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Welcome, October! People are already handing out free candy, and won’t stop until next year. And hey, why not? Bikinis are at least nine months away (assuming it stops snowing before May gets here), nothing’s in season except squash, and it’s cold—if we can get the kitchen toasty, hopefully some of the heat will drift into the living room and combat the chill emanating from the ill-conceived window door.

What I’m saying is, “It’s time to start baking again.”

I think the Worcester County Homemakers would agree, so I consulted their 1961 tome.

homemakers do it...at home

As per usual, I have an opinion.

I heart Worcester

It’s true: I do so heart Worcester. I’m just so-so on Abraham Lincoln, whose upper torso I found a bit out of place, but a mere moment of googling uncovered a visit to Worcester on September 12, 1848, earning him permanent fixture in the minds of Worcester housewives, even a hundred years later.

Amid such white trash classics as “Clamburgers” and “Baked Stuffed [with onions, carrots, shortening, day old bread, and evaporated milk] Hot Dogs” I came upon a most enchanting proposal.

butterscotch-pecan biscuits

Butterscotch! Pecans!! Biscuits!!! Awww, and I bet they’re gonna be so goddamn cute too! Let’s do it. I drag out this clumsy atrocity for its sole function.

butterscotch-pecan biscuits

I love biscuits, but usually have to resign myself to drop biscuits because I hate kneading, likely because I suck at it. These, however, were extremely manageable, and are my new favorite thing to whip up for no reason.

circle circle

The biscuits are going just inside muffin pan cups, so scrounge about for whatever cylinder you have about that’s closest to the right size. In this case, I used this promotional wine glass that came free with the only wine tasting I’ve ever attended.

Inelegant uses for elegant items.

Get a little mis en place going strong…

polka dot dot dot

Now I did follow the recipe for this part. This time. Next time I will not be mixing the butter with the brown sugar because as I quickly discovered it doesn’t exactly make a suspension, and the levels in each cup were . . . variable. But then Math told me the good news: it works out to 2 tsp of melted butter and 2 tsp brown sugar in each cup, making the next part easy.

Just before starting on the dough, set the oven to 425o, cut 2 tsp (2/3 tbsp) into each cup and put it in the oven for a little bit. Keep an eye on that, you want the butter just melted and not sizzling. Once your biscuits are cut and ready, measure a solid 2 tsp of brown sugar into each cup and stir. I like using chopsticks for these kinds of things, and they’re also easy to clean/store.

I also discovered only 38 solid pecan halves after dropping $5, so instead of 5 in each cup, I settled for 3, which arrange much more nicely than I imagine 5 might.

almost like little abstract plants

Set biscuits atop each cup and bake for fit-teen minutes.

putting the bisc in biscuit

Now because I stopped to snap that, I really missed out on some delicious butterscotch that cooled onto the pan [that I later scraped out for a midnight snack], so unless you’re f’blogging, pop them out toute de suite. I promise they will not be as syrupy as you expect, but a little bit of parchment will go a long way just in case.

Such brass!

And then eat them. Eat them as soon as they will let you.

and now they're arrows.

Butterscotch-Pecan Biscuits
adapted from Worcester County Homemakers Cook Book (1961, Home Department Advisory Council, Worcester County Extension Service, Worcester, Mass.)

1 stick butter, sliced into 2 tsp (2/3 tbsp) bits
2 cups flour (248g)
1 tbsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1/3 c cold chopped butter (5 1/3 tbsp)
3/4 c milk
1/2 c packed brown sugar (50g)
36 whole pecan halves (1 c)

Drop 2 tsp butter in each cup of a muffin pan and put into oven as it preheats to 425o. Keep checking as you work on the biscuits, and pull out as soon as it is *just* barely melted; do not let it bubble.

Squizzle flour, baking powder and salt in food processor real quick in lieu of the traditional sifting. If traditional, poor, cheap or have a tiny kitchen, sift into bowl. Cut/pulse in the 1/3 c butter, and once you have coarse pebbles, add milk, work into a ball, and turn onto a floured board. Knead 10-12 times, roll out and cut 12 circles-cum-biscuits (see wine glass notes above).

