Thimble Cookies or Jam Thumbs or Bird's Nest Cookies - Mom

These little cookies never had a definite name when we were growing up, but despite that, we always knew what someone was talking about when they were named.  I always thought there was a special secret to these cookies, I think I thought that they formed little dents in the middle naturally, all on their own, like magic.  It wasn't some big revelation when I realized that you had to make the dent with your thumb before baking it was just common sense, but I was surprised to find out that Mom used a thimble to re-define the dent after baking because they often came out of the oven swollen almost shut.  Good advice Mom!

Jam Thumbs

Pre-heat the oven to 350^F (175^C)

Cream together until fluffy
1/2 cup butter
1/4 cup sugar

Mix in
1 egg yolk (save the white for later)
1 tsp vanilla

Finally stir in
1 cup flour

Shape the dough into balls, dip the balls in the egg white then roll in sweetened dessicated coconut and place on a cookie sheet.  Make a dent in the middle of the ball with your thumb before baking.

Bake for 10 - 12 minutes then take out of the oven and use a thimble (or in my case a slim bottle with a very small lid) and widen the dent to make it bigger before transferring to a wire rack to cool, work quickly to fill with raspberry jam while they're still warm.

Pumpkin Pie - Mom

This October, I missed Thanksgiving because I was on holiday.  I missed it last year due to excessive bad health.  Missing it once I could deal with, missing it two years in a row was unacceptable, so I rallied my fellow Canadian ex-pat friends and told them they were coming to my belated thanksgiving lunch.  Being Canadian I have to explain Thanksgiving to my British co-workers and in the process I get to tell them about Pumpkin Pie.  In my industry, people change companies a lot, so I have to explain it at least every other year, the reaction is always the same, deep suspicion about why you would put pumpkin in a pie, interrogation about the flavouring (is it sweet or savoury), and when I bring in my leftover pie to share round an almost universal chorus of how do you make that, I need the recipe.

So here it is, this is my Mom's pumpkin pie and I've given an increased quantity for the spices because she always adds extra and so do I.  If you can't find a tin of pumpkin puree (or don't want to go to a specialty food store and spend in the region of £6.00 on it), you can buy a pumpkin, the kind for a jack-o-lantern, scoop the seeds out and bake it until soft, then puree the flesh in a blender, it speaks of dedication to your pie, and you'll have more pumpkin than you need so you can also make soup.

This pie is what makes the house smell of Thanksgiving.

Pumpkin Pie

Pre-heat the oven to 450^F (232^C) and put the oven shelf at the lowest position.

Roll out short crust pastry and line two 7 - 8 inch pie plates, make a crimp with your fingers or press with a fork round the edge to make it pretty.  Use pastry that is made with vegetable shortening (or even lard if you can) do not use all butter pastry, because of the high oven temperature, all butter pastry is likely to burn.  Do not dock the pastry, leave it unblemished because you are not blind baking it first.

Mix the ingredients with an electric mixer in order, beating well between every ingredient
2 eggs
3/4 cup sugar
1 3/4 cup pumpkin puree (that's a whole small can if you bought it)
Spices:  2 tsp dried ginger
            2 tsp cinnamon
            1/2 tsp cloves
1 can evaporated milk (that's a 410g can)

Pour the filling into the unbaked pie shells and put in the oven to bake for 15 minutes at 450^F, then turn the oven down to 350^F (177^C) and bake for another 30 - 45 minutes or until a knife inserted in the centre comes out clean.  If you have to put the two pie pans into the oven on a diagonal, about 10 minutes after turning down the temperature, swap the pies so the back one comes forward and the front one goes back, it'll help even out the cooking.

I didn't get a chance to take a picture of my pies before my thanksgiving lunch, I only thought of taking a photo after I had taken it to work and put it by the tea kettle for people to help themselves, it was gone by the time I remembered, sorry.  So here's a picture of the lovely flowers I was given for making thanksgiving lunch, aren't they pretty.

Pinwheel Cookies

I’ve gotten ahead on the baking and behind on the blogging, the result is, hopefully, two posts this week.

My mom had a rather meagre selection of cook books when I was young, and even fewer on baking, but I can still remember looking through them and thinking the few pictures were amazing and inspiring. Looking back now those same photos look horribly dated and, worse, very pedestrian, but they served their purpose at the time and got me to experiment with new recipes all the same.

