Cherry Bars Baked in the Hayes-Custer

In my last post, I said that I would be bringing a series of posts to you about cooking out in the summer kitchen.  I've started those, but this isn't one of them.  

We have five sour cherry trees here on our farm.  Three are courtesy of my grandparents, and the other two are volunteer children of our venerated Montmorency cherry tree.  The Montmorency cherries are my favorite, but they aren't quite ready yet.  Nancy and I did pick from the other two dwarf cherry trees yesterday, though, and as she is not a pie lover, I made cherry bars.  I've seen this recipe in several places, but we first had these in the early 80s after my aunt Rhonda Jo made them.  Now, they are a recipe that I will forever associate with her.

I think Rhonda Jo probably made them with canned cherry pie filling, but since we are starting with fresh fruit, the first thing we had to do is convert the cherries into pie filling.  To do that we use an old Kitchen Klatter recipe that my Great-Grandma Ruth very likely copied down as she was listening to the radio.  

For one batch of cherry pie filling, you need the following:

4 cups of fresh cherries

1 to 1 1/2 cups cherry juice (the juice from the cherries should be sufficient)

1 cup sugar

3 to 4 Tablespoons cornstarch

1/2 teaspoon almond flavoring

This avocado green plastic colander belonged to Granny,
my paternal grandmother, and I've been picking cherries
into it for almost forty years.

Of course, you first have to pit the cherries, saving as much of the juice as you can.  The process of pitting cherries by hand is messy and not an appropriate place for a camera, so there are no pictures of that step.  Sorry.  

Both of my grandmothers, Meme, and my mom were all very thrifty cooks, and very little of the produce that we grew here at home went to waste.  I grew up watching this team of women work for hours over dishpans of wormy apples just to save whatever they could for human consumption.  Hence, Granny always made us save the pits as we processed cherries.  She would then put just the tiniest bit of water on them in a saucepan and bring them to a boil on the stove to get as much of the cherry juice as possible.  I don't know whether this is necessary or not, but this is what she always did, so I continue the tradition.

  

The cherry pits and a splash of water coming to
a boil over a freshly started fire in the Hayes-Custer
in the summer kitchen.

The boiling cherry pits.

Once you have all of the juice drained off the pits, place the four cups of cherries, the juice, one cup of sugar and 3 to 4 Tablespoons of cornstarch in a heavy-bottomed saucepan.  

Start cooking this mixture directly over the firebox, but when it begins to thicken, move it to the middle of the cooktop to continue cooking until the desired thickness is reached.

Hint: This step can be a bit tricky.  Sometimes (often), this has not wanted to thicken for me.  I discovered that if you strain the cherries from the juice and cook just the juice, sugar, and cornstarch directly over the fire, once it reaches a good boil, it will thicken when you add the cherries back into the hot mixture.

It has been extremely dry around here this spring, though, and we had a hard time getting much juice to come out of the cherries at all.  Thus, yesterday, I actually had to add a little boiling water from the teakettle in order to thin the mixture to an appropriate consistency.  You just have to watch and be careful!

Remove the cherry mixture from the stove and stir in a 1/2 tsp. almond flavoring.  Set aside.

For the batter, you will need 1 cup of very soft butter (no substitutes) and 1 3/4 cups of sugar.  

Please pardon my avocado green Sunbeam Mixmaster.
It is uglier than sin.  It belonged to Granny, and when I 
inherited it 26 years ago, I thought I would just use it
until it died.  The thing has to be near to fifty years old now
and shows no sign of dying anytime soon.  How I wish she'd
bought a white one!

Cream the butter and the sugar together until smooth.

Add four eggs to the butter and sugar mixture.

To the above, beat in 1 tsp. vanilla, 1/2 tsp. salt, and 1 1/4 tsp. baking powder.

Stir in 3 cups of sifted all-purpose flour.  Good luck trying to keep from tasting the batter at this point.  It is SO GOOD!

Spread two-thirds of the batter into the bottom of a greased jelly roll pan.

Spread the cherry filling over the bottom layer of batter, and then dollop the remaining batter on the top.

Bake in a moderate oven for about a half hour until it begins to pull away from the edges and is golden brown.

Doesn't the Hayes-Custer do a nice job
of baking?

