Brownies from the Betty Crocker book

The little light bulb in our microwave burned out.

Brownies ⅔ cup margarine or butter 5 ounces unsweetened chocolate* 1¾ cups sugar 2 teaspoons vanilla 3 eggs 1 cup all-purpose flour 1 cup chopped nuts, if desired Heat oven to 350°. Coat a 9-inch square pan with cooking spray. If you really want to guarantee the brownies cannot stick, cut a piece of parchment paper to fit the bottom of the pan before spraying it. Then spray the pan, press the paper into place (pushing out as many air bubbles from underneath as possible), then spritz the top of the paper. Heat butter and chocolate over low heat, stirring constantly, until melted. Remove from heat and set aside to cool slightly. If your flour has a lot of clumps, sift it so you don't have to overbeat the batter to break them up. In a large bowl, beat sugar, vanilla, and eggs with an electric mixer on high speed 5 minutes. Reduce speed to low and beat in the chocolate, scooping up from the bottom of the bowl with a rubber spatula, just until mixed. Beat in the flour just until blended. Stir in nuts if using. Spread in the pan. Bake 40 to 45 minutes or just until brownies begin to pull away from sides of pan. A toothpick in the center should have no liquid batter clinging to it (but if it has a few clumps on it, that's fine). Cut while warm. *To substitute cocoa powder, use 1 cup of it (or 15 tablespoons if you want to be very precisely correct). Add an extra 5 tablespoons of butter or margarine to the recipe. To really get the most flavor out of the cocoa powder, melt the butter (or oleo) and get it very hot instead of merely warm enough to go runny. Whisk in the cocoa powder, turn off the heat, and let it sit while you prepare the baking pan, get out the other ingredients, etc. This will draw out a lot more chocolate flavor than merely stirring the dry cocoa in. Source: Betty Crocker's 40th Anniversary Edition Cookbook, 1991

Actually, the bulb has been burnt out for a while now, and they are surprisingly hard to replace. You might think there would be a little panel inside the microwave that you either unscrew or carefully pop out of place. There isn't. You apparently have to get out a screwdriver and de-husk the entire thing, exposing all the electrical workings that actively want to kill you.

Seriously, microwaves are incredibly dangerous when you start messing with their innards. Even unplugging them doesn't make them safe (though you should do that anyway). Various electronic components in there retain more than enough to charge to ruin your life. I wasn't in the mood for heart failure caused by inept microwave repair. As a result, I've kept a watchful eye on Craigslist and garage sales for a replacement. One quickly tires of aiming a flashlight the microwave door to see if the water is boiling yet.

However, as I mentioned when I tried to get my hands on a platter from a dead microwave, times have gotten tough for all of us. People don't get rid of perfectly good things just because they're a little outdated. Every used microwave I've seen online is either too small for a standard-size dinner plate, utterly disgusting on the inside, or has a note in the listing that it doesn't work right. However, this massive thing turned up the other day. Someone was renovating a kitchen and decided they didn't want their decade-old appliances. 

I was absolutely incredulous that we got this for less than a thrift-shop price. It is one of those fancy microwaves that is also an oven. Like, it has heating elements alongside the magnetron. 

It also helped that one of the people in our house has been salivating over these convection/microwave ovens for a while now. Like, it's one of his dream appliances. I didn't think I could persuade anyone to replace a microwave with another microwave. However, I effortlessly got everyone to agree to trade the microwave for a long-cherished wish. I just thought it was nice that the light still worked. 

 

Unfortunately, this thing was huge. Before I saw it in person, I thought we could put it where its unenlightened predecessor sat. But our current microwave barely fits in its little corner of the kitchen, wedged between the wall and the kitchen sink. There is no room for appliance growth.

But we had to find out if it even worked before thinking about where to put it. It boiled a small cup of water in an agreeably short time. (It was nice to be able to watch through the door without a flashlight.) Then, to try out its baking ability, I put a slice of bread in there. It turned into successful toast. Next, I placed an oven thermometer in there, and it confirmed that it agreed with the microwave's thermostat. (Again, it was nice to read the thermometer without a flashlight.) It was time to actually make something in our new, um, oven.

I wanted our microwave's first recipe to be special. So today, we are making Betty Crocker's brownies. I am genuinely surprised I never made these the entire time Mom had this book on the shelf. This was the book I always cracked open whenever I wanted to make anything, and somehow I never made the brownies.

Betty Crocker's 40^th Anniversary Edition Cookbook, 1991

We first bloomed our cocoa powder because baking chocolate has gotten crazy expensive. I loved seeing how much cocoa went into the pot.

