Bangor Brownies: or, We finally had too much molasses

I saw the truly insane usage of molasses and had to do it.

Bangor Brownies 1 cup flour 1 tsp baking powder Pinch of salt ¼ cup melted shortening 1 cup molasses 1 egg 2 oz unsweetened chocolate, melted* 1 cup nuts, if desired Heat oven to 325°. Spray a 9" round or 8" square pan. Line the bottom of it with paper cut to fit. Then spray the top of the paper. Sift together flour, baking powder, and salt. Set aside. Mix together the shortening and molasses. Then add the egg and the chocolate, beating each ingredient before adding the next. Beat well. Then stir in the flour. Add nuts last. Pour into the pan and bake about 15-20 minutes, or until firmly set. Turn out of the pan as soon as you take it out of the oven, and cut with a sharp knife. *If desired, you can substitute 6 tablespoons of cocoa powder. Increase the shortening by two tablespoons. Note: We recommend omitting the chocolate. Instead, add spices like cinnamon, ginger, and nutmeg. The Metropolitan Cook Book, Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, via Mid-Century Menu

The Metropolitan Cook Book, Metropolitan Life Insurance Company (via Mid-Century Menu)

As I've said before (and often), I like molasses so much that I pour it onto waffles. And look at how much we're using today!

With normal, molasses-free brownie recipes, the batter isn't this dark until after you've added the chocolate. But this recipe uses a truly glorious amount of molasses. 

I thought I might have a good gingerbread recipe on my hands, so I split the batter in two before adding the chocolate.

As the brownies baked, I couldn't help wondering what made these distinctly "Bangor" brownies. Is it the molasses? I quickly found another recipe for Bangor brownies. Even if you swap the sugar for the molasses, the two recipes aren't the same.

Mrs. Mary Martensen's 1933 Century of Progress Cook Book, via The Internet Archive

And so, I went to Food Timeline and learned that the town of Bangor, Maine figures prominently in the (surprisingly hazy) early history of brownies. The earliest "Bangor Brownies" they had (dated 1912) are completely different from either of the Bangors we have already seen. But it seems like aside from today's recipe, molasses doesn't really go into Bangor brownies.

When I checked on the brownies at the end of the recipe's 15 minute baking time, I grimly suspected that I would soon dump them into the trash. When your hot batter is bubbling and oozing like a pan full of simmering spaghetti sauce, you usually have a failure in the oven. I was utterly furious at wasting chocolate and nearly half a jar of molasses.

I gave the brownies an additional 5 minutes because I figured the oven was already heated and the "brownies" were already in it. Also, I wasn't ready to face the hot pan of ruined grocery money. At the end of the extra time, I found that the batter had set. However, it looked less like brownies and more like hardened mud. I was ready to dump the entire pan into the garbage can, but I didn't want to melt the trash bag.

I only cut the brownies as a formality, but they had a surprisingly good texture. I expected a gummy hardened paste, but they somehow had become a light and fluffy gingerbread. The molasses-only side of the pan was only a few spices away from being really good. This may be worth exploring further.

However, I wasn't impressed with the chocolate brownies. The chocolate and molasses tasted like they were at war with each other. I thought they would meld into something beautiful and they absolutely did not. I never thought I'd say this, but I think this brownie recipe is better without chocolate.

Molasses Cookies: or, More amazing recipes from instruction manuals!

Once again, we are borrowing recipes from people selling kitchen toys on Ebay.

Molasses-Spice Cookies ½ cup shortening ½ cup sugar ¼ tsp salt ¼ tsp baking soda ¼ tsp allspice ¼ tsp mace ¼ tsp cloves ½ tsp cinnamon ½ tsp ginger 1 egg ¼ cup molasses 2½ cups flour Heat oven to 375° Have ungreased cookie sheets, a thin metal spatula, and a cooling rack ready. Cream the shortening. Add sugar, salt, baking soda, and spices, cream well. Thoroughly mix in the egg, then the molasses. Beat until light and well-whipped. Gently mix in all but a quarter-cup of flour. Dough should be firm like modelling clay, and not at all sticky. Add the remaining flour (and possibly a bit more) if needed. Put through a cookie press onto the (ungreased!) baking sheet. Bake 8-12 minutes, or until slightly darkened at the edges. Immediately after you take the cookies out of the oven, use the spatula to remove them to a cooling rack. If you don't have a cookie press, you can shape the dough any way you like. You can use a rolling pin and cookie cutter. Or, you can roll the dough into little balls and flatten them between your hands. Or, you can use a cookie stamp if you have one. Or, you can roll the dough into little snakes and form them into whatever shapes you like (rings, pretzels, spirals, stars, etc). Source: Mirro cookie press instruction sheet

I have been looking for new recipes to put through my squirt gun. Even though we had one really good recipe fall out of a box while we were pruning clutter, you can't always count on cookies to find you. I found someone selling an older cookie press online. They had photographed the entire instruction sheet to prove that it was intact. This included the suggested recipes. Naturally, I saved the images and then hastily closed the page before I could be tempted to buy it.