Notes:

If you want to freeze sour cherries for later use in pie filling, pour the cherry juice from cooking the pits, the four cups of cherries, and the cup of sugar into a freezer container and freeze.  When ready for use, thaw, drain the sweetened juice off, add the starch and cook.  Add the cherries once the juice and starch have come to a boil and thickened.

If you were going to make a cherry pie with the filling, I would recommend adding a dash of cinnamon to it along with the almond flavoring.  JUST a dash, though.

These bars can be made with any type of canned pie filling.  Strawberry is one that I've seen fairly frequently.

Some people drizzle a little vanilla icing over these bars.  Now, I love frosting and put it only lots of things, however, I will admit to thinking that these are sweet enough without it.  You do what you want, though.

Grandma Marian's Rice Pudding

Both Meme and Grandma Marian were of the school of thought that rice should be cooked forever in the top of a double boiler.  I know Meme's mother (my great-great-grandmother) cooked it in the same manner, and it was always served on Saturday night for supper.  Thus, I almost laughed aloud when I read the following bit from page 50 of my reprint of the 1933 Home Comfort Cookbook:

"Rice should not be put into a double boiler and cooked slowly into a pasty mass."

That is EXACTLY what they both did, and I ate it happily every time!

If I had to hazard a guess, I would say that Grandma only made rice once per month.  It was served instead of the ever-present potato with a sprinkling of sugar and a dash of cinnamon once it was on our plates.  Other than that, it was completely unseasoned.  (I had never even heard of salting rice until I was in college, and I had never had Chinese food either.)  If any rice was leftover, she would make it into rice pudding for dessert a day or two later.  Since she didn't ever know how much rice she would have (she was constantly cooking for large groups of family and hired men), there was never any recipe for her rice pudding.  Furthermore, sometimes it all fit into a small custard cup, and sometimes it needed an 8" x 10" Pyrex dish.  Obviously, this dish is very flexible.

Also, I should give fair warning that though Grandma always called this "rice pudding," it is really more of a baked custard with rice in it.  Thus, if you are looking for a rice pudding that is more similar to a cornstarch pudding, this isn't going to fit that bill.

To start with, you need leftover cooked rice, eggs, milk, sugar, and vanilla.  You can see in the picture below that I had two different containers of leftover rice, and I would estimate that they amounted to about 2 1/2 cups altogether.

To this amount of rice, I added three eggs and some milk, a splash of vanilla, and perhaps a quarter cup of sugar.  I could have put more sugar in--Grandma certainly would have--but I like this best served with ice cream, so I didn't want it to be all that sweet.

Three eggs didn't seem to be sufficient, so I added a fourth and a dab more milk.  That's the thing with this sort of "recipe": you have to carefully observe what things look like so that you know how to adjust your proportions.  In this case, you want there to be enough egg and milk mixture to cover the rice completely.  You can see that things looked better after I added these extras.

Finally, add whatever amount of raisins you would like.  I think I put in a heaping half cup into this batch.  

Lightly sprinkle cinnamon on the top of the pudding once you put it in whatever dish you are going to bake it in.

This is a particularly good recipe to bake in a wood cookstove because you don't have to have a certain oven temperature.  I imagine Grandma baked it at 325ºF, but you just have to have a slow to moderate oven.

Watch the pudding carefully, baking it until it is firm in the middle.  Depending on the size of your pudding, this can take quite a while.  Again, just watch it carefully and don't let your fire get too hot!

I like this rice pudding best when served warm.  Grandma always served it with Cool Whip, milk, half & half, or ice cream.  My favorite is ice cream.

We have some family friends who make a very similar dish that they just call "Baked Rice."  Theirs is less sweet, has a bit of salt added to it, and is served as a starchy side dish for the main meal rather than a dessert, but it is the same basic idea.  Both their family and Grandma's has a lot of German influence, so I wonder if this is a German dish.

Please fill up the comments with information about whether you or your family make something similar, and let us all know how your method differs.

Vintage Recipe: Chocolate Drop Cookies

Valentine's Day was one of Meme's (pronounced with long "e" sounds) favorite holidays.  I mention her in the biographical information on the left because she was largely responsible for my early fascination with woodburning cookstoves.  Meme was a great-great-aunt on my mother's side, and as she had no children of her own, she was very close to our family.  She and I spent a lot of time together--much of it baking--and she would continually reminisce about cooking on a woodburning cookstove.

