Graham Cracker 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. 

 

Second-Stab Saturday: Uncracked Chicago Cheesecake!

I hadn't yet gotten groped at airport security and I was already cooking for strangers.

Chicago-style Cheesecake        Crust: 6 oz (about 1⅔ cups) graham cracker crumbs* 2 tbsp butter 2 tbsp sugar Pinch of salt (if butter is unsalted)        Filling: 1 cup sugar 1 pound cream cheese 2 tbsp flour Pinch of salt 1 tsp vanilla 4 eggs, separated 1 cup cream        To make the crust: Cream the butter and sugar. Mix in the crumbs. This is easiest with your hands or with an electric mixer, instead of with a spoon. Press the crumbs into the bottom of a deep springform pan. If you don't have one, you can use a 9" square pan or a very large cast-iron skillet.        To make the filling: Beat the sugar and cream cheese until well creamed. Add flour and salt, beat in thoroughly. Add the vanilla and egg yolks, mix well. Then mix in the cream. Beat the egg whites until almost-but-not-quite stiff peaks form. Then fold them into the batter. Pour the batter into the pan and bake at least one hour. It is done when the center springs back when lightly pressed with the finger, and when the cheesecake jiggles instead of sloshing. When it is done and the oven turned off, crack the oven door open and let the cheesecake stay there until it cools completely. Then refrigerate overnight. *The original recipe calls for crushed zwieback crackers, but those are surprisingly hard to find these days. Unless you really want to be period-correct, graham crackers will be just fine. Source: Mrs. Mary Martensen's Century of Progress Cook Book (recipes from The Chicago American), 1933, via The Internet Archive

Note: If you want to lift the whole cheesecake out of the pan before serving it (and don't have a springform pan), cut a piece of cardboard to fit the bottom of the pan you're using. Make sure there aren't any big gaps when you press it into the pan, but it shouldn't fit snugly either. You're going to want to easily lift it out after baking. Wrap the cardboard in foil. Next, cut two wide strips of parchment paper (say, 2 or so inches), that are long enough to lay across the pan and stick out a little over each side. Grease the pan. Then lay the paper strips crosswise across it so they cross in the center. You want both ends of each strip to stick out over the edge of the pan. Then put the cardboard into the pan on top of the paper. You now have a pan with four paper tabs poking up from the cardboard you put on the bottom. Put the crust mixture on top of the cardboard, and proceed with the recipe. After you have the batter on top of the crust, you should have four paper tabs sticking up from the edges of the pan. After baking the cheesecake and then refrigerating it until it's completely chilled, cut around the edge of the pan to free the cake, being sure to cut between the paper and the cheesecake. Then lift the cheesecake by the paper tabs. You can now set it on whatever serving platter you like. You could use just one paper strip instead of two. But I recommend using two paper strips, which gives you a backup in case the first one rips.

Greetings from semiremote Pennsylvania! I forget how persistent snow is in places that actually have winters. The temperature has hovered in the fifties (that's, like, 10° or 12° for our Celsius friends), but the snow still lines the roads. It feels unexpectedly disorienting- when the temperature says to wear a light jacket but the ground says to get out your boots.

 

This town happens to use a pole-mounted municipal siren to summon the volunteer fire department. I've been in Texas long enough to associate these things with tornadoes. The siren went off on my first night in Pennsylvania and terrified me.  I was like "OH SHIT IT'S BLOWING IN!" The calm weather outside only scared me more. I thought this would be one of those horrible storms that comes out of nowhere and takes off the roof. But no, it was just a siren on a utility pole summoning the volunteer firefighters.

While we were making plans in the week before I took flight, I offhandedly suggested making a cheesecake. A few days later, my friend said "I told everyone at work that I'd bring a cheesecake." He and his coworkers are lucky that he already said he'd do all the kitchen cleanup if we cooked anything.

This brings us to our recipe. When last we saw a Chicago-style cheesecake, it was delicious but it also cracked. I don't know why that bothered me, but it did. So this time, we left the oven door slightly cracked open until the cheesecake got cold. The result: a perfect, crack-free cheesecake. Either leaving it in the oven fixed our problems, or things are just better in Pennsylvania.

You may notice that we're using an actual springform pan. I bothering with springforms a long time ago. I only ever seem to use them once before abandoning them in the cabinets. And once again, I'm only going to use this one once before abandoning it in someone else's kitchen and flying out of the state. (He insisted on buying it. I was fully prepared to repurpose a casserole dish.)

Getting to our happy results, I could say that sag in the middle is perfect for piling in fresh fruit or whatever. But this cheesecake really doesn't need the help. Like, I could barely get the ring off the pan without someone cutting into it.

