Pizza dough

When I was little, I both loved and feared pizza night in equal measure.  I loved helping my Mom make pizza, everything from squishing the dough into the pan to all the spreading and sprinkling of toppings, it was one of the few meals that Mom let us help prepare and it was fun.  I also feared it because it meant I would often have to eat pizza and they tasted awful.  Once the meal preparation was over and the pizza was in the oven, the dread would start to set in.  Sometimes Mom was nice and let me have a sandwich for dinner instead, after all it's not like pizza was good for you, so I guess she didn't feel the need to force the issue all that much but I remember having to choke down that meal more times than I cared to and it pained me everytime.

I don't want to sound like my Mom was a bad cook she had her ups and downs like most home cooks, I'm going to place the blame for this one squarely on the shoulders of chef boy-ar-dee, their pizza kits were horrible things.  Inside that green box was of a sachet of dough mix, a long skinny tin of sauce with little slices of extra-hot, skinny pepperoni floating in it, and another tin of grated parmesan cheese that was probably full of additives to stop it from melting when they sealed the tin.  Add to that the less than stellar quality extra toppings and plastic cheese from the fridge and you have a recipe for a grim meal.  There's a limit to what you could expect in a small town in northern Canada in the 1980's but that early experience was so off-putting to me that I was labelled a funny kid that didn't like pizza.  I don't know what prompted Mom to stop buying those kits, I remember a few different pizza situations as I got older, between pre-made pizzas from the grocery store and my when Dad got a new job with a company that gave meal vouchers when employees worked overtime that could be redeemed at local take out places, I remember the calibre of pizza improving.

Thinking back I'm trying to remember if I really was that much of a picky eater as a child.  I quite happily ate fried liver and drank goats milk, you can't say a child who will do that is that picky, but there were a lot of foods I just didn't want to put in my mouth.  Now that I'm grown up I've been adventurous enough to try most of my hated foods again, either as a whole dish or as separate ingredients and most of what I didn't like I have narrowed down to them containing mayonnaise (or mayo-like sauces), but I also didn't like intensely spicy things or fatty foods that produced a slimy cling in my mouth.  I would say the jury is still out on my picky eater child status.  Once I stopped hating pizza, I can remember still having a few incidents of being a brat about what I would or would not eat on my pizza, but a lot of foods I didn't like have gained my affection slowly and now there's very few things I won't eat.  I also believe that even if you don't like something right away you should give a food more than one chance, except mayo that one has had hundreds of chances and it's still vile.

I don't think I was missing out on too much back then by not liking pizza, the selection of toppings that I can recall was so limited that if it was still the sum total of the pizza experience I don't think I would bother with it all that much now.  Thankfully that's not the case and I look at everything from vegetables to seafood as a potential pizza topping, spinach and potato - yum, aubergine and bacon - yup, clams and zucchini - that's good too, if it sounds like a good combination I'll try it on a pizza.  On my last trip to Italy I think I ate about 20 different types pizza and I was only there a week!  All of it was pre-made sell you a slice to take away hole-in-the-wall-establishment food, but the variety on offer and at most places the quality of ingredients just blew my mind, and you can ask for a slice any size you want, they charge you by weight.  Wandering around a historic city looking tourist sites of immense cultural significance interspersed with breaks for munching lots of little slices of thin crispy pizza the size of a half sandwich is one of my definitions of happiness.

Pizza Dough

In a measuring cup mix
225ml warm water
7g dry active yeast
1 tbsp white sugar
mix to dissolve the yeast and wait for it to start foaming

Using a stand mixer with a dough hook, in the bowl of your mixer add
375g plain flour (or bread flour or if you want to get fancy Italian Tipo00 flour)
1 tsp salt
2 tsbp olive oil
and the water/yeast mixture

Turn the machine on low and let it work magic until the dough is smooth and elastic, about 10 minutes with a sturdy machine.

And you're good to go!  I don't do the rise-knock back-rise again process with pizza dough.  I normally make about 6 individual pizzas out of this about 9 - 10 inches diameter but they're never properly round, I like my crust to be thin and crispy but my greedy eyes want it to be the size of my plate, you can make however many pizzas of whatever size or thickness you like.

