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Family recipe for classic white frosting

This is my Grandma Piper’s classic white frosting recipe that she always used on the family recipe for white layer cake. Her notes: “This frosting is super. It never hardens on the cake. BUT, it is only enough for sides and top. So must use a filling.” I just doubled it for B’s birthday cake and there was plenty left over.

I’d never heard of a frosting with a flour and milk base before so looked it up online. Apparently this is “ermine” frosting. I was sort of skeptical, but it is really, really nice. It’s not quite as sweet as a standard buttercream, and Grandma Piper is right. It stays so fluffy, it’s kind of crazy. It was super easy to spread even after it had been in the fridge (after it had come to room temp, of course).

***

Double the quantities if using it for the top, sides, and inside of this white layer cake recipe.

  1. In a saucepan, combine 5 T all purpose flour and 1 c (225 mL) milk, and cook until very thick. Whisk constantly! If you manage to avoid lumps, you won’t have to push it through a sieve later. Put it aside and let it cool completely.
  2. In a KitchenAid mixer or a large bowl with hand beaters, cream together 1 c (227 g) unsalted butter, 1 c (125 g) powdered sugar, and 1 t vanilla until white and fluffy.
  3. Add the 100% cooled milk mixture to the butter mixture and beat them together for around 10 minutes. At the end, the frosting should be lump-free and the consistency of thick whipped cream.
  4. If you still have lumps, push the frosting through a fine mesh sieve to get the majority out.
  5. Store in an airtight container in the fridge until ready to use.

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Family recipe for white layer cake 🎂

Context

This recipe was in the cookbook that my Grandma Piper customized for me. This is apparently the cake that the Piper family always made for weddings (so my great-grandma’s recipe on my Grandpa’s side, I think), and my Grandma made it for birthday parties. I made this for the first time last week for B’s birthday party on the weekend.

It results in an exceptionally smooth batter, it almost feels a bit too fancy for a kid’s party. But it’s a lovely cake! It also stored well double-wrapped in the fridge for a few days before I iced it. I haven’t tried freezing this cake, but I think it would probably work nicely.

Grandma would have always used her KitchenAid, but it was no problem making this with handheld electric beaters. Her recipe didn’t specify salted or unsalted butter. I used salted and quite liked it. Likewise it didn’t specify the sugar. I’m almost certain she would have used granulated, but I used caster which worked fabulously. If you use caster, just make sure to go with the weight measurement, not cups.

Apparently this recipe makes 3 dozen cupcakes and you have to bake those for 25 minutes. But I’ve never tried it, and there is no more instruction from her on that.

Goes well with this classic white frosting recipe.

  1. Preheat the oven to 325F (165C).
  2. In a KitchenAid, or in a large bowl using electric hand beaters, cream together ⅔ c (150 g) butter and 2 c (400 g) granulated sugar until very smooth. Add 1 tsp vanilla extract and beat until smooth.
  3. In a separate bowl, sift together 3 c (360 g) cake flour and 1 tbsp baking powder.
  4. With the mixer on low, add the flour mixture in to the butter mixture alternating with 1½ c milk, blending after each addition. Do not overbeat.
  5. Butter and flour two eight-inch cake pans.
  6. In a separate bowl, beat together 4 egg whites until stiff but moist. Make sure that the beaters and bowl are very clean, any fat will prevent the egg whites from frothing up nicely.
  7. Fold the beaten egg whites in to the rest of the batter using a large metal spoon.
  8. Pour in equal parts in to your two prepared layer pans. Then bake at 325F (165C) for 10 minutes, and 25 minutes at 350F (175C).
  9. When done*, remove from the oven and let cool in their tins for about 10 minutes. Turn the layers out on to a cooling rack, and let cool completely before icing the layers or double-wrapping in cling film to refrigerate or freeze them. If storing, try to store them side-by-side to preserve height.

* This cake is sort of hard to tell when it’s done. When done, it will have picked up a little bit of color on top and should pull away from the sides of the pan slightly. If you listen to it you shouldn’t hear much crackling, and if you very lightly press the top, it shouldn’t feel like you pop too many bubbles.

