Category: Family Recipes

My mom’s friend Anne Sim from Elgin in Morayshire, Scotland sent a cookbook to my mom that contains Scottish recipes.  Anne admitted that she is not a cook, but her mother Mary Ann Noble was a cook for a large house in Edinburgh.  When inquiring about Christmas recipes Anne said: Mothers fav. to bake was rock cakes, shortbread, Oatcakes, pancakes & scones, all baked in the "Range" (Aga) in the kitchen.  Unfortunately, like most excellent cooks, Mary Ann made up her own recipes and didn’t measure ingredients.    And unfortunately there was no recipe for rock cake in the cookbook she sent.  I asked Marion Smith, my husband’s distant cousin from England, but she didn’t have a recipe either.  So, after a bit of research, I was able to take the scone recipe from the Scottish cookbook and modify it into a, hopefully, acceptable version of a Christmas Rock Cake!

Ingredients:

3 1/2 cups of flour

6 teaspoons of baking powder

1 1/2 teaspoons of cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon of fresh grated nutmeg

1 cup of sugar

1 cup of currants

1 stick of butter

1 large egg

1 cup of milk

Directions:

Place flour in the bowl of a mixer (trust me, using a mixer makes this a ton easier than doing it by hand).  Turn mixer on low and add baking powder, cinnamon, nutmeg, sugar and currants.  Cut the butter into small chunks and add, allowing the mixture to become slightly crumbly.  Add the egg and mix well.  SLOWLY add the milk and mix well.  The mix should be the consistency of drop biscuit dough.  Then, like drop biscuits, drop rounded tablespoons of dough onto greased baking sheet.  Bake at 400 for 18-20 minutes until toothpick comes out clean.  Yields about 18 cakes.

Serve warm with butter!  Yum!

I do want to also add the Soda Scone recipe that is in the Scottish cookbook Anne sent.  They sound so delicious!

Soda Scones from the Daily Record Guide to Scottish Cooking (the Daily Record has been around since 1895).

Ingredients:

1 pound of plain flour

1 ounce of baking powder

2 ounces of sugar

2 ounces of oil

1/2 pint of milk

Directions:

Place oil, milk, and sugar in a bowl and mix well.  Add the sieved flour and mix well.  Divide into four equal pieces an roll each into a six-inch disc.  Flour well and bake on a hot griddle until cooked all the way through.

Thank you Anne for the book and idea!  And thank you Marion for pointing me in the right direction to research this to come up with a recipe!

Oh, and Harry Potter fans…you’re welcome!

When I was little my mom and I used to make these stained glass cookies at Christmas.  The exact recipe she used has been lost in the past 37 years, so I have had to modify it somewhat.

One of the first things that is different is the actual shape.  Mom and I would roll the cookie dough into ropes and form them so they resembled the lead in actual stained glass.  That is definitely a way you can do these, however I now cut out the cookie shape and then carefully use a small sharp knife to cut out the center.  The other modification is that I had to find a cookie recipe to use.  The one I found is by Tupperware, circa 1980, and is called Granny’s Sugar Cookies.  My guess is that the recipe card was handed out when someone (my mom) bought Tupperware cookie cutters because the back says “TIPS FOR MAKING PERFECT COOKIES WITH YOUR TUPPERWARE COOKIE CUTTERS”.

Onward!

Ingredients:

1/2 cup of butter

1 cup of sugar

1 large egg

2 cups of all purpose flour (plus 1/4 cup for rolling)

2 teaspoons of baking powder

1/2 teaspoon of salt

1/2 teaspoon of vanilla

a bag of Lifesavers (honestly, I can’t even begin to give an amount.  It really depends on how many cookies you plan on making, the shapes of the “voids”, the size of the “voids”, etc.  use your best judgment and remember that the dough can continue to chill if you have to run out for more!)

Directions:

Cream together the butter and sugar.  Add in the egg and vanilla.  Then sift together the flour, baking powder, and salt.  Divide the dough into to two balls and chill for 2 hours.

While the dough is chilling you get to work out some aggression!  Separate the Lifesavers by color, place each color in it’s own baggy.  Go outside with a hammer and crush those suckers up!  They don’t need to be crushed to powder, just into small pieces.

When dough is chilled remove one ball from refrigerator and roll out to about 1/8 inch thickness.  Cut the dough into your desired shapes.  Then, with a very sharp (be careful!) small knife, cut out a void in the center of the cookie (see notes below for more information).  Likewise, you can just roll the dough into ropes and form into the desired shapes.

