My Grandma Anna was a fine lady, resilient, and a strong culinary influence.
– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef, Ph.D.
My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.
Swedish Dessert
INGREDIENTS
1 cup (2 sticks) butter*
⅔ cup sugar
3 egg yolks
2½ cups flour
1 tsp almond extract (optional)
SPECIAL UTENSILS
electric beater**
cookie gun, aka cookie press
2 cookie pans
* = This was also made with NucoaTM. It’s hard to imagine how fiercely devoted some people were to this margarine.
** = Grandma didn’t use an electric beater. She used a hand-held one. However, those beaters are mighty hard to find these days.
Makes 80 cookies. Takes 50 minutes.
PREPARATION
Preheat oven to 360 degrees. Add butter to large mixing bowl. Use beater set on high until butter is light and fluffy. Add sugar. Mix with beater until butter and sugar are well blended. Add 1 egg yolk at a time, blending each instance. Gradually add flour, mixing all the time. Add almond extract, if desired, and mix briefly with electric beater.
Grease cookie pan lightly with paper from butter. Choose a disk for the cookie gun. Add dough to cookie gun. (Follow instructions that come with cookie gun.) Use cookie gun to press out dough onto cookie pan. Be creative. Make whatever shape you want. (My grandma favored the letter s.) Bake at 360 degrees for 10 minutes or until cookies start to brown. You might have to cook in batches. Gently remove cookies from cookie pans using fork. Gently, gently, as some cookie shapes crumble easier than others.
TIDBITS
1) Why are there so many towns in the western America named after Sweden? Culinary historians hold it is because of the wondrously sturdy wheels the immigrant Swedes used in their covered wagons. While others used wooden spokes in their wagon wheels, the Swedes made theirs from spritz cookie dough. Egg yolks were much stronger back then, making for more durable spokes than ones made from wood. Indeed, chickens were buffer in the 1800s, being able to bench press a 200-pound man.
– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef
My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.
Mexican Dessert
TRES LECHES
INGREDIENTS
1 tablespoon cake flour (1 ½ cups more later)
1 tablespoon softened unsalted butter (½ cup more later)
½ cup softened unsalted butter
3/4 cup sugar (½ cup more later)
5 eggs
1 ½ cups cake flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon vanilla extract (1 teaspoon more later)
1 3/4 cups whole milk
1 14 ounce can sweetened condensed milk
1 12 ounce can evaporated milk
1 3/4 cups heavy whipping cream
½ cup sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
SPECIAL UTENSIL
9″ x 13″ baking pan
electric beater
PREPARATION
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Use 1 tablespoon butter and 1 tablespoon cake flour to grease and dust baking pan. Add butter and 3/4 cup sugar to first large mixing bowl. Mix butter and sugar together, using cake or medium setting on electric beater, until butter and sugar become fluffy. Add eggs and 1 teaspoon vanilla extract. Blend again. Add 1/3 of the baking powder and the 1 ½ cups flour at a time to batter. Use blender set on cake after each addition.
Pour batter into baking pan. Bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes. Let cake cool for 30 minutes. Poke cake several times with fork, skewer, or ninja knife. While cake cools, add whole milk, condensed milk, and evaporated milk to second large mixing bowl. (Also clean mixing bowls. As my Grandma Anna use to say, “The outstanding chef’s kitchen is perfectly clean when the dish is served.”) Mix the three milks together with whisk or with electric beater set on fold or low. Pour combined milks evenly on top of cake. Refrigerate cake for 1 hour.
Add whipping cream, ½ cup sugar, and 1 teaspoon vanilla extract to recently cleaned ☺ mixing bowl. Mix with electric beater set on whip or high until topping is thick. Pour topping over cake. Keep tres leches cake refrigerated until ready to serve.
TIDBITS
1) Doesn’t evaporated milk sound as if there should be no milk left? Well, because it’s all evaporated milk.
2) Condensed milk also seems like it should be hard to make. If you were to try condensing a cartoon of milk with, say, a sledgehammer, you’d most likely get milk flying all over the kitchen.
3) Then you’d have to clean up all that milk from the walls.
4) And goodness sakes, you’d be in big trouble if you shattered your sweetheart’s Ming Dynasty Vase on your back swing with that sledgehammer.
5) Best leave condensing milk to the condensed-milk manufacturers. Let them work their magic.
6) But you can safely smoosh a marshmallow bunny with your thumb and index finger.
7) Doing so will give a marshmallow figure that looks like that North Korean dictator, Kim Something.
8) The dour dictator doesn’t have a sense of humor. Maybe we can destabilize his regime by posting Kim marshmallow bunny pictures all over the internet. Maybe we can shake his authority to the point where he flees his country and a democracy takes his place.
10) We will all share in a Nobel Peace Prize.
11) Posting marshmallow bunny pictures can bring down Kim’s Stalinist regime. Remember the power of culinary politics. After all, it was Queen Marie Antoinette’s remark of, “Let them eat cake,” to the starving mobs of Paris that started the French Revolution.
– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef
My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.
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