While the cocoa was blooming, we plugged the mixer into an outlet that doesn't share a circuit with our new glorified toaster oven. This crammed us into the back corner of the kitchen, but such are the realities of plugging a whole oven into an ordinary wall socket. 

Whipping the eggs and sugar felt a lot like making pizzelles. It also made me think of the Canadian brownies, which start the same way.

Meanwhile, our cocoa and butter had melded into something absolutely beautiful. You would never know we didn't use actual baking chocolate.

I thought the cocoa-butter would sink to the bottom of the bowl, but instead it landed in one big mound.

The first swirls of chocolate looked so beautiful in the batter. I knew that good things were coming.

Almost looks like a china pattern, doesn't it? 

I have to give the Betty Crocker people credit: their recipes always deliver. The batter made me want to unplug our fancy toaster oven and get out a spoon.

As we went from bowl to pan, I worried that our batter was too thick. But I checked the directions, and they say to spread the batter instead of pour it.

Our ambitious microwave is supposed to come with little oven racks and other bits. But we only got the glass plate that sits in the bottom when you're not using any of its extra high-priced features. Fortunately, we happened to get an all-metal colander when the last one wore out.

Jumping a week into the future, someone else wanted to do a frozen pizza in this thing. I showed him how to balance the pan on the colander and be sure not to turn on the magnetron. A few minutes later, I heard a crash and yelping. After finding out what happened, I could only say "Yeah, it's easier to handle a pan if you take it out of the oven before heating it up."

I cannot stress enough how wrong it felt to put a metal baking pan in the microwave. I was terrified that I would use the wrong setting and turn on the magnetron, but then I figured that the ensuing lightning storm would let me know I had erred.

Before running this ambitious microwave long enough to actually cook something, I had thought it might be nice for summer baking. Heating up an entire full-size oven in July is an act of cruelty against the air conditioner. But the kitchen got really hot while this thing was running. The sides and back of the it barely felt warm, but apparently this thing leaks out a lot of heat anyway. Our boring old "conventional" oven might actually be the more economical choice. 

Betty Crocker bakes these for 40 minutes, which seemed very long for brownies. Which brings us to this thing's other selling point: It's not just an oven but a convection oven.

I wasn't too excited that this has a convection fan. I've seen a lot of people claim that convection ovens can cut the baking time in half, but in my experience, they don't really change much. I think the fans in most home models are too weak to speed up any baking. (Though things do cook a lot more evenly without having to rotate any pans mid-time.) Just in case, I set the timer to go off early. These were done about ten minutes ahead of time.

Our brownies looked really nice until I cut them. Then they looked destroyed.

I think I overbaked these just a bit, which is not our microwave/oven's fault but operator error. You could tell they would have been amazingly fudgy had I taken them out of the oven a few minutes earlier. They had just the right amount of chocolate--- not too little and not an overly rich onslaught. 

I'm not surprised a Betty Crocker recipe turned out good. That's why I so rarely write about them: there's no adventure in making recipes that have been tested before printing. 

Betty Crocker recipes tend to come out like you think they should. Betty Crocker's brownies come out like what most people think brownies should be. Betty Crocker's birthday cake looks and tastes like a birthday cake. And so on. 

I don't know that I'll rush to make these again (I tend to favor the brownie recipes that you just stir together with no extended beatings). But I'll definitely keep this in mind for when I want brownies and the meditative experience of a recipe that can't be rushed.

Cheese Savoury: A pie pan of melted cheese

Looks like I got a return flight just in time! (well, aside from the fact that I landed in Texas.)

Cheese Savo(u)ry ¾ cup breadcrumbs ¼ pound ground beef (or meat of choice), cooked ¼ pound sliced tomatoes ½ pound shredded cheese (use the type(s) of your choice) about 2 tbsp butter Heat oven to 400°. Grease a 9-inch pie pan. Sprinkle about two-thirds of the breadcrumbs into the bottom of the pan. Then sprinkle the meat on top. Lay the tomatoes on top of the meat. Put the cheese in the pan over the tomatoes. Sprinkle the remaining breadcrumbs on top. Dot with the butter, cut into small pieces. As you put everything in the pan, sprinkle a pinch of salt and a little pepper over each layer. (Be careful how much salt you use per layer lest you overdo it. You want all your little salt sprinklings to add up to just a few good shakes of it.) Bake for about an hour, or until browned on top. Cut and serve while warm. The Southern Districts Advocate; Katanning, Western Australia; July 8, 1935; page 3

The Southern Districts Advocate; Katanning, Western Australia; July 8, 1935

At this point, airport construction almost feels like an act of defiant optimism. You have to believe in the future before you can build for it. Pittsburgh Airport even has cute signs with the local English.