Today's recipe was perfect for me. It involves excessive amounts of molasses and our new cookie caulking gun. I could hardly wait to bring the stand mixer into this too.

I don't know if the cookies need this kind of excessive whipping. or if I just like playing with electric mixers. But the well-whipped cookies came out great the first time, and now I'm afraid to try any other way.

And now we get to the most exciting part of this recipe: pouring in a lot of molasses. I love any excuse to use excessive molasses, up to and including pouring it all over waffles. And just look at those beautiful brown swirls!

The molasses tinted the dough to a light honey color rather than the dark brown I hoped for. I began to suspect that the recipe writers had restrained themselves to a polite amount of molasses in some misguided pursuit of moderation and good taste.

If we look away from the recipe and read the general directions at the top of the sheet, we are told to set aside some of the flour (say, a spoonful or two) when mixing it in. In their own words, "Due to variations in flour and the size of eggs it sometimes becomes necessary to omit some of the flour or to add an additional one or two tablespoons."

I really like that they wrote this. A lot of people (including my past self) think you merely get your measurements right and all comes out perfect. This is annoyingly common among those smarmy men who upload baking videos that involve a whiteboard covered in math and mansplaining. But in reality, even the most regimented industrial bakeries must vary their formulas from one batch to the next. If the people in the Twinkie factory have to tweak the recipe from day to day, so do the rest of us.

The flour darkened the cookie dough to a more acceptable color. It may not show in the pictures, but just take my word for it because my phone hates the kitchen lights for some reason. I will always be surprised when white flour (of all things!) adds a brownish tint to recipes.

And so, it was time to load up our dough contraption and start squirting! 

On a recipe group I'm in, somebody said that it's easier to use one of these dough presses if you don't grease the baking sheet. This sounded like blasphemy, sacrilege, and heresy to me. It also meant I would actually have to wash the pans. But when I've use paper (ungreased or not), only half of the cookies only stayed where I tried to put them. I've been getting a little tired of dropping cookie misfires back into the mixing bowl.

I haven't baked cookies without paper or foil under them for multiple years. After scraping far too many stuck-on cookies off of bare pans, I swore never do that to myself again. But I was personally reassured that if I use a thin metal spatula to promptly get the cookies onto a cooking rack upon removing them from the oven, they will not stick. I found it reassuring to have a specific person to blame when my cookies inevitably glued themselves to the pan and required a chiseling job.

But even though other people and the instruction sheet told me not to grease the pan, I didn't believe them. Instead, I reconciled myself to sacrificing the first batch of cookies after they almost certainly fused themselves the pan. After making peace with impending failure, I decided to play with all the little stencils. I've been steadily making my way through all the designs that came with the cookie gun. This one really raised my curiosity. I couldn't begin to imagine the cookie it would produce.

At first, I merely got spaghetti-like extrusions. They flopped about uselessly when I lifted the press away from the pan.

I don't know what to do when these things don't work. Our cookie press doesn't have any adjustment knobs to tweak when cookies don't come out right. It only has one lever on top that pushes the dough out. When I did get a cookie out of that stencil, it looked, um, like this.

I don't think I will reuse this one in the future.

While the first batch baked, I pressed out the second. The raised sides of this pan gave me pause. They promised to make it difficult to get a spatula in there at a flat angle. But putting those worries aside, we did find out that the star tip makes really cute cookies.

The recipe says to bake 10-12 minutes, but mine were done in about seven. I suspect that different cookie guns dispense different-sized cookies which need different baking times. Maybe this recipe handout was originally boxed with a cookie press that makes big cookies.

After the first batch was ready, I got out the metal spatula and was pleasantly surprised-- amazed, even-- at how easily the cookies lifted right off. Incidentally, it felt weird to use this spatula indoors. We only ever use it for grilling, hence the permanent burns.

The plain round cookies are the misshapen ones. I got tired of putting the dough back in the press, so I reshaped them with my hands instead.

