Let Us Eat Cake!

Let us eat cake!  Let us celebrate!

My turn to make cake........but the birthday girl gets to choose what kind.  And the winner is?  Applesauce cake with caramel frosting! Happy birthday, dear Leo....happy birthday to you!

I love making this cake for so many reasons.  First reason is the cookbook itself, a gift from Millie almost 40 years ago.

 It is what we fondly call the 'old St. John's cookbook', full of well known names past and present.  There are kitschy little quatrains and helpful household hints in the margin.The pages are stained, sticky, and yellowing at the edges. The apple cake recipes have all been sampled, except for the one with coconut, an ingredient I don't regularly have on hand.  Even though I've made many cakes from this cookbook through the years, I still have to stop and read the recipes to ensure I am getting ready to bake the right one: no to the raisins and the cake flour, yes to the cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg and cup and a half of applesauce. No to Mrs. Anna Rolf's recipe; yes to Mrs. Adolph Kemper's.

I've got a tall quart jar of homemade applesauce.  I used to cheat and throw in a whole pint jar for the 1 1/2 cup applesauce the recipe calls for just because I hated to have that little dab of sauce left in the jar. Bad idea! Better to open a quart jar and avoid a result that is more 'sauce' than 'cake'. Besides, that leaves a part of a jar for the kids to finish at lunch!

I sample this sauce...mmm, it's pretty and pink, sweet and tart simultaneously....a jar of Macintosh from the tree by my mother and father's back door. Macintosh apples are not for eating out of hand and they don't keep well as fruit, but there is no better apple for sauce...and thus for breads and cakes year 'round.  When I stir up this cake batter in my big Kitchenaid, I am mixing up the ingredients of our family's heritage. What better way to celebrate a family birthday!

As a purely practical manner, this recipe is always perfect after 30 minutes at 350 degrees.  No guesswork, no toothpick, no angst.

It is also a perfect vehicle for a batch of caramel frosting.  Another vintage recipe from a vintage cookbook, this time a Kitchen Klatter cookbook that was already a classic when I received it as a shower gift from Grandma Hurst's friend, Mabel Pursell, back in 1976.

The cover is gone, but there are two frosting recipes in this book that are nonpareil.  One is a quick fudge frosting notable for its sheen and smoothness; first step for this one is beating an egg to frothiness.  The other is the 'Elegant Caramel Frosting'.  I'd swear on a stack of cookbooks of its infallibility if I hadn't managed one time to burn it to inedibility.  But, honestly, the exception proves the rule: this is the next best thing to a homemade caramel candy minus the risk of damaged dental work.  Caramel frosting is at least half the reason to bake this cake and this recipe piles it generously on all four corners.

Finally, the interpretation of "fruit" in our family is lenient and the leeway allotted to a birthday celebrant is broad. IF, perchance, there is any  applesauce cake remaining after dessert is served, it is completely appropriate to eat it for breakfast the next day.  Carpe diem!

Another day, another birthday. Another chance to bring together past and present, to light candles and have the little ones blow them out in a gust of smoke, to dish up tradition and thanksgiving around a big table.

To eat cake.

Twelve Days of Christmas.. Spruce Style

On the first day of Christmas, the postman brought to me...

A 4# wheel of Baby Swiss Cheese....

On the second day of Christmas, my true love brought to me..

Two slabs of ribs

and a 4# wheel of Baby Swiss Cheese....

On the third day of Christmas, the FFA sent to me...

Three bricks of Cheddar

Two slabs of ribs, 

and a 4# wheel of Baby Swiss Cheese.

On the fourth day of Christmas, Chriscakes threw at me...
Four flying flapjacks...

Three chunks of cheddar,

Two slabs of ribs

 and a 4# wheel of Baby Swiss Cheese

On the fifth day of Christmas, the UPS man saved for me, 

Five wines from Napa...

Four flying flapjacks,

Three chunks of cheddar,

Two slabs from Jack Stack,

..and a 4# wheel of Baby Swiss Cheese...

I'm not going to carry this parody to its logical conclusion.  But...let there be no doubt that I could! Experimentation and tradition summed year by year yield a food pyramid of ever increasing height and girth, the limiting resource being that of time.  There are only so many days on the holiday calendar and one must needs spend one's time in pursuits other than cooking...or eating.  