After our post-return grocery trip, everyone in the house expressed an interest in making a beef pot roast. I had no interest in eating any of the meat (though I did skim out a lot of the potatoes in there). So I decided to instead use my portion of dinner to explore the new-to-me world of "savo(u)ries"-- mostly because this particular one involves a lot of cheese.

I'd barely heard of savories before making this, but some quick reading tells me they're like a non-sweet dessert. In other words, they're something you serve after the meal as a nice finish, but they're savory instead of sweet. I'm going to stop my explanation here so that I can avoid being wrong.

The recipe starts with minced meat. Apparently outside of North America, they mince meat instead of grinding it. I could have gotten out the hand-cranked grinder (mincer?), but today I went with the dishwasher-safe one.

The recipe next calls for sliced tomatoes, which brings us to the other reason I made it (besides cheese). These tomatoes were pruning up in the refrigerator. No one wanted to eat them, but I couldn't let myself throw them out.

The tomatoes were half-frozen from sitting in the coldest part of the refrigerator for a while, which made them wonderfully easy to slice.

Well, having gotten all our ingredients ready, the time had come for assembly!

If you look closely at the tomatoes, you can see that they still hadn't defrosted. This happily meant that all their tomato-y goodness would melt into the food instead of going to waste on the cutting board.

Now, we finally arrive at our featured ingredient: half a pound of cheese. I didn't expect it to fill up an entire pie pan, but fill the pan it did. If you like cheese, I already recommend this recipe and I haven't even baked it yet.

As a finishing touch, we're supposed to dot this with butter. Since I already had the cheese shredder out, I thought I would instead put little butter shreds all over the top instead of trying to cut it into tiny pieces. The butter softened instantly, and all those butter curls clumped together instead of scattering like cake sprinkles. We managed to tease them apart, but I don't recommend bothering with this at home.

The recipe ends with the instruction "put in a hot oven and bake 1 hour." That seemed too long to me. Then I thought that perhaps the long baking time is to get the cheese equivalent of onion caramelization (if such a thing exists). So I let our savoury stay in the oven until it looked like it was nearly burnt (which, by the way, happened well before an hour). It wasn't too overcooked to be good, but I definitely should have taken it out earlier.

This really made me want a beer to go with it. Also, it somehow tasted like I had put a lot of sausage in it. There's not a whole lot of meat in there, and the whole dish contained no spices besides black pepper. But somehow it tasted like it had a lot of sausage anyway. I have no idea where that came from, but I was not disappointed.

Other than the unexplained notes of nutmeg, this was a lot like baked macaroni and cheese without the macaroni. If you really like cheese, you will love it. And as we previously noted, the best mac and cheese has multiple cheeses in it. So why not buy a cheese assortment and put it all in the food processor (easier than shredding all those toothpick-appropriate cubes) for a savoury?

Graham Cracker Cream Cake: Every one of these is delicious in its own unique way

No matter where I travel, I always end up in the kitchen.

Graham Cracker Cream Cake 1½ cups graham cracker crumbs 1 tsp baking powder ½ tsp. salt 5 eggs, separated 1 cup sugar 1 cup chopped nuts, if desired 1 tsp vanilla Cream filling (made from the custard recipe or pudding mix of your choice) Icing or whipped cream for the top Heat oven to 350°. Cut parchment paper circles to fit the bottoms of two 8-inch round cake pans. Coat the pans with cooking spray and firmly press the paper into place. Then spritz the top of the paper with cooking spray. Even if you don't usually line your pans, you really want to with this cake. It did its damnedest to stick to the paper when I made it. Because I was prepared, the cake fell out of the pan and took the paper with it. You can easily peel stuck-on paper off of a cake. But if the cake sticks to the pan, it's all over. Mix the crumbs, baking powder, and salt; set aside. In a very large bowl, beat the egg yolks until thick and pale. Add the sugar and beat until very pale and about the consistency of cake batter. Then change out the beaters in your mixer (if it came with a second set), or run the mixer in a cup of soapy water to thoroughly clean them. With a spoon or rubber spatula, stir in the crumbs, nuts, and vanilla. Beat the egg whites until soft peaks form. Then fold them in, about a third at a time. The mixture may seem too stiff for this to work, but it will be fine. Pour into the pans and bake for about 30 minutes (they may take longer), or until the cake pulls away from the sides of the pans and spring back when lightly pressed in the center. Put layers together with cream filling. When making the filling, reduce the milk (or whatever liquid the recipe or mix uses) to about three-fourths the original amount so it is thick enough to stay in the cake and not get squeezed out when you stack the layers and then cut it. You can either ice the cake, or leave it bare and serve with whipped cream on top. Mrs. Mary Martensen's Century of Progress Cook Book (recipes from The Chicago American), 1933, via The Internet Archive

After discovering graham cracker cakes from one of my great-grandmother's paper scraps, I don't know why they ever went out of style. They taste just like the crumb crusts underneath countless cheesecakes and pies, and a lot of people like those more than the cheesecake itself. 