Getting the cookies immediately off the pan had an unexpected upside. It didn't matter if the smaller cookies were done while the bigger cookies were still raw. You could remove some of the cookies as needed and let the others resume baking. The half-baked ones didn't have time to cool off before returning to the oven.

Here are our cookies on the cooling rack, with the astonishingly clean pan behind them. 

Most of the cookie shapes came out rather nice. However, the ones from the irksome stencil looked malformed at best. A passing person, lured by the kitchen smells, said "It looks like a cosmic horror of boobs." The weird cookies even made our six-petal flowers look bad by association. 

Setting aside the cookies that unfortunately came out just like they're supposed to, I will have to get a bigger rack if I make spritz cookies a lot. I only bought this one for baking fish sticks in the toaster oven. I never thought that a small cookie press would require paraphernalia and threaten to take over all the storage space in the kitchen.

I have to give our friends at the Mirro recipe development department a tip of the hat and a lot of credit. These cookies were absolutely fantastic. This is the best recipe I've gotten out of an appliance manual since the coffee cheesecake. One person said "These taste professional!" I meant to find out if the spices get stronger the next day (as often happens with gingerbread and related things), but the cookies were all gone by the end of the night.

Slovakian Poppyseed Cake: or, We need to buy poppyseeds in bulk

Everyone who saw this recipe said "I hope you're not taking a drug test."

Poppyseed Cake ½ cup poppyseeds ½ cup milk 1 cup flour 6 tbsp butter or oleo Pinch of salt (if butter is unsalted) 1 cup plus 2 tbsp sugar ½ tsp vanilla 1½ tsp baking powder 2 eggs, separated Grind the poppyseeds. Add the milk, and soak overnight in the refrigerator. The next day, whisk in the flour, and set aside. Heat oven to 350°. Grease an 8-inch cake pan. Cream the butter, sugar, salt, vanilla, and baking powder. Add the egg yolks one at a time, beating well after each. Gradually add the poppyseed mixture, and beat until smooth. Beat the egg whites until stiff but not dry. (They should hold a point, but the very tip should fall a tiny bit.) Fold them into the batter. Pour into the pan and bake for 45 minutes. Top with plain or fancy frosting, according to taste. Florence Ribovich (Hammond, Indiana), Anniversary Slovak-American Cook Book, First Catholic Slovak Ladies Union, 1952

Before I made this recipe, I never thought about how much drug tests have become part of our everyday lives. Even people who have never been inside a police station know that a single poppyseed bagel will make you test positive for heroin. And we are using a lot more than a bagel's worth of poppyseeds today.

Anniversary Slovak-American Cook Book, First Catholic Slovak Ladies Union, 1952

We've made a few recipes out of the Anniversary Slovak-American Cook Book, but until now we've stuck to things like brownies and banana bread. Today we are finally venturing into the eastern European recipes that were only a few pages away from the peanut butter cookies.

I have never seen a poppyseed cake like this before. But while this recipe may be totally new to me, apparently it's very common in eastern Europe. The Slovak-American Ladies' Association Cook Book has three nearly-identical recipes for poppyseed cake spanning two pages. All of them require you to purchase two standard-size spice shakers of poppyseeds.

 

Florence Ribovich doesn't tell us to grind the seeds, but the other poppyseed cakes do. I therefore figured the instruction to grind the seeds was implied. And so, for our first adventure in eastern European cooking, I pulverized enough poppyseeds to make 7 or 8 non-Eastern European cakes. It looked like I was making a cake with potting soil.

I thought the milk would turn blue after soaking overnight, but it looked white and unchanged the next day. When we poured it out, the poppyseeds at the bottom had turned into a peculiar colored slime.

We are directed to add the flour to our poppyseeds and milk, and so I did. It turned into a grayish purple clay. Usually when your cake batter threatens to break the spoon, you have messed up beyond any attempts at salvaging. But since I know nothing about eastern European cooking, I assumed that things were going as Ms. Ribovich intended.

At this point in the recipe, the spoon proved useless. We had to bring in the power tools. With the indispensable aid of our mixer, we managed to turn this into an actual (if rather bizarrely colored) cake batter. I wasn't using the mixer to stir things together so much as chop up the heroin clay until it gave up.

At this point, our batter tasted like poppyseed kolache filling. Did you know poppyseeds have a taste? I used to think they merely added speckles and textural interest to poppyseed cake. But it turns out they have an nutty, anise-and-pecan-ish flavor. As soon as I tasted a sample, I regretted halving the recipe.

The cake rose a lot in the oven and produced an impressive dome. It would have looked so much better had I baked this in a loaf pan. If you want to bake this cake in layers and stack them, I would reduce the oven to 325°, and also make the batter thinner in the center of the pans and higher on the sides.