Forget the sparkle of jewelry...forget red bows on luxury cars...even forget i-thises and android-thats...the most personal gift one can give is food, and whether it be homemade or handcrafted, a luxurious treat from afar, or the essence of a favorite memory, like Proust's madeleines, it is the one present that can be tailored expressly for the giftee from the gifter.

Tradition.  Tradition is the ribbon tying Christmas pasts to Christmas presents.  Tradition leads me to stock up on butter and powdered sugar for the frosted sugar cookies we will decorate after the children are out for Christmas vacation ; some of the cookies will be Christmas stars...and flowers...and moons...cut with the soft tin cookie cutters my mother used and then passed along for generations of cookie sprinklers to come.  Cookie day is a tradition eagerly awaited as much for the general gaiety and camaraderie as for the resulting sugar high.  For the sixth day of Christmas, let's sing about children a-frosting... 

I'm not a fancy baker, but what I bake, I bake often.  The winter apples in storage are still firm though beginning to wrinkle.  Vast heaps of peels fill the sink and chopped apples become loaves, each batch a pyramid unto itself: four cups of apples, three cups of flour, 2 cups of sugar, 1 cup of oil. The loaves used to line up two by two like animals in the ark...Sunday school teachers, school teachers, mailman, busdriver, choir director, neighbors, open houses.... a dozen or two stacked like bricks for a Farm Bureau hospitality room.  I can't see the bottom of the fruit crisper yet, but I will before New Year's.  Every day of our holiday song will find apple loaves a'baking.

So much sweetness, so much nostalgia, so much candy wrapped up in our Christmas.  Way back when, Santa Claus would leave Laura and me a bag of Russell Stover candy straws in our stockings every year at Grandma and Grandpa Froerer's on Greenberry Road.  Orange, yellow, green, and pink...the pink cinnamon sticks were carefully rationed and savored. Alas, Honeysuckle Straws are extinct..not even an image available on Google! At Granny's, homemade candies: sticky divinity, peanut brittle, cubes of butterscotch and chocolate fudge waited to be picked over with molasses cookies and lebkuchen. Alas! My sporadic efforts at candy making result in pans abandoned in the snow, contents fused to the steel and glass. Instead the candy dish on the dining table sparkles with shiny Snickers and peppermint puffs, dark chocolate Treasures and York Peppermint Patties in holiday red and green. The candy dish was a present from Ann and Matt soon after we moved to this house. One way I fulfill my role as grandma is to make sure this candy dish reflects the bounty of the season, just in case Josh asks if he may have a piece of candy five minutes after he comes to our house.  

On this eighth day of Christmas there's a candy dish a 'shining.

 Trips to the airport and trips to Target; anniversary celebrations and last minute props for Christmas parties and programs; all that windshield time surely earns a stop at Starbucks.  What'll be today?  Gingerbread Latte'? Peppermint Mocha? A Spicy Flat White? Or hard core caffeine with a Cranberry Bliss bar on the side?  Just three more days to go...and I've got  12 stars! Make mine a Caramel Brulee' a steamin'. 

Christmas Eve day, one of my favorites of the year. We eagerly anticipate the joy of Christmas morning.  The lights of the tree, the lights of the town warm and brighten as the culmination of Advent looms.  I have three coffeecakes to prepare for Christmas morning: a dozen eggs, 5 sticks of oleo and 40 oz. of cream cheese. The dough for each cake must be kneaded and mixed by hand, chilled for two hours, then rolled and raised on the radiator in the kitchen before it is baked.  This hands on, hands in baking is perfect for the quiet reflection appropriate to Christmas Eve. Often, these cakes are what I bake last, after the last package is wrapped and the house is quieted....Three cakes a'bakin  and two mugs of eggnog on Christmas Eve.

. 

On the last day of Christmas, the postman should bring me....