Place the cookie cut outs on silicone bakeware, parchment, or greased cookie sheet.  Carefully put desired colors of crushed Lifesavers into the cookie’s void, keeping as much off the cookie as possible and spreading out to all corners.  You can be as creative as you like with mixing colors!

Bake cookies at 375 for 8-10 minutes.  Let cool completely before removing.

Notes:  the cookies will puff up some, so make sure that the void is large enough to still be seen after baking.  I always figure the very first batch is a tester batch to see how well they turn out, then I make changes based on that.  To cool the cookies quickly to avoid waiting to long between batches, place potholders on a shelf in your refrigerator and move the cookie sheet directly from the oven to those potholders and chill for about 5 minutes.  It is also a good idea to keep the cookie dough chilled until ready for use to make it easy to roll out.

This week I am posting recipes for the holidays!

A distant DNA cousin, Susan Gilliamsen, sent me this recipe for her mother’s cheese “straws”, but they are actually VERY yummy cheese wafers!  Susan says:

Christmas wasn’t Christmas without Cheese Straws when I was growing up in the south. It was my adopted mother, Pam, who instilled the tradition. Her recipe is basically the classic southern version.

Susan says: The pic is of me at 6, Christmas morning 1966. Probably the first year I got to help with this recipe.  I love the “Elf on the Shelf” sitting on the tree!

What I found interesting about this recipe is that I had never heard of sprinkling sugar on cheese straws.  I am here to tell you that it is really good. 

I used Susan altered version of rolling the dough into logs before chilling. 

Ingredients:

3/4lb. of butter (3 sticks, cubed)

1lb. of shredded sharp cheddar cheese

3 1/2 cups of all purpose flour

1/2 teaspoon of salt

1/2 teaspoon of cayenne pepper

pecan halves and sugar for topping

Directions:

Sift flour into a large bowl and blend with salt and cayenne. Blend cut up butter and shredded cheddar with flour mixture until dough is smooth and color is uniform. (Susan says: My mother did this by hand, exhausting! I use a stand mixer.)

Chill dough for several hours to overnight. When chilled, preheat oven to 325 & roll dough to approx 1/8" – 1/4" thickness, slice into small rectangles (like a wide half strip of bacon), scratch tops of slices with a fork to rough up surface. Arrange on baking sheet lined with parchment about 1/2" apart. Set a pecan half on top of each slice if you like (Susan says: is traditional, but I prefer mine without the pecans). Bake 10-15 min, until lightly browned (Susan says: the thinner your slices the shorter the bake time of course, watch these, they’ll burn on you in a heartbeat!). Sprinkle lightly with granulated sugar as soon as they come out of the oven, while still hot, then remove to a cooling rack.

Notes from Susan: I, out of laziness mostly, have altered the rolling out process a bit (a lot!). I roll the dough into "logs" before chilling. Once chilled I take out the log(s) and slice into "coins", rough up the "coin" surface with a fork, skip the pecans and keep the sugar sprinkling. The size of your "log" will determine the width of your coin of course.

I still have some in the fridge to make!  They really are so very good!

This week I will be posting recipes for the holidays!

Stephanie Miller, one of the sweetest people I have ever met, sent me this recipe to try out.  She may not be blood family, but she is certainly family to us!  Stephanie writes:

When I was 16 and worked at a Chiropractor’s office this little lady named Mrs. Lorena Roberts used to come in every week. She was so tiny, but each week she bought us this cake she called Chewy Cake. I have had this recipe since 1977 and don’t know how long she had it before that but she made it for everybody. It was soo good.

Ingredients:

1 stick of butter

1 1lb. box of dark brown sugar

2 eggs

1 teaspoon of vanilla

2 cups self rising flour

Shredded coconut and pecans (Stephanie says: to your liking – she never gave me a specific amount but I used like a quarter cup chopped nuts and a half cup coconut.)

Directions:

Melt butter and sugar. Cool. Mix in other ingredients. Pour into a baking dish and bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes. When done, cool, cut into squares and serve.

Notes:

I actually ended up making this recipe twice, because I kind of messed up the first time.  Here is what I found works (at least, it did for me!):  melt the butter, then add DARK BROWN sugar and stir until smooth, then add the vanilla to it.  Have the flour ready in a mixer.  Once the butter/sugar/vanilla combo is melted and slightly cooled, start mixer and add the combo.  Once that is blended well add the eggs one at a time.  Lastly, add in pecan pieces and coconut.  I sprayed baking spray into a 2.2 quart Pyrex and baked for the given time.  It will puff up and when it cools it will fall some. 

It is very, very delicious!  And very, very rich! 

Thank you, Stephanie!