Regardless of whether the cake was any good or not, it was a lovely composition of colors. The purple(ish) cake contrasted with the white icing on top. The whole effect gained extra vibrance from the thin band of a surprisingly pretty golden color that separated the cake from the icing.

The cake tasted a lot more normal than I expected. The poppyseeds added an interesting toasty flavor, but their distinctive taste became more muted after baking. I was hoping for poppyseed kolache filling in cake form (especially after tasting the cake batter), but I got a perfectly lovely cake instead.

I must also note that the cake was amazingly soft and fluffy. Any reasonable-sized piece threatened to topple over on the plate. If I cut a slice that didn't threaten to tip over, it was too big for one person. (This is a very good problem to have.) 

So, if you don't mind buying a lot of poppyseeds, I definitely recommend this cake. It's unusual enough to be interesting without being weird. (Well it's unusual where I live, anyway.) But you should probably make sure you don't have an upcoming drug test.

Sandies: or, Using flour as a dye

I made these purely to play with my cookie squirt gun.

Sandies ¾ cups shortening (4½ oz) ½ cup powdered sugar (2 oz) 2 tbsp water ⅛ tsp salt ½ tsp lemon extract 1½ tsp vanilla 1½ cups flour (6 oz) Heat oven to 375°. Line your cookie sheets with ungreased paper. Cream the shortening until softened. Gradually add the sugar. (If using an electric mixer, you can simply put both into the bowl at the same time and beat them together.) Beat until light and fluffy. Add water, salt, lemon extract, and vanilla. Beat very well, whipping until it looks like cake frosting. Sift in the flour and mix well. Put through a cookie press. Or, shape into small balls and press each one about ¼" flat between your hands. Bake 8-10 minutes, or until golden at the edges. Anonymous recipe card

This recipe comes in the same handwriting as the ill-fated stuffed cupcakes, but that didn't worry me.

Our cookies begin with powdered sugar and shortening. I am always a little leery of shortening (even beef fat seems more trustworthy), but at least we would avoid any butter-related failures.

This recipe marks the beginning of the era of lard. We recently ran out of shortening (I tend to be a bit heavy-handed when brushing it onto the pizzelle iron). It proved cheaper to purchase a can of 50-50 shortening and lard than to pay for straight shortening. Since one creepy white fat looks just like another to me, I followed the prices. I've seen some people swear that lard is the magical secret of all their baked creations, and today we will find out.

I noted that the recipe doesn't call for any baking powder. Therefore, the only leavening in these cookies is what you beat into them. I therefore let the mixer run for a very long time to whip a lot of air into it. As I watched the bowl spin, I couldn't get over how white our cookie dough was. The spoonful of tap water did not make it look any better. It tasted like knockoff Oreo filling and looked unnatural.

We usually add vanilla for its flavor, but I really hoped it would dye the dough a bit. I don't trust baked goods that are the color of copy paper. Unfortunately, the vanilla didn't change the color at all. And so, to hopefully give the cookies a more natural tint (and also because the dough tasted a bit bland), I thought of our 1930s sugar cookies and added nutmeg. Our dough gained some brown specks, but it remained as unnervingly white as ever.

Here we get to the most surprising part of the recipe. When I mixed in the flour, the dough turned a (blessedly natural-looking) creamy color. Who knew you could dye foods with white flour?

You can really see the difference when you look at the residue on the beaters from top to bottom. I'm contemplating the bizarre series of events (starting at the lard factory and ending with my electric mixer) that led to white flour being the most colorful part of a cookie recipe.

And now, we get to the fun part: squirting all the cookies through the caulker! I only made this recipe because its directions end with "fill cookie press," so I was so excited that I didn't care that I had to throw a lot of misshapen cookies back into the mixing bowl.

The cookies were perfectly baked on the 8 minute mark, which is exactly at the lower end of the baking time written on the card. However, the oven smelled faintly of ham while they cooked. I don't know if that was the lard, or if I need to clean away the residue of previous dinners. As I hoped, the cookies puffed up very nicely in the oven. Letting the mixer run for an extra minute or six (before adding the flour!) did wonders.

These cookies were a lot better than the list of ingredients made me expect. They are so crisp, yet they nearly melt in your mouth. I don't know if this is a really good recipe, or if the lard made that magical difference. Either way, they were so good that they all disappeared while I wasn't looking.

So, while following the handwriting may sometimes lead to a misfire, usually it takes you to the best recipes you will ever find.

