French Pudding, with apologies to the French

Eleanor was superstitious. More superstitious than any person I've ever known, and it wasn't an ironic superstitiousness, either: she was totally sincere. AND I don't mean, like, “broken mirror” superstitions, but weird ones like “if you put your shirt on backwards you have to leave it that way because it's bad luck to turn it around,” and “don't turn the page of your calendar to the new month until the new month has already started.”

So, in honour of Friday the 13th, which would have been Eleanor's least favourite day of this year, I give you my first disaster recipe from the box. It is not a recipe for pudding. Nor is there anything about this recipe that is French, with the possible exception of the inclusion of unsweetened whipped cream, but I think even that's a bit of a stretch. This is sort of like a trifle, but you're supposed to make it in a baking pan, and it includes raw eggs... I guess if I get food poisoning, we'll know today is truly an unlucky day. And for a no-bake recipe, get ready to use all of your dishes again.

I made a couple of substitutions here: I can't get Nilla Wafers anywhere, so I used Digestive Biscuits. Also, I can't find crushed pineapple in this country and I don't know what size “a small can” is, so I used two tiny cans of pineapple rings, which I pulverised way beyond “crushed” in my food processor. 

Anyway, it's way less bad than I thought it would be, but I still think it probably counts as a disaster. Eleanor may have liked it (there's a note in her handwriting that reads “delicious” in the top corner), but I think we're gonna have to agree to disagree on this one. In the 1960s it might have been awesome, but today it's kind of just a mess that reminds me of something that would have been served at a church potluck when I was a kid.

The verdict:

1 spoon out of five. I think it still deserves a single spoon because the recipe clearly worked the way that it was supposed to, it's just that the flavour combination and texture and its general existence are not really appetising. I do, however, feel like this is a fixable recipe: what if the cookie layers were cubed angel food cake? Or there was a layer of white cake, then pineapple filling, then a white cake layer and then the custard/whipped cream combo was the frosting? It's probably possible to fix this up into something edible, but if you make it as listed here, it's probably not going to be great. Unless you just really like canned pineapple, I guess.

The recipe:

French Pudding

The ingredients:

8 oz Nilla Wafers or digestive biscuits, crushed
4 oz butter
1 ¾ c powdered sugar
2 eggs
1 c whipping cream
1 small can crushed pineapple, or 2 small cans pineapple rings, crushed in a blender or food processor
½ c chopped nuts (I used pecans)

THE DIRECTIONS:

Sprinkle half of the cookie crumbs into the bottom of a 9x13 pan, as evenly as possible.
Cream butter, powdered sugar, and eggs until well-mixed, then pour it into the pan on top of the crumbs.
Whip the cream until fluffy, then spoon it evenly over the butter mixture in the pan.
Spoon the crushed pineapple over the whipped cream evenly.
Sprinkle the chopped nuts and the remaining cookie crumbs over the pineapple and press down gently.
Refrigerate until ready to eat, so, basically refrigerate forever.

Yields a 9x13 pan of pudding, and if you could find 35 people who wanted to eat it, I bet it would comfortably feed all of them. 

Thumbprint Cookies with Chocolate Filling

Lately I've been alternating between recipes from the box that are so easy they don't even properly deserve to be called recipes (I'm looking at you, beer bread and the upcoming tomato soup recipe I'm sharing later this week) and dishes that, strictly speaking, include multiple recipes just to get to a finished product. This is one of the latter.

I've said already that I'm not wild about melting chocolate. I find it to be a really fickle project, and for every batch of chocolate I've successfully melted, there's another one out there somewhere that I've either burned or seized. Luckily, so far with the box, there have been no major incidents (but that doesn't mean I love the process)... until now.

I made these cookies for Judson to take to work for a game night he and some friends organised, and I was super excited about them because the cookies are supposed to be filled with “jam, citrus peel, or chocolate,” and I recently found a recipe for “chocolate filling for cookies,” so I got to use two recipes at once this time. (The recipe card for the cookies is worn and stained with Eleanor's notes in the corner, so I know she made these a lot. The chocolate filling recipe looks practically brand-new, so I don't know that this is what she used to fill the cookies, but we liked them pretty well.)

Eleanor wasn't pretentious enough to call the filling of these cookies ganache, but that's more or less what it is. It's the same chocolate mixture I used in the Chocolate Key Lime Pie from earlier this week, because I made these cookies first and was so excited about the results. Anyway, I was anticipating disaster, but sometimes it turns out if you follow a recipe to the letter, good things WILL happen.

These cookies are perfect cocktail party food: they look supremely fancy, they're rolled in nuts to give them a nice toasty flavour, and the rich, smooth, almost bitter chocolate filling contrasts really well with the sweet and crumbly shortbread texture of the cookies. You could fill them with jam, lemon curd, or candied citrus peel, but I think the chocolate is the most elegant/least messy of those options (and you know how we love elegance in this house. Ahem.).

