The Minecrafter’s Cookbook: Dirt Block Fudge

April 12, 2024 Sarah

Alistaire picked out The Minecrafter’s Cookbook (An Unofficial Cookbook) at the library because what kid doesn’t love Minecraft? He went through the book and picked out a couple of recipes to cook for culinary purposes. The book was published in 2018, so is six years old, but still relevant for fans of the game. It has lots of choices, and many full color photos of the food.

The dessert he loved was the Dirt Block Fudge, on pages 62-63. It’s a very easy recipe with just three ingredients. Even young children can do this recipe with an adult’s assistance. And they will enjoy it! It’s sugar. What’s not to love about that when young?

You can swap out the chocolate chips for what you like: butterscotch, mint, dark chocolate, white, and even use different flavoring extracts for a wide range of easy fudge.

Dirt Block Fudge

Ingredients:

3 cups milk chocolate chips (you’ll need 1½ bags, 11.5 ounces each)
14-ounce can of condensed sweetened milk
1 tsp pure vanilla extract

Directions:

Cut parchment paper to fit an 8″x8″ pan. Set aside.

Add the chocolate chips and milk to a microwaveable bowl. Microwave for 30 seconds, stirring with a spatula, and repeat as needed until the chips melt.

Stir in the vanilla.

Scrape the fudge into the prepared pan, smoothing it out on top.

Place in refrigerator and chill for an hour.

Take out and cut into bite-size pieces. Store covered in the refrigerator.

~Sarah

Recipes · Reviews

The No-Fuss Bread Machine Cookbook: Soft Egg Bread

March 7, 2024 Sarah

I recently saw a cookbook that grabbed my attention: The No-Fuss Bread Machine Cookbook: Hands-Off Recipes For Perfect Homemade Bread. It’s been out for a few years, so I am glad I came across it.

When life gets busy, our bread machine is my savior. Putting the ingredients in, walking away while I homeschool the boys, and working on the homestead are everything. Come back 4 hours later to a perfect loaf of bread, especially with how our house runs chilly in winter. It really makes lunch that much simpler.

I was very excited to have many new recipes to try. The book is straightforward to follow and offers three sizes of loaves for each recipe so that you can use a 1-pound, 1½-pound, or 2-pound machine.

This cookbook has many bread options, from regular bread to spice bread, fruit bread, cheese bread, vegetable bread, holiday bread, and even how to start sourdough bread in your bread machine.

I love getting inspired. And it’s just what I needed as winter slides into spring, and I am so busy.

The recipe I chose to try is a rich egg bread, which is very indulgent. Very soft indeed. This recipe alone made going thru this cookbook worth it.

Soft Egg Bread

Ingredients:

1 cup milk*
5 Tbsp butter*
3 eggs*
1/3 cup granulated sugar
2 tsp fine sea salt
4 cups all-purpose or bread flour (480 grams)
1½ tsp bread machine or quick-rise yeast

Directions:

Add ingredients as listed or in the order your bread machine calls for.

Set for Basic/White cycle and medium crust.

Once baked, remove it promptly and let it cool on a wire rack.

Store in a bread bag.

*We use a Zojirushi bread machine, which has a preheating cycle. If your bread machine doesn’t do this:

Milk at 80-90*. The butter melted and cooled down. Eggs at room temperature.

Makes one 2-pound loaf.

~Sarah

Homeschooling · Recipes

Roasted Egyptian Potatoes with Onions and Peppers – Homeschooling Project

January 11, 2024January 28, 2024 Sarah

Our youngest is in 6th grade, and his homeschooling curriculum includes a social studies book where, with each chapter, he covers a new region. In each region, he has choices of further studying of that country. It often includes where the student researches and makes a meal from the region. We went to the library and found a book on modern Egyptian cooking, Eat, Habbi, Eat. It was actually in the “featured” area of cookbooks in the library.

It’s a great cookbook to get an insight on modern cooking for the region. It goes thru the basics, including what one would have in their pantry in the kitchen. It is a hardcover book, as much for the coffee table as it is for cooking from. The dishes are photographed in color.