My poor unsuspecting friend was not prepared for how good this was. While d in fact give some away at work, it was a much smaller chunk of cake than I think he planned. Just like the last time I made it, I was told "This is the best cheesecake I've ever had!" 

So if you like cheesecake, you owe this recipe to yourself. But don't promise anyone else a slice. 

Travelin Cookies

We at A Book of Cookrye are going en voyage!

Traveling Cookies ½ cup peanut butter 1 cup sugar 1 tsp vanilla 1 egg 1 cup whole-wheat flour About 5 ounces blueberries, if desired Heat oven to 350°. Grease an 8" square or 9" round pan. Melt the peanut butter in a large bowl or in a saucepan. Stir in the sugar. Thoroughly beat in the egg and vanilla. Then mix in the flour. This will probably be very crumbly. Add the berries if desired. Spread and press into the pan (I find it easiest to press it out with my hands). Bake 13-20 minutes, or until the center springs back when lightly pressed. Cut while hot. Adapted from Betty Feezor's brownies

I can never get through an airport on the first attempt. I have been stranded, I've been bumped off flights, I've had my reservations disappear from computer systems, I've had freak storms ground all of the planes, and I've had the pilot turn the plane around and make everyone get back off. I don't feel safe until we're off the ground and too far away to loop back.

With that in mind, I always bring snacks when I travel. In my experience, dropping a fistful of granola bars into one's bag is absolutely not enough. So today, we're making something to tide oneself over in the event of an expected stranding.

We're starting with Betty Feezor's brownie recipe because it's hard to go wrong with brownies. I sometimes make them with peanut butter instead of chocolate. Half butter and half peanut butter give a good, fudgy texture. But today, we're using all peanut butter because it's vaguely better for you... I think.

Every recipe can teach you something new. Today, I learned to never melt peanut butter in a thin metal bowl over a gas burner. It scorches in 5 seconds, and you cannot stir it fast enough to save it. I also learned that burnt peanut butter smells exactly like popcorn. Someone wandered in the kitchen and actually asked "Do I smell popcorn in here?"

All right, let's try melting the peanut butter again. Because no one likes a scorcher of a recipe, we switched to the microwave.

This mess is why I only replace half the butter when I want a nice dessert. The recipe gets crumbly if you use straight peanut butter. But if you've been on the road for a while (or simply stuck in a bus terminal, or watching your flights get cancelled from an uncomfortable bench at the terminal) the full-peanut ones hit a lot better.

Now, we get to the next ingredient that makes these super healthy: whole wheat flour! I often use whole-wheat flour in brownies (chocolate or otherwise) without trying to delude my way to health. It adds a nutty undertone that goes great with chocolate. Today, it will also help us tell ourselves that we're making a healthy snack.

I know this looks like will end badly. But we're not going for an exquisite creations today. We want something that can provide sustenance and also get crammed into the bottom corner of a small bag.

We had to switch to a bowl that let us get both hands in there and force everything to mix.

To finish these off, we're going to dump in the last of the berries that were starting to prune up in the refrigerator. I figure that at this point, our bars are nutritionally about the same as a peanut butter and jelly sandwich (excessive sugar included).

I know it looks like a mess in the pan. But it's a mess that will keep you going.

If we cut one after baking, you can see that they don't look as bad as you may think. The crumbly bits kind of melt and merge together into a dense semi-brownie sort of thing. They taste sort of like peanut butter cookies and fill you up quick. They're not bad on an ordinary day, but they really hit the spot when your travels have gone awry. In full disclosure, they are a bit messy to eat, so you should definitely put a few napkins in your purse. But if you're stuck on an uncomfortable bench long after you should have taken flight, they're perfect. 

 

Party Cheese Tray Macaroni

The best macaroni and cheese comes from catering leftovers.

After the big birthday party, when the tables were being cleared and everyone with a large purse was gravitating towards the half-empty trays, I tipped what remained of the cheese tray into a plastic bag graciously provided by the people in the kitchen. I don't know what all of these cheeses are, but they definitely cost me nothing.

I could have simply put these in the refrigerator and left them, but macaroni seemed a lot better. Really, I think the best macaroni and cheese comes from party-tray leftovers. capt I could have rubbed each of these cubes one at a time against the cheese shredder, but we have power tools.

As I wrote a long time ago, my baked macaroni and cheese is simple. Make layers of noodles and cheese, insert in oven, bake until melted. Some people like making a cheese sauce for macaroni, but I like it better when it is just noodles and cheese. Some ingredients don't need any help.

For baked macaroni, I suggest cooking the noodles until they're a lot softer than you usually would-- almost mushy, even. This counteracts the oven drying them out. You should also put a lot of cheese on top. This tastes better and helps keep the noodles underneath from getting crunchy. (It's also a great excuse to use up any near-empty bags of shredded cheese that are getting perilously close to expiring.)

