Cream Puffs - Grandma Ross

I don't remember much about Grandma Ross' cream puffs, mainly what I remember is her serving desserts that were sandwiched together with whipped cream.  Mostly meringues with whipped cream but Mom says she also made cream puffs and I found her recipe for them.  I've made choux pastry before and, despite common opinion, it's such a doddle that I didn't know why Mom never picked up the recipe, especially if she was trying to impress company because choux pastry always looks impressive.  Cream puffs are especially impressive because they're nice and big.

A recent conversation with Mom revealed that she was just stymied by the recipe instructions her mother left and for some reason they were always slimy inside even though she thought they were fully cooked.  Well, I can understand her difficulties, especially in the pre-internet world, these are the instructions from Grandma's recipe, "When water & butter are boiling add flour & salt.  Remove from heat.  Add eggs & beat one in at a time." - that was it, nothing else, so no wonder, huh?  If it wasn't for the internet I wouldn't know what to do with the recipe either, so thank-you technology.

 

Cream Puffs

Pre-heat the oven to 400^F (205^C)
Heat in a pot until boiling:
1/2 cup water
1/4 cup butter

While waiting for the water to boil, sift together:
1/2 cup flour
1/8 tsp salt
The moment the water and butter are boiling, turn the heat off, move your pot to a cool burner.  Dump all the flour into the water in one go and start stirring furiously.  I use an electric hand mixer but don't if your pot has a non-stick coating, mine are stainless so I'm good.

Once the dough comes away from the side start adding one at a time
2 eggs
It'll look like scary scrambled eggs for a while but keep mixing until the dough is smooth, shiny, and drops off the beaters (or spoon) easily.

Grease your baking sheet then splash some cold water on them and give them a shake so that you only have small drops of water clinging to the sheet.  This is a trick I found on the internet, because it's the steam that causes the choux pastry to puff up, if you have slightly damp baking sheets it creates extra steam for extra puff.  I'm not sure if dampening the tray makes much difference, I've always had my choux pastry puff up big and I only found the water trick recently, you still have to grease the sheet though, even if it's non-stick.

Spoon big tablespoon sized dollops of the dough onto the sheets leaving enough space for the cream puffs to expand to double their size without touching each other.

Bake  for 40 mins.

When you take them out of the oven, scoop them up off the baking tray immediately and punch a small hole in the bottom then put them on a wire rack to cool.  The internal structure of the choux pastry will remind you of strands of cobwebs like you see as special effects in old haunted house movies.  If you don't make a hole the steam has no where to escape, it'll stay inside, condense, and turn the cobweb strands slimy.  You could possibly try rescue your cream puffs by scraping the insides out with a spoon after you cut them open but you won't have any body left to it and the steam might also have gotten into the shell of the cream puff and there's no rescue for that.  Punch a hole in it, I used the handle of a spoon.

Once they're cooled, they'll keep for a few days if you don't fill them, but where's the fun in that?  Cream puffs can be cut open and filled with whipped cream or creme patisserie.  If you make profiteroles, the cream puff's miniature-cousin, they should be filled by piping the filling in through the hole you made to vent the steam.  To make the dessert extra indulgent you can also top them with sauce or chocolate shavings.

 

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.

Christmas Pudding - Mom and Grandma Ross

It's beginning to smell a lot like Christmas in my flat, that's right it's Pudding Weekend.  You need to make your Christmas pudding at least a month in advance because it has to age, so that means now.  When my grandmother immigrated from Scotland to Canada she started making her Christmas puddings in canning jars. So for my sisters and I, the jar presentation is part of the tradition, passing those two-pint jars full of pudding around the table to help yourself to as much pudding as you think you can fit in the gaps of your stomach that aren't full of turkey and fixings.  What really crowned the dessert, for us, was the foamy white sauce we poured over the pudding, every year I almost expected a war to break out over the white sauce.

Last year I asked my sister Allana to interrogate both my Mom and our (Mom's) cousin Margaret for the recipe for pudding.  Allana craftily chose to ask when they were in the dozy stage of post Christmas dinner food coma, in front of a selection of other cousins for witness and peer pressure, in an attempt to get the truth out of the recipe saboteurs.  It didn't work so well, they kept mixing up the ingredients and amounts, not a straight answer out of either of them.

Mom emailed me her recipe which I then, as per usual, emailed back for corrections of glaring mistakes.  I've also supplemented the method instructions with a bit of internet research because the information I was given was very sparing.  Mom did say she normally doubles the recipe but I only made a fraction of the recipe because I didn't need to make enough for a family.  I'm not worried though, I've got an awful lot of pudding for a greedy girl to eat - mwah ha ha!

Mom's Christmas Pudding

Mix in a roomy bowl
1 cup grated carrots
1 cup grated apples
1 cup grated potato
1 cup raisins
1 cup currents
1/2 cup grated frozen butter (the original recipe says suet but Mom never used that)

One trick I found is to make piles of all the ingredients in the bowl so you can keep track of what you've added, once grated the apple looks like potato, raisins and currents might look a little too similar, separate piles keeps everything in order.

