Southern Belles: Recipe

Remember when I teased you about when I was going to give you this recipe?  Well here it finally is!

Some of you reading this might remember when I first made these cookies from an old recipe I found in a magazine; well here is my modified version to share with you.

The name sounds so fancy, yet they aren't hard to make.  Some precise measuring, time, and an 8 by 11 inch pan is all it takes.  You don't have to be a baking guru to get these right.

The Ingredients:

• 3 Tbs. butter
• 1 cup of sugar
• 2 eggs ( save one egg white for sugar topping )
• 1 1/2 cups of flour
• 1 tsp. baking powder
• 1/2 salt
• 2 Tbs. heavy whipping cream
• 1/2 tsp. lemon juice
• 1/2 tsp. vanilla

For the Sugar Topping:

• 1 egg white, beaten
• 1/2 white sugar
• 1/4 brown sugar
• pinch of cream of tartar
• 2/3 cup shredded coconut

We're going to mix the cookie dough first, pre-bake it a bit, then put the topping on, well, top of it and finish baking the whole thing.

( I wish to apologize in advance for the horrible lighting in my kitchen. Please bare with me, the cookies will be worth it in the end, I promise. )

Preheat you're oven to 325 degrees ( fahrenheit ).

It starts out just like any other cookie recipe, by blending the butter and sugar together.  It'll be a sandy looking, because of how little butter there is compared to how much sugar there is.  Just make sure that there aren't any big clumps of butter hanging out in your mixer.

Put your eggs in next, saving one of the egg whites for later.  I find the best way to do this is to crack the egg into your hand and let the white slide through your fingers.  Mix till smooth.

The flour, baking soda, and salt get sifted right into your mixer bowl...

...and the heavy whipping cream, lemon juice, and vanilla get splashed right on top of that airy pile when you're done sifting.  All these things get mixed in at once, till it all comes together into a nice looking dough.

Time to get this dough into the pan.

I use an 8 by 11 inch pan to get my desired thickness.  The dough will spread out to about 1/4 of an inch thick.  Make sure you spray the pan so that the cookie doesn't stick!  Use a spatula for the spreading, wetting the back of it every few spreads to keep the dough from sticking to it.  Make it as uniform as you can.  You don't want one end to be much thicker than the other, or else it'll bake a bit funny.

When you're satisfied with your spreading, pop it into the oven for 15 minutes.

While it's baking, it's time to mix up that sugar topping.



Toss the egg white, white sugar, brown sugar, and the cream of tartar into the mixing bowl and beat it on high.  Please note: this is not a meringue.  But the egg white will expand a bit to give you more topping.  Continue beating it for about three minutes.  You should have a nice, smooth, sugary mixture in your bowl.



Dump your coconut in and mix on high for another 2 minutes.



The topping should look something like this when it's done.

And now we wait for the cookie in the oven to be done baking.

When you do finally take it out of the oven, let it cool for 5 minutes before you put the topping onto it.





The topping doesn't need to spread, and I wouldn't recommending trying to anyways because you'll end up ripping your cookie ( not that I ever did that, of course ).  It's one of those nice, crumbly toppings that you can just sprinkle on the top of whatever you're baking.  So sprinkle away, creating an even layer all across the top of your cookie.

Then it's back in the oven for another 15 minutes.



When it's finally done baking, let it cool completely before cutting and eating.  If it's still warm it'll wanna rip coming out of the pan.  The best way to cut it, I think, is in squares, and small ( -ish ) ones at that.  It's a very rich cookie, crunchy on the top, and chewy underneath.



I bet you'll feel super fancy after making these.  They've got a fancy name and they look like the perfect victorian tea party treat when they're all cut into neat little squares and arranged on a little plate.  I mean really, how could you not feel fancy after all that?  I, for one, feel the need to find a pretty white parasol to walk with after eating just one square.

You'll be hooked on these cookies as soon as you take you're first bite, I guaranty it.  Just make sure you have people to share them with, though, because I would really hate to see you fall into a sugar coma after eating the whole pan by yourself.