The 1920s Monarch range which had been her family's second wood cookstove rested in the washhouse on the farm where my cousin makes his home now.  Fortunately, it had been removed from the beautiful farmhouse in 1948 because the house burned to the ground in 1962.  As that farmstead with the gaping basements used to be a favorite picnic spot for us, I would always go into the washhouse and take a look at that beautiful stove.  I can remember one time when all of my mother's family, including Meme, had a cleanup day at the "other place," and my uncle convinced Meme to give us a little tutorial about how she used to cook on that great range.

On our farm a row of cedar trees used to separate the two houses, the southernmost four standing in a perfect square, and I can remember that when I was five, I drew plans in red crayon for a summer kitchen to be built using those four cedars as the corners.  My idea was that the Monarch range could be moved to our place.  I can remember pitching the idea to Granny, who listened with amusement but obviously had no intention of making these dreams a reality.  

So, during those early years I had to be content just pretending to cook on a woodburning cookstove while playing with the toy cookstove that Meme had in the spare bedroom of her apartment.  You can see an identical toy at this post: The Stove That Started It All.  I suppose that I was in junior high or early high school when Meme began to realize that my desire to cook on a real woodburning cookstove was more than just a passing fancy.  I remember that we were in her apartment kitchen watching a pot on the back burner of her Hotpoint electric stove when she started back-pedaling on her romanticism of the woodburning range.

"Oh, you don't really want an old cookstove," I recall her saying.  I protested, and she said, "You have to haul all the fuel in and the ashes out, and then there are some days where maybe it rains and then you can't get the fire to go at all." (My grandfather later explained the set up of the kitchen chimney in the house that burned, and I'm not at all surprised that they had trouble getting a fire lit on rainy days.  I've never had such a problem.)  However, her years of waxing poetic about the woodburning cookstove had made their mark.

If Meme were alive today, she would shake her head and be a little embarrassed to think that she had anything to do with my affinity for wood cookstoves.  But the reality is that her influence on me was and is far greater than just that.  I won't take the time and space to talk further about all of that here, but I will say that one of the areas of influence Meme had was on my chocolate preferences.  Meme was a chocolate aficionado, even though I'm sure she'd never heard the word.  Meme loved chocolate.  Her favorite gifts at Valentine's Day were roses and a box of Russell Stover candies.  Among her meager belongings at the end of her life were further evidence of her love affair with chocolate.  She had used large See's chocolate boxes for storage of various articles, and at the end of this post you will see a vintage Mrs. Steven's candy tin that she used as a cookie can for decades.

Meme was funny about her chocolate, though.  While I never knew her to discriminate between dark or milk chocolate when it came to those many boxes of Russell Stover's, in her own cooking she halved the chocolate in her recipes.  Perhaps this was from motives of economy, I don't know.  Whatever the reason, after a steady diet of lightly chocolated sweets all through my youth, I'm not a fan of dark chocolate, and I prefer baked goods that have had their chocolate content reduced too.  As I write this, it just now dawns on me that perhaps this is the reason I'm not a chocolate cake fan.

The recipe that I'll eventually get around to sharing with you in this post is one of those where Meme always reduced the chocolate.  Sometime in the 1920s, Meme left the farm to attend Iowa State College (later renamed Iowa State University) in Ames, Iowa.  She was nearly thirty years old at the time, and I imagine that after the great romance of her life had dissolved due to religious differences, she thought she ought to be prepared to support herself with a career.  Meme spent only a year at Iowa State and then transferred to Grand Rapids, Michigan, where she completed her Bachelors in dietetics.  

During my own time at ISU, I had an American history class in the auditorium in MacKay Hall, which is the headquarters of the College of Family and Consumer Sciences, and I often wondered which rooms Meme would have spent most of her time in seventy years before I got there.  I could imagine her as one of the women in the historic pictures of cooking classes in that building, standing in stiffly starched aprons over ancient gas hotplates.  I knew about her time at Iowa State because in her kitchen she still had two stacks of recipes that bore the Iowa State College labels.  These stacks were bound by elastic bands from panty hose, but one of the recipes was never with the rest; it was the recipe for Chocolate Drop Cookies.  I have Meme's box of recipes now, so you can see the card in the picture below.  It is hard for me to believe that it is nearly 100 years old today.  Don't try to read the recipe the way it's written because she never followed this, even though you can see that she looked at the recipe many times!