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Grandma Piper’s Cheesecake recipe(s)

My grandma’s cheesecake is truly the best around in my opinion, and it has been a huge hit on the extremely rare occasions I have made it for friends.

It is a little involved to make, you really need to follow the instructions and ingredients quite carefully in order for this to come out right. It takes about a whole afternoon and it’s best to let it chill in the fridge overnight, but it’s very worth it. Also worth the lactase pill, in my case. Can be made 1–2 days ahead of time.

I’ve included variations on the original recipe below because she included these variations in the cookbook she gave me. I’ve never made them myself though, not yet!

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Grandma Piper’s Strawberry Shortcake 🍓 recipe

This is a re-written version of my grandma’s recipe. I inhaled this as a kid.

It’s basically a really massive “drop” biscuit that you then slice in to portions and drown in strawberries + milk. It is one of the quickest and easiest things to make, a must between May and June.

You can use oat milk instead, just try to use something as similar to whole milk in consistency as you can find. The smaller the strawberries, the sweeter they are. A sturdy straw works fantastically as a strawberry core-er.

Also, you can make this ahead of time, but it’s really best enjoyed the same day you make it. The crispy bits of the cake go a little soft after the first day, and the strawberries, while still delicious, start to look a little sad and anemic. It’ll still taste good, but I recommend re-warming a slice of cake if you’re having it the next day or so.

One final thought: This makes quite a lot of cake + strawberries… Might be worth halving this recipe if you’re not serving many people.

As my grandma wrote in her recipe book (she was confident about this recipe, and she wasn’t often wrong): “MMMM good!”

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Grandma Piper’s Ice Cream Cake 🍦 recipe

I think you could do a ton of great variations on this recipe. Like a crushed gingersnap base with chocolate ice cream and butterscotch chips instead of chocolate chips. Or a Biscoff cookie base with coffee ice cream. Or a graham cracker base with quality, real vanilla ice cream.

But below is Grandma Piper’s original recipe, with some notes from my friend Sarajane Blair. Grandma preferred mint chocolate chip.

This is super simple but takes a lot of freezing, so plan to make it at least a day in advance. It’s easiest if you give it a few days and do most of the freezer time overnight.

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How to make around 40 applesauce and oatmeal mini-muffins with a 1½-year-old

Ingredients
  • 1¼ c (112 g) rolled oats
  • 1¼ c (250 g) unsweetened apple sauce
  • ¼ c (50 g) sugar
  • ½ c (118 mL) milk (oat milk works too)
  • 4 T coconut oil (melted butter works too)
  • 1 t vanilla extract
  • 1 large egg
  • 1 c (130 g) whole wheat flour
  • 1 t baking powder
  • ¾ t baking soda
  • 1 t ground cinnamon
  • ¼ t salt
  • ½ c (80 g) raisins or sultanas
Equipment
  • Cooking spray or room-temp butter for greasing the muffin trays
  • Two 24-count non-stick mini-muffin trays
  • Scales or a measuring cup set
  • Measuring spoon set
  • Liquid measurement jug
  • Medium mixing bowl
  • Large mixing bowl
  • Fork
  • Spoon
  • Spatula
  • Learning tower or a sturdy step-stool for the kid to stand on
  • Aprons, ideally

Preheat the oven to 375F (190C).

While the 1½-year-old is playing with their toddler-sized soccer ball at your feet, take all of the ingredients and equipment out of the cupboards and grease the mini-muffin trays. To get started, pour the oats in to a medium sized bowl and pour the “dry” ingredients (flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt) in a bigger bowl.

Let the kid climb up on to the learning tower platform, and immediately recognize that starting with the oats was a mistake because they love oats. Try to prevent them from shoveling dry oats in to their mouth by giving them a spoon to stir with, and then realize that just compounds that mistake since they’ve recently learned how to use a spoon at dinnertime.

