February 2011 - How Mom Did It

Popovers

I’ve been making popovers ever since I was eight years old. I found the recipe in The Children’s Friend (a magazine put out by my church for kids under age 12) and I was hooked.

They are super-easy, thrifty, fun to make and, even better, delicious!

INGREDIENTS

3 eggs

1 cup milk

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 cup flour

I am now going to tell you the top-secret, ultra hush-hush, uber-surprising tricks for making good popovers:

Get the muffin tin cold. Normally, I stick it in the refrigerator, but since it was a cold day, I put the pan on the porch. (See the snow?)
Do NOT (do not , do not, do not) pre-heat your oven! I am serious. You are going to put a cold pan into your cold oven once you are ready to bake them. There is something about doing it this way that makes the popovers puff up so prettily. You’ll see what I mean in a minute.

Beat the eggs with a wire whisk.

Add the milk to the eggs. Mix.

Add the flour and salt.

Beat everything together with the wire whisk until it is thoroughly mixed together.

Spray the cold muffin tin with a baking spray. I like Pam - both the spray and my niece.

Fill the muffin tins 1/2 full and put the pan into the cold oven. Then turn up the heat to 450 degrees. (Cold to hot. It works.)

Set your timer for 25 minutes and then try to do something else while you wait. You must do something else while you wait, because you don’t want to open the oven while they are baking or your popovers won’t pop.

THE WAITING BEGINS

“If I look at you with my big black eyes, will you give me a popover?”

“No? Really? Bummer.”

“If you give me a popover, I’ll lick my lips for you. See how good I am at it?”

“No? No? Why is it always ‘no’?

“Okay then… I’ll just go over here and sulk a little bit. I’m okay. Really. You don’t need to feel guilty or anything about how mean you are to me.”

THE EATING COMMENCES

Since we can’t open the oven to peek at the progress of our popovers, we need to resort to trying to see them through the oven door.

See that? They are popping up! Oh boy!

Yum. Drool. Heart beating quickly. They are ready now to take out of the oven!

Aren’t they gorgeous?

A word to the wise: Admire your popovers while they are in the oven, because they won’t stay puffed up like this for long.

Now you are going to murder your popovers by sticking a toothpick in them to release the steam.

I know… I was just overly dramatic, particularly since they start to deflate as soon as you take them out of the oven. But I often feel so sad at this point.

Why do they have to die? Why? Why? WHY?

Because poking them with a toothpick turns them into the cutest little cups and that’s a good thing, Martha Stewart.

They are perfect with homemade, fresh peach freezer jam.

See how frosty the jar is? That’s because I had just barely taken it out of the freezer. I popped it into the microwave for about 30 seconds to get it loosened up enough to eat it.

Oh my…I do love a good, fresh-fruit jam. Nothing like it anywhere.

I’ll teach you how to make it next summer, once the peaches in our orchard get ripe.

Popovers with jam. See how they settle down into the cutest little cups, just perfect for putting jam or honey in them? And they are so light! I could eat half of a pan in one sitting.

But I won’t.

Because I shouldn’t.

Although, I have.

Filed Under: Breakfast, Misc Breads

Key Lime Pie

posted by KellyC 13 Comments

I’m going to let you in on a secret now…It may surprise you, so hold onto your chair.

I like Key Lime Pie – or Key Lime anything – better than chocolate. Better than Oreos. Better than ice cream. Better than the beach.

Well, maybe not the beach, but I do like it a lot. Key Lime Pie is almost always my dessert choice when I eat at restaurants.

Because I am such a Key Lime Pie fool, I have searched for years to find an easy recipe that tastes as good as the first piece I ever had. (The first piece of anything is always the best…)

Hurrah! I think I’ve found it and here it is!

INGREDIENTS

Single-Crust pie shell
3 egg yolks
1 14-ounce can sweetened condensed milk
1 teaspoon of key lime zest
1/2 cup water
1/3 cup lime juice

Prepare pastry shell by lining a 9 inch pie pan. You can either make your own homemade pie shell (use my Perfect Pie Crust recipe) or you can do what I did on this particular occasion – use a frozen pie shell.

