In honour
. . . of a reissue of SUNSHINE we should certainly have a disgraceful recipe or twelve. So, here’s one.
The obvious answer to everything is chocolate so this is something that isn’t chocolate. It is, however, one of the recipes that haunts my dreams even when it’s getting on for two decades of dairy-free* since I last made it**. (I used to have a lot of cheesecake recipes. Sigh.) Note that while it calls for cranberry sauce, proper Seville orange marmalade also works a treat. But you do need something with a little bite and a little texture–not applesauce, for example, although apple chutney using a good crunchy sour cooking apple like Bramleys would probably perform handsomely.***
Hatbox Pie
So called because if you use a hatbox, there may be enough room. The original recipe tells you to make it in a 9″ pie plate. They are out of their tiny minds. Try a 9- or 10″ springform pan.
1 c all-purpose flour
1 c jumbo oats (ie large flakes uncooked oatmeal: the stuff goes by a lot of different names)
2/3 c dark brown sugar
½ tsp baking powder
½ c soft slightly salted butter
Mix together till crumbly. Reserve 1 cup, press the rest on bottom and sides of springform pan. Spread a generous 1 c cranberry sauce over crust; sprinkle the 1 cup crumbs over sauce and pat gently. 350° 20-25 minutes. Cool thoroughly.
½ c confectioner’s/icing sugar
2 T milk
1 ½ tsp GENUINE vanilla EXTRACT, no ersatz flavouring
3 oz soft cream cheese
2c sweetened whipped cream (so you use about 1 T sugar per cup when you beat it)
Blend all but whipped cream with electric mixer; fold cream in gently last. Spoon carefully over crust. Store in refrigerator. Have lots of friends over when you make it, because the crust will go soggy after a few days.
* * *
* Except when my idiot husband buys cheese and I idiotically eat it, which happens at least twice a decade, plus an ice-cream blow-out about once a year. I generally try to hold the latter on a night that Peter is playing bridge. When I say blow-out I mean blow-out and Peter gets a look on his face similar, I imagine, to the expression of a man who, looking out the window at the full moon, happens to glance back indoors again in time to see his wife dropping to all fours and growing fur. It’s only once a year! Not once a month!
** There are quite a few of these I admit. I used to lead a depraved life. But they should be good for some years’ worth of occasional blog entries anyway.
*** And there are some very good commercial Seville orange marmalades out there but if you’re going to use cranberry sauce, make your own. This is the recipe I use:
Cranberry-orange sauce
2 T cornstarch/corn flour
½ c water
½ c sugar
¾ c fresh orange juice–oranges never come in ¾ c size.^ So you can either eat the rest of the second one, or fill up the first with water to make ¾ c. If you do the latter however you must use the orange oil/essence. So if you haven’t got it, you’re going to have to steel yourself and open another orange. You can also experiment with using un- or less-diluted oj concentrate, but beware, if you use too much of it your sauce will be very liable to stick and burn.
The original recipe calls for 2T orange rind. When I’m making Hatbox Pie with it, I use more.
¼ tsp orange oil/essence NOT ‘flavouring’
2 c fresh or frozen cranberries. If frozen, use them frozen: don’t defrost first.
Combine cornstarch and ¼ c water in a pot big enough to hold everything, stir smooth. Then add sugar, orange juice^^, the rest of the water. Bring to boil, cook till thickened, stir in rind, oil, and cranberries. Cook just until cranberry skins pop. Cool.
I make this every year for Thanksgiving and/or Christmas. It’s good hot or cold. It’s also good at the bottom of a hatbox with whipped cream piled on top.
* * *
^ It’s a Communist plot. Hey, remember the Communists? In today’s world Senator Joseph McCarthy almost looks like a nice guy.+
+ Did you know the first time he ran for office he ran as a Democrat? (I’ve just been reading up on him on Wiki, because I can never remember whether it’s the senator or the baseball player who is Joe, not Joseph.) And lost. That was just before he joined the army so he would have a war record he could lie about. I did say almost a nice guy.
^^ As I’m proofing this I discover I typed ‘justice’. Orange justice. I like it. Especially after Joseph McCarthy.
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Ha. And to think I have held back sharing the Black Forest Cheesecake in respect of your non-dairy situation. :p
i might just have to dig that one up now.
No, no! The intro to PWYF says it’s okay! No horrid chemicals, but dairy is okay! You can’t see me crying on my keyboard! :)
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Robin – avert your eyes now from the dairy ….