Make sure your oven rack is in the lowest position in the oven.  If you have a pizza stone use following your manufacturer's directions.
Pre-heat your oven to 400^F (around 200^C) or hotter if  your oven goes higher and you're brave enough,  the hotter the better.

Divide the dough into your chosen portion and roll out to your desired size.  I sprinkle a handful of cornmeal on the countertop to roll my pizza dough out on top of and use flour on the rolling pin, but it's your pizza so do as you like.

Slide your pizza onto your baking tray then start loading it up.

Decorate with sauce or not, toppings and seasonings of your choice, cheese or not, good ingredients will make a better pizza than poor quality ones and you have just gone to the bother of making the base from scratch, I'd say you deserve good toppings.

I don't think you have to cover every visible bit of the surface with toppings but it is nice to get something yummy in every bite.

Bake for 7 - 12 minutes, keep an eye on it through your oven window, it can go from perfectly done to burned really fast but if you take it out too soon, it won't be done on the bottom.

If I'm not going to eat all the portions of pizza dough at once (and let's face it, on my own I'm not) I usually roll them out to size before freezing them.  I transfer each base to a sheet of baking paper, stack the papers up with the pizza bases on top of each other, trim away the excess paper and wrap the stack in plastic film.  I then put the stack onto a baking tray or cutting board so it stays flat and put it in the freezer.  The baking paper stops them from sticking together.  Once they're frozen I can reclaim the board.  Then I have a bunch of dinners half-way made waiting for me, if I take one out of the freezer before I start to heat the oven, because I roll them so thin, they usually thaw in the time it takes to pre-heat the oven.  You don't have to thaw it to start spreading the toppings so it's ready to go by the time the oven's fully hot.  Faster than ordering from a shop.

Sausage Rolls - Grandma Ross

There's a lot of baking (and cooking for that matter) that my Grandma Ross did that my Mom never kept up with.  My Dad had objections to leaving the oven on overnight to make meringues, most of the rest I suspect was either more fiddly than she cared to deal with or that she just considered too unhealthy, "We don't need it," was her most common response - funny how we "don't need" a cream puff or yorkshire pudding but a double batch of chocolate chip cookies in the house wasn't subject to the same criteria.  Her refusal to carry on a lot of Grandma's recipes didn't stop her from waxing on about her mom's culinary repartee, the little quirks that made her versions different from others and how beautifully her results turned out.  If you listen to my Mom, her mom made the clearest broths, the whitest and dryest meringues, and the palest and most finely textured shortbread.
 
But Grandma, being Scottish, also did savoury baking which was not all that common in northern British Columbia, or at least not that I knew.  One of the recipes that I used to bug my Mom to make, that we "didn't need" was Grandma's sausage rolls, growing up I wasn't the biggest pastry fan (probably why it's such a nemesis now, curse you karma) but I did like sausage rolls, they were fantastic.  I think to my young palate the rich animal fat in a lard based pastry made sense taste-wise when paired with meat rather than with fruit.  I only distinctly remember my Mom making sausage rolls once in my life, and I'm going to accuse Mom of doing it this one time to use up some of Grandma's leftover pastry from the freezer, only because I remember asking what something was and being told it was sausage roll pastry and my Mom is waste adverse so she wouldn't have thrown it out.  But other than that it was Grandma's wrinkled fingers that I remember rolling the pastry around the sausages and making slash marks in the top to let the steam out.
 
Grandma's recipe makes a lot of pastry for a lot of sausage rolls, I used less than a quarter of the dough and it covered 4 large sausages.  I'm also realising that this whole not giving full information might be a trait of people from a generation that knew how to cook and bake very well.  Gram didn't list sausages in the ingredients nor did she mention how many sausage rolls this makes.  I know she used to use very thin sausages but I only had fat ones, if you use thin sausages you will get a higher pastry to sausage ratio which is quite decadent.

Sausage Rolls

Get your favourite pork sausages out of the package and if necessary cut into individual sausages.  Poke a few holes in each sausage casing so that the fat can drain out as they cook.  Put them in a pot of water and boil for about 20 minutes.  When they are cooked, drain then peel the casing off the sausage, discard the casing and set the sausage aside to cool.

Pre-heat the oven to 450^F (218^C)

Sift together in a roomy bowl
2 cups flour
1/2 tsp salt

Cut in
1/2 pound lard
I cut it really chunky because I wanted really flaky pastry, it still pulled all the flour together, it's a lot of fat.