Anyway, today we are making our first graham cake that's not from my great-grandmother's notes but from an outside source.

Mrs. Mary Martensen's Century of Progress Cook Book (recipes from The Chicago American), 1933

This comes from Mrs. Mary Martensen's cookbook. I've come to like this book a lot. After reading the scanned PDF on a screen wasn't good enough, I hijacked a friend's printer and bound it Coptic-style. (The board for the covers was lovingly swiped from an artist's scrap heap.)

If you don't want your book trimmed, anyone can do Coptic binding without buying specialized supplies. Really, you just need some sturdy string, an extra-large needle, a way to punch holes in the pages (I used a power drill), and a few clamps. I think most people already have everything except the extra-large sewing needle and possibly the clamps. Still, those are things you can get from most craft and hardware stores. You don't need to go to any specialized bookmaking shops. (It definitely helps to wax your string, but I simply pulled mine through a dollar store tealight candle.)

But if you want your book to have neat edges, you probably can't do that with things lying around your house. I had to take Mrs. Mary Martensen to a local binding shop. They were like "I don't even know how to charge you for this, so have a good day!"

So my honest advice is that you can make Coptic books at home in a leisurely afternoon. You don't have to glue them together and let them sit in clamps overnight. Nor do you need to spend a lot of money on book-specific tools unless you want the edges to be nice and even, in which case it's awfully nice to have a hydraulic cutter in the house.

Didn't Mrs. Mary Martensen come out cute!

 

All of this bookbinding chat is to say that my friend's kitchen has open shelves instead of cabinets. While I don't like exposing the dishes to airborne grease and other ickiness, it was nice to prop up the book at eye level.

Getting down to cake, this particular recipe starts off with a modern-day luxury: nearly half a dozen eggs.

Speaking of eggs, I looked up Mrs. Mary Martensen to see what other publications are still floating around. I didn't want to order any, but I did look through sample pages of various booklets just to see if any recipes were carried over from one book to the next. This cake made the cut at least twice, though they seem to have taken out half the eggs as the Depression wore on. (Also, I've got those cupcakes saved for a future dessert occasion.)

What Shall We Have For Dinner? Twenty Menus by Mary Martensen, ca. 1930s (via Ebay)

I didn't buy this book, but it made me like Mary Martensen even more than I already did. For one thing, the meal planning page tells us to serve dessert "once a day, sometimes twice." Also, among the household hints on the back cover, Mrs. Mary Martensen says that "Tests also prove that searing does not hold in more juices." 

Mrs. Mary Martensen was simultaneously of her time and ahead of it.

It's true that cooking advice from ninety years ago often gets debunked in the ensuing decades (unless they're telling you to serve dessert once a day, sometimes twice). But modern tests show that searing doesn't "seal in" anything. Also, given that steaks are generally considered man-territory for manly-men, I don't appreciate how many websites called it an "old wives tale." 

Towards the bottom of the list, under "Other Foods:" Dessert once a day, sometimes twice.

Setting aside our gender symposium and getting back to the mixing bowl, you can tell this recipe came out after handcranked eggbeaters got cheap. I can't imagine anyone putting a few linear miles on a whisk for the sake of pulverized graham crackers.

We only needed a minute with an electric mixer to get here, but a hand-whisk could easily have stretched this into multiple hours.

After our egg yolks and sugar were beaten until they looked like batter, we needed to move them to a bigger bowl. If you try this at home, you can start this recipe in a really big bowl and lower the dirty-dish count, but this one was made of cheap plastic that couldn't withstand an electric beating. The mixer gouged several pits out of the plastic when making a cheesecake and filled the batter with blue speckles.

Adding the graham crackers turned this into a really hard paste. I didn't see how we would ever fold in the egg whites without mashing the air right back out of them. But I figured that we still had some baking powder in the batter in case the whites failed.

I coaxed the whites into the batter in a few increments. To my surprise, the batter actually fluffed up.

I know that most cakes pull away from the sides of the pan when they're ready to leave the oven, but these shrank a lot. They also formed little filaments of hardened batter as they contracted. These would later unnerve the person I was visiting, who said "I feel weird eating a cake with strings coming off it."