BLACK FOREST CHEESECAKE
INGREDIENTS:
250g plain un-iced chocolate biscuits, finely crushed (that’s cookies for the peoples in the USA!)
125g butter, melted
3 teaspoons gelatine
1/2 cup water
250g packet cream cheese, softened to room temperature (Really soft. Must be room temp!)
3/4 cup castor sugar
1 tablespoon lemon juice
300ml thickened cream (I use the stuff that is 35% milkfat as I don’t like the thickeners. Any higher and it probably won’t whip softly)
425g can pitted cherries
Topping:
1 tablespoon cornflour
1 tablespoon castor sugar
1 tablespoon dark rum (optional)
METHOD:
1. Combine crumbs and butter in bowl, mix well; press over base and side of 20cm springform pan; refrigerate 30 minutes.
2. Sprinkle gelatin over water in cup, stand in small pan of simmering water, stir until dissolved.
3. Beat cream cheese, sugar and juice in small bowl with electric mixer until smooth and creamy; transfer to large bowl.
4. Whip cream until soft peaks form, fold into cheese mixture; fold in gelatin mixture.
5. Drain cherries, reserve 3/4 syrup for topping.
6. Spoon one-third cheese mixture into crumb crust, top with half the cherries, then continue layering, ending with cheese mixture. Refrigerate several hours or until firm.
7. Spread topping over cheesecake, swirl gently into cheese mixture. Refrigerate until set. Decorate with extra whipped cream and cherries, if desired.
Topping: Blend cornflour and sugar with reserved syrup in pan. Stir over heat until mixture boils and thickens, stir in rum; cool 10 minutes before using.
Source: Sweet Old-Fashioned Favourites (ACP)
Note: this is a very rich cheesecake. It’s the choc biscuits that do it I think.
AAAAAUGH. But see what a good person I am–I UNSCREENED this.
Yes you did. You could have kept it all to yourself. If there could be a non-dairy version I’d give it to you. Maybe I will look through Mum’s “alternative” cookbooks.
Some alternatives work a treat, but most of the alternative cookbooks that stick too close to ‘normal’ food make it all too hard, and often silly. Like, vegetarian *sausages.* **What??** I’v got some vegetarian cookbooks I like a lot though.
Mmm, looks good.
Cheesecake recipes? I’ve recently convinced Jeff that cheesecake is *good*. (He’s a picky eater. He ate a burrito the other day! I called my mom, who wondered if I still had the right husband.)
And you’re right. SUNSHINE *must* be celebrated with dessert. Yum.
who wondered if I still had the right husband.)
********* This phrasing could be open to misinterpretation . . . :)
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This phrasing could be open to misinterpretation . . . :)
LOL! Okay, who wondered if the one I married hadn’t been replaced somehow. How about that? :D
Oooh! The Invasion of the Body Snatchers! Pod person!!!! :)
I don’t normally like cheesecake, but that sounds good!
Orange justice. I like it.
Sounds like a new superhero to me… Of course, most things make me think of superheroes, really. “ORANGE JUSTICE. HE STRIKES A MIGHTY BLOW FOR TRUTH, DEMOCRACY, and 100% of your RDA of Vitamin C with each punch. Scurvy criminals, beware, for ORANGE JUSTICE has come to town.”
(Yes, ok, it’s been a long week. I can’t be held responsible for anything ridiculous I might type in the near future.)
Oh good. We like ridiculous. And I won’t point out it’s Monday because I’m a kindly person.
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And I won’t point out it’s Monday because I’m a kindly person.
GRAHHH! Literalist. :) A week is a week, whenever it finishes… And I’m well on the way to another long one, though should be slightly less craptastic than the previous… I hope! :)
I hope so too! I would settle for MORE SLEEP! Er–what time is it? No, no, don’t tell me . . .
I hope so too! I would settle for MORE SLEEP! Er–what time is it? No, no, don’t tell me . . .
:) Eleven here, and I’ve only just got home to start doing the things I need to do at home. (First of which being, of course, screw around online for a bit. But not nearly so much as I might ordinarily…)
Yaay for screwing around on line. :)
http://www.mimiccreme.com/ Nuts, water, no chemicals …
This is all you need to survive being a non-dairy person … the ” ice cream” you can make with it is heavenly (using the sweetened version). I started using it to satisfy the cravings of my dairy/ egg intolerant friends and even folks who can eat Ben and Jerry’s ’til the cows come home swear it is fantastic.