Meme completed the four-year dietetics course in three years, and due to the stress of doing so she suffered what was then called a "nervous breakdown."  She returned to the farm to recover, and events conspired to keep her there until 1947 when she left to make room for my newlywed maternal grandparents.  I'd be willing to bet that several batches of these cookies were baked in that old Monarch wood cookstove in the twenty years between her return from college and her move to Council Bluffs.  I KNOW that oceans of these cookies came out of the oven on the bright new General Electric Airliner range that she had for the thirty years that she lived on Grace Street in the Bluffs, and another large number of them were baked in the aforementioned Hotpoint in her subsequent apartment.  These were truly one of her favorites.

Honestly, they're one of mine too, but I discovered that I hadn't made them since before Nancy and I were married, so it was high time that I introduce her to them!  One last note before we get to the directions: when I spent my two years at Iowa State University in the mid-1990s, I lived in the dorms, and these cookies were still on the menu of the food service system.  You can't imagine how excited I was to see them.  They were served two on a plate, and I knew immediately what they were and was surprised that seventy years later ISU was still using their recipe.  However, when I took my first bite, I was so disappointed.  They didn't taste anything like Meme's because they followed the recipe and used the full amount of chocolate.  They bordered on bitter, in my opinion, but I ate them anyway.

To make these the way Meme did, here is what you'll need:

1 oz. Bakers' unsweetened chocolate

1 cup light brown sugar (the lighter the better)

1/2 cup butter, very soft but not melted

1 egg

1/2 tsp. soda

1 tsp. baking powder

1 tsp. vanilla

1/2 cup milk

1 1/2 c. + 2 Tbsp. sifted flour

Here is what you do:

1.  Build your fire so that you will have a moderate oven.

2. Over the coolest part of the cooktop, melt the ounce of unsweetened chocolate.  (Does anyone else miss the individually wrapped one-ounce squares as much as I do?  I have a terrible time getting the new solid bars to break right along the lines.)

The chocolate melting in Meme's old Mirro saucepan
on the far right side of the Margin Gem.

3. While the chocolate is melting, cream the brown sugar and butter.

 

The soft butter and the light brown sugar
being creamed by Meme's 1950 Sunbeam
Mixmaster.  You can tell already that this
recipe doesn't make a large number of cookies.

4. Add the melted chocolate to the sugar and butter mixture.

5. Beat in the egg.  You'll have to scrape the bowl carefully to make sure that any chocolate that stuck to the bottom of the bowl is thoroughly incorporated.

6. Add the baking soda, baking powder, and vanilla.

The measuring spoon you see here was
also Meme's.

7. Add the flour and the milk alternately.

The two measuring cups and the plate
in this picture belonged to Meme.  The
plate is part of a set of Homer Laughlin
Eggshell Theme from the 1940s.

8. Mix all just until well blended.  The dough will feel much more like thick cake batter than cookie dough.

9. Drop by heaping teaspoonfuls onto a lightly greased cookie sheet.  Make sure the cookie sheet is only lightly greased.  You can see in the first picture below that I was too generous with the Crisco.  That is why in the second picture two of the cookies have slid into their neighbors once they were exposed to the heat of the oven.

This is Meme's cookie sheet.  She'd be
so embarrassed if she knew how
"seasoned" I've let it become.

Photographing fire is so difficult!  I wish you could
really see what kind of a fire it takes to keep a
moderate oven.

10. Now, baking these is a little tricky because you can't tell by looking at a chocolate cookie just how brown it is becoming.  Instead, you've got to poke these with your finger.  They are done when they have spread out flat and feel like they have just begun to form a slight crust on the top.  They are overbaked if they feel like they will be crispy.  This should take anywhere from 8-12 minutes depending on how hot your oven is running.  Remember that the end product here is more like a little flat cake than what we usually think of when we think of a chewy or crispy cookie.

11. Remove the cookies from the pan and put them on paper toweling on the countertop to cool.  You'll ruin them if you put them on a cooling rack.  Trust me on this one!

