Kuchen in the kitchen

 I have been rediscovering my interest in baking for church coffee hour.

Out of the tree of life I have picked me a plum. Today I made a recipe from my Taste of Home Baking cookbook. I made Fresh Plum Kuchen!

This follows Peach Coffee Cake which I made last week. That is a picture from that adventure up above. The clutter shows how out of practice I was. However I am getting better!

The Fresh Plum Kuchen called for two cups of sliced plums. My brother George had brought us plums from Bailey Clinton. I took a bowl of them and sliced them. You always think you can slice them neatly however you cannot. There is this pit that has to be removed. The recipe writers never think about that. Here is a secret however: It does not matter. The plums get buried in the cake anyway.

They say: "Arrange them neatly over the cake" No need to bother!

The world slows down when you bake. Getting the pastry together always takes a little longer than you think it will and you have to go with that. It did feel so good today to butter the springform pan and pour the cake batter into it.

Then the plums scattered in the batter. I took my time trying to distribute them well.

Then I sprinkled white sugar over the top. That was my contribution to the recipe.

Then Howard and I were eating dinner so I had to set the timer on my phone to make sure the kuchen did not bake too long. We were out on the porch and all of a sudden I hear this jingling and goofy music and it was my phone. "What is that?" I wondered. Then I realized: Ah, the kuchen was done.

Being on Keto I have not sampled the cake. However it looks good, and it smells good. If something looks good and smells good you know what that means.

It is good!

Sugar haze on the Feast of St. Blaise

As promised, the picture of my braided coffee cake all sugared up.

It was soon all gobbled up!

We had an unexpectedly big crowd today for our coffee hour. I expected a small crowd what with the Super Bowl which, you can tell by that I am writing at the hour I am that it does not mean the world to me. I would rather be listening to Leonard Pennario or finishing up a sketch, both of which I have managed to work into my evening so far.

But back to our coffee hour. Maybe it was the mild weather, a break after all these frigid days. Maybe it was that word has gotten out about my rocking pastries. We will never know. But after the Blessings of Throats, it being the Feast of St. Blaise, everyone came streaming over. New people, regulars, everyone. I was astonished!

A word before I continue about the Blessing of the Throat. There was no way I was going to miss getting my throat blessed, particularly since I somehow skipped my flu shot this year. But I had a quandary.

I set up the coffee hour this morning pretty much all on my own. My friend Margaret, who usually helps, she and her husband are in Florida. I did pretty well because I was at church by 8, and I got in just in time for the Asperges. I was singing the Asperges with the choir, entreating God to sprinkle us with hyssop and we will be whiter than snow. Thinking of white snow it suddenly hit me--

Oh no! I forgot to put out the sugar!

The sugar is supposed to go next to the coffee. The coffee pot had been gurgling and percolating and the cream was out and also on hand was a beautiful bottle of Frangelico that one amazing young gentleman had brought to go in our coffee. But the sugar. The sugar!

I had to get over to the coffee hour to put out the sugar and so I did the unthinkable. I cut in line for the Blessing of the Throat!

Everyone was lined up in two queues in the center aisle. But the lines went on forever. Surely it would not matter if I slipped in, you know? So I did.

And my friend Lou told me at coffee hour that as I presented myself for the blessing, as captured in this quick photo he took with his phone ...

... this one woman in line looked at me dagger-eyed!

She does not go to coffee hour and so she does not know my vast responsibilities to it. And so she judged me. That is what Lou told me anyway. He said he saw the woman make this face.

It is a big problem, someone cutting in line for the Blessing of the Throat!

But so must it be. I made it over to coffee and I got the sugar and put it out. And there were already one lady and two gentlemen waiting for it, would not you know.

The good news is, we carried off this feast, which besides what I brought also included bagels and cream cheese brought by our friend Thomas and beer bread that our friend Joe made with blueberry ale. Joe if you will remember is the gardener with the romantic flowering quince. I have his recipe for the beer bread now and we have not heard the last of it.

Next week I will remember the sugar. I will not make that mistake again.

I will branch out into different mistakes.

Thank you, Betty Crocker!

Saturday is baking day as I prep for church coffee hour. Today I tried a new coffee cake. It is titled Sweet Bread Wreath. It is from Betty Crocker and it came out looking great.

I like to do something new every week. That is the game! Ideally it is something that teaches me some new technique or makes me do something different. In this case it was making a braided wreath. I had not done that since I made a braided Christmas Stollen a long time ago from the Monastery Cookbook. Now that was a project. One day I will have to revisit that.

That was not a wreath. Today's bread was.

You had to divide the dough into three pieces and roll them into 26 inch ropes.

Then you braided them loosely and shaped them into a wreath. It was all easier than I thought it would be.

The wreath was kind of rough at the bottom edge where the ends of the ropes were pinched together. However, I figured, that is where I can cut into it when it is on the coffee hour buffet. If you do not cut into a cake nobody cuts into it and it just sits there. That is what I have learned!