Your butter should be melted by now, so measure 2 tsp brown sugar into each cup and stir with a chopstick. Plop a biscuit atop each cup, bake 15 minutes.

Flip onto a cutting board covered with parchment immediately upon removal from the oven. Let cool and just try to resist.

cairn.

Feb-7-2010

erinire comes over to play

Posted by aleta under pure photography

They say you should be close to your wedding photographer, know their kids’ names, address them by their first name. Sadly, given that you are likely to only spend a couple hours with your photographer, the majority of which time will be all business, this is rarely what happens. Couple this with a destination wedding in Mexico, where I don’t even remotely trust that I’ll ever see my (expensive) photos ever again, and an all-around distrust of anyone’s ability to capture interesting artistic shots, and selecting a wedding photographer can generate copious amounts of relatively unnecessary anxiety.

Enter Erin. Here is a woman who is not only charming and beautiful, but that bitch can take photos with her iPhone that rival those of my D80. I mean, big time awesomeness with respect to portraiture. They say food photography is extremely difficult, but I don’t believe them. Food photos are extremely controlled, no movement, you can leave as long an exposure you need, tripods aplenty…I just think it’s so much easier than capturing movement.

Erin’s background is in film (and she was totally the first friend I’ve had with an imdb entry, how frickin rad is that?!), so she certainly knows how to frame a shot. Except she didn’t know how to use a real camera. Which sounds really risky, but we went with it. So now she has my beloved D80 and my favourite 50mm lens, and has been cavorting about the country and Boston with it, snapping everything. EVERYTHING. And then she comes to my house and photographs me cooking, which takes a lot of the pressure off creating a post (bee-tee-dubs, new post this week featuring her photos). And I also have someone to help me in my Etsy photography.

Anyway, I’m pretty happy with these shots, they convey…some kind of quaintness that I don’t often bring across, but is rather inherent to my personality. Thought I’d share our sunny Sunday morning vintage-inspired photo shoot.

First I made some coffee with a disappointingly modern grind-and-brew.

Sunny Sunday Morning Vanity

Employed the gorgeous new 50s pinecone carafe.
Sunny Sunday Morning Vanity

Grabbed some milk and cream.
Sunny Sunday Morning Vanity

Oh yeah, and Patrick was there! I almost forgot!
Sunny Sunday Morning Vanity

So I modeled an apron for him.
Sunny Sunday Morning Vanity

…but only after selecting the ideal manual mixer as a prop with the most pin-up face I think I’m capable of.
Sunny Sunday Morning Vanity

Sunny Sunday Morning Vanity

We discussed the hand mixer at length.
Sunny Sunday Morning Vanity

Sunny Sunday Morning Vanity

He gave it a shot and agreed that it has a very pleasing sensation when you cranked it. I was all like “Right dude? Seriously!”
Sunny Sunday Morning Vanity

I was satisfied with my selection.
Sunny Sunday Morning Vanity

Add gratuitous vintage masturbation.
Sunny Sunday Morning Vanity

That lovely lady there is myself, with makeup (shockingly), in an early 50s party dress, pastel crinoline, peeptoe shoes, rickrack-trimmed pink apron, luscious lips and a rarely large Pyrex bowl in turquoise Butterprint…I’m actually amazed at how consistently I managed to keep my era. We call that era control around here.

So no point I guess other than if you happen to be having a wedding in the New England area within a couple hours of Boston, Erin would be thrilled to backup photograph for free to get a little bit of experience. She really does love nothing more than snapping photos, and it would be doing us an inadvertent favour as well. You can get files in RAW, unedited, and a full release for their future use. I’m telling you, if she weren’t *already* our wedding photographer, I’d definitely take me up on that (or whatever . . . I’m not entirely sure of the proper grammar on that one).

Happy sunny Sunday!

Not as cool as the posse Andre has, but I set up an Etsy shop for all the vintage stuff I love so much but have no space for. I like to think the descriptions really carry my personality for me. I feel ever-so-slightly lame for posting this before some amazing recipe, but I’m really enjoying still life photography of the non-food variety, and will be posting in the next week or two (really really I mean it this time!).

So consider Aleta’s Kitschen open.