So far I’ve done various chocolate versions, as well as raspberry, wild strawberry, lingonberry, and peach and have moved the ice cream maker from storage to center stage. Everyone from my elderly parents to the fussiest kids and my health food phobic brother has declared it deluxe. And the best thing is that it’s so easy … you dump a carton into a blender or bowl, mix in your flavoring, put it in the ice cream machine and you go do something else until it’s done.
I will be experimenting with other “creamy” things in the near future. If I come up with the results I expect I will keep you posted. Don’t know if anyone is importing it in the UK, but if they can ship in fruit from Chile, South Africa, and Australia …
somebody ought to be importing mimiccreme.
Um. I don’t know Dipotassium Phosphate but Google is re-naming it an agrochemical, which is not encouraging. I need to look further. I’ve tried other ‘nut milks’ and have been slightly underwhelmed.
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Wikipedia says it’s a salt, essentially a form of potassium, and is on the FDA’s GRAS (Generally Recognized As Safe) list. The FDA article is here: http://www.cfsan.fda.gov/~dms/opascogd.html (look under Potassium Phosphate, dibasic) and deeply science-speaks about the importance of potassium in the human diet. (Of course, this is the same government body which refused to put Stevia, a non-caloric sweet herb used in South America since pre-Columbian times on the GRAS list because of pressure from artificial sweetener manufacturers…*sigh*)
Happy research!
JM in KC
Thanks! However, GRAS is full of s—! But thanks for an aim in a useful direction. :)
Here’s an alternative cranberry sauce recipe that’s so easy it’s a joke:
Take 1 12-ounce package of cranberries, add 1 cup grade-A maple syrup, and boil together until cranberries pop.
(You want the grade-A syrup for this recipe so the maple flavor isn’t overwhelming.)
This does *not* come out too sweet. I like a rather spicy cranberry sauce, so I add cinnamon and cloves to the mix. It would also be easy to add orange peel or even orange extract.
****Have lots of friends over when you make it****
Yes, SHARE those calories! ;)
Yes, from where I sit that would cost £1000 per serving. Sigh. It sounds heaven.
Yes, SHARE those calories! ;)
*********** YES. :)
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Oh, good. I’ve been waiting for a Playing With Your Food blog, so that I can stay on topic and share the following:
http://cakewrecks.blogspot.com:80/
July 24 is my favourite.
I admit to typing this up two days ago and then not finding the time to get online to post between my recovering dog and my sick partner. Now sick partner is improving, recovering dog is eating again, but healthy cat suddenly has an eye infection. (I think I should just have my paycheck this month sent directly to the vet ;)
——-
I just turned 33 on 8-8-8 and thought that I’d share my favorite birthday recipe. This is the smell I always woke up to on my birthdays. (and still wake up to when I visit my parents in the States)
_Birthday biscuit cinnamon rolls_
2.5 cups flour (I use whole grain)
0.5 cups wheat germ/bran
1.5 tablespoon baking powder
2 tablespoons sugar (or a bit more than 1 Tbs Honey
3/4 cup butter or shortening
1 cup milk
—
3/4 cup sugar
3 teaspoons cinnamon (more or less, to taste)
Chopped nuts
Chopped dried fruit
Sift and mix dry ingredients.
Cut in butter*, using two knives or a pastry blender
Add milk and stir until it just mixed.
Knead on floured surface until dough just holds together and then roll out to 1/2-inch thickness.
Dampen dough surface with a little water (or melt 2 Tbs butter and spread on surface)
Spread sugar mixture on surface and sprinkle with optional nuts and fruit. Roll up and use a serrated knife (hint you can put a little flour on the knife if you’re dough’s sticky) to cut into 2 inch wide pieces.
Place on tray and bake in pre-heated oven at 400 F or 180 C for 13 to 20 minutes or golden brown on top.
*There’s a trick to making a good biscuit dough. The butter needs to be cut in until it’s fine clumps, but not too fine, and after the milk’s added the dough needs to be mixed enough but not too much. I have to admit that it’s taken me 10 years to make fluffy melt-in-your-mouth biscuits as good as my mother’s. (of course I didn’t grow up on a farm making biscuits daily for the farm hands) So if the biscuits fall apart the dough wasn’t kneaded enough and if they’re bricks they have been kneaded too much.
Rebecca WinkleBeam
Mmmm. :) I used to be able to make biscuits, but I haven’t tried lately. And I’d have to adapt the butter because I’d be using orange juice instead of milk. It can be done but I don’t remember. . . .
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Have you tried using “Oat Milk”? Have had pretty good success with it so far. Makes verrrrry yummy oatmeal pancakes.