Maybe the curriculum wanted traditional foods, but for sure doing a modern take was fun.

Alistaire picked out the Roasted Egyptian Potatoes With Onions And Peppers on pages 116-117.

The dish was a huge success. We served it with roasted chicken. All the boys had second servings of the vegetables. Considering one of them hates onions, he actually said he liked the onions in this dish. The vegetables are deep in flavor, soft to eat, but not mushy. I’ll have to make this again in summer when the produce is coming in from the gardens.

Roasted Egyptian Potatoes with Onions and Peppers Recipe

Ingredients:

1 can tomato paste*
½ cup + 2 Tbsp olive oil
2 tsp ground cumin*
½ to 1 tsp red chili flakes*
1 tsp fine sea salt
2 pound yellow potatoes or fingerling size
2 large white or sweet onions
2 red bell peppers

Directions:

Preheat oven to 450°.

Mix the tomato paste, ½ cup of the olive oil, cumin (if using), chili flakes, and salt together in a large mixing bowl (do not use plastic as you will stain it!).

(Since we used new potatoes that are thin-skinned I did not peel as directed in the book. The peel has many nutrients!)

(We used round potatoes so cut in half, and then in threes, then chopped into fork size sections)

Add to the bowl and toss gently to coat.

Meanwhile, peel and chop the onions into 1″ chunks, set aside in a bowl.

Seed the bell peppers and cut into 1″ strips, set aside with the onions.

Heat the remaining 2 Tablespoons olive oil in a large cast iron skillet over medium high heat.

Add in the poatoes and brown them for about 3 minutes, stirring as needed with a metal spatula.

Add the onion mix to the mixing bowl to get all the remaining tomato mixture, then add to the skillet. Stir well.

Transfer to the onion and roast for 30 minutes.

Notes*:

I left the cumin out as the boys are not fans of its flavor profile.

My tomato paste I had on hand was infused with herbs.

As for the chili flakes, I used half of what was called (so I used half a teaspoon). While I love spice, I knew I wanted it to be kept balanced for the boys.

As for the potatoes, buy what you can find. In the middle of winter, small bite size potatoes are expensive at $5 for 1.5 pounds, where as I can buy regular yellow potatoes for $3 for 2 pounds.

~Sarah

Homesteading · Recipes · Reviews

Great Depression Era Recipes: My Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook

December 10, 2023January 28, 2024 Sarah

I know as a child I saw the original book of My Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook (and it was an antique by then):

My Mom had friends who were off-grid homesteaders who lived up in the foothills. Living their best early 80’s hippy lifestyle. She was also friends with elder ladies who had vast cookbook collections from their youth. These visits were boring for me, so I’d wander in and sit and read the books, that seemed to be so old and quaint to my young mind.

It was the first of its kind. A modern cookbook with actual full ingredient lists, cooking times and temperatures. That might seem odd, but if you try your hand at making vintage recipes you run up against this. The author assumes you know how long to bake a cake, or that you should sweeten berries for a pie, without listing it in the ingredients.

It was ring bound inside so you could add in new pages if needed. And more so, you could send away by mail for more pages to add in, should you have your own recipes to add in. And it had cut out tabs so you could easily wander to where you wanted. A little filing cabinet if you will.

Just like the later Red Plaid cookbooks that would follow, this was the Great Grandmother that set the path. It was modern, it was based in Home Ec Science. And it came out in the Great Depression, when the homemaker didn’t have the ability to waste money. She needed to be able to feed her family, and do it well. See here for a neat history on this cookbook.

In 2018 it was reproduced as a paperback with a new cover:

I picked up a like-new copy of it online. It is a mid-size trade style book. It’s got all the pages as the original, just not in the same format as the old version. Since it’s bound, you cannot add in pages and it doesn’t have the index tabs. That’s OK. It’s still usable.