While I don’t suspect this will earn me any  money, it does satisfy an insatiable lust for vintage I have no use for. If I had the dough, I’d just give it all away, but sadly, I don’t. Still, it pays for an otherwise expensive and storage-raping hobby.

These were my favourite descriptions, I had tons o’fun with these things.

Bold.Advanced STRAIN/CLOSE/POUR lid technology.

Tang Pitcher & Mugs “A Bold Wave of Sunshine”

This lightweight pitcher and mugs are appealingly vintage with what could very well pass as Hillside Middle School’s new logo in 1982.

Outfitted with slick STRAIN/CLOSE/POUR lid technology, this would be an ideal vessel and serving cups of Tang for, say, two children who are thirsty after swinging in the yard. The pitcher holds 3 quarts (96 oz) and each mug holds 12 oz. That means you can pour each cup all the way to the top FOUR TIMES before you have to make more Kool-Aid.

Pitcher is 9.5″ tall, 4.75″ in circumference and 8″ wide (lip to handle). Each cup 4″ high, 3″ in circumference. Packaged with complimentary packet of Tang.

Spring Blossoms in your oven

Pyrex Spring Blossom Casserole & Whisking Bowl

This set will no doubt impress your mother-in-law, who will burn up much of dinner talking about her wedding dish pattern, and every scrap of Pfaltzgraff she’s ever owned while you smile and enjoy dinner without having to force small talk.

Funky Spring Blossom Casserole and Whisking Bowl by Pyrex. Made for housewives in the USA between 1972 and 1979, who says you can’t use them now?

Oven-to-table, cheery, and just begging to try your grandmother’s noodle casserole recipe, the casserole holds 2.5 quarts, and the bowl 3 cups. Silver V marking on the casserole in the photos has been safely removed.

Packaged with a delicious casserole recipe card to try out. 😉

Samson's Stimulating

Sick Mustache Wall Plaque

The plaque pretty much says it all.

Not only is this vintage (1968), it’s all Victorian stylized so it’s like, Vintage Vintage. Double Vintage. Meta-Vintage.

This bad lawrence comes from Yorkraft which, according to a cursory overview of the Internet, appears to be one of the earliest sources of “Crap that Places Like Applebees Put on Their Wall in Lieu of Real Antiques.” Wikipedia had nothing, Google Maps had an unconfirmed listing in York PA, and while I found links to Yorkraft.com, they were dead. Then I remembered there were muffins cooling on the counter and so that’s all I know about Yorkraft.

Nice beard, though.

16″ high by 12″ wide on sturdy, completely flat 1/2″ MDF board. 1968 Yorkraft, York PA. 3 lbs 5 oz, this thing is wicked diesel. Packaged with all my love. <3

Okay, now go tell your friends!

Funky Things That Fly Wild, wild roses. Couldn't tear me away...

Feedback? Things you like? Am I missing the mark? Is vintage even cool any more? Would you actually pay for any of this junk? Though my food photos rely heavily on boring white plates, this is the stuff I pull out when we have company.

I don’t have much to say about the Daffodil Cake other than it appeared in my What’s Cooking in Massachusetts! 4H cookbook, and a quick Google is telling me that it is an Eastery-Springy-type of cake. So I guess I just missed Easter, which is fine because something in me still resists holiday seasonality. My guess is I still haven’t outgrown that jaded teenager phase, where family stuff is stupid and cheesey.

Foamy.

In line with the Spring theme we accidentally have going here, this cake is EXTREMELY light—for cake. It’s similar to an angel food cake, except that you are not left with an inordinate amount of unemployed egg yolks. In this cake, the egg yolks are used to make a second batter, this one all yellow, naturally, and the result is a little two-toned cake that is not as cool a surprise as say, a rainbow cake, but still pretty neat! It can be served in a manner similar to angel food cake, and in that vein would be quite delicious with some strawberries and whipped cream!

Egg yolks that are busily not going to waste.

I made this bad lawrence twice in an attempt to fix major problems from the first go at it. I cite as evidence:

Exhibit 1.