Any questions?  Let me know in the comments below!  I would love to hear to from you, and please, do tell if you feel fancy after making them like I do!

Em  :)

Fun-tastic Cupcakes

My little sister was talking to me about something she had read in one of her books this morning when the word 'cake' was mentioned.  We couldn't get the thought of it out of our heads after that.  We could just imagine how nice it wold be to have a cake to eat, or cupcakes, for that matter.  Sweet, fluffy, and delicious cupcakes.

So we decided that we needed to make some.

More correctly, I found a recipe on Pinterest for made-from-scratch cupcakes and she made them for me.  Isn't she just the sweetest?

It was really fun to sit at the dinning room table ( to supervise, you know ) and watch her make these from scratch all by herself.  I was very proud, I have to tell you.  Reading the recipe and making the measurements with little input and advice from me.

While she was mixing and baking, I got to sit back and read.  Really, I can't see how the situation could have been better.  Having cupcakes made for me while I got to supervise and read, and read, and read some more to my little heart's content, knowing that I would have treats to eat at the end of it?  That must be what it feels like to have servants.

( Not that my little sister is my servant or anything.  At least, as far as she is concerned.  But not really.  Just joking.  Maybe.  Mostly.  )

And they weren't just any cupcakes, either.  They were funfetti cupcakes with chocolate sprinkles on the top ( I pinned the recipe here to my Yummy Foods board, if you would like to make some yourself ).  We didn't have any powdered sugar for frosting, so we tossed the chocolate sprinkles on instead ( notice how I say we because supervising your younger sibling is really half of the work, you know ).

In the end they turned out great, even without the frosting.  She ( we ) did a great job making them.  I'm so proud of her ( us ).  This is why it's so great to have younger siblings.  You'll always have someone there to boss around I mean help you out and make you cupcakes for absolutely no reason other than the fact that they love you.

Seriously though.  My little sister's pretty great.

Em

Birthday Buckets Of Fun

Last week it was my daddy's birthday; this week it is my mama's birthday.  I heard her get up early this morning, as is normally her custom.  I slept in for a bit, letting her enjoy the quiet house to herself for while.

 After a little bit, I finally wandered down the stairs to sleepily sing her happy birthday.  Then it was up to the kitchen, to get busy baking once again.  My original plan was to make her some Southern Belles for her birthday threat; but then I got to thinking about how delicious those skillet cookies I made for my daddy had tasted, and thought, "Well, why not make both?"

So I did.

These skillet cookies seem to be becoming a bit of a new tradition to make on birthday's in our house.  It's tradition that I would most certainly be pleased to have.

As for the Southern Belles, I spent the rest of the morning baking them up.  You will be pleased to hear that baking them was a bit of double mission.  The top reason was because my mama loves them.  But the second reason was so I could get pictures along the way to make you a post on how to make some Southern Belles for yourself.  That recipe will be up sometime next week, but I'm not telling you when exactly.  You'll just have to watch and see.

It was a quiet day, which is what my mama loves best.  She got yummy baked goods, help with the garden, and plenty of time to work on the dream that she's chasing: her blanket shop.  I have watched her make and create all sorts of handmade items over the years.  Her love for crafting and making is what has been my inspiration to craft things of my own. It is because of her I have the cooking, baking, and HomeEc skills that I do.  Some of my fondest memories are of the times when I was little, sitting next to her on the couch as she taught me to knit or embroider.

She has always been there to teach me everything that she knows, and she'll always be there to answer my questions in the future.  Firm yet sweet, kind and comforting, she taught me to always care for those you love, and appreciate the simple things in life above all others.  And all the while, her flowers on the fence are blooming just as brightly as the novelties coming from her own hands.

Em

Skillet Birthday Cookie

I had the wonderful pleasure of waking up early this morning to make my daddy not just one, but two skillet cookies for his birthday.  He has never been big on sweet cakes loaded down with lots of frosting, but skillet cookies are something that he just can't get enough of.