Switch the spoon out for your grandma’s 100% flat spatula to confuse and confound them (“…what on earth is this?”) while you measure out and pour the applesauce in to the oats. Let them lick the applesauce spoon, making them doubly excited about the mixture in the medium bowl. Remember almost too late that their Nana recently gave them a very cute apron, and manage to pull that over their head right before a glob of oats and applesauce dribbles off their chin.

Measure out and add the sugar to the oats-applesauce bowl. (That bowl is only becoming more and more exciting to the kid.). Then measure out the milk in to the jug and pour that in. Mix it up a bit to distribute the chill of the milk — because you learned last time that if you throw melted coconut oil directly on top of cold milk, it congeals in to one big lump — and then measure and add the coconut oil.

You could add the vanilla now, or you could forget it entirely because you hid the little bottle behind the fruit bowl away from cute grabby hands.

Add the egg last (adding it last means less likelihood of raw egg making its way into their mouth), then stir the oat mixture together thoroughly. Put the bowl aside, well out of reach.

Open up the raisins and put a handful on the counter to distract the kid. Fluff the dry ingredients in the big bowl together with a fork, and then pour in a half cup of raisins.

Pour the wet ingredients in to the dry ingredients while the kid absolutely houses the rest of the raisins, and then mix it all together with the spatula until combined.

Using the spoon you abandoned earlier, fill as many of the mini-muffin cups as you can. You want them each to be almost full, maybe seven-eighths of the way there. If you have any empty cups, use the kettle that’s always sitting on the stove to pour a little bit of water in them. You do this because someone once told you it protects the tray, but you have no idea if that’s actually true.

Part way through filling the cups, get the kid down from the learning tower because they’re bored and have spotted their ball again. Try to avoid having them step in the spilled oats and flour because it will stick to their feet and track throughout the apartment. Finish up the filling, then put the trays in the oven and bake at 375F for 15 minutes. Remember as soon as you’ve put the trays in that you always mean to put them on a baking sheet since it’s easier to take them out that way, and make a mental note (again) to do it next time.

When they’re done, let them cool momentarily in the tins to “loosen up” and then remove them to a wire rack to cool completely. Accidentally forget that the kid really loves muffins (why else would you be making them in the first place?) and belatedly realize that you’ve left an actual mountain of one of their favorite things out in plain sight. Blow on one frantically while the kid shouts “MUH-IN!” until it’s cool enough to eat.

Let the rest cool completely before storing them in a gallon-sized Ziplock bag in the freezer. I can’t say how long they keep, since we never keep them all that long.

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What a cake

EL and KT came over for dinner last weekend and brought cake. WHAT A CAKE.

It was a chocolate coffee crunch cake. I asked EL, basically it’s this chocolate cake with coffee whipped cream and honeycomb as per this Serious Eats recipe.

It was insanely good. Super decadent, but also somehow very light. Just the perfect texture.

The cake itself kind of reminded me of a cake from a long time ago, so I dug out my grandma’s recipe book again. Turns out my great-aunt’s Texas Sheet Cake recipe (jump to recipe, though I recommend reading the critical notes first) is pretty similar in a lot of ways. Most of the measurements are the same, and both are pretty much one-bowl recipes that call for boiling water.

I haven’t made it recently, but it seems to me that it might be a bit denser / richer than the cake recipe linked above since it has more fat and less milk (1 c butter and ½ c buttermilk in the sheet cake versus ½ c oil and 1 c buttermilk/milk in the layer cake). A denser texture would make sense I suppose for a single-layer cake.

I think the recipe above makes more sense for a layer cake, but I’ll write my great-aunt’s recipe out below since the many-times-Xeroxed version in my grandma’s cookbook is almost unreadable and since it might be worth trying this out with the coffee whipped cream + honeycomb topping.