Add and mix in
1 tbsp grated onion
1/4 tsp cayenne pepper (Mom remembers Grandma used to use paprika when she didn't want it quite so spicy)

In a measuring cup mix together
1/2 cup cold water
1 egg yolk
1 tsp vinegar

Pour about 2/3 of the liquid into the flour and fat and mix with a fork, if you need more liquid you can add it but I didn't and actually needed to add a bit more flour (about 1/4 cup).

Roll the pastry out in strips and wrap around your pre-cooked sausages, trim away the excess if there is any and seal the long edge with some beaten egg, leave the ends open.  Feel for the gap between each sausage and cut between them to separate.

Roll the pastry so that the seam is on the bottom, brush the top of the pastry with some beaten egg and transfer to a baking tray.  Cut some slits in the top of the pastry.

Bake for about 12 - 15 minutes or until golden brown.

Fluffy White Frosting - Mom

Two posts in one day! 
 
This is birthday cake fluffy white frosting so sweet that it makes your teeth ache.  Actually, it's Italian meringue but we didn't know that growing up, even Mom didn't know that it was called Italian meringue until I told her about a year ago.    

Apparently, Italian meringue is a recipe only the most intrepid baker would challenge herself with making and Mom just churned it out like it was no big deal.  Even the first few times I made it I had no idea it was such a big deal and I went looking for a similar recipe on the internet because I agreed to make a cake for someone who was lactose intolerant, I couldn't do buttercream but needed to do frosting and remembered this one, really you'd think I would have found something that would have warned me off but no, I didn't and it wasn't hard at all.  So in our opinion it's not a big deal, it's easy.
 
Fluffy White Frosting
 
I'm going to list all the ingredients at once here because there's a lot of text in the instructions and you are dealing with boiling sugar, so I don't want you to miss anything, you need to have everything ready on the counter waiting to be used.
  
1 cup granulated sugar
1/4 tsp cream of tartar
a dash of salt
1/3 cup water
2 egg whites - yolks discarded
1 tsp vanilla extract
  
It's not hard, you just need to move fast at the finish and you don't have time to go searching through your cupboards.
 
  
Here we go:
In a small saucepan (if you have one with a pouring spout now is the time to use it) combine
1 cup granulated sugar
1/4 tsp cream of tartar
a dash of salt
1/3 cup water
  
Give it a stir then run your finger round the inside of the saucepan and make sure you push all those little grains of sugar down into the water.
  
Turn the heat on low, because a little bit of warm will help the sugar to dissolve at this point you can give it a little bit of a stir to help it a long, be sure to check again with your finger for any grains of sugar that may have crept up out of the water and push them back down.  If the pan is too hot to check with your finger it was too hot for you to be stirring, tip the lot out and start again.
  
Once the sugar has started dissolving, Do Not Stir It Again - this is a rule with sugar, once you start to cook it you don't stir it.  You won't get a syrup, you'll get a grainy mass, I don't know why, sugar's just cruel that way.
  
Now, turn the heat right up high and bring the sugar to a furious boil, and leave boiling for about three to five minutes.  Don't let it start to caramelise but make sure it's angry.
  
Into the bowl of your mixer put
2 egg whites
start mixing slowly until you get a few bubbles forming in the egg whites, then turn it off and wait for the sugar syrup.
 
Turn the mixer on your highest speed and slowly from high above the mixer pour a very thin stream of the sugar syrup into the egg whites as they beat.

 
The boiling will cook the egg whites but the mixing will keep them soft and fluffy as it does.
 
Immediately, once the sugar is fully mixed in, quickly add in
1 tsp vanilla
mix again to distribute the vanilla through
 
Scoop the frosting out onto the cake and start spreading it around, if you're icing a cake from a tube pan, make sure you push some icing down into the hole.  Work quickly, the frosting develops a skin really fast.  We used to decorate by slapping the surface of the frosting with the spatula and pulling out peaks and swirls like a spiky cloud.

 
If you're super fast you could use a piping bag but I haven't the talent, I'm more a spiky cloud type person.  Also spiky cloud helps to camouflage the toothpick where my pound coin is hiding.  heh-heh-heh.