Likewise if you do not take the cover off something, be that cover foil or plastic or whatever, experience teaches me that nobody takes the cover off. They might reach under the plastic or foil and take a slice but they do not remove the covering, oh no.

Got to love it!

Back to the Sweet Bread Wreath which, by the way, you can find the recipe here.

I put it in the oven to proof at a balmy 100 degrees and here is how it was after maybe an hour and a half. Eventually it emerged.

So pleasingly plump! I gave it a lot of time because I used white whole wheat flour. I was out of plain white flour and too lazy to go to Albrecht Discount.

Before it bakes you are to brush the Sweet Bread Wreath with beaten egg and then sprinkle it with spices. Here is where I did not read, and I mixed the spices in with the beaten egg. Oh no. Oh no!

I brushed the mixture on as it was, fingers crossed, and into the oven it went.

Ta da!

I think I will sprinkle powdered sugar on it immediately before serving. Another lesson I have learned is people like a bit of sweetness but not a load of it. Well, the kids like a load of it, which is why I made brownies as well. But most people don't want anything with too much sugar. Still they like some. They do not want no sugar. You must strike this happy medium.

Which I hope I do with the Sweet Bread Wreath. I will try to take a picture tomorrow before Mass so we can see how it looks with its pious dusting of sugar.

Meanwhile I have nothing but praise for this particular Betty Crocker cookbook. It is "Come Home To Dinner" and it utilizes your appliances like the bread machine and the Crock Pot.

Its bread section is the greatest. I have done a bundle of the recipes and they all work out great.

As opposed to this other bread machine cookbook -- this series of cookbooks really -- that I used to use. Here, I found this picture of them. I had three of these books.

The breads on the cover look yummy! And they usually came out well. But not after an eon of fussing and tweaking. I would look in the machine and they would be too crumbly or too wet or too heavy and the machine would be huffing and puffing and finally just stop.

I was always adding something or amending something but somehow I never blamed the books. I always blamed myself. And at the end when the breads came out well I would write "VG" or "Made for church everyone ate it up" or something like that, and forget about all the work I went through.

Whereas with this Betty Crocker book, the dough always comes out of the machine perfect and easy to work with, no muss no fuss. I marveled at it for several weeks until it finally dawned on me: Those cookbooks I used to use were just plain bad.

Fie on them! I do not think I will even give them to Amvets. I do not want some other cook baking for her church coffee hour to be pulling her hair out. I think I will just throw them away!

Betty Crocker is my new best friend. Sometimes you need someone who has been around since your great-grandparents' era, you know?

She knows her stuff!

The Sunday baking report

One reason I went for that bike ride yesterday was that I was relaxing after my church coffee hour baking.

It is hard to believe I have been baking for the coffee hour for two years now. Two and a half years! What is really funny is I still get a real kick out of it.

Yesterday my theme was, I was baking out of a cookbook called "Breakfast at Nine, Tea at Four." It is put out by, ahem, the Mainstay Inn in Cape May, New Jersey.

With us it is more like, Mass at Nine, Coffee Hour at Ten Fifteen. But it is all good. I made Orange Kuchen and Blueberry Breakfast Cake, both from that cookbook. They were part of a larger buffet that also included banana bread, corn bread, eggs with sausage and veggies ...

... and my trademark Jackson Pollack coffee wreath pictured way up above. This week I made a chocolate filling.

Also on the groaning board were Lizzie's brownies and yummy zucchini bread, and watermelon that our friends Bill and Margaret bought. That is life at St. Anthony of Padua's Latin Mass! Every week is like Babette's Feast. Other people bring stuff, too. We do love to eat.

Yesterday to the pleasant surprise of Team Coffee, the turnout was great even though it was a summer day and our Latin Mass Picnic was last week so you would have thought people would have had enough of each other for the time being.

We went through almost all the food!

And my friend Alenka who is from London praised in particular the Orange Kuchen. Alenka does not care for cinnamon and deplores that here in America it is everywhere. And so I had subbed in allspice for cinnamon in the recipe, all on account of her.

I was particularly proud of the eggs because they were a last minute sub for something that, uncharacteristic for me, had not worked out. I threw this dish together and prayed it would bake fast enough to get me to the church on time, as the song goes.

My prayers were answered! I was on time! Well, almost on time. The priest and the altar boys ...

... made it in just before I did, darn. I had to stand back.

But still. Such fun, you know? Sometimes at Mass it is hard for me to keep my mind on the prayers because I am thinking about the food.

I am not Mary, I find myself thinking on those occasions.

I am Martha!

My fair share

We are entering the high eating season of the year.

You pass the September Ember Days, and you are into it!