The recipe seems overly detailed, but I'd encourage you not to skip the step of rolling the cookies in egg whites, even if you skip the nuts: the whites help give the cookies some body and keep them from splitting apart as they cook-- important since you'll have to press down the centers while the cookies are still hot. The recipe only makes about 16 cookies, so this is the perfect treat to bring to a friend's house to nibble with coffee, though it's easy enough to double it (and evidently, Eleanor often did, as she scribbled in the doubled amounts next to the original ingredients). Plus, I've now made this chocolate filling twice, with two different types of chocolate and two different procedures, and it's come out beautifully each time. If I can do it, so can you. Good luck!

The Verdict:

4 Spoons out of five. The cookies are straightforward enough, if a bit detailed, and the chocolate filling is surprisingly foolproof. They're rich enough and the chocolate is dark enough you're not going to want more than one at a time, so make them for a party or to go with coffee, not to get a major sugar rush.

The Recipe:

Thumbprint Cookies with Chocolate Filling

The Ingredients:
The Cookies:

½ c shortening (or Stork, if in the UK), softened
¼ c brown sugar
1 egg, separated
½ tsp vanilla
1 c sifted flour
¼ tsp salt
Finely chopped nuts (I used a mix of almonds and pecans)

 

 

 

 

The Filling:

1/3 c sugar
1 tbsp milk
1 tbsp butter
1 tsp vanilla
1 egg, beaten
6 oz. semi-sweet chocolate
Handful of whole pecans

THE DIRECTIONS:
THE COOKIES:

Preheat oven to 375F/190C.
Mix shortening, brown sugar, egg yolk, and vanilla together in a large bowl.
Stir in sifted flour and salt (texture will be dry and almost like wet sand, but should stick together well).
Roll dough into 1-inch balls.
Dip in lightly beaten egg white, then roll in finely chopped nuts.
Place about 1 inch apart on ungreased cookie sheet.
Bake 5 minutes, then remove from oven and quickly press thumb or small spoon on top of each cookie to make a dip where the filling will go (if you figure out a way to do this without burning yourself, tell me how).
Return to oven and bake 6-8 more minutes until golden brown.
Let cool on a rack before filling.

THE FILLING:

Stir together sugar, milk, butter, vanilla, and egg in a bowl and set aside.
Melt chocolate in microwave at 10-second intervals, stirring after each interval until smooth.
Allow chocolate to cool slightly for about a minute, then pour in sugar mixture.
Stir constantly and quickly until mixture is smooth and glossy-- it may seize for a moment and get slightly grainy, but keep stirring briskly and it should smooth out quickly.
Spoon filling into each cookie's centre, topping with a whole pecan while still warm.
Filling will set and become semi-firm, but it will always be soft and fudge-like, not hard like a bar of chocolate.
(If you have any leftover filling when you've filled your cookies, dig around in your pantry and see what else you can dip in chocolate-- I used some clementines and a handful of saltines to finish up my chocolate-- yum!)

Yields approximately 16 cookies

Chocolate Key Lime Pie

Do I ever have a doozy of a recipe to share with you today. I made this key lime pie for our anniversary last week, and I spent nearly all day on Thursday making it/washing dishes I dirtied while making it.

If you've ever made a key lime pie, you probably think I'm lying. Usually, even if you make the crust from scratch, key lime pie only has about four ingredients, and it's perfect that way. Why gild the lily on this one?

Well, let's back up here for a second: Judson doesn't like sweets (except root beer floats, the ingredients for which he forbids himself from keeping in his own kitchen because if he had them, he would eat nothing but root beer floats all day long). Oh, sure, he'll have a bite of cake or a cookie if they're around, but if there are any other snacks around, he'll always choose salty over sweet-- the opposite of me. His only exception to this rule, other than the aforementioned root beer float, is key lime pie. And since this year it fell to me to plan our anniversary, I knew I had to make a key lime pie, especially once I realised there was a recipe for it in the box.

Recently we spent a weekend in the Florida Keys, the birthplace of key lime pie, and while there we saw a lot of chocolate-covered key lime pie on menus around the islands. We made so much fun of it, thinking it was a flavour combo that, although both ingredients are good enough on their own, taste terrible together... but then I found a recipe for “Laura York's Fudge Surprise Key Lime Pie” in the box and was immediately chagrined that we'd have to eat it.

It's one of those recipes that fool you into thinking you're just making a pie, and then you realise that it's actually THREE recipes in disguise: a crust, a chocolate filling, and a key lime pie. Not to mention the insane amount of substitutions I had to make: I couldn't find key lime juice (duh), macadamia nuts (a little bit puzzling), “butter flavour Crisco” (doesn't exist here in the UK/possibly doesn't exist anywhere since it's no longer 1989), chocolate fudge topping (weird), or gelatin (thoroughly puzzling), but, you know, other than those FIVE ingredients I had to make do without, it's practically exactly the same. Also, here is a direct quote from the recipe, as written in the St. Pete Times on March 8, 1990, just to prove how much of a pain it is:

“Cut slits around edge of pastry leaving 1 1/8 inches between slits. Fold top left corner down to the bottom right of each dough section forming triangles. Prick bottom and sides 50 times with a fork.”