12. Once the cookies are baked, it is time to make the frosting.  If you looked at the recipe above, you know that it came with a frosting recipe, but that was never what Meme did.  Instead, in a small bowl, she would put about three tablespoons of butter, a teaspoon of vanilla, and perhaps a tablespoon or so of Hershey's cocoa.  Add two or three tablespoons of water and stir.

A little more cocoa than I wanted jumped out of
the jar when I poured it in, so my frosting was a
little darker than Meme's.  Oh, and you guessed
it: this is Meme's bowl too.

13. Beat in sufficient powdered sugar to make a thick but spreadable frosting.  Frost the top of each cookie, and don't be too stingy.

Now, you could eat these at this point, but try not to.  Yes, I know that is much easier for me to say than it will be to do!

14. Pack the cookies into an airtight container, using waxed paper to separate the layers so that the frosting doesn't glue them all together.  Let these sit with the lid on overnight.  The next day they will be at their peak, and what a peak it is!

This is the vintage Mrs. Stevens' Candies tin that
Meme always put these cookies in.  It was her widest
tin, so the cookies didn't have to be stacked high,
which would mash them.

Grandma Marian told me once that Meme used to get the lightest brown sugar that she could, and these cookies would have a reddish cast when you bit into them.  I didn't have very light brown sugar, but the batch that you see here did have a slight reddish cast inside them.  If someone can explain that to me, I'd appreciate it.

These were a huge hit with my resident picky eater, and they really aren't difficult to make.  I don't know why it has taken me over seventeen years to make these for Nancy, but I'm not planning on waiting that long again!

Vintage Recipe: Auntie Freda Sieck's Sour Cream Sugar Cookies

This post was requested by one of The Ivers Girls.  The Ivers Girls grew up as neighbors to my maternal grandparents, but to call them simply neighbors or family friends doesn't begin to describe the relationship that our two families share.  For well over fifty years, our lives have intertwined in so many ways that I'm not even able to number them all.  Over that half century, many, many recipes have been exchanged between the two families, so when the youngest of The Ivers Girls mentioned to me earlier this fall that she wished she had my grandma Marian's sugar cookie recipe, I was surprised.

"You mean Grandma never gave that to you?" I asked.

"Whenever I asked about it, all Marian would say was that there was 'nothing special in it,'" she responded.

This is very surprising to me because my Grandma was not one to keep any recipe a secret, especially one like this that she used so frequently.  When I was young, these cookies would show up about once per month from October to April.  In October, they were cut in the shapes of pumpkins and leaves and were frosted with orange tinted icing.  Come November, they appeared in the shapes of turkeys with orange or brown frosting.  Of course, in December they were cut in all sorts of Christmas shapes, and the frosting would be white, pink, and pastel green.  (Grandma didn't believe in darkly colored frosting; she said that you shouldn't have to taste the color.)  In late December, Grandma would make another batch and cut them all into bells to "ring in the new year."  These always had white frosting and usually a cinnamon candy for the clapper.  In February, they appeared as pink frosted hearts; in March, green-frosted shamrocks.  Finally, in April dozens of eggs, crosses, and churches would be cut out.

My mother's favorite story about these cookies is from the Christmas season that was most likely my freshman year of high school.  She had just returned to teaching full-time, and we were extremely busy with activities, too.  Mom had mixed a batch of these and put the dough to chill on our enclosed north porch, which often serves as a walk-in cooler in the winter months.  She always covered the mixer bowl with a luncheon plate, making it easy to access.  As we kids walked in and out of the kitchen door, it was too easy to just lift the plate and grab a bite of cookie dough.  None of that batch of dough actually made it to the oven.  While I would feel terribly irresponsible if I recommended eating cookie dough with raw eggs and flour in it, I will admit that this dough is really good!

My grandma actually sold these cookies for a short time in the 1990s, and while most people associate this recipe with her, she got the recipe from her paternal aunt, and she forever referred to them as Auntie Freda's Sour Cream Cookies--hence the title of this post.  

So, without further ado, here is the big "secret."  Here are the ingredients:

2 cups sugar

1 cup shortening

2 eggs

1 cup sour cream (commercial or country, but not too sour if using country)

1 tsp. soda

2 tsp. vanilla

dash salt

4 1/2 - 5 1/2 cups flour (or more)

And here is the method:

Cream the shortening and sugar.

