letters to be sure I could read it), I wasn't entirely sure I had the real thing in my hands.

So I did what I always do. I called my mom's sister, Aunt Jan, and asked.  Every year since my mom passed away, it's been the same thing: me calling Jan to consult on a recipe only days before Christmas. Mind you, they've been different recipes for different dishes (chowders, casseroles, cakes, cookies...), but I really don't know what I would do without her. She's my mother's memory, in so many ways.

The gingerbread cake was a success. We had it on Christmas Eve (after the traditional Maritime Christmas Eve dinner of Lobster), slathered with whipped cream. I almost cried when I tasted it. I was 7-years old again and not entirely sure I shouldn't believe in Santa.

Believe it or not, that cake brought on a resolution of sorts... Lemme explain:

Christmases Past:

When I was a kid, my mom worked full-time in the office at our family's pharmacy, yet she managed to fill our holidays with the right mix of family, friends, and food. My mom was like living with Mrs. Claus, she loved the holidays so much.

Oh, I know she was stressed out doing it and I know that having her parents visiting each Christmas was part of that stress.  Somehow, though, it just seemed like part of the festivities to me - like it was a race to a finish-line and Christmas Day was the destination:

"Can we get all these presents wrapped and delivered before December 24th?"

"Will Grammy 'behave' herself this year?"

"Did we get cranberries for the cranberry sauce? No? Someone, got car keys and a license? GO! Grocery store, now!"

Christmas Present:

Unfortunately, my approach to Christmas this year (and in the past) was the same as my mother's - Rush, rush, rush, Crash! - so when it's all said and done, I haven't had those imagined idyllic evenings of making cookies, inviting friends or family over for visits, driving around to see the lights, taking advantage of the snow falling to catch flakes on my tongue...

This year, while Christmas held, for the first time, lots of magic for our little boy, it did feel like a lot of rushing about to assist that magic. And frankly, I'm disappointed in myself.  So I'm here to tell you this - I'm going to fix that for Christmas 2012 specifically and for 2012 in general.

(Making Grammy's Sugar Cookies)

My plan for 2012 is to be more organized so that, frankly, I can sit down and relax.


Christmases Future:

1. Get ready for everything in advance: for Christmas, this translates into "Buy the presents early." I've already bought some presents for next year - oh yes, I did - they were on sale and very affordable. And I'm very pleased with myself.  For the rest of the year, this means if we're going out, we need to start the process earlier, instead of running out the door. If we're going to the cottage, pack our clothes a couple nights before, so there's no late night panic. If we're going to an appointment, leave in lots of time to find parking. etc. etc.

2. Set a budget and shop wisely: We've got some big purchases coming up as we're doing some work on our house (more on that another time), so we're going to need to shop around, get quotes, and stay on budget.

For Christmas, this translates to "stop the madness!"With one side of my family, we all decided to give small gifts. It was a relief and frankly, I did this even with the side of the family that didn't make this decision. We're not exactly independently wealthy here, so that's that. Christmas should not be about the gifts anyway... uh, but not that I'm giving my presents back from this year. Hey, it's a process, I'm working on it!

3. Give to charity: For Christmas, this translates to financial donations. We did this for a couple of our gifts this year and frankly, I think this is a tradition we'll carry on throughout the year. None of us are really hurting in our families, so I think that a donation to a charitable organization in lieu of a birthday gift might not be a bad idea.

We have been very fortunate in our lives to always manage to scrape by - either by the skin of our own teeth or with the generous help of our families. We'll do this by giving what we can with what we have as there's always someone with less.  My husband is working on some music that he hopes will benefit the Alzheimer's society and I'm hoping to start doing some charity knitting.

So, while I do want to lose weight, get fit, and all that, I'm not really one for resolutions. It's more of a "growing up" and "acknowledging my part in this" kind of year.  So, I'll try to stick with these points for this year, so that next year, I can enjoy more of this:

*I haven't written about the loss of my MIL here, but perhaps someday I will. She was a beautiful and graceful woman who maintained those same qualities right up until the end, despite her daily struggle against the disease that stole her from us.

Our garden "bounty"

Our garden "bounty", a photo by Sesser on Flickr.

Last spring, Mr. Happy and I decided that it was time to plant a garden. With the rising price of food in mind, we rented a rototiller and Mr. Happy set to work tilling the bed. 

Never mind the argument we had about the placement of the garden (an argument that only took 5 months for Mr. Happy to concede I should have won. Ahem), and never mind the incessant rainfall, we thought it might be a good way to supplement our "stores".

We planted carrots, onions, red cabbage, brussel sprouts, beets, green and yellow beans, sugar snap peas, lettuce and a couple tomato plants.

The carrots and onions grew, though only a little. Despite their size they are still delicious and appreciated in the various dishes into which I've thrown them.

The red cabbage, though a bit neglected, did grow and was delicious. The brussel sprouts were steam rolled by a small boy and his wheelbarrow. The beets, well, that was a sad loss.

The beans, both yellow and green were picked and devoured quite readily.

We did our best to use the "natural landscape" of our yard wisely. We planted climbing things near our fences. The sugar snap peas flourished on the fence at the end of our driveway. They were a tasty temptation when we arrived home at the end of a work day.

We did learn a valuable lesson about the sugar snap peas, however, after eating handfuls of the delicious pods raw: They are extremely hard on your mouth if eaten in large amounts. I spent a week at the cottage in "SSP addiction recovery" waiting for the skin in my mouth to return to normal. It turns out, they are still quite delicious if served lightly steamed.

The lettuce was the crowning glory of our garden and heartily fed many guests at our table over the summer. We hauled table and chairs outside at every opportunity and set about pretending we were dining on a backyard patio under a Tuscan sun. In actuality we were in our own backyard, surrounded by our ugly metal fence, near a busy street and under a Haligonian sky (though that setting does have its own charms).

Our lessons for next year are as follows:

• Improve the soil.
• Move the garden or cut the tree (hence the springtime argument).
• Get the seeds/plants in the ground earlier.
• Pray for more sun and less rain, yet encourage child to water plants in a gentle manner.
• Remind toddler how to walk in the "valleys". between the rows and not across the "hills" with his wheelbarrow.
• Make the garden bigger MORE MORE MORE!
• Plant squash (oh wait, we did. It died.)
• Plant pumpkins (pumpkin shortage in the city this year)
• Do something to that dreadful fence.
• Invite more friends over to enjoy our garden bounty with us, however small.