 

One of the favourite experiments were the pinwheel cookies, as my sister Heather said, “They weren’t made very often but when they were made they were good.” Well, they weren't made very often because I was the only one who made them, and I did share baking duties with my sisters and mom.  The pinwheels sparked my love of icebox cookies as the ultimate in convenience baking and the swirls of vanilla and chocolate cookie dough always raised the question of how do you make that? Which made me feel very smart because I was the one who could do it. My mom recently claimed on one of her visits that she used to make the pinwheel cookies as well, but when she watched me make them for the blog (and to send some to Allana and Dad), she then backed down from her claim saying she doesn’t remember ever having to roll out and sandwich together two flavours of dough, I’ll let her off the hook for trying to steal my thunder because she backed down so readily.

 

Pinwheel Cookies

 

Mix together until smooth

2/3 cup butter

1 cup brown sugar

 

then add and mix well

1 egg

1 tsp vanilla extract

 

In a separate bowl, mix together

2 cups flour

1/4 tsp salt

1/2 tsp baking soda

then stir into the batter until smooth.

 

To make the pinwheels, divide the dough in half, put half onto a sheet of baking paper and leave the other half in the mixing bowl.

 

Add to the dough in the bowl

2 tbsp cocoa powder (make sure it's dark cocoa powder)

and mix until the dough is chocolate

 

Roll out the chocolate and vanilla doughs on separate sheets of baking paper to 1/8 inch thick and to the same length, but make the chocolate one a bit narrower.  A trick I have for making them very rectangular when they start to go oval is to cut off the rounded ends of the oval, then cut those pieces in half, turn the two halves so that the corners are to the outside and patch them back onto the main piece of dough.  The dough is really forgiving and you're going to roll everything up into a log so no one will see any of the patchwork.  If they're not rectangular you get quite a few 'dud' cookies when you start cutting the ends.

Then sandwich together, chocolate on top of vanilla, try to get the chocolate in the middle of the vanilla so there is a border on both sides.  You want a border on both sides so the centre of the pinwheel has a nice tight curl in the middle and so the vanilla seals the chocolate on the outside of the roll.  I didn't do a very good job, it's been a while since I made these and it requires more conviction than I had to flip the chocolate over.

Then roll into a log, wrap with one of the sheets of paper and freeze for at least an hour.  At this point you can take the dough out of the freezer to slice and bake or divide into portions to freeze to use later (it'll keep in the freezer for 1 - 3 months depending on how cold your freezer is).

Preheat the oven to 350^F (around 175^C), slice the log into 1/4 inch cookies, the size of the cookie is not based on the thickness of the slice but the fatness of the log, don't be tempted to cut them thicker to make them bigger, it won't work.  Bake for 6 - 10 minutes, oven temperatures vary as well as the coldness of the dough, as the dough warms up by sitting on the kitchen counter while waiting for successive trays to bake they will need less time.

You can see what I mean about not getting a tight curl in the middle, I didn't have enough border of vanilla on the inside edge of the roll.  They were still delicious.

Scottish Scones or Highland Griddle Scones

The only meal that is a mandatory requirement when I see my Mom, whether I visit her or she visits me, is the Scone Lunch.  This is a meal that has been passed down the generations in our family in my memories from my Grandma Ross, although I know she learned how to make scones from her mother and can only guess how many generations before.  Scottish scones are my first baking memory, standing on a step-stool in Grandma's kitchen in the house on Mallard St, watching her papery skinned wrinkled fingers softly working the dough, turning them into scones on her aluminum electric griddle.  Making scones with her was an apprenticeship, I learned components of the process in stages, a bit at a time, how to cut the dough, to turn the scones so they cook on all sides, how to rub the butter into the flour, and my favourite bit (even still today) flipping the dough in your hands to knock the excess flour off.  I don't think she ever let me make a full batch on my own so in a way I never graduated.  In my defense, she didn't leave very good instructions for my continuing education behind, the only copy we have of her recipe is in a very tattered old copy of a United Church Women's cook book, most of the ladies at church would have been invited round for a scone lunch and they must have pestered her into including the recipe, I almost wonder if she didn't want to share the recipe because if you hadn't ever made them you would read this and not even try.

