White Sauce - Mom vs Margaret

When I was young I remember Christmas dinner at our house with my grandparents from my Mom's side joining us, there may have been a few years this didn't happen but on the whole this is what I remember.  My Dad's parents were "snow-birds" the entire time I was young and went down to Arizona for the winter, I vaguely remember one Christmas with them in Duncan (it might have been an Easter tho) and one year we went to Arizona.  After my Mom's parents passed, we started having the big Christmas dinner at Mom's cousin Margaret's house, although Mom also did a smaller dinner for us between Christmas and New Year.  This is where the great pudding confusion began.  Mom and Margaret both made different puddings and different white sauces but claimed to have inherited their pudding recipes from their mothers, who would have inherited from their mother - who was the same woman, my great-grandmother.  So why were the puddings different?

After I made my pudding this year my sister, Allana, emailed me asking if I was going to make Margaret's as well to do a side by side comparison.  I didn't have Margaret's pudding recipe so I said no.  A week ago Allana emailed me Margaret's pudding and white sauce recipes* - suddenly things took a very interesting turn.  It was too late to make another pudding, it wouldn't have time to mature and it wouldn't be a very fair comparison, but I could do a head to head competition between the white sauces.

The main difference between the white sauces is that Mom's is made with butter while Margaret's is made with whipped cream.

Mom's White Sauce

Cream
1/2 cup butter

Gradually add
1 cup sifted icing sugar
beat until well blended

Beat in
1 tsp vanilla
1 egg (or two egg yolks)
a few grains of salt

Set over a pot of hot simmering water and cook and beat with an electric beater (or hand whisk and very strong arm) until it has thickened and is smooth and light - about 7 minutes.

Serve hot or cold


Margaret's White Sauce

Beat until thick, then set aside
1 cup whipping cream

In a second bowl beat until thick and pale yellow
1 egg that has been rinsed with boiling water before cracking open

Add 
1/3 cup granulated sugar (more if you like it really sweet)
beat again

Add and give a quick stir
1 tsp vanilla

Fold in all the whipped cream

Refrigerate until ready to use


Time for the taste test!

Mom's white sauce made me think it was almost pourable icing and it was thick in texture and very sweet.  Against the rich heavy flavour of the pudding it really held its own.  It also held its texture when slathered all over the hot pudding right to the very end of the eating, a major feat of which to be proud.

When I said it was very sweet though, I think I'd cut back on the sugar a bit.  I don't say that sort of thing casually, usually I don't believe there's ever too much sugar in anything.








Margaret's sauce was lighter in texture and less sweet, the freshness of the whipped cream was a relief after eating too much dinner and then facing down two bowls of pudding.  Against the pudding I thought the flavour wasn't strong enough and it melted into the hot pudding too quickly.

This flavour discrepancy doesn't align with my memories, I remember the sauce working very well with the pudding.  I think I need to add a small caveat here; Margaret's pudding recipe looks like it would produce a less dense pudding with a lighter flavour so this might not be a very fair competition after all.





Other factors to consider:  
>Margaret's sauce was easier to make, but I had two bowls to wash up when I was done.  Mom's was more fiddly and could have the potential to create more dishes to wash than it did but I was sneaky and cooked it over my pot of boiling potatoes instead of getting out a new pot - love a multi-task.
>If I were to sit down and eat just the sauce by the bowlful (which I've often thought would be a sensible thing to do) I'd choose Margaret's.
>How fast can you eat your pudding and do you mind if it turns soupy if you're slow?
>Which do you like more?  Butter or the ingredient that makes butter?

This was fast becoming a draw and my tummy was starting to hurt.

???Who do you love most???

In the interest of science (purely scientific research I assure you, not to force a conclusion so I could stop eating and go lie down) I did a little experiment.  I mixed a little bit of plain cream into Mom's sauce and it was stellar!  It cut back the sweetness that little bit and freshened up the flavour but still had the the heft to stand equal to the pudding's flavour and held up against the heat of the pudding.

The Winner
ME with my sauce that I've just invented!




* Major kudos to Allana for getting Margaret's pudding and white sauce recipes out of her.  I remember hearing Margaret say one year that she posted jars of pudding to one of her own (adult-aged) daughters who was in South America rather than giving her the recipe to make it herself.

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.