You can see how including that particular photo might counter any culinary abilities y’all might have thought I had. The good news is that I only had to try this one more time to get much more satisfying results, and I identified my major issues here. The first:

Daffodil cake.

Let me just say up front that is not meant to be a dick joke.

The terminology in the original recipe says “beat until stiff.” Now I’m going to venture that, in this case anyway, stiff does not imply stiff peaks, because the first time around it took me damn near 45 minutes with a handmixer to attain stiff peaks, which even then were passable at best. And then my cake exploded out of my pan and burnt to the bottom of my oven in a smelly mess (see above).

The other big hint that something was wrong was when I tried to remove the cake from the pan and then had to kind of grope it out with my fingers. It was embarrassing.

Mess.

Perhaps in 1962, they had nonstick tube pans they don’t make like they used to, but my nonstick bundt could not handle that baby, and as you can see, this time around I was plenty generous with my cooking spray. That cake might be soggy coming out of the pan, but it’s coming out of that pan on its own, goddammit!

Here’s a rare Omnomicon action shot.

Two tone!

And the bottom was the most delicious part of this. If you aren’t big on presentation, I recommend eating the entire crust off the bottom, because the cake is moist and fluffy and once you flip it onto the bottom and leave it that way for a few hours, the delicious crunchy almost-meringuey texture becomes the texture of just . . . regular cake. Not as magical at all.

Nice bottom.

Interestingly, though you pour the yolk mixture on TOP of the whites mixture (which would logically put it on the bottom of the cake once flipped out of the pan), the yolk mix is denser and therefore sinks to the bottom of the pan. In this particular piece, it looks like a funky ying yang.

Cake Shui.

But when I overbeat the white mixture, the yolk stayed right where one would expect it to—to the top of the pan and bottom of the cake. I have to assume this is due to the increased firmness in a longer beat time for the white.

Daffodil cake.

So then I took some literal shots with a daffodil, which really don’t complement the visage of the cake very well, but I bought those flowers and by golly they’re gonna be in my pictures!

Daffodil cake.

The best way to describe the plush airiness of these, however, is with this shot, wherein I tore a piece of cake in half. Verily, I rent it asunder for the visceral pleasure of it.

Daffodil cake.

And then one more picture of daffodils. Just so I can get my money’s worth.

Just daffodils. No cake.

Daffodil Cake
adapted from a 60s era 4H fundraiser book: What’s Cooking? In Massachusetts

6 egg whites
1/2 tsp cream of tartar
1/2 tsp salt
3/4 c sugar
1/2 c cake flour
1 tsp vanilla

Preheat oven to 325o.Beat egg whites until foamy. Add cream of tartar and salt, and beat until the mixture can hold a little bit of shape, but not until stiff peaks form (it should take you about 5 minutes to reach this consistency with a mixer on medium). Briefly beat in vanilla. Sift sugar and flour four times (seems like overkill to me, but just to be safe I went ahead and did it), then fold into egg white mixture. Pour into well-greased tube or bundt pan and set aside.

Now it’s time for the egg yolks!

6 egg yolks
1 tsp vanilla
1/4 tsp salt
3/4 c sugar
3/4 c cake flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/4 c boiling water

Put about 2 c water on the stove to boil. You’ll want to measure your boiling water after it’s come to a boil instead of before (what with evaporation and what have you). Beat egg yolks 3 minutes, add salt and vanilla, then gradually beat in sugar. Sift the flour and baking powder four times (again, it couldn’t hurt) and add alternately with hot water. Pour atop the white mixture in the pan.

Bake 50 minutes, let cool completely (at least an hour) before removing from pan.

Serve by itself for a cottony delicious treat, or with fruit and the whipped topping of your choice for a more full-blown sort of dessert.

Fun variation:
So some versions of the daffodil cake include a lemon icing, and this one in particular calls for either vanilla or lemon extract in the yellow batter. My awesome idea is to dye the white part with lemon extract and the yellow mixture with vanilla. It will taste the same, and 90% of people won’t notice which is which, but it’ll be really funny for that one person with the particularly sharp tastebuds.

Daffodil cake.

nutrition summary (for 1 of 8 servings): 260 calories, 4g fat, 0g fiber; 5 weight watchers points