This is the hardest baking I have ever done, in preparation for this blog entry I made 5 batches in the space of about a month, under the guidance of my Mom and picking her brains for every tip and trick that she can remember from her Mom.  If you are at all interested in making these, please take heart that I still feel nerves about them turning out wrong when I'm making them.  I really don't know how to write this any better than she did, I'll try to make it fit my recipe writing style but I don't promise anything easy.

Grandma Chrissie Ross' Scones

In a mixing bowl, add
Flour, a 2 cup measuring cup filled until it is heaped up, a really big round heap of flour
1/4 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda, generously rounded not flat
1 tsp cream of tartar, again generously rounded not flat
mix well and leave to rest for half an hour at least - don't skip this I don't know why it's necessary but there is magic in the wait

After resting the flour rub into the flour mix
Butter the size of a large walnut - go buy some walnuts in their shells if you can't gauge

At this point pre-heat an electric griddle to around 345^F, or make a wild guess with a frying pan on the stove top, I have settings 1-6 on my stove and need a heat setting between 3 and 4, they don't brown at 3 and they brown too fast at 4, I adjust back and forth.  Use a nice big pan with a flat bottom, if you can find a square pan all the better, do not add grease or cooking spray to the pan, heat it DRY, the flour on the scones will stop them from sticking I promise, but you can use a non-stick pan if you are skeptical.

Make a well in the centre and add
1 egg
2 tablespoons of golden syrup or pancake syrup (or for a short while we used honey from Mom's bees)
1 to 1 1/4 cups of milk - use half evaporated milk and half water (start with 1 cup and add the rest only if needed), the evaporated milk makes the insides yellow and much richer than plain milk
Mix to make a soft dough, do not over mix but there cannot be any lumps of flour and it should be stiff enough to be handled with just your fingers and a knife, no spatulas or flippers or rolling pins allowed.  Turn out a third of the dough onto a well floured counter cover the top with more flour and pat the dough out to a round.

Be sure to push the flour up from the board onto the edges of the round as you pat it in case you need to cook the edges.

Cut into 6 triangles, make a little ridge line of flour with your knife before cutting through and push the flour down into the cut, wiggle the knife side to side a bit as you go.

Use your knife to pick up each triangle, then flip it back and forth between your hands to knock the excess flour off before putting it on the griddle.

Cook for approximately 4 minutes on the first side then 3 minutes on the other side until pale golden brown.  You only get one flip but you can peek at the underside to see if it's ready to turn.  If the edges look a bit raw but the scone is browned, you can flip it up on the cut edge and turn it to cook on all the edges, the heat will go up through the scone in the insides will come out fluffy and pretty.

Once cooked cool them on a wire rack, then take a stiff bristle brush and brush off the rest of the flour before serving.  It makes enough for 4 greedy people to have scones for lunch/dessert or 6 polite people who are getting something else for dessert, I'll explain a bit later.

Be careful not to over cook the scones, my Grandpa Sidney was pretty sensitive to the level of brown that a scone reached and had a rather unkind phrase for one that was too brown.  He called them 'telephone scones' because he assumed that Grandma was chatting away on the phone when she should have been watching the scones.  There's a good one on the left and a telephone scone on the right.

The beauty of a Scottish Scone is that it starts as lunch and becomes dessert.  Our family's scone lunch must have canned salmon (British Columbia sockeye if you can find it) mixed up into a spread, butter, cheese and raspberry and other jams, additional nice things are salad vegetables in the summer to make your savoury sandwiches more interesting and soup in the winter because it's warm, lastly my Dad is fond of peanut butter on his dessert scones (although he was initially viewed as a heathen by his in laws for this request).  Start with the savouries and move on to the jams when you're nearly full.

A final word of warning, these scones go stale fast, they are soft and slightly moist and fluffy the day they are baked, they go dry and crumbly and mealy overnight.  Do not under any circumstances make them a day in advance, either be piggy enough to eat them all on the day they are baked or throw them away. 

They will take patience and practice, in my case a lifetime of trying and I'm still not quite there yet, but I'm getting closer and I now have the courage to invite friends round for a scone lunch and even to tell them that they're getting scones for lunch before they come.

Mmmmm, fish on a scone, it makes it all worth it.