This morning for our St. Anthony's coffee hour I made two pumpkin delicacies. I am sorry if I was jumping the gun a little but I could not help it! I made a pumpkin wreath, one of those big coffee cakes I make with yeast, and I also made a Bundt cake I called Buttercup Rum Cake. There is this amazing recipe, Whiskey Squash Cake, which was the first successful Bundt cake I made a couple of months ago. I riff on it now and this version used rum instead of whiskey, as well as deep orange Buttercup squash.

I assume it was good because it vanished pretty quick!

I have been having a good time with the farm I joined, this CSA. This is the same ol' organic farm I used to belong to, Porter Farms. I just do not remember having as much fun with it then as I have been having this year.

The deal is, they deliver to the office. And so every week, on the appointed day, at the appointed hour, all of us are going downstairs and collecting these bags of produce. It is hard not to smile when you are toting this big bag with collard greens sticking out of it and so it is always a bright and cheery day.

I took the picture up above of one share. That was especially heavy because of the cantaloupe which was like a bowling ball! But it was so sweet and good, worth the long haul across the parking lot.

Here is the share from Sept 7.

I love how the farm says one share does for four people, or for two vegetarians. That Sept. 7 share, I think I ate it pretty much single-handedly in two days! The cantaloupe on the other hand lasted us a week. We ate every bit of it.

This current share included an array of peppers which, I used them for this Mexican cheese soup I made for the coffee hour. The coffee hour sees a lot of the vegetables. A few weeks ago I made yummy white bean soup with greens from the farm.

Bring on the fall eating season.

I am ready!

Can stand the heat

This heat wave, I love it! Above is a picture I took of torpid Hoyt Lake.

One of the things I have been doing to celebrate the heat wave is go swimming. The other thing I will get to in a second.

The swimming has been great. No, you do not swim in Hoyt Lake. But there is plenty of other opportunity! The other day, I went to Beaver Island with my brother and my niece and nephew. There were no lifeguards or parking fees because the season is over, at least so they say. Hundreds of people were on the beach, folks of all stripes. All of us unsupervised! It was so peaceful and beautiful.

We kept gloating about it being late September and here we were swimming. Except as George reminded me, we have been swimming at Beaver Island much later in the year than this. We do get beautiful autumns here in Buffalo, or should we say, beautiful summers.

Today I went swimming at LA Fitness but even indoor swimming is wonderful. They have huge windows and it feels so refreshing.

So... what was the other thing I was doing to celebrate the heat wave?

I have had the oven going full blast!!

For our Tridentine Mass coffee hour, I made Orange Cornmeal Cake out of Martha Stewart ...

... and Cocoa Fudge Bundt Cake...

... and one of my signature coffee wreaths, from King Arthur Flour. Howard took all these pictures and he photographed the wreath before it went into the oven. When it came out, it was huge!

The Orange Cornmeal cake was really interesting because you top it with sugar and the sugar forms this crust. The fudge Bundt was a great old Betty Crocker recipe that mixed up all in one bowl.

I will have to remember that.

Along with this heat wave!

Bless me, Father, for I have cooked

Today for church coffee hour I went back to a cookbook I've had for years and had completely forgotten about. It is this cookbook from Cape May's Mainstay Inn. It is called, "Breakfast At Nine, Tea At Four."

Why, you cute cookbook!

I made Banana Crunch Coffee Cake, p. 104. While it was baking I turned a few pages and found Orange Kuchen. I had an orange. I had everything I needed. So I made that too.

Here is a funny thing. Both the Banana Crunch cake took about three times as much sugar and butter as the Orange Kuchen. Both baked in the same pan, the 9 by 13, one of my favorite pans, I must point out.

Well, even though the banana cake took enough sugar and butter -- and coconut, too! -- to sink a ship, I made it as written. Give the people what they want! Several times I have skimped and tried to make things healthy and in that case nobody eats it.

Both cakes were a success. My friend Oscar complimented me on the orange cake. Oscar comes from some South American or Latin American country I can never remember, but he is an authority on baking and he loves the taste of orange peel. As do I! It is most zesty.

Another way in which I was a winner, I made a crock pot of white beans and greens, the greens being the collards from my Porter Farms CSA, which is another story for another day. One of the gentlemen complimented me on that! He and his wife were on some kind of plant-based diet and he could not believe his luck.

Long story short, here I am kicking back and listening to Harry Connick Jr. and basking in my greatness. Oh! There is one more thing.

Lizzie and I both managed to make it to Mass in a timely fashion! The Kyrie was just beginning which was not bad for us. Last week, even better, we made it in time for the Asperges. What are we doing right? We were trying to figure that out because it would be great if this trend continued.

I think with me, it was because I made two big coffee cakes instead of any number of smaller ones. That plus I made Amaretto Coffee Wreath ...

... which was huge too. Howard took that picture of it on its parchment paper! I threw these treats together yesterday easily, among doing other things. Howard helped me carry them out to the car this morning so that was something else. He usually helps me but this morning he did the lion's share of it. Not as many pans, and a lot of help! That made a difference.

Now if I could only bring this kind of productivity to the rest of my life.

Onward and upward!