Next, it was time to put the cream filling onto our masterpiece. I had planned to simply put icing in the middle, but the recipe says to "put layers together with cream filling." I didn't give that any thought until my friend looked at the recipe and asked "Why is it a graham cracker cream cake? There's no cream in it. It's just eggs?" So, I made a custard for the middle.

Also, I love how the cake fit snugly in the paper plate. It's like the two were made for each other.

If the filling is an odd color, it's because I couldn't resist adding something that practically suggested itself as it sat among the spices After all, one of the nice things about cooking in other people's houses is you can use things you don't have at home.

To further put the cream in cream cake, I put whipped cream on top of it. This conveniently meant I didn't have to attempt a decent-looking icing job.

Like the chiffon cake, it was almost impressively resilient, which was great until you tried to get a knife into it.

I thought this cake tasted wonderfully and deliciously like a graham cracker pie crust. My friend, on the other hand, pondered his slice (while rapidly inhaling forkloads of it) and said "This tastes like banana bread."

"I guess it does, but there's no bananas in it."

"I know, but it has the same spices as banana bread."

"The only spice in this is vanilla." (Only the filling contained root beer.)

"Then what is this?"

I thought this had the best flavor of all the graham cracker cakes we've seen on this blog (though our first one had the best texture). My friend took a fairly large hunk of it to work (but not too much-- apparently it was too good to send out of the house). I was informed that "everyone loved it."

Hershey's Blossoms: or, Betty Crocker will not be outdone

Who would have thought that the Hershey people don't have the best chocolate recipe?

Peanut Butter Blossoms 48 Hershey's Kisses 1½ cups all-purpose flour 1 tsp baking soda ½ tsp salt ½ cup shortening ¾ cup creamy Peanut Butter ⅓ cup granulated sugar ⅓ cup (packed) brown sugar 1 egg 2 tbsp milk 1 tsp vanilla Additional sugar for rolling Heat oven to 375°. Have baking sheets lined with ungreased foil or parchment paper. Remove wrappers from chocolates, set aside. Stir together flour, salt, and baking soda. Set aside. In a large bowl, beat shortening until creamy. Add peanut butter and beat until well blended. Add sugars and beat until fluffy. Add egg, milk, and vanilla; beat well. Mix in the flour. Shape dough into 1-inch balls. Roll in granulated sugar; place on cookie sheet. Bake 8 to 10 minutes or until very lightly browned on the edges. Immediately press a chocolate into center of each cookie. They will crack around the edges. Remove from cookie sheet to wire rack. Cool completely. Source: Hershey's Kisses bag, probably 2013-15

Before we get any further, I would like to propose that even before AI, ad copywriters were never real humans. Would a sentient person with deep thoughts and real feelings write a phrase like "Peanut butter cookies with a HERSHEY'S KISSES Brand Milk Chocolate in the center"?

We're making blossom cookies because when visiting friends, one should bring out the really good stuff. I cut this off a bag of Hershey's Kisses years ago (around the time I wrote about shoving cauliflower through a meat grinder, actually) and never got around to making them. Then I lost the slip of plastic and made the cookies from Betty Crocker's website instead. Much later, the recipe we never made fell out of a box of assorted clutter.

I thought it'd be the same as the one we made already. Both Betty Crocker and Hershey are corporate brands, so it makes sense that one company would license a recipe to the other. But I cross-checked just to be sure. Betty Crocker uses butter, but the Hershey people use shortening. You know, the unnaturally white stuff that absolutely does not creep me out.

Incidentally, the Hershey's people stopped printing the recipe on their chocolate bags some time after I cut this out. Today, you get this:

Really helpful, guys.

Anyway, we couldn't decide in the store whether to use chocolate or strawberry kisses in these. On the one hand, chocolate is always the answer. But at the same time, artificial strawberry flavoring is one of the food industry's greatest creations. We made the obvious compromise. (And yes, the pink candies tasted exactly like a synthetic strawberry shake from any drive-thru. It is very fortunate that the bag contained a lot more candies than we needed.)

After pressing the candy into the hot cookies, we found out that the strawberry kisses have a lower melting point than chocolate. They collapsed on themselves before the cookies cooled.

We didn't throw these cookies away, but they didn't vanish off the plate like Betty Crocker's did. They tasted just fine, but they were just a bit drier than Betty's. So if you're going to make blossom cookies (and they do have a way of bespelling people), I'm going to suggest you use the Betty Crocker version. 

But I won't say these weren't bad. When I suggested giving some away, I was decisively refused.