Orange Chiffon Cake - Gram and Allana

It's my birthday and growing up, apart from a few animal shaped cakes that looked like they should have been painted on cave walls, birthday cakes were made in a tube pan, that means angelfood cake (I think the only cake in our house that was made from a box mix) or Orange Chiffon Cake.  This is also the cake that we remember had money inside, which made it an extra special birthday cake.  I remember my sister Allana making this cake a lot in the summer, I know other people made it at other times but this one I really identify with her so she's getting a mention in the title credit.
 
Gram gave this recipe to Mom to help use up all the eggs from the chickens, there really were more eggs than we could eat sometimes, I can remember having multiple 4-litre sized ice-cream buckets full of eggs in the fridge some summers.  In the summer the chickens had such rich diets from all the vegetable scraps, kitchen waste*, garden trimmings, and grass clippings they were fed and they got so much sunshine in those long northern days that their eggs had these impossibly deep dark orange yolks, all the baking had a strong yellow tint - no such thing as a white cake at our house in the summer, so the orange chiffon cake was a warm golden colour that complimented it's name and flavour beautifully. 
 
I can also remember trudging out to the chicken coop every morning in the snow to feed and water the chickens and collect the eggs before school and getting paid $1 per week to do it.**  There weren't many paid chores around our house, but if we took on an extra responsibility we did get rewarded - side note the chicken chore also required the chore doer to shovel a path out to the coop every time it snowed (that was on top of regular shovelling duty) and you weren't allowed to quit the job mid-winter so if you were lazy and shovelled a narrow little path at the start of the snowy season you made a rod for your own back until spring.***  I'm also pretty sure that if no one took chicken care and egg collecting as a paid extra around the house, it would have become a mandated free chore.
 
Orange Chiffon Cake
 
Pre-heat the oven to 300^F (150^C)
The cake is mixed in three separate bowls, then combined at the end.
 
Bowl A - use your mixer for then transfer the whisked egg whites into another bowl so you can use your mixer again for Bowl C
Whisk together to form stiff peaks
5 egg whites
1/2 tsp cream of tartar
 
Bowl B - use any bowl big enough to hold the ingredients
Mix together
1 1/2 cup flour
3 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup sugar
 
Bowl C - use your mixer again for this
Whisk until pale (or somewhat lighter if you had summer eggs from our chickens)
1/3 cup vegetable oil
1/2 cup orange juice
5 egg yolks
zest from 1 orange (or 3/4 tsp of lemon extract, but I don't remember this being in our house)
 
Now incorporate backwards.
 
Into the egg yolk mixture in Bowl C, gradually whisk in the dry ingredients from Bowl B, then gently fold in the egg whites from Bowl A.
 
At this point I'm going to make a dastardly confession, this is pure sacrilege in the baking world but I'm just going to say it.  I don't fold in my whisked egg whites.  I'm really bad at folding in egg whites.  I either over mix to such an extreme that I've lost half the air in the whites that there was no point in being so finicky or I end up with slimy cooked blobs of un-mixed-in egg white all through my cake.  I've given up trying.  I add them (usually in two or three batches) to my mixer and stop/start the machine using the lowest setting so that it barely swirls and I push down the egg whites every few times and occasionally pull the batter from the bottom up over the top, the process usually takes about four minutes.  And maybe it's because I'm so bad at folding in egg whites, but I don't think I lose any more air than if I spent half an hour trying to fold in the whites.  If I'm really worried about the potential loss of airiness of my cake I'll whisk an extra egg white at the start.  There you have it, my dirty secret, use it wisely and at your own risk.
 
Pour the batter into a 10 inch loose bottom tube pan like you'd use for angelfood cake and bake for 25 minutes at 300^F (150^C) then turn the heat up to 325^F (162^C) and bake for a further 20 - 25 minutes.
 
When done, invert the pan on top of a bottle so that it hangs upside down to cool, my cake pan is annoyingly 10 1/2 inches and it really makes a difference but has convenient little feet to cool it upside down so I forgive it.  By the way, this is one time where you don't want a non-stick cake pan, you want the cake to stick to the pan and not fall out while it cools.

Once cool, flip the pan right side up, run a knife around the sides and the tube of the cake to loosen, then pull the side part off, run the knife along the bottom of the pan, then flip the cake over onto a plate and the tube/bottom part of the pan should slide out.