Mix in
1 cup brown sugar
1 tbsp black treacle (molasses)

Leave it all to sit for an hour or two, the liquid will come out of the grated ingredients and form a sugar syrup which will soak into the dried fruit plumping them up.

Then add to the wet ingredients and mix well
2 eggs

Sift together
1 1/4 cup flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1/2 tsp all spice
1/2 tsp salt  - but only if you used suet or unsalted butter (if you used salted butter don't add extra salt)

Mix your dry ingredients into the wet and fill your steaming vessel.

If you want to go our family style, fill canning jars to half full, put the canning lids on and pressure cook for 90 minutes at 10 pounds pressure.  The recipe makes 4 pints of pudding.

Or you can go traditional pudding style, butter either one large or several small pudding basins, fill with the mixture and cover with a layer of buttered parchment and foil in which you have folded a small pleat to allow for expansion, tie the paper on top and make a string handle and put into a roomy pot with a trivet inside it and steam for 3 hours.  If you use several small pudding basins still steam for the full 3 hours.  Check your water layer every 20 minutes or so and top up with boiling water from the kettle as needed.  After you've finished steaming leave to cool in the pot completely, change your parchment and foil lid after cooking for a fresh one exactly the same.

I went for a hybrid method, I don't own a pressure cooker but I did want my pudding in a canning jar.  I filled the jar and used a canning lid but steamed it for 3 hours.  I also had to form a very high hat out of foil for my pot as it wasn't anywhere near tall enough to hold my canning jar, and I didn't have a trivet to put my jar on so I used a pair of chopsticks.  Because I didn't use a pressure cooker I didn't expect the canning lid to seal but it did!

So my pudding is now sitting in a cool closet away from light and heat to mature.  Nothing to do now but wait, oh the waiting, it's like sweet torture.  One thing I'm sure of, I have the cook book with the recipe for the foamy white sauce in my possession, no foiling by the saboteurs on that one!

I started with around a quarter of the jar full of pudding and during the steaming it grew to half full, I probably could have got away with putting it in a pint jar but I wanted the big jar even if it wasn't going to be full to the top.

Meringues - Grandma Ross

My Grandma Ross used to make the most amazing meringues, they were pure white and crisp and dry and just melted in your mouth.  A lot of times when I'm baking, I end up with an extra egg white and I can't help but whisk it up to make a batch of meringues.  I try to convince myself that they're a virtuous little sweet treat, there's no fat in them after all.
You can multiply the recipe up if you have more than 1 egg white but I wouldn't want to tangle with making a batch bigger than 4 egg whites, my oven couldn't cope.

Meringues

Pre-heat the oven to 120^F (50^C)

Whisk until soft peaks form
1 egg white
1/4 tsp cream of tartar

Slowly add in and whisk until stiff peaks form
1/4 cup caster sugar

Blob the meringues onto a cookie sheet that is lined with baking paper (I don't like to recommend using paper all the time, but if the meringues stick to paper you can peel the paper back, if they stick to the tray you're stuck) if you want to get fancy you can use a piping bag to make decorative blobs.

Baking time depends on how big you make them, little meringues can take less than 2 hours (watch a movie and they're done), really big meringues might need to go overnight.  They're done when you pinch them and they crack.

Little meringue kisses.

a few desserts

Being busy socializing this holiday season means that most of my baking has deviated from the blog agenda, but I don't like the idea of not posting just because I'm not doing family recipes.  And I'm a bit proud of my efforts so I might as well show off.

First up, my croquembouch! Making the profiteroles was super easy, as was making the orange blossom flavoured pastry creme to fill them. The spun sugar/caramel was a bit more difficult, I had to have a few tries to make it without burning it. My downfall, I think, was in over-filling the profiteroles because they were very heavy and as I built the tower up higher, it started falling in on itself, I don't have a croquembouch cone so I was free-forming the tower which might have been my other downfall. Never the less, I was well pleased with myself. Delia Smith's choux pastry recipe (x4) and a basic pastry creme recipe (x4) with orange zest and orange blossom water added instead of vanilla (I read about 5 pastry creme recipes and can't remember which one I used).  I decorated it with spun sugar and hand piped chocolate stars.

Second is my baked chocolate and orange mousse.  James Martin rarely sends me wrong, I added a shortbread base as I was afraid of it sticking to the bottom or not being able to serve it neatly and decorated with candied orange slices.  Much as I love James' love for desserts, I think he doesn't realize that most people don't need as big a serving has he indicates, the full recipe stated serves 4, I also only made a half recipe of mousse and it easily made 6 generous slices.

Lastly is my Christmas dinner dessert, Chocolate and Chestnut souffle Mont Bry, based on a Larousse Gastronomique recipe (I added a bit of cocoa powder to make it chocolaty).  I don't have a souffle dish, nor do I have 6 ramekins, so I used 4 mugs, there wasn't enough mixture to fill them right to the top as per instructions (I guess my mugs were a too big) so they didn't rise much over the top of the mug and the slanted sides of the mug probably added to the result of the souffles capsizing a bit, but not bad for a first attempt.

Sorry, I haven't written out the recipes, but I have referenced what I can remember so you can so you can go track them down if you're interested.