A few critical notes about the sheet cake recipe:

  • The most notable differences between the sheet cake below and the layer cake linked above is the quantity of cocoa (3 T = ⅛ c in the sheet cake versus ¾ c in the layer cake) and the presence of espresso powder (none in the sheet cake versus 1 t in the layer cake). I suspect it would benefit from a stronger chocolate kick… So maybe it would be worth adding more cocoa powder.
  • I’ve added the metric measurements below by using the Traditional Oven converters online. They’ve never failed me yet, but I should say that I haven’t tried these exact metric measurements so can’t vouch for them. If you want Marie’s original version, go with cups.
  • I’ve written the “preparation” section more or less exactly as my great-aunt wrote it. I do actually think it could be simplified though, probably more along the lines of the recipe that EL shared and linked above where you essentially mix all of the dry ingredients + sugar, then beat in the wet ingredients, then carefully beat in boiling water. But I haven’t tried it myself!
  • This recipe calls for buttermilk, whereas the layer cake recipe linked above calls for whatever milk you have on hand. I have a feeling that you really do need to use buttermilk or faux buttermilk (milk + lemon juice or vinegar) for this recipe to work since it only calls for 1 t of baking soda. If you don’t have buttermilk or can’t make faux buttermilk, I’d probably add some baking powder.
  • This recipe doesn’t call for salt, I think because she assumed you were using salted butter. If using unsalted butter, add ½ t salt as well.

Texas Sheet Cake

Marie Longman

Ingredients

  • 2 c (400 g) sugar
  • 2 c (250 g) flour
  • 2 sticks (1 c, 226 g) butter
  • 3 T (⅛ c, 15 g) cocoa powder
  • 1 c (235 ml) water
  • ½ c (118 ml) buttermilk*
  • 2 large eggs
  • 1 t baking soda
  • 1 t cinnamon
  • 1 t vanilla

Preparation

  1. Oil and flour a 15″×10″×1″ jelly roll pan, and preheat the oven to 350F (175C).
  2. In a large mixing bowl, briefly stir together 2 c sugar and 2 c flour.
  3. In a small pot, bring 2 sticks (1 c) butter, 3 T cocoa powder, and 1 c water to a boil, then pour it over the flour and sugar mixture.
  4. Add ½ c buttermilk, 2 eggs, 1 t baking soda, 1 t cinnamon, and 1 t vanilla to the bowl with the other ingredients, then beat everything together just until smooth.
  5. Spread the batter in to your prepared jelly roll pan, then bake for 17-20 minutes at 350F (175C) until a toothpick inserted in to the center comes out clean.
  6. Let cool completely, and then top with the frosting of your choice.

* To make ½ c buttermilk, pour ½ T of lemon juice, distilled white vinegar, or cider vinegar in to a ½ c measurement and then top it up the rest of the way with the milk of your choice. Actual dairy products will curdle when they hit the acid, which is what you want.

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Three sherry-and-rum-based cocktails

Leaned hard in to sherry and rum this holiday season. These are a few cocktails I enjoyed the most.

Three are sherry-and-rum based: the Flor de Jerez, Shaken Egg Nog, and the Kingston Sheroni. I use the same Amontillado sherry and dark rum for all of them. Our “bar” area is not large, so economy is the name of the game.

I also included one other cocktail: the Unequal Negroni. Not rum or sherry-based, but we made it a bunch over the holidays so I wanted to write it down here for posterity.

The Flor de Jerez and Shaken Egg Nog are particularly useful holiday cocktails because they aren’t as strong as many others. Nice towards the end of a perhaps heavy-on-the-drink day when you’d like to still partake but not get in over your head.

Both of the above cocktails call for “rich sugar syrup”. To make this, combine 2 parts sugar with 1 part water. Heat until dissolved, then store in the fridge.

For the alcohols, don’t go for the cheapest you can find… it just isn’t as nice, I promise. You’ll try it and think, “This is ok but not great, what’s the point?” You don’t need to get top-shelf stuff, just maybe go for something other than Bacardi Black, you know?

If you aren’t sure which rum to go for, feel free to use your favorite search engine. OR, much better yet, peruse therumhowlerblog.com. Talk about dedication, you love to see it. FWIW, I’m currently using Diplomático Reserva Exclusiva since that was called for in the original Egg Nog recipe I tried. It’s perhaps a bit sweeter than many other rums, so maybe keep that in mind.