Obviously I have to try some of these alternatives again. I bailed on ALL of them some years ago and just haven’t tried again.
Sympathy on the dairy thing. Can’t decide whether that would be worse than my no-longer-tolerating wine, beer etc (not even cooked in recipes – think its congeners, not alcohol per-se). Just think, no champagne ever again. Its very bleak and middle-aged.
Oh dear! That sounds even worse! But I suppose you adapt to your shortcomings–I still miss cheese but I DEPEND on the occasional injection of champagne!
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Mmm, cheesecake…. alas, my husband refuses to eat it, claiming that cheese should always be savoury! So I have to devour it all myself (and thus explode) or (on a good, healthy day) share with workmates. Happy workmates.
Re-reading Sunshine always makes me want to bake. After the first reading I had to go out and find a cinnamon roll recipe – such things being previously unknown in my experience. I’ve never looked back – though it would be lovely if one day you feel the need to share Sunshine’s own recipe, assuming she has one! (She must do, yes?)
She makes cinnamon rolls by instinct, as do I. Neither of us has been successfully cornered into trying to write it down.
Cream cheese is . . . NOT cheese. It’s a separate substance. Try that argument. :)
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Oh good, an excuse to share my latest cake recipe with you – Five-minute cake. (And yes, it is CHOCOLATE!):
http://www.dizzy-dee.com/recipe/chocolate-cake-in-5-minutes
It works better if you make it in a pudding-basin rather than a mug (either that or I have very large tablespoons, but it overflowed like crazy first time I tried!). And I didn’t have any cocoa in the house, but it’s wonderful with chocolate chips!
LOL! Well, I don’t have a microwave, but it looks like fun! :)
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It occurs to me that for people who don’t use milk at all, like yourself, coffee or fruit juice would make an excellent substitute in this recipe!
Milk is the least of my problems in cheesecake: I can’t eat the *cheese*. Believe me, I’ve substituted fruit juice ( . . . allergic to coffee too: it’s true, I’m a mess :)) in HUNDREDS of recipes.
Good heavens, another person allergic to coffee. Me too. I have always been a tea drinker, so that’s no hardship, but there are times when I do miss coffee.
I’ve ALWAYS been allergic to coffee so I’ve never had to miss it. (Would that I’d ALWAYS been allergic to dairy.) It does smell nice but I’ve *tasted* it, and everyone is right that it smells better. I actually started drinking tea as something to do with my hands when everyone else was drinking coffee, but I became a total addict pretty quickly.
I hit send last time and wordpress told me I was posting too quickly and to slow down. Though, I’m not sure how as it took me a couple of minutes to write last post… Anyway, Robin, if this is a duplicate, feel free to delete this one. No need to repeat myself.
I don’t even LIKE cake* — esp. chocolate cake — and I want to try this immediately! I’m going to teach this to all my psuedo nieces and nephews (i.e. children of my friends). Thanks for the recipe link!
*Yes, I’m a freak of nature who has next to no sweet tooth, and no, this does not include cheesecake, which is food of the gods.
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cheesecake, which is food of the gods
************* I entirely agree, unfortunately.
Yes, WordPress does that occasionally. It also EATS comments.
Mmm, lovely. I’ll try this with blackberries – there seems to be potentially an enormous crop of those this year, just starting to ripen. I think it will have to wait until I go back to work in a couple of weeks’ time though – not risking having this alone in the house with us! :)
I should think this would go well with a rhubarb compote, too, earlier in the year when the stalks are all nice and pink?
Well, I wouldn’t do rhubarb myself–too mushy. Blackberries might work. They have *some* texture. Even popped cranberries retain quite a lot of bounce; and even undercooked rhubarb is kind of disintegrate-ery. But I can’t eat it any more so my opinion doesn’t matter. Sigh.
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Mmmmmmmm…*smacks lips in anticipation* This sounds fabulous, and a great use for the last bits of the most recent batch of celebratory cranberry-ginger-lime-orange concoction still living in the fridge! I can’t wait for the house to cool off enough to risk turning on the oven!
On a completely different note, the last performance of Titanic: the Musical was last night.* It was a great run, even with people collapsing the first weekend from heat exhaustion** Since the musical is over, my calendar pertly reminded me that it was time to “nudge McKinley” about the possibility of notating Song II*** in a format that will# allow for blog posting. So, consider yourself nudged! :-)
Smiles,
Jeanne Marie (in KC)
*to a crowd of 3,000!! ^ %
^she said smugly
%who gave us a standing ovation at the end – not something generally seen from folks on blankets!