I used Martha Stewart's chocolate chip skillet cookie recipe, with extra butter smeared into the cast iron before it got put into the oven, because really, there can never be enough butter.  If you're wondering why I had to make two instead of just one, well, let me just remind you that my family and I are piranhas.  There's just over half of one left as I type this.  I'd bet my spleen that even that will be gone by breakfast tomorrow.

All in all, it was a wonderful day spent relaxing at home, baking, tinkering with the truck, drinking iced tea, and of course, eating slices of cookie.  We made him one of his favorite meals for dinner, pulled pork quesadillas with homemade guacamole.  It's a bit of a tradition of ours to let the birthday person pick out what they would like to have made for them for dinner.

It made me smile to look out our kitchen window over the tops of the neighborhood houses and see the sunset lit up with my daddy's favorite color: orange.  Everyone around my house is currently chasing some dream or goal of their's, determined to make it work.  Call it silly, but it felt sort of special to have his favorite color in the sky to end his special day, especially with all the hard work he's been doing lately to reach his dreams.

 

My daddy is just as silly as he is wise, and just as loving as he strong.  He taught me to dream, and to work hard, to smile, and to look for the hidden beauty in everything in nature around me.  He never complained when he had to hum to me for hours at a time at 3 in the morning just to get me to fall asleep when I was a baby, and he never failed to share his food with me even though he just got home from a 12 hour shift and was starving himself ( because as a toddler, everything tastes better coming from someone else's plate, right? ).

He's always been by my side, I know that we still have plenty of adventures left to go on.

:)

Em

Beading, Dancing, Tea Party, Oh My!

Ok, so I have, admittedly, been a bit distracted this week.  The reason?  I'll tell you why next time.  For now, let's rewind back to Wednesday.

I got up super early to bake some more Southern Belles and make iced tea in anticipation of my best friends coming over to spend a good part of the day with each other.  I wanted us to have something sweet to eat and good to drink.  I did say, after all, that maybe the next time I had friends over, I would make the Southern Belles again to have a tea party with them.  I changed the recipe a bit from the first time I made them, and I think I liked it a bit better.  Give me a couple of weeks to get down off the sugar high they gave me, and I'll make them again for you, this time with the recipe and how-to pictures to go along with it.

When they got here, we sat down and started beading.  That had been the plan for the day.  Teaching each other new tricks, trading beads, and sharing stories.  It was fun to laugh and create with them, and we made some beautiful things.  Rings and bracelets and earrings flew from our finger tips, and I learned some things that I didn't know about beading before.  We were quite blessed, you see, to have two beading experts sitting at the table with us.

Then we moved on to dancing.  My friends have been to group dances before where it seems they teach all sorts of different dances.  We started out by teaching each other a simple swing dance, which I was ecstatic for ( more correctly, my friends taught me a simple swing while I played us some jazz music ).  Over the past few months I have begun to discover that I love jazz, and with it has come a strong desire to learn to swing dance.  So you can imagine how much fun I had.  Or maybe not, because I was pretty dam happy ( do you see the Percy Jackson reference? ) over something that might seem a bit odd to you ( either way, you should listen to this song because it's really quite addicting ).

We needed more room than the inside of the house could provide, some we went out into the hot summer afternoon to dance barefoot in the grass.  We danced the Patty Cake Polka, a country line dance that I sadly can not remember the name of, and the Celtic Cross, in which we had to drag our mothers into the ring to have enough people to do it.  It made it all the more fun.

We had some confusion as we danced, partly due to the fact that half of us had never done the dances before, and partly due to the fact that we were all girls.  We frequently had to stop dancing and start some parts over because we forgot who was supposed to be dancing the guy's part.  A lack of young men can sometimes be a troublesome thing.  We easily wore ourselves out and were back inside to eat sandwiches and guzzle iced tea.

And so our sweet summer day went.  Now I can hear you yelling through your computer screen at me.  "Where are the pictures, Em?!  We want to see you beading and, more importantly, tripping as you tried to dance."  And I do so apologize for the lack of pictures in this post, I truly do.  But I was having too much fun to remember to take pictures.