In terms of glassware, I’d love to have a bunch of fancy coupes and stuff, but don’t have the space. We use the the 20cl (6¾ oz) Duralex Picardie glasses for pretty much all cocktails. And water, and wine, and so on. So although I mention a coupe glass for the Flor de Jerez since that’s what is called for, know that I actually sling it in a more standard little cup and it still tastes great.

Flor de Jerez

Makes one 3½ oz drink.

  • 1½ oz Amontillado sherry
  • ¾ oz lemon juice
  • ½ oz dark rum
  • ½ oz rich sugar syrup
  • ¼ oz apricot liquor*
  • 1 dash Angostura bitters
  • Lemon twist garnish

Combine all in a shaker with ice, and shake until very cold (about 15 seconds). Strain in to a chilled coupe and garnish with a lemon twist.

* I use Cointreau instead… I just always have it in for margaritas and have never got round to buying the apricot stuff! Though I’m sure it’s nice.

Shaken Egg Nog

This isn’t the real deal! But I prefer it, it isn’t as gloopy and it’s not a faff. Note: Do not make this unless you have whole nutmeg. It really isn’t the same with the pre-powdered stuff.

This is *heavily* inspired by Anders Erickson’s Egg Nog, just slightly different ratios. His recipe makes one 7 oz drink, which is just slightly more than I personally want for an Egg Nog serving and is a bit too big for our glasses. It’s also a bit eggier, which is not necessarily a bad thing but is not always what I want. I highly recommend trying his Egg Nog, and you should watch his YouTube channel if you’re interested in cocktails in general.

You don’t have to, but I *highly* recommend the extra step of double-straining this thing. You don’t want an errant snotty egg streak sneaking its way in to the glass…

Makes two 6 oz drinks.

  • 3 oz cream or non-dairy creamer*
  • 2½ oz dark rum
  • 1½ oz rich sugar syrup
  • ¾ oz Amontillado sherry
  • 1 large egg **
  • Whole nutmeg, grated garnish

Combine all of the wet ingredients in a shaker, and shake for about 20 seconds until very frothy. Add ice, then shake until cold for about 10 seconds. Double-strain into a chilled glass, then grate a whole nutmeg over the top.

* I quite like Oatly Barista for this.

** You could probably use aquafaba (chickpea water) instead. I haven’t tried it! But I imagine it would work alright. Just make sure it’s not salted. One large egg = roughly 2 fluid oz. Maybe try 1½ oz aquafaba and see if that works.

Kingston Sheroni

So the Kingston Negroni is a thing (equal parts overproof Jamaican rum, Campari, and sweet vermouth). And the Sheroni seems to be a thing (equal parts gin, Aperol, Amontillado sherry, and sweet vermouth). This is kind of a combination of the two? IDK, I tried it and like it.

Amontillado sherry is a bit less sweet than sweet vermouth generally. And likewise, dark rum is more sweet than overproof rum. Combining the two and omitting the sweet vermouth seems to balance things out a bit IMO.

Used a lemon twist instead of orange because this drink is slightly sweeter than a normal Negroni, and I like the more piercing scent of the lemon peel against that sweetness.

Makes one 3 oz drink.

  • 1 oz dark Jamaican rum
  • 1 oz Campari
  • 1 oz Amontillado sherry
  • Lemon twist garnish

Combine all in a tumbler with ice and stir until very cold, about 30 seconds. Strain into a chilled glass with fresh ice, and garnish with a lemon twist.

Unequal Negroni

I *know* that Negronis are supposed to be equal parts. But it always seems too syrupy to me. Hey, to each their own.

Makes one 3¼ oz drink.

  • 1½ oz gin
  • 1 oz sweet vermouth
  • ¾ oz Campari
  • Orange twist garnish

Combine all in a tumbler with ice and stir until very cold, about 30 seconds. Strain into a chilled glass with fresh ice, and garnish with an orange twist.

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Thanksgiving 2022 notes

Thanksgiving this year was verrrrry small. We had a few options to celebrate with friends / family, but ended up just sticking to the three of us at home. I’ve been sick for almost two weeks now and was not about to give this to someone else. 💀 Plus that meant we could move it to Friday, which was helpful since I was at least feeling a little better at that point.

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