Next is Gram's money magic trick, I only remember there being coins in tube pan cakes but Gram says she put them in any cake that she made as a birthday cake.  I can remember learning this trick for the first time in Gram's kitchen in Duncan, I really felt like we were being sneaky, I can remember being so excited about being let in on the secret of how to get the money into the cake.  I helped her wrap coins up in wax paper, then she took a knife and made some slits in the cake into which I pushed the wrapped coins, then we iced the cake which covered up the points where we pushed the coins.  Mom recently told me a story about Gram marking the point on the cake with a toothpick where one of the coins was inserted before icing the cake to make sure that the birthday boy (she had two sons) got a slice with a coin, or it might have been that there were enough coins that everyone got a slice with a coin but they were all pennies and the birthday boy got a nickel.  Either way, Gram was sneaky and I was easily impressed.

The toothpick marks out the pound coin for my slice of my birthday cake, the other coins wrapped up are pennies heh-heh-heh.

* watching chickens eat spaghetti is hilarious
** might have been $2 a week, but it certainly wasn't $5 - there was the mother of all arguments that mowing the whole lawn with the push mower was worth more than $5 and egg collection was worth a lot less than lawn mowing - I do remember it was a paltry sum even back then so I'm sure it was $1, but hey it was $1 more than your sisters were being given and you didn't have to justify why you needed/wanted money, it was yours to spend as you like.
*** occasionally Dad would run the snow blower all the way down to the chicken coop and not just stop at the barn, but I remember often having to shovel it when it was my chicken chore.

Rhubarb Cake - Mom and Gram

This cake officially comes from Gram LuVerne, Mom's copy of the recipe is in Gram's handwriting.  My rhubarb memories are so tightly tied to my Mom and it is my Mom who I remember making this cake.  I don't think many people grow up with rhubarb memories, none of my childhood friends did, more than once I had to identify the plants for them.  I can remember the rhubarb plants being contained by old tires behind the greenhouse and their massively huge frilly leaves on their primitive stalks made me think they should have belonged in a jungle not our back yard.

As with all garden items in my childhood, rhubarb came with chores and there were a few days every summer that were spent cutting mountains of rhubarb into chunks to be bagged and frozen.  But there was also the treat of being given a stick of rhubarb and unlimited access to the sugar bowl to dip and chomp away.  Rhubarb mostly went into pies and this cake, a few times I can remember it being made into jam and at least once it became wine.  It's a funny fruit but I'm glad it featured in my childhood, that sour pink and green stalk is an acquired taste and I don't have to miss out on it because I do know what to do with it.

The recipe makes mention of chopped nuts, just that a few would be nice, but Mom has confirmed that they never made an appearance in her version of the cake.

Rhubarb Cake

Pre-heat the oven to 350^F (177^C)
Grease and flour a 9 x 13 inch rectangular cake pan

In your mixer beat together
1/2 cup of butter (the recipe says margerine or oil but Mom uses butter)
1 1/2 cups sugar

When fluffy add in and mix well
1 egg

While that is mixing, measure out your wet and dry ingredients and prep your rhubarb

Dry
2 cups all purpose flour (plain flour)
1 tsp baking soda

Wet
1 cup soured milk
     - or 1 cup fresh milk with 1 tsp vinegar to sour it

Rhubarb
2 cups chopped rhubarb, tossed with a dusting of
1 tbsp flour

Alternately add in half your dry ingredients, then milk, then the rest of the dry ingredients, be careful not to over mix.

Stir in by hand the chopped rhubarb and pour the batter into your cake pan.

Mix up the topping
3/4 cup brown sugar
3 tsp ground cinnamon (be generous)

Sprinkle the topping over the batter and bake for 45 - 50 minutes
     My cake pan is smaller than 9 x 13 so my cake needed to bake for 60 min

It's not much to look at but the flavours are beautiful, when you slice into it, the cinnamon sugar topping just crumbles and dredges the whole of the cut side and drags the flavour all the way down the slice.

Edit - Gram sent me an email about this cake, she checked her recipe and noticed that she got it from (my Great) Aunt Eva, and most likely came from Aunt Eva's mother my Great Grandma Pierce.  She also said that my Mom commented she thinks this is a prairie cake.  Thanks for sharing the heritage Gram!  It's a yummy cake.