Tag: chocolate

Mrs. Lanier’s Buttermilk Sheet Cake

On a yellowed scrap of paper torn from a sheet of the thin and inexpensive stationery you could buy in pads at the five and dime when I was a boy is a recipe written down for Jerri by Mrs. Lanier of Atlanta, Kansas. It’s probably the same paper that she used to write letters to her daughter Joyce. Joyce was married to Merle, one of Jerri’s twin brothers.

Atlanta is a small town, but it still has two churches, a United Methodist Church and a Christian Church. The Laniers belonged to the Christian Church, and you can be sure that Mrs. Lanier made her Buttermilk Sheet Cake for a lot of potlucks. For one thing, it’s delicious; for another, you can make it in a ranch house in the Flint Hills of Kansas with no electricity without tiring your arms beating the batter.

INGREDIENTS:

1/2 cup oleomargarine
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1 cup water
2 cups granulated sugar
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 T cocoa powder
1/2 tsp. salt
2 large eggs
1/2 cup buttermilk
1 tsp. baking soda

PROCEDURE:

Preheat the oven to 400º.

Bring the oleomargarine, oil and water to a boil in a small saucepan. Sift the sugar, flour, cocoa and salt together into a mixing bowl. Pour the boiling liquid into the dry ingredients and beat well with a wooden spoon.

Beat the eggs with a fork or whisk until lemon colored. Then beat in the buttermilk and baking soda. Blend the egg and milk mixture into the cake batter and stir just until it is well mixed. You will have a thin batter that looks like milk chocolate.

Grease a 9 by 11-inch cake pan. Pour in the batter and bake it for 23 minutes on the center shelf of the oven. Test for doneness with a toothpick inserted into the middle of the cake. If it comes out clean, the cake is done. If not, bake for two or three more minutes and test again.

Cool and frost with your favorite chocolate icing. You might want to try this very simple recipe for Good and Easy Chocolate Frosting.

INGREDIENTS:

1 cup granulated sugar
4 T butter
4 T milk
1/3 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips

PROCEDURE:

Stirring continuously, bring the butter, milk and sugar to a rolling boil in a small saucepan over moderate heat. Boil for 30 seconds. Remove the pan from the heat and quickly stir in the chocolate chips. Stir until the chips are melted. Cool and use.

NOTES: If necessary, return the pan to the heat to help melt the chips, but do not bring the frosting back to a boil. Add a dash of salt if you make this frosting with unsalted butter.

I normally avoid using oleomargarine for anything, but Mrs. Lanier was from Kansas, where even today restaurants serve oleo and call it butter. Jerri told me that the cake recipe did not work with butter, and I have learned to trust her. It definitely works with oleo. Try it.

Hot Fudge Sauce

My mother loved to try new things she saw at the Co-op grocery or A & P, so it is very likely that I had my first taste of commercial hot fudge in 1948. That’s when Smucker’s introduced chocolate fudge as one of their spoonable ice cream toppings. She probably made hot fudge sauce before then, because I have loved the stuff for as long as I can remember..

After the Dairy Queen opened in Hayward, I became a regular customer for hot fudge sundaes and hot fudge malts. By the time I was in high school my friends and I would gather at the soda fountain on main street where I even tried hot fudge cokes.

If you think that sounds odd, you did not grow up in the golden age of the soda fountain where you could customize your phosphates and sodas. There were the standards of course–lemon or lime phosphates, lemon/lime phosphates, cherry phosphates and plain Coca Colas. But there were dozens of variations including chocolate cherry cokes, lime cokes and vanilla cokes.

And of course, there was the “Suicide” or “Slop” made with a squirt of just about every flavoring stirred together in a large malt glass. I think that they cost about fifteen cents and were not very good. All the sugar in them, however, made them ideal for dipping the end of your paper-covered straw in the glass and then blowing the paper up to the tin ceiling, If you were lucky, the paper would stick there to make more cleanup work for whatever friend was working at the fountain that day.

Having matured a little, and real soda fountains with tin ceilings almost impossible to find, I no longer try to stick soda straw paper on ceilings. However, I still enjoy eating hot fudge sundaes, especially ones with home made hot fudge sauce.

Many years ago I used a recipe from one of our cookbooks to make what turned out to be the best hot fudge sauce we had ever tasted. I promptly forgot which cookbook held the recipe, and my sporadic attempts to find it proved futile. Then one day I stumbled on it, complete with a “Very good!” note in Jerri’s handwriting.

The recipe is based on one by Jane Buhr from Our Church Picnic compiled by members of the Church of the Immaculate Conception in New Richmond, Wisconsin. Here is how to make it.

INGREDIENTS:

4 squares semisweet chocolate
3 heaping tsp. cocoa
1/2 cup butter
2 1/2 cups sugar
A pinch of salt
12 oz. can of evaporated milk
1 tsp. vanilla

PROCEDURE:

Melt the chocolate, butter and cocoa in a double boiler, stirring frequently to make a velvety liquid. Gradually add the sugar, salt and milk, stirring continuously until the sauce thickens. Stir in the vanilla. Serve warm over ice cream or other desserts.

NOTE. You can store this sauce for several weeks in the refrigerator and warm it when needed.