Now then, these are not necessarily fancy recipes, but these came from an era when many ingredients were just not there for people to buy. And beyond that, the concept of the modern grocery store was 2 decades away. (It isn’t that grocery stores didn’t exist, they sure did but they were tiny compared to after World War II and the Baby Boom. Add in cars to haul food, a good economy, and things like grocery carts added to stores stocking more and more ingredients.)

Some of the spellings are also interesting to note. An example, while reading the cookbook, I kept seeing “sirup” called for. It was in relation to corn syrup and maple. I had no idea that in 2015 the USDA got involved in it and finally declared that syrup was to have a y, and not be spelled sirup anymore. Huh. No idea. It had taken 144 years to get there in fact, and even in 1959 it was changed in the Webster Dictionary, people kept using the old version. That was a rabbit hole I went down for an hour researching.

Another is “sweet milk” which means fresh milk, in the era before ultra pasteurized milk that can sit in stores for 3 months. It just meant it hadn’t soured yet (which happened quickly then).

There’s also far less processed food, and people were eating organ meats still. Waste not, want not.

So let’s get cooking.

I of course picked the one recipe that was missing the baking time. Hahahaha….but I figured it out. I was halfway through making the recipe when I realized that this one lone recipe had no pan size or time. Oops. I looked at the other cake recipes and figured I could match the time for it. I wrote the recipe up to reflect my changes.

The cake and frosting were paired together in the book in Chapter IV (four) on pages 6 to 7.

It’s an interesting match. The cake itself isn’t very “spiced”, the frosting is def very coffee flavored. If you didn’t like coffee, I would just leave it out and use more half-and-half instead of water.

I liked the cake, but as with many Great Depression-era recipes, it isn’t an amazing recipe. These were everyday recipes, simple to make. Nothing too scary flavor wise.

Spice Cake Recipe

Ingredients:

1/3 cup shortening
1 cup granulated sugar
1 cup sour cream
1 egg
1/8 tsp fine sea salt
1 tsp pure vanilla extract
1 2/3 cups cake flour
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350°. Lightly oil an 8″x8″ glass baking pan.

Cream the shortening and sugar together. Add in the sour cream, mix in. Add the egg, salt and vanilla, beat in.

Add in the flour, cinnamon, baking soda and baking powder, beat in till smooth.

Spread evenly into the pan.

Bake for 30 minutes and check. I baked ours for about 35 minutes, till the top was golden and a toothpick came out clean from the center with crumbs. Check often and don’t over bake.

Let cool fully on a cooling rack.

Coffee Icing Recipe

Ingredients:

3 Tbsp unsalted butter
2 tsp half and half or heavy cream
2 Tbsp boiling water
2 tsp instant espresso powder
3 Tbsp cocoa powder
2 cups powdered sugar
½ tsp pure vanilla extract
¼ tsp fine sea salt

Directions:

Beat butter till smooth, add in cream and work in. Add the water and espresso powder, then the cocoa powder and salt. Add in powdered sugar, beat till smooth, then mix in the vanilla.

The icing should be smooth and spreadable. If too thick, add a tiny bit more half and half. I found the frosting to be very thick.

Frost cooled cake.

~Sarah

Recipes

Teach Baking to a Teenager: Making a Birthday Cake

September 29, 2023January 28, 2024 Sarah

Our middle son has been interested in cooking and baking for a few years. He is 13 now and fully capable in the kitchen now. Our oldest son had his birthday this week, and W asked if he could make the cake. Which…why not? We had been walking by the bakery in the regionally local Safeway, and in their very sparsely stocked display case, 2 layer cakes are now $29.99 and up! For a cake that honestly, while pretty, just never tastes great. It’s $30 boxed cake mix, with shortening frosting to be honest.

We came across a new cookbook in the library last week, “Anyone Can Cake” by Whitney Depaoli. It caught my eye as it was faced outward. W was enamored by the book immediately. It is written very straightforwardly and is usable by a raw novice to cake baking and decorating. Yes, she covers fancy techniques as well, but the book is about the basics: How to bake a good-tasting cake, how to make various frostings, the gear, how to dye buttercream, how to pipe, and so on. All I could think of was how lame the Wilton booklets were when I was a teen (and how it was only aimed at older women).