**August heat-wave in Missouri meets a musical set on an early-spring mid-Atlantic cruise^
^the director refused to entertain the idea of re-staging Titanic as a Caribbean cruise, with attendant costume adjustments…
***or others, I’m not picky!
#A sacrifice to the the Cyber-Gnomes must be made in anticipatory propitiation!
YO. YOU RATBAG. You ARE the one who offered to notate Song II for me. So WHY didn’t you answer mine about what music-notation programme you use???? Grrrrrrr.
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You asked me about that?!?!?! I’m terribly sorry I didn’t reply!! I had no idea you asked! I never receive emails alerting me to replies to my comments, even when I check the little box (blogmom, help?!), and haven’t had time to read through comments with the musical happening! A thousand apologies!!
To answer your question, the program I use is Sibelius 2.0 (they are up to a higher number, I’m sure, we’ve had this version for 5 years). Here’s their website (and, yup, they are up to 5.2 now…)
http://www.sibelius.com/products/index.html
Again, many apologies!! I’ll send Green and Blacks in reparation!!
Jeanne Marie
Thank you very much! All is forgiven! :) I decided it must not have been you and that whoever Jeanne Marie was she was tactfully not telling me that it wasn’t she, so as not to embarrass me! (I’m *relatively* hard to embarrass, because I screw up so often!) I’m preparing to bite the bullet and buy some proper software–what I’m REALLY doing is preparing to convince Peter to bite the bullet for me, he’s always asking for gift ideas and I have BOTH a birthday and Christmas coming up in the second half of the year! Oisin uses the professional Finale, and I’ve got the free one, but it does NOT have either the capacity to have both hands/clefs in the SAME clef (the intro to Song II is BOTH clefs bass) or the ability to change time signatures. And I change time signatures **constantly** although this is OISIN’s fault because he keeps encouraging me to listen to the speech rhythms of poetry I’m trying to set!
Anyway the prices are similar (yaaaaak) so I’ll try to do a bit of compare and contrast. Is there a reason you chose Sibelius?
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Oh! I have a thought… A program similar to Finale, that we use in my acapella group to arrange our songs- and it is free to download, because I have the website: http://members.jube.org/noteworthy.html
scroll down and it says “get noteworthy HERE”
and it gives you the code etc.
heehee.
I think this might be just the thing.
Maybe.
Worth looking at, anyway!
–Julia
Yay for forgiveness! :-)
I picked Sibelius because a friend had Finale and said it was very clumsy, and I had attended a fairly helpful “Sibelius training session”* at a professional conference. Also, the local music conservatory uses Sibelius rather than Finale, who knows why, but still seemed like a good endorsement.
I will point out that another friend swears by his professional edition of Finale, and he uses it all the time for composition and arranging. I tend to think that you get used to the foibles of whichever program you purchase, to some extent. Oisin having Final might be a worthwhile benefit (a local expert you can call and weep with) if you chose Finale. Since Sibelius is now so far from my older version, I might not be that great a resource for weeping with!** But, in terms of your specific issue (needing two staves of the same clef and changing time signatures) I know that I can do those things in my version of Sibelius, because I’ve done it before for some of my projects. (I can send you an example of this if you’d like to see something…)
I wonder if you could get educational pricing for either of these programs? You could argue that you write books, which are in libraries which are in schools….hmmm…
:-)
In any case, I am happy to help as I can!
Smiles,
Jeanne Marie
*Please Buy Our Stuff session
**although, perhaps this gives me the excuse to go to the Business Manager and weep over my poor outdated program…hmmm….
Thank you! I’d love to see what Sibelius produces–can you email me something? If I know an attachment is coming and you SAY SO in the email I can get around my computer’s Maginot Line and let it in. I’ll ask Oisin if he knows about Sibelius when he gets back. Yes, I’m sure there’s a certain amount of adaptation to what you use. I assume it will PLAY what you’ve written also? With my pianistic skills this is CRUCIAL. I waste huge amounts of time learning to play something and THEN decide it’s not quite what I had in mind. :(
What do you use yours most for?
Hello! I am a lover of your books and sometimes reader of your blog (no offense it’s just that I can barely keep up with my life :) ). But I always seem to come by and read when you have posted a recipe. It is great to read the recipes and maybe imagine what character might enjoy which and then try them later. I am a recipe creator too and think it’s lots of fun. I even got to go to the Pillsbury Bake-Off with one of my creations which was a great experience.
But what I really wanted to say is I am very excited about Chalice! Will there be midnight release parties for it because I would so be there! Thanks for all that you do!