I will show you the earrings I made, though.  They are awful pictures taken in awful lighting, but I hope they will do to help make up for me forgetting to take any other pictures.  I will try harder next time.

Em

Southern Belles

Reading a back issue of the magazine "Reminisce" in bed late last night, I came across someone's grandmother's recipie for a type of sheet cookie called Southern Belles.

It was around midnight when I decided, "I'm going to make these tomorrow."



Now I'm not going to lay out the recipe for you here, because it's not my recipe, it is a prized family recipe that had been passed down through the this person's family, and I don't want to take any credit for it.

But, what I will tell you is that I found the idea of making these cookies to be one of the coolest things I could spend my Sunday morning doing.  There is enough sugar in here to give me a headache ( which they did ), and there is no baking time mentioned in the recipe, so I had to spend 25 minutes pacing my kitchen floor watching them bake like a hawk, but boy was it fun.





Southern Belles remind me of a type of shortbread with a brown sugar coconut meringue spread over the top.  I followed the recipe to a tee, and this is the result I got.



They were delicious, I can tell you that.  And yes, I did say were, because believe it or not, they are half gone already I don't honestly think they are going to make it through the night.   My family and I are piranhas, you see, so nothing really last all that long around here.

I can think of a few ways to switch things up a bit to tailor these wondrous treats exactly to my family's liking.  In fact, I believe I might be inspired to make a Southern Belle recipe for our family, to be passed down through the years and the generations.

One thing I know I might have to change is how the meringue is made.  In the recipe it said to throw everything in with the egg white and beat till fluffy.  I wasn't so sure, but I wanted to do it exactly how the recipe said, so that's what I did.  I could hear Julia from America's Test Kitchen yelling at me from a distance.  Now I think that next time I'll make the meringue like you would normally make meringue, and then fold in the coconut after I've gotten it to a stiff peak, so that it'll be a bit more meringue-ish.  I think that'll make Julia feel better ( if you've ever watched the TV show, then you'll know how much she loves to get her meringues just right ).

Overall though, I was very impressed with myself, and I felt quite fancy, for some reason.  These seemed to me like a special tea time treat from the days of old.  So I made some tea, and sat down to a tea party for one.  Perhaps the next time I have friends over I'll make these again, and we can all tea party together.



Em

Mug Brownie : Recipe

There are many different recipes for mug brownies floating around on the web, and I have tried quite a few of them myself.  Most of them didn't use vanilla, over cooked them till they were too dry, and none of them ever used butter.  They used olive or vegetable oil instead.  How sad is that?

I have taken away, added, changed up, and mixed up all my findings from these recipes, until I have finally come to the point where I have my own mug brownie recipe, one that is chocolatey, moist, and uses real butter.

Because really, isn't everything better with butter?

Ingredients

• 1/4 white chocolate chips ( optional )
• 1/4 cup flour
• 1/4 cup granulated sugar
• 3 tablespoons cocoa powder
• 3 tablespoons water
• 2 tablespoons melted butter
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• a pinch of salt

You'll need your favorite mug, of course, just make sure that it is microwave safe, and preferably not stoneware.  While you can microwave most stoneware, those suckers take a long time to cool down, let me tell you.

So here we go, I guess.  

( Note: this really should not explode inside the microwave on you.  Pinky promise. )

Start out by mixing all of your dry ingredients together.  Dump your flour, sugar, cocoa powder, and salt into your mug.  Stir till evenly combined.

Next, add your wet ingredients.  This is the part where you have to melt your butter.  Now, I don't want you to get too emotional over this part.  I know that your two tablespoons of butter might be sitting in their bowl chilling and chatting with each other . . .

. . . and that they might be a bit upset when they find out they're going to be melted . . .

. . . but we're making brownies here, my peeps.  And sacrifices must be made.