Beat in the eggs.

Add the sour cream.

Stir in the soda, salt, and vanilla.

Beat well and then begin adding the flour a cup at a time.

Add the flour a cup at a time until you have a dough that 
is not quite stiff enough to roll.  I had just a tad extra sour
cream in this batch because I wanted to finish out the
container, and I had to put in six cups of flour to get the
dough to the right consistency.

Chill the dough for at least two hours; overnight is better.

Now, here is the first real "secret" to getting these to turn out like Grandma Marian's.  When you roll these cookies out, you can choose what you like best.  My mom likes to roll them wafer thin because she likes them thin and crispy.  If you want a really thick cookie, these will work for that too.  However, Grandma always rolled them out to about a quarter of an inch, maybe less.

The next secret to getting them just like Grandma's is in the baking.  These need to be baked in a moderate oven, but here again, the length of time they are baked depends on your personal preference.  Mom likes them best when they are brown all over.  They are good that way, too, but just be aware that the flavor is completely different than if you bake them just until the edges begin to show that they are turning a light brown.  Grandma was adamant about this.  I can still see her standing at her wall oven watching these cookies like a hawk.  As soon as the first hint of brownness began to appear at the edges, she whipped them out of the oven.  Depending on the heat of your oven, eight minutes may even be too long for these cookies to bake.

A word to my fellow wood cookstove users about baking cookies in a woodburning cookstove:

Remember that when you are baking cookies, you'll need to build your fire a little hotter than what you ordinarily would for the desired baking temperature.  Basically, if you need a 350ºF oven, build your fire in whatever way would give you a 375ºF oven.  The reason for this is that with cookie baking, you will be opening the oven door far more frequently than you would if you were baking a pie or a cake, for example, and a wood cookstove oven doesn't recover its heat as quickly as a modern one does.

A sheet of sour cream sugar cookies in the oven of
the Margin Gem cookstove.

Once the cookies have baked, immediately remove them from the cookie sheet to either a cooling rack for crispier cookies or a paper towel-covered countertop for a softer cookie.  You can tell what my preference is by looking below.

Grandma would say that the top and the third cookies
in the stack nearest the bottom of the photograph are baked too long.

The last and biggest secret to getting these cookies to taste exactly like Grandma's is in the frosting.  She would always just mix up a buttercream icing with powdered sugar, butter, water, and vanilla, BUT she would also add just a hint of almond flavoring--not so much that you would be able to immediately identify it, but enough that you can definitely taste it.  This little dab of almond flavoring really sets these cookies off.

Once the frosting has set enough to handle, pack these cookies into airtight containers, putting waxed paper between the layers to prevent the frosting from gluing them all together.  The frosting will soften the cookies over the next few hours, and the end product is deliciously addictive.

I wish I could give you an estimated yield, but I had put this dough out on the aforementioned north porch and did a poor job of resisting the temptation to snitch from it here and there.  Keep in mind, though, that with 5 1/2 cups of flour, this recipe makes a lot of cookies.  Enjoy!

Easy Baked Fish in the Wood Cookstove

I've mentioned before on this blog that this land-locked Iowa boy prefers to eat meat that originally had fur or feathers on it, but I do occasionally enjoy fish.  This method of baking fish is what my mother used to do when she cooked orange roughy for us when I was growing up.  However, when I find orange roughy these days, it is horribly expensive, so I now use this same method with pollack and feel that it is almost as good.  (In case you haven't followed this blog for very long, I'm all about dirt cheap cooking!)

I think that baking fish is particularly well-suited to the wood cookstove because it doesn't seem to me like it needs a certain oven temperature to be successful so long as your oven is at least above 250ºF.  If you disagree, let me know in the comments section below.

Because I never worry about an exact oven temperature for baking fish, I don't have to build my fire in any particular way before I begin the preparations for it.  I have also baked fish in both of my stovetop ovens quite successfully.

The first thing to do is to put your fish filets in a glass baking dish and sprinkle them with perhaps a tablespoon of lemon juice.  The acidic nature of the lemon juice is why I use a glass dish rather than a metal pan.

I then sprinkle the fish with a little seasoned salt.  I used Lawry's in the picture.  Some regular salt and a little paprika would work, too.  Then add a little bit of pepper.  I've also used a sparing sprinkle of Mrs. Dash, but Nancy doesn't like that, so I just used a tiny bit of freshly ground pepper in the photo below.