I really like using pasta shells for macaroni. When they happen to land in the pan open-side-up, the cheese melts and turns them into little bowls of cheesy goodness.

It's been a while since I made a large batch of mac and cheese. But I'm seriously considering buying a cheese tray for the express purpose next time I do it. At any rate, this was a wonderful little bonus treat when I got home. 

 In closing, always be sure you have decent snacks in the car, and don't forget to slip a few hotel teabags in your purse! 

All for Pie

Happy birthday to Our Grandmother of Cookrye! A big party was organized. I had nothing to do with the planning, so the whole thing went absolutely perfect. My gift was to bring her favorite pie. Not that I didn't say I brought it for the party. Nope, her gift was a whole pie, all to herself, to take home. (Fittingly, she happened to give me the cookbook from whence came the pie.)

We've met chess pie before, but let's reiterate the recipe:

Chess Pie 1 tbsp cornmeal or graham cracker crumbs 1¼ cups sugar 2 tbsp flour 3 eggs ½ cup butter or margarine 1 tbsp vanilla 1 tbsp vinegar (cider vinegar adds a nice flavor) 1 unbaked pie shell Heat oven to 350°. Mix crumbs, sugar and flour in a large bowl. Thoroughly beat in eggs. Whisk in the butter, beat well. Add vanilla and vinegar; pour into pie shell. Bake for 45 minutes (55 in a metal or foil pan). Mrs. W G Byrd, El Reno, Oklahoma; Favorite Recipes of America: Desserts; 1968

This pie is pretty quick unless you make the crust yourself. (I love when the good recipes are also the easy ones.) I would have flung this together in three minutes but for one crucial ingredient: graham cracker crumbs.

The original recipe uses a spoonful of cornmeal, and you might think I should follow what is written. But the first time I made this pie (somewhere well before 2010), we ran out of cornmeal and white vinegar. So I substituted graham cracker crumbs and cider vinegar. 

At the time, my grandmother (viz. the recipient of this pie) promptly declared it her favorite pie. You might think this was simply grandmotherly praise, but if so, she is committed. She has asked for a chess pie every time we've gotten together ever since. That is a lot of chess pies. I may someday try the recipe exactly as written, but I dared not mess with success on my grandmother's birthday.

I first attempted to borrow one graham cracker. (After all, the recipe only uses a tablespoon of crumbs.) I knocked on the door of every neighbor that's had toddlers in the yard. After getting past their bemusement, no one had any graham crackers in the house. I can't blame them because I didn't have any either, but I was selfishly annoyed all the same.

I then asked the neighbors with kooky, vaguely southwestern yard art. Surely, people with artistic scrap metal in the yard would think nothing of lending a life-saving culinary hand! Well, I was incorrect. Not only did they have no graham crackers (which was fine albeit disappointing), but the woman who answered the door looked at me like I proposed setting up a cocaine dispensary among her quirky decorations.

The very thought of buying a whole box of graham crackers just to pulverize one of them irked me deep in my cheapskate soul. So, I decided to make them for myself. I said to myself "We made that graham pie crust before! It was very easy!" Before getting out the mixing bowl and softening the butter, I remembered that Maida Heatter's recipe made a LOT of graham crackers. So, I quartered the ingredient amounts. This required doing a bit of recipe math, which led to, um, tabulated typewritten recipes.

This will not be the week I win the Dillard's gift certificate for typing excellence at secretarial school. 

I had one graham cracker which I could pulverize. I also had a lot of extra ones. Even when you quarter the recipe, you get a lot of crackers. I decided to go a bit British here and make "digestives," which apparently are sort of like graham crackers with the bottom. (I could easily be wrong about this.) I'm surprised that these aren't more popular on our side of the Atlantic. Chocolate and graham crackers are hardly a kooky foreign combination here in glorious America.

But the chocolate-bottomed grahams led to another problem: all the potential wasted chocolate in the bowl. 

Sending chocolate to the city dump is a disgrace. So, I folded over the paper I had baked the crackers on to expose its clean side, piled the extra chocolate onto it, and let it harden. Afterward, I cut it into small pieces and returned them to the chocolate chip bag.

After all this detouring, I finally got around to making the pie. And it is time to ask: was this one tablespoon of crumbs really worth it? 

 

Well it was worth it to me because sometimes this kind of thoroughly unnecessary baking is my idea of a good time. Also, I didn't have to interact with people at the grocery store. (Some days, you just can't manage the robotic flow of "how are you i'm fine how are you i'm fine how are you i'm fine.") Also, the pie came out perfect, and the day was a beautiful success!