Blueberry Bread

This is my favorite kind of stupid-easy recipe. Not only is it truly stupid-easy, but it’s handed-down stupid-easy. It’s stupid-easy with history, People, and that’s the best kind!

I was given this recipe by my adopted grandmother. This woman is truly the embodiment of grandmotherly loveliness, and she’s a practiced hand in the kitchen. She makes this recipe a lot - as do I - because it’s both easy and versatile. One doesn’t need blueberries - one can use pretty much ANY yummy filler - or none at all; one can make a cake or a loaf or cupcakes; one can eat this as dessert or a snack or breakfast. Truly, it’s culinary acrobatics at its finest, and here’s how you do it:

Set your oven to 350° and either grease and flour your pans or line cupcake tins with papers and set aside. Cream together a stick of butter with one egg and a cup of sugar and set aside. Sift together 2 cups of flour, 2 teaspoons of baking powder and 1/2 teaspoon of salt, then pour, into a separate container (I use my Pyrex measuring cup), one cup of milk with a good blop of vanilla extract (the recipe calls for 1 teaspoon, but I’m SURE I use more than that; I never measure it and I have a particular affinity for vanilla). Bring the butter mixture back and add the flour and milk alternately until all the ingredients are combined. Fold in about 2 and 1/2 cups of blueberries (or whatever mix-in you’re adding) and turn the batter into whatever cooking vessel you’ve prepared. Sprinkle the top with sugar, if you’re into that sort of thing - and bake in the center of the oven for about 30 minutes for the loaf pan; your baking time will be decidedly less - only about 11 minutes or so - if you’re baking in a cake pan or cupcakes, so keep an eye on them. They are done with the toothpick test.

I make this most often with blueberries, but I’ve also had fantastical luck with cinnamon and brown sugar swirled through, chunks of peaches, strawberries, and even rhubarb and raspberries. It is a consistent winner, and I hope you enjoy it half as much as we do.

Boston Cream Pie

Mr. Chili’s favorite birthday cake is Boston Cream Pie. I believe it’s true that I’ve made him one every May 30th for the last three years in a row. While the recipe for Boston Cream Pie is a little fussy, it still qualifies as stupid-easy, so here we go.

For starters, I’ve yet to find a yellow cake recipe that I like as well as what I can get out of a box. Judge me not, my friends; I have no problem whipping up a scratch chocolate cake, but there’s something about that dense, heady vanilla flavor of a box yellow cake that I haven’t been able to adequately recreate, so Betty Crocker it is. I make two layers according to the package directions, then set them out to cool while I get on with the filling and the glaze.

I have always had a love/hate relationship with custard; I love to eat it, but I hate to make it. Well, let me amend that - I don’t HATE to make it, but it took me a long time to learn the technique of good custard-making (I failed it in home ec. classes in high school and had more than my fair share of split custards in my adulthood, too). I figured it out, though; here’s how you do it:

In a small bowl, beat two egg yolks together and set them aside. Combine 1/3 cup of sugar (I use a little more), 2 tablespoons of cornstarch (I sift the cornstarch through a little mesh strainer first, just to be sure there are no lumps that might give me trouble later in the process) and a pinch of salt in a sauce pan and stir in 1 1/2 cups of milk. Heat these over medium, stirring often, until the mixture comes just to a boil, then temporarily remove the pan from the heat (keep the burner on).

Scoop out a little of the hot mixture and, whisking constantly, drizzle it into the egg yolks. Then, scoop out a little more and repeat this process. When you’ve worked in about 1/3 of the hot stuff into the yolks, scrape them back into the saucepan and cook the whole thing together for about two and a half minutes - it should be thick and bubbly.

Remove the pan from the heat and pour the custard through a strainer into a bowl (you’ll have to coax the stuff through the mesh - it should be pretty thick by now). I stir in a little vanilla or, even better, vanilla paste at this point, then I put a piece of plastic wrap directly on the surface of the custard and stash the bowl in the fridge to chill while I get on with the glaze.

Boston cream pie is covered with a simple ganache; and when I say “simple,” I mean it. Put one cup of milk or cream in the microwave or, if you don’t have a microwave - don’t snicker; I know a LOT of people who don’t - heat it on the stove just until it’s good and hot but not boiling (three minutes in the zapper works for me, or about five minutes on the stove). In the meantime, chop up about 12 ounces of good chocolate (or, alternately, about a cup and a half of chocolate chips). Pour the milk over the chocolate and let it sit for a moment or two, then start stirring; pretty soon, the whole mixture should be smooth and glossy. Set it aside to cool (sometimes I’ll put this in the fridge, but not often; getting it to room temperature is usually sufficient).

Put one of the cake layers on a plate, dump all of the cooled custard in a pile in the center, then put the other layer on top and gently press until the custard starts to ooze out the sides. Pour the ganache over, stick in some candles, and make a wish!

The only thing you should be aware of is that once this cake is cut, it’s photogenic days are over. The top of the cake WILL slide off the bottom if given a chance (we came downstairs the next morning to find this had happened) and because the custard is made with egg yolks, it’ll go bad pretty quickly if not kept refrigerated. I don’t think this will be a problem, though; it probably won’t last that long, anyway.