Lastly, dot the top of the fish with a little bit of butter--you don't need much!

The fish is ready to go into the oven.

Pop all of this in the oven to bake uncovered until the fish flakes easily when you stick a fork into it.  This occurs at an internal temperature of 145ºF.  The cooking time simply depends on how hot your oven is. Obviously, the hotter it is, the faster it will bake.

The fish is done because it flakes easily.

So quick, so easy, so flexible for the wood cookstove, and so delicious!

The fish was the only part of this meal that did not come from
our farm.  I wrote about preparing the squash in this post last week.

Cheating with Your Wood Cookstove: Gooey Butter Cake

A quick internet search reveals that Gooey Butter Cake is a pretty common recipe, but I didn't know that several years ago when I found this recipe in the back of my mother-in-law's mini-van.  It had been written on a fancy recipe card and then photocopied onto an 8 1/2" x 11" sheet of paper.  It was attributed to someone named Hilda and neither Leona nor anyone else in the family knew where the recipe had come from.  No one knew Hilda, and no one even recognized the handwriting on the recipe card!

I made this according to the recipe the first time, but I wasn't that impressed.  I tweaked it just a bit this time, and the reviews are better, but I still wouldn't call this a stellar dessert.  However, if you need something a little exciting but don't have much time, this could do in a pinch, and because it is so rich, a little goes a long way.

For the bottom layer, here is what you will need:

1 chocolate cake mix (this is why I call this recipe cheating)
2 eggs
1/2 cup butter
1 tsp. vanilla

The original recipe called for a yellow cake mix, but my first change was to use a chocolate one.  I would say that yellow cake is probably my favorite, and if given a choice, chocolate cake is the last thing I would take. However, the bottom layer of this cake has kind of a brownie texture, so I opted for a chocolate cake mix, and that suits my eaters much better.   Lately, I've taken to putting about a tsp. of burnt sugar flavoring into brownies, so I also added that.  If you are unable to find burnt sugar flavoring, you can fairly easily make your own burnt sugar syrup.

As always when baking in a wood cookstove, the first step is to build your fire and begin heating your oven to the desired temperature.  You need a moderate oven for this cake, and I think it is best to shoot for around 325ºF.

While your oven is heating, begin melting your butter over the coolest part of the cooktop.

Combine the melted butter, cake mix, eggs, vanilla, and burnt sugar flavoring.  This could be done by hand, but I used an electric mixer because the mixture is so stiff.

Once everything is thoroughly combined, transfer to a greased 9"x13" baking pan.

Press the mixture into the bottom of the pan, spreading evenly all the way to the edges.  Buttered fingertips make this process a bit easier.

For the second layer you will need these ingredients:

1 pound of powdered sugar

8 oz. softened cream cheese

2 eggs

1 tsp. vanilla

Combine all of these ingredients until smooth.  Again, I used an electric mixer.

Spread the cream cheese mixture on top of the cake mixture.  I am careful to not let it touch the edges of the pan.

Bake in a moderate oven for about 40 minutes.  "Hilda" forbid me from peeking during this time, but I did take a gander in the oven at about thirty-eight minutes.  I think it is generally bad wood cookstove practice to never peek.  Mind you, I'm not advocating opening the oven door every few seconds, but we have to be reasonable.  When Meme taught me to bake, she never used a timer for anything.  In fact, she didn't even own a timer. Instead, we would take casual looks at the kitchen clock and rely on the sense of touch and sight.

I used to have a blind friend who could tell whether something was done baking by the smell of it.  However, wood cookstove ovens are not vented into the kitchen, and the Margin Gem even has a gasket around the oven door, so you can rarely smell baked goods until you open the oven door at least a crack.  

What Gooey Butter Cake looks like when it is done baking.
If you look closely at the oven thermometer, you can see that
the oven was running at about 325ºF.  I wouldn't go much
hotter than that.

Remove from the oven and cool completely.  You could eat this cake at this point, but I have to say that I think this one benefits quite a bit from being covered very tightly and refrigerated for at least a day.

These are extremely rich, and I find that a 1"x1" square is plenty to satisfy my sweet tooth for quite a while.

I hope you enjoy them!