HOW TO MAKE KEY LIME PIE

Beat three egg yolks. (No, they aren’t beaten yet. But they will be. Just wait.)

Now it’s time for the sweetened condensed milk. You can either use the well-known brand name (which I won’t mention here) or another kind. I always go for the thriftiest solution.

The pie doesn’t care.

Gradually stir the sweetened condensed milk into the beaten eggs.

Add the lime zest. Mix well. (By the way… see my zester? Best purchase I ever made. I use it all of the time.)

Now it’s time for the limes. Can’t make a Key Lime Pie without them, right?

What is a key lime, you ask? They are little round limes that come from Florida. When you buy them in the store, the bag is labeled Key Lime. They have a slightly different flavor than “regular” limes, but in our part of the world, we don’t see them much. So if I don’t have them, I use regular limes and the pie is still good. But key limes do taste better, in my humble opinion.

Now comes the hard part – juicing all of those hard, little limes…

First, I tried to extract the juice using my normal juicer. That was a big bust, because the limes are so little they slipped off of the top. So I had to resort to squeezing them by hand – one measly little lime at a time. Because key limes are so tiny, it took the entire bag to get enough lime juice.

Well. Actually. No. I just lied. I didn’t get quite enough juice out of this big pile of limes, so I had to squeeze in a little bit of lemon into it.

But no worries… the pie was awesome. Apparently, limes and lemons are not against sharing a pie pan.

You’ve already got the lime juice in the mixer, right? Good. Now add the water.

Mix until thickened. Notice that the filling isn’t green. If you want your pie to be green, you’ll need to add a couple of drops of green food coloring at this point.

I chose to leave mine au naturale.

Pour the filing into the pie shell. Bake at 325 degrees for 30 minutes.

Smack your lips when you take the pie out of the oven. That’s all you are allowed to do at this point, because you HAVE to MAKE yourself let the pie cool down before you eat it.

Resist.

Do not lick the pie.

Not yet.

Okay! We’re finally ready to dig in! Serve your pie with whipped cream. Try not to cry when you taste how delicious it is. Attempt to refrain from carrying the pie, along with a fork, into the closet so that you can pig out on Key Lime Pie goodness.

Your family will thank you for your generosity.

Filed Under: Pies

Fruit Cocktail Cake

posted by KellyC 19 Comments

This quick, uber-rich Fruit Cocktail Cake is one of Gary’s favorites. I’ve made it for him more times than I can count.

You will need…

1 can of fruit cocktail
1 cup of sugar
1 cup of flour
1 egg
1 teaspoon of baking soda
1 cup of chopped nuts (optional)
Brown sugar

Lightly beat the egg with a fork.

Pour all of the ingredients, except the brown sugar and the nuts, into a bowl.

Stir together. Pour into an 8×8 cake pan.

(Sorry, I forgot to take a picture the batter in the pan. But you don’t need it, right? Of course, you don’t!)

Pour the brown sugar and nuts into a bowl. This time I used chopped pecans.

If I don’t have nuts in the house , I leave them out. Fruit Cocktail Cake is good without them.

By the way… this recipe calls for 3/4 cup of brown sugar. When I made it this time, I forgot that over the years, I’ve cut down on the amount of sugar I use – a lot – because using this makes this larger amount makes the cake seem overly sweet to me.

Mix the brown sugar and nuts together.

Does this look like a lot of brown sugar? It is.

Sprinkle the brown sugar mixture on top of the cake batter.

See the top part of the pan – the part in which the topping is sparse? That’s about the amount I usually add.

This is what the cake looks like if you use all of the brown sugar. If you love brown sugar, you will love this.

Bake at 350 degrees for 35 minutes. If you don’t use so much brown sugar, it isn’t quite as gooey.

But don’t get me wrong… the cake is great as it is. It’s just that I prefer it a little less rich. (Things that are too rich tend to make my teeth hurt a little because they go into sugar shock!)

Serve with whipped cream, Cool Whip, or vanilla ice cream, if you’d like. As you can see, Fruit Cocktail Cake is super moist, ooey-gooey, and oh, so good!

(Despite the large amount of brown sugar, I ate multiple pieces of cake. It was a sacrifice I had to make for the good of mankind.)