One and an eighth inches? Fifty pricks? Anyway, I think I deserve to have this dumb pie named after myself after the amount of work I put into it. So we're changing the name on this one to “Blair Cowan's Irritatingly Difficult and Highly Specific but Completely Adaptable Key Lime Surprise Pie.”*

I have to say, Ms. York didn't let us down. I was ready to hate this pie, I really was: it's extremely time-consuming, it requires a ton of ingredients that aren't easy to find in the UK, it includes two flavours I didn't expect to enjoy together, and worst of all (to me), it includes cooking cornstarch, which I can almost never do successfully. But then a weird thing happened. After it chilled and everything set and we served it with the incredibly irritating chocolate-covered hazelnuts I had made earlier and a “cloud” of whipped cream... it turned out to be delicious. Judson loved it, I loved it, and our only disappointment is that we went out of town for the weekend and couldn't finish it on our own.

*As a sidenote, I was gonna include a joke in here about not knowing who Laura York was, but then I looked her up and found this.

The Verdict:

3.5 spoons out of five. This pie is good. Really good (which it should be, since it will dirty every dish in your kitchen and take you an entire afternoon to make, a fact which is rendered even more irksome by the fact that normal key lime pies are so easy). If you aren't stuck making the recipe word for word like I am, it's definitely possible to adapt it to be easier and quicker: use a pre-made pie crust, use hot fudge ice cream topping instead of the homemade filling I had to make because I couldn't find anything premade, don't bother coating your own macadamia nuts in chocolate, buy a bottle of key lime juice instead of juicing your own limes, and you could even skip the whipped cream, as the real treat here is the pie itself. I'd rank it higher if it was easier to make, but the awesome taste and texture don't quite outweigh the amount of work I put into this one.

(It's worth noting that Judson, who didn't have to make it and just got to eat it, is voting hard for a 5 Spoon rating. He loved it.)

THE RECIPE:

Blair Cowan's Irritatingly Difficult and Highly Specific but Completely Adaptable Key Lime Surprise Pie

The Ingredients:

The Crust:

1 1/3 c flour
½ tsp salt
½ c shortening (or Stork, if you live in the UK)
3 tbsp ice water

The Fudge:

6 oz semi-sweet chocolate
1/3 c sugar
1 tbsp milk
1 tbsp butter
1 tsp vanilla
1 egg, beaten 
1/3 c macadamia nuts or hazelnuts, coarsely chopped

The Key Lime:

¼ c water
1 c sugar
1/3 c cornstarch
1 c milk
3 egg yolks, lightly beaten
1/3 c key lime or plain lime juice
¼ c shortening (or Stork, if you live in the UK)
1 c sour cream

 

The Topping (optional):

2 c whipping cream
¼ c powdered sugar (icing sugar in the UK)
8 whole macadamia nuts or hazelnuts
¼ c semisweet chocolate, melted

THE DIRECTIONS:

CRUST:

Combine flour and salt in a bowl.
Cut in shortening with two knives until flour is blended in and dough has made pea-sized chunks.
Sprinkle in water, one tbsp at a time, tossing dough lightly with your hands until it forms a ball.
Cover and refrigerate 30 minutes.
After dough has chilled, preheat oven to 425F/218C.
Lightly flour countertop and rolling pin.
Roll dough into circle one inch larger than a 9 inch pie plate.
Loosen dough carefully and press into pie plate gently.
(Optional: for decorative edge, cut slits around edge of pastry and fold dough sections into triangles to resemble a sun)
Prick dough all over with a fork to prevent shrinkage, then line the pan with foil and fill with dry beans, rice, or pie weights.
Bake 10-12 minutes until golden brown, then let cool.

FUDGE:

Chop nuts coarsely and set aside.
Melt chocolate slowly in the microwave, stirring every 10 seconds until smooth.
While chocolate is melting, combine sugar, milk, butter, vanilla, and egg in a small bowl.
Combine chocolate and sugar mixture, stirring constantly and briskly, until butter is melted.
Pour fudge into crust and use a spatula to spread it evenly.
Press nuts into the chocolate, then pop crust in fridge to set.

Key Lime:

Heat sugar and cornstarch over medium heat in a saucepan, stirring frequently.
Add milk and stir until smooth.
Add yolks and lime juice, stirring constantly.
Add shortening and keep stirring until mixture comes to a boil.
Boil one minute then remove from heat and pour into a large bowl.
Chill 45 minutes, then fold in sour cream. (Mine looked lumpy at this point because of the cornstarch, but it smoothed out when the pie set).
Pour into the chocolate-lined shell and chill at least two hours before serving.

TOPPING (optional):

Melt chocolate slowly in the microwave, stirring every 10 seconds until smooth.
Dip whole nuts into melted chocolate and place on a sheet of parchment paper.
Refrigerate until chocolate sets, at least 15 minutes.
Combine powdered sugar and whipping cream in a bowl and beat with a whisk or mixer until stiff.
“Spoon tablespoons around the edge to form 'clouds.' Top each cloud with a chocolate-covered nut.”

Yields one delicious pie and a whole lot of dishes.