My Father’s favourite dessert was ice cream and while Mum often made that for him she made lots of other desserts as well. For some reason he had a great dislike of baked custards, but he did like rice puddings so Mum often made one for him. You can serve it with stewed fruit as well as the jam mentioned in the recipe, but it’s quite nice just on its own.
Back when I was little these were a family favourite, especially in the winter. Now I’m older I can see why – they are sweet, filling, cheap and also quick and easy to make. They can be a bit stodgy, but a light touch will give you a light, fluffy and richly flavoured dessert, which is especially good with some runny cream on top. Great on cold winter nights.
As you can see this recipe comes from one of Mum’s original handwritten notebooks. It’s hard to read so I’ve rewritten in out down below. These days there’s lots and lots of different Banana Cake recipes, but this old one was way before you could buy sour cream, so you had to make your own sour milk by adding lemon juice to warm milk. Easy to do and it makes a lovely moist cake.
While on the dessert theme, I thought I’d add this one. It’s another of Mum’s great standbys. I can’t count the number of times she made it or I’ve eaten it. I can still see it in the bowl she always served it in. A family classic.
Sorting through Mum’s recipes all last year made me take a look at my own Recipe Folders and I decided that it really was time to update them. So over the Christmas break I sorted them and put them into new, clean folders. It took three days of hard work, but the reward was discovering lots of old favorites and especially old recipes passed down from Mum.
These Summer Onions are one of them. Mum loves onions and these are a version of pickled onions, the big difference is the onions you use. Salad onions are the best as they are large and have a softer texture. Also you don’t have to leave them weeks to mature, they can be used the next day. They are great on sandwiches and with cold meat and salads.
As the question marks indicate, you can adjust the sugar and salt to taste and over the years I’ve also added extra spices, just whatever I have in the cupboard. You really can’t go wrong.
The first Christmas after I got married, my husband had to work on Christmas Day so I met him at lunchtime and we had a picnic lunch in the Botanical Gardens, which was a lovely way to celebrate our first Christmas together. That first Christmas also meant my first Christmas cake baking effort. It was a disaster, a soggy undercooked cake – ruined. When I told Mum she smiled and told me to mashing it all up in a bowl add a cup of cold tea and recook it as a pudding and to this day I’m still amazed that it worked. My cooking improved somewhat after that and this Dutch Fruit Cake became the recipe I used for many years. Adding the mixed peel and nuts and brushing the cake with brandy while still hot makes the cake a little more Christmasy.
DUTCH FRUIT CAKE
Line a cake tin with a layer of brown paper and a layer of baking paper. Boil together butter, sugar, water, fruit, spices, lemon juice for 3 minutes. Set aside to cool. When cool stir in beaten eggs, flours, treacle and lastly bi-carb soda dissolved in boiling water. Bake in a moderate oven 180o for 2 hours. Mixed peel and nuts can be added if like. For a Christmas touch – when still hot from the oven pierce the cake with a skewer and brush with brandy.
This may not be a traditional Christmas pudding, but when I found it in Mum’s recipe book I couldn’t resist adding it in. It’s an old fashioned sago pudding, nice as is, but I think adding some extra fruit would put it in the Christmas pudding category.
This is a much older recipe and is probably the one that Mum would have used when she made the pudding in the cloth. It doesn’t have brandy or sherry in it, but if you wanted a richer pudding it wouldn’t hurt to add it. It has less fruit in it than Recipe No 1, so would make a smaller pudding.
Posting last week’s recipe for the Hot Chicken & Asparagus Roll started me thinking about Mum’s recipes for homemade pastry. The first one that came to mind was one that I’ve used many times. At some stage I must have gotten the recipe from Mum and typed it up, it appears in my recipe folder as ‘Biscuit Pastry’ I’m not quite sure why as I’ve always used it as a sweet pie or tart base. It is really good with lemon meringue pie and lemon tart .
Looking through Mum’s handwritten recipes I found these three oldies as well.
PASTRY FOR PASTIES
The family loved homemade pasties. Mum would have made the pastry, rolled it out, cut it into circle shapes, (probably using a bread and butter plate or a saucer as a template) filled them with finely chopped steak, onions and potato and then folded them over and sealed them.
Pastry recipe:
QUICK PASTRY
I’m not completely sure what Mum used this for, but I like the simplicity of just using flour and cream to make the dough.
ROUGH PASTE
I always thought Rough Pastry was a form of puff pastry, but this recipe seems to be something else again, maybe the rough just means that it’s easy to make? It should have a lovely butter flavour though and now I’ve found it I’ll have to give it a try myself to how it works.
I’m sure Mum would have gotten this recipe from Mrs Wood to bake cakes to send over to Dad in England during WW2. Mrs Wood was Mum’s sister’s mother-in-law. She was a wonderful cook and I can remember visiting her house in East Malvern where there would always be plates of biscuits and freshly baked cake for afternoon tea. The Soldier’s Cake Tins referred to were used to bake a cake in to be sent overseas to the troops. The tins came with a lid so the cakes were baked then sealed to be sent off. Cake shops also sold fruit cakes that fitted into the special “Willow” cake tins. Fruit cakes with brandy were usually the cakes made this way as the brandy stopped the cake going mouldy during the time it took to reach the soldiers, wherever they were serving.
MRS WOOD’S XMAS CAKES
Combine the fruit and brandy, leave overnight to marinate. Beat the butter and sugar together, add eggs one at a time. Add sifted flours and spices. Add fruit and nuts. Combine boiling water and carb soda and mix in well. Bake in prepared tins – 3 hours, turn after 1½ hours. Soldier tins measured 7½ inches = approx 20cm. So the mixture makes 2 x 20cm cakes – the ingredients can be halved for 1 cake.
Beb's Recipe Drawer 