A Thank You from the 

Tarkio HyVee

Apple Lion

What a crummy year for tomatoes! This summer of 2015 has granted cool nights and drenching days: fabulous for flowers of begonias, not so conducive for blooms on tomatoes.  I bring in the harvest one handful at a time...enough to decorate either three BLTs or two iceberg wedge salads. I am disheartened when my photos from Septembers past feature buckets of juicy fruits, gold and striped, pink and scarlet.  There they are: in the garden, arrayed on the picnic table to ripen, on the countertop cored and cleaned ready to be cooked, and steaming out of the canner...meals for the cold season, just add beans or pasta. 

Well, that was then and this is now.  Thankfully, the Lord doth provide: 

9Out of the ground the LORD God

 caused to grow 

every tree that is pleasing to the sight

 and good for food; (Genesis 2:9).  

Ben with apple, circa 1987

Josh helps himself, circa 2011

If there be not tomatoes, or peppers, or other garden bounty as the calendar turns to September, we look to the trees.... where there will be apples. They may not be beautiful; they may not be bountiful.  But apples will be there for the picking....

We are apple people. I was raised on the Stark Brothers fruit tree catalog.  My grandfather tended his adopted orchard with diligence and brought fruit for tart sauce and fruit for sweet pies to my Granny; we kids pounded the tether ball he planted in the center of the orchard for our entertainment and assumed the long low hanging limbs were welcome mats to literal tree houses. 

My folks planted fruit trees on the terraced field south of their farm house.  The trees benefited from drip lines during dry spells and the careful cultivation and pruning of these meticulous growers.

 Visitors to the farm were treated to boxes of apples that exemplified the breed; regular customers called to see when their favorites would be ripe.  The litany of  Missouri apples and their place in the great march from summer to frost are markers in our family calendar: the great green Lodis, sour and saucy;  the lovely spreading Earliblaze, not much for keeping, but tart and almost crisp out of hand, first summer apple to pick and eat before they carpeted the ground. Rosy honey sweet Galas, moody and susceptible to all nature of disease, but as pretty as a blushing peach. Little Jonathans for pie. Beautiful big red and green Mackintosh for the tastiest, fruitiest, chunky applesauce.  

( A mere zephyr would drop a Mackintosh; after one fell came an avalanche.)  Ozark Golds, so versatile, perfect for lunches those first days of school and not half bad keepers for a hot weather summer apple.  Then, as the days shortened, it would be time for the All Stars of Missouri apples: the Golden Delicious, green and gold and juicy and crisp.

Lastly, the Blushing Goldens would be nestled carefully in boxes lined with newspaper and carried down into the fruit cellar to keep and use all winter.  At Christmas time, my father would fetch a box of Blushing Goldens for us to take home, their barely wrinkled skins giving notice to the concentrated sweetness underneath.  Blushing Goldens: without them, no Apple Breads for treats in January and February!

Lee and Ann and Ben learned proper apple picking etiquette: to use two hands to pick so the fruiting spur would not be damaged and to set, never drop, the apples in the basket or box. The kids were always eager to help if it meant a ride back to the shed in the wagon behind the four wheeler.  Grandpa always told them to stay in the mowed path or the Apple Lion might get them.....

I don't remember the origin of the Apple Lion; perhaps he was related to the BarkaBoos that we humans couldn't sense  but that would get the dogs all riled up.  Ann thought the Apple Lion looked like Aslan from the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, but I assumed he was a merry prankster....kind of like his creator...with the enthusiasm and bright button eyes of Tigger in Winnie-the-Pooh.  Either way, the Apple Lion proved to be elusive and invisible, as such mythical creatures can be; he was a scapegoat for all kinds of unexplained phenomena, but served to keep the kids on the mowed paths and out of the reach of ticks and other unfriendlies.....

Like an up to date version of Johnny Appleseed, my folks brought me twenty little apple trees to civilize our homestead not long after we moved to the farm.

 Over the next few years, they came up to visit us early in the spring...and to give the apple trees a professional pruning and good start in life.  These same trees are well past middle age, apple tree wise, and have fallen prey to ice and drought, disease and wind, but we still fill boxes and bushels,  flower pots and ice cream buckets with our favorite fall fruit and have enough to share with friends and family and the resident bee hives. 

 Apple bread for breakfast?  Of course!  Apple pie a' la mode?  Why not?  A Dutch apple pancake some chilly evening?  Can't wait.....