French Orange Cake: or, Getting continental with raisins

I'm a sucker for recipes that drop the word "French" in the title.

French Orange Cake Grated rind of 1 orange 1 cup sugar ⅓ cup shortening 1 tsp baking soda 1 tsp baking powder pinch salt 1 egg 1 tsp vanilla 1 cup sour cream* 2 cups sifted flour 1 cup chopped raisins        Topping: Juice of 1 orange ½ cup sugar Whipped cream for serving (optional) Heat oven to 350°. Grease a 9" square pan. Rub together the orange rind and sugar until the sugar is a bright yellow and smells strongly or oranges. Cream together the sugar, shortening, baking soda, baking powder, and salt. Add the egg and vanilla, and beat until very light. Add about one third of the flour. When mixed, add about half of the sour cream. Repeat this with another third of the flour and the remaining half of the sour cream. Then mix in the last third of the flour. When all is combined, stir in the raisins. Bake for 25 minutes, or until a toothpick in the center comes out clean. While the cake is baking, make the topping. Mix the sugar and the orange juice, and then heat until the sugar dissolves. You can either do this in a small saucepan over medium-low heat, or you can use the microwave by cooking it for 15 seconds at a time, stopping the microwave and stirring the juice after each time. As the juice gets hot, watch carefully so it doesn't boil over. As soon as the cake comes out of the oven, pour the syrup on it. Allow to cool, or serve it warm. If desired, serve with whipped cream. *or sour milk, or buttermilk Mrs. John E. Meeter, 239 College Ave, Chambersburg Pennsylvania; Philadelphia Inquirer Recipe Exchange, September 13 1935, page 12

Mrs. John E. Meeter starts off strong. We're only a minute or two into the recipe, and we already have oranges and sour cream.

Because this recipe makes a lot of cake, I halved it. This entailed splitting an egg in half, which has become a surprisingly undaunting task after doing it enough times. I'm not complaining about the egg-splitting. I only point it out so I can note that the orange rind had turned the sugar such a beautiful color that the bright yellow egg looked like a hideous beige spill on top of it.

Our finished cake batter was thick enough to suspend in the beaters.

When the batter landed in the pan, it looked a lot like 1234 cake.

You may have noticed that the recipe calls for raisins, and our cake batter doesn't contain any. The raisins, predictably enough, incited an ideological split in the house. Some people really didn't want those creepy crawly brown things in the cake. I, on the other hand, wanted to see if they improved the cake at all. After all, Mrs. Meeter put raisins into the cake, and she got her name and recipe in the newspaper and a $2 basket of groceries. Maybe the raisins make the cake French.

And so, after putting half the cake batter into the pan, I did this to what remained:

I didn't realize that the raisins would add volume to the cake batter. So, I ended up beraisining half the batter but therefore two-thirds of the cake.

With the cake in the oven, it was time for the topping. Mrs. Meeter would have dissolved the sugar and orange juice in a tiny pot on the stovetop (perhaps by setting it over the stove's pilot light), but we can use a microwave instead.

Our resulting glaze looked just like that syrup in canned peaches with a bit of extra yellow food coloring in it. For the record, I didn't add any dyes to the cake or the glaze. Oranges produce a really pretty shade of yellow on their own.

Getting back to the cake itself, I thought it would level itself off in the oven. It did not.

Looks like a child's modeling clay project, doesn't it?

The glaze highlighted every finger-smudged contour of the cake and made it look worse. It's very rare for a glaze to make a cake look bad, but we succeeded today.

As is often the case with cake, it looked better after cutting. The visual shortcomings all but disappeared. However, some people thought the intrusive raisins cancelled out any aesthetic improvements.

Raisins or not, everyone really liked the cake. The orange glaze added beauty to perfection. Seriously, I would save the glaze recipe even if I didn't make the cake again.

Bizarrely, you couldn't tell the raisins were there. You couldn't taste them, they didn't change the texture, they didn't even add little pockets of moistness. It appears the power of oranges can defeat raisins. So unless you're trying to sneak raisins into everyone's food like a parent slipping pulverized broccoli into lasagna, you can omit them and lose nothing. Maybe Mrs. Meeter knew the raisins wouldn't alter the cake at all, and that's why she added them. After volumizing the cake with imperceptible raisins, there's more cake for your hungry children, your spouse who just got home from a factory job, a few unexpected guests who followed your progeny home, and yourself. You might even have an extra slice to pack into your husband's lunch the next day.

Raisin-based economizing aside, this is a really good cake. It turns out that using actual oranges to make orange-flavored things is delicious.