I recommend zapping your butter for about 10 seconds at a time to avoid it popping all over the inside of your microwave ( it might be out for revenge, you see ).  It should really only take two 10 second runs to get it all melted.  Once most of it is melted, you can usually stir it around to get the rest of it to melt so that you don't over do it in the microwave.  The second it starts to sound like WWIII in there, you know you've gone too far.

Once melted, dump directly into your mug, along with your water and vanilla.  Stir till all the lumps are gone and you're super sure that there are no stubborn dry ingredients clinging to the bottom edges of your mug, because it's kind of gross to get to the bottom of your brownie and find a pocket of flour that didn't get stirred in.  Just a warning.

If you want to up your brownie game to royalty status, you can take those white chocolate chips and put them on top of your brownie after you are done stirring.  It might sound tempting to stir them into your brownie, but don't.  They will hold onto their heat stuck in the middle like that and they will burn.

It's not fun people.  It's not fun.

So keep them on the top, like a crown of white diamonds fit for the ruler of the world ( which I am, but you guys can pretend ).

Microwave for 1:30, then let stand in the microwave for 2 minuets.  This is the hardest part, because you can smell it, and it's right there in front of you, just waiting to be eaten, but don't give in.  Letting it stand for a few while it's still hot will complete the baking process without drying it out, and it will give it time to start cooling down, so that unless you used a stoneware mug, it should be ready to eat if you blow on your bites after those long, hard two minuets of waiting.

Look at that glorious mug brownie.  Just look at it.

Mmm, yes.  It's time now to get a book and curl up under a blanket to enjoy life to it's fullest.  So let me just go grab my book, grab my blanket, sit down and -

Oh, wait.  What's this?  Did I eat my brownie already?

Well then . . . I'll just have to make another one.

Em

Pie and Blankets

A week filled with delicious pies and snugly blankets.  What could be better?

It was just yesterday that I found out the 28th of April is nation blueberry pie day, and this was not an opportunity I could pass up.  So I went searching through my stack of library books.  I knew I had brought home a pie book sometime in the past month.  It was just a matter of finding it.

Using the super easy recipe from the book for the filling, and our own all butter crust, I made not just one, but two blueberry lemon pies with crumble topping.  I ate nothing but pie for dinner.

And then some more for dessert.

As you might know after all that writing in March, I had decided to let all 28 of my rough drafts sit for a month before starting to edit them.  That month is almost over now, but during it I have begun work on toddler sized blankets to sell in an online shop.  The two blankets above are ones I've made progress on in the last week.

Over the rest of the spring and summer I'll continue to make blankets, and write out patterns for them, as each and every one I do for my future shop comes straight from own noodle.  My hope is to have this thing going by the end of the year, so cross your fingers for me, pretty please.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna have to cut this post a bit short.  I have a whole other pie yet, you see, and it's just begging to be eaten.....

Em

Birthday Weekend: The Tuxedo Cake Returns

It's nice to make something for someone and see them use it for the rest of their life.  I may have made it a small challenge for my sister to get to the bag I made her, but I know that it will be one such item for her, and I can't help but smile at that.  That tuxedo cake from back at the end of January?  It came back and tempted us all again, though this time in it's birthday suit ( I'm sorry but I couldn't resist the pun ).

I am now ready to travel the world in style and with class ( class from my suitcase and from my friends ) after I finished redoing the lining on the inside of my old, no longer dirty green suitcase.  A little upholstery fabric and lot of spray glue later, it is finally travel ready once again.  It was much easier to put the new fabric in than I thought it would be, and I got through with no mishaps.  Well, except for one thing.  The back of the bottle I was using clearly stated NOT to get any of the spray glue on your skin or in your eyes.  So what's the first thing I do?

I spray it all over my hands.  Naturally.  Now this is the same person who a week ago managed to cut their finger, on a door frame.  That's right everyone.  I have talent.

"Talent."

One of the most wonderful things about living where I do is getting to see hot air balloons above my house in the spring and fall.  And the sky, oh how beautiful the sky can be.  I simply can't imagine myself living some place where I wouldn't be able to see the sky.

Em