She does tutorial videos on YouTube, under Sugar & Sparrow. Which I might add, he was watching all the videos that week after finding her channel.

He asked F what cake he’d like. Well, F runs to the simpler things in life and loves a good vanilla cake. So we set out to the store to get a few supplies for it. We opted to make it as 2 8″ cakes, though the recipe can be done in 3 6″ pans. As a gift, I got him a cake turntable (really affordable actually!) that I had to be honest, always wanted. To ensure it was good, I picked up actual cake flour for once. Well worth the few dollars. Even with supplies, we still made the cake for less than that bakery one.

Then he got baking with my oversight.

Cakes getting ready to be put together.

Favorite Vanilla Cake Recipe (Page 126)

Ingredients:

292 grams cake flour (2¾ cups)
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp fine sea salt
½ tsp baking soda
¾ cup unsalted butter (12 Tbsp), room temperature
1½ cups granulated sugar
2 large eggs + 2 egg whites, at room temperature
1 Tbsp pure vanilla extract
½ cup full fat sour cream, at room temperature
1 cup whole milk, at room temperature

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350°. Cut two circles of parchment paper to fit inside two 8″ baking pans. Lightly oil the pans, press the parchment paper onto it, set aside.

Add the flour, baking powder, salt, and baking soda into a small mixing bowl, whisk together.

In a stand mixer bowl, with the paddle attachment on, add the butter (cut into Tablespoon slices). Beat at medium-high for about 2 minutes, until the butter is creamy. Add the sugar and at medium-high for another 2 minutes, scraping the bowl and paddle at halfway with a spatula.

Turn to low and add in the eggs and egg whites, one at a time, until just combined. Add in the vanilla and sour cream, slowly turn up and beat for a minute. It will look curdled, this is normal.

Turn the mixer off, and add in the dry ingredients. Start on low and mix till just worked in. Slowly add in the milk, and beat till it just comes together and is smooth.

Divide equally between the prepared pans. Smooth out and lightly tap the pans.

Bake for 30 to 35 minutes, when a toothpick comes out clean and it smells baked.

Let cool fully on a wire rack.

We took the advice to chill the cakes a bit after they were cool, before decorating, and this made a huge difference I found, when applying the buttercream.

Vanilla Buttercream recipe (Page 133)

Ingredients:

1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, at room temperature
3½ cups powdered sugar
2 tsp pure vanilla extract
2 Tbsp whole milk
¼ tsp fine sea salt

Directions:

Add the butter to a stand mixer bowl, with a paddle attachment on. Beat the butter on high speed for 7 minutes, until it’s creamy and pale in color.

Turn to low and add in the powdered sugar 1 cup at a time, beating in each addition fully.

Add in the vanilla and salt, beating in, then the milk. Mix at low for 1 minute. Check with a spatula that all the butter is mixed in, scrape if needed and beat in.

Frosting the Cake to complete the look

I showed W how he could cut strips of parchment paper and put them on a cake turntable (so they stick out for easy removal). We then placed one chilled cake on that and applied a thin “crumb coat” layer of frosting with an offset spatula. Top it with the second cake and crumb-coated the top and the sides. We then chilled the cake for 30 minutes to set it up.

He returned and frosted the top and sides properly, using a bench scraper to smooth the frosting out gently. He applied sprinkles to the bottom of the cake, using the parchment paper to gently tap/press them into place.

W wanted to use “cake drip“. We could have made it, but honestly, it was easier to buy it already made. It is heated up in the microwave in its squeeze bottle and you let it, well drip, as you turn the turntable. He also wanted it to coat the top. So I poured it while he quickly spread it smooth. It sets up fast and is hard, so two make it easier. He put more sprinkles on and was done.

We carefully pulled the parchment paper out (next time I’d do it before adding the cake drip, as I bent a couple drips. Oops.)

It was time well spent with my kiddo. And that cake? It was SO moist and delicious. Making a real cake is so worth the tiny extra bit of work.

~Sarah