YUM!

Muddy Dirt Cake *EDITED!*

Several years ago, I made a chocolate cake for my daughter’s birthday. Nothing special, really - just a chocolate cake that I was intending to frost with chocolate frosting.

You know what they say about intentions and the road to hell, right?

I’m not sure how it happened, but the cake would not come out of the pans. YES, I greased and floured the pans; I’m a Goddess in the Kitchen, remember? For whatever reason - whether the oven temperature was off or the humidity was wrong or the moon was in retrograde - those cakes dug in and hung on, and the only way I could get them out of the pans was in pieces.

There I was with a recipe’s worth of cake bits. Frustrated, but entirely undaunted (by then, I’d learned to look at challenges as just that - challenges - and to not let myself get too worked up), I came up with a plan. I further crumbled the bits and put them in a glass dish. Then I put together a couple of batches of chocolate pudding; the cook-and-serve kind because, really? Instant? Not so much. (And yes, I use pudding mixes. Like brownies, the stuff from the box just comes out consistently better.) Once the pudding had chilled, I folded it into the cake bits, blopped a little bit of whipped cream on top and voilla! Muddy Dirt Cake. Though it wasn’t PRETTY, the dirt cake went over HUGE with the under-five set. The grown-ups seemed to like it pretty well, too.

I’ve made this cake on purpose several times since then. Sometimes I use boxed cake mix, sometimes I start from scratch, but I always use Jello or Royal cook and serve chocolate pudding for the “mud” component. My family doesn’t require theatrics, but if they did, I would pretty this up by serving it in a clean (preferably glazed) flower pot and sticking either sugared or silk flowers in. You could make it more kid-friendly (as if it’s not enough already!) by mixing in some gummy worms and putting some candy bugs on the top. Either way, this is stupid-easy yumminess at its finest.

Edited to include this photo of Punkin’ Pie’s 11th birthday cake, complete with silk flowers and gummy worms.  The girls came to the table and didn’t know where the cake was until I pointed it out to them.  It was a HUGE hit:

Rhubarb-Pecan Bread

A few years ago, I took a graduate class titled “Literature in Early America.” The class was taught by an amiable professor who also happens to be one of the country’s leading experts in Shaker history, literature, and culture. The class covered a whole lot of other literary traditions, but that little group figured heavily into the mix.

The class was a lot of fun, not only because the professor was a lot of fun, but because he was genuinely interested in allowing us to learn in ways that made sense to us; he didn’t prescribe assignments so much as make suggestions for our investigation. For example, one of the projects he offered up was a gravestone study. We studied the art and iconography of colonial gravestones! In a LIT class! It was fantastic! I got to research on of my (adopted) ancestor’s stones in a nearby town and wrote quite convincingly that his stone was more ornate and larger than his parents’ simple carved boulders because he managed to achieve a much higher status in the community; he became a Supreme Court judge - one of the first in the colony.

But I digress…

The final project for the class was left almost entirely up to the discretion of the student, and I decided that I would study the Shakers. We have a couple of Shaker villages in New England - one of which is still a living community - and I’ve always been interested in their art and, more importantly, their cuisine. I came up with the idea to do my final project around a Shaker meal, that I would cook for my class, and relate the idea of cooking to the foundation and maintenance of family. In Shaker tradition, the group is considered a family, and that concept of relation is essential to their community and their faith. I would investigate how cooking and sharing meals together helps to create and strengthen familial bonds, and then connect all that to some poetry and songs that the Shakers hold as foundational to their faith.

My professor loved the idea (as did my classmates, who were looking forward to a home-cooked meal in class). After an introduction to Sister Frances through my professor, I was invited to spend a day in the kitchen, helping her prepare the noon meal for the family. We talked about her history in the kitchen, we talked about my children and my schooling and my plans to be a teacher (doesn’t she just look like a friendly grandma who would ask me about such things?). We baked chickens and peeled potatoes. We set the table, said prayers with the family, and ate together. We had a lovely afternoon and, when it was all over, I left with a couple of recipes and some memories that I pull out every spring around rhubarb season.

One of the recipes I was given was this one. It’s for a quick bread whose main flavors are rhubarb and pecan, and it’s fantastically yummy (and easy; remember what I said about how much I love yummy and easy?). Because good things should ALWAYS be shared, I’m sharing this - another of my favorite recipes - with you.

Rhubarb Pecan Bread

Preset your oven to 350•

1 1/2c brown sugar
1 beaten egg
2/3c vegetable oil

Combine these in a large bowl and set aside.

1t baking soda
1t vanilla
1c buttermilk
1t salt

Whisk these together in a measuring bowl.

Measure out 2 1/2 c flour and add to the sugar, egg, and oil, alternating with the milk mixture.

Stir in 1/2c chopped pecans and 1 1/2c chopped rhubarb (I usually add more rhubarb than that, but that’s just me).

Pour into greased and floured pans, sprinkle with sugar, and bake 1 hour or until the loaves test done. I tend to bake these in mini-loaf pans, so they’re portable and giftable.

(*I nailed the final assignment. I brought in Shaker fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, green beans and scallions, the rhubarb bread and a Mother Ann cake. How could I POSSIBLY get a bad grade for that?)