Mmm Mmm Monkey Cake

It's Christmas Eve day, so what am I doing?  Making monkey cake of course!  It's our traditional Christmas morning breakfast.  It meets all my requirements for a special family breakfast:  it's yummy, it's sweet, everybody likes it, and it's easy.  I've been reading a book about healthy eating and I think we should do that.  But not today.  I got this recipe from my dear mother-in-law, and here's how you do it:

In a saucepan, combine 1/2 cup sugar, 1/2 cup brown sugar and 3/4 cup of butter.  This makes the lovely, ooey, gooey syrup that goes over the whole thing.  Just put in on low and stir it now and then while you're working on the monkey part of the cake.  (I don't know what it has to do with monkeys and it doesn't look or taste like a cake to me, but that's what it is what it is.)

Oh, you might want to turn your oven on to 350 now.  My oven takes a long time to heat up, so I give it plenty of time.  You can be creative with this next part.  I used to put the cinnamon sugar mixture in a plastic bag or plastic container with a lid.  Now I just mix 2/3 cup of sugar with a teaspoon of cinnamon in a regular old bowl.  You'll need this in a minute.  Just let it sit there.  And stir that pan on the stove!

Then open one of your four cans of Pillsbury Buttermilk Biscuits.  Yes, you can use the generic ones if you want.  I trust Pillsbury, so that's what I'm going with for Christmas.  Don't you love the "pop" when they open?  It used to scare me, but now I can remain quite calm.

Then cut up the biscuits into quarters.  When the kids were little I would have them help with various parts of this operation and it seemed to take a long time.  It's actually a pretty quick process!

Then drop a bunch of the cut up biscuits in your bowl of cinnamon sugar and toss them around a little.  I like to use a slotted spoon sort of thing and just scoop them out when they're coated.  

Deposit those delightful morsels into a pan of some sort.  Bundt pans were a necessity in every kitchen in the 70s and 80s, but I always had stickage problems with mine, so I got rid of it.  A bundt monkey cake looks lovely, but now I use two regular loaf pans instead.

Stir your syrup on the stove!  Then keep cutting and coating 'til all four tubes of biscuits are done.  Now you're ready for the syrup.  It should be all melted and simmered together by now.  The butter tends to float on top of the melted sugar and that's okay.  Just pour it over your biscuits.

My word, that looks good, doesn't it?

Pop 'em in the oven and set your timer for 25 minutes.  Now do your dishes.  Don't let them pile up. You may hate doing it now, but you'll hate it more later.  

Since the dishwashing didn't take very long, you might as well balance your checkbook... and get something ready to dump your monkey cake on when you take it out of the oven.  You must dump it out upside down IMMEDIATELY before the syrup starts to stiffen up.  If I'm serving it right away, I plop it out onto a plate, but since this will be waiting for tomorrow, and I'll want to warm it up in the oven then, I'm going to put mine on a sheet of foil ontop of a cooling rack.  Is ontop really not a word?  It should be.  Upon is one word, so why not ontop?

It might take longer than 25 minutes to get done.  It should be plenty brown on top.  When you think it's done, just turn out your monkey cake and make sure you scrape out any delicious syrup which may still be clinging to the pan-- the more that ends up on your cake, the better!

I should warn you that if you try to eat some too soon, you may very well burn your fingers and your tongue.  I know what I'm talking about.

The whole recipe appears below at the bottom of this blog.

Merry Christmas everyone.  Of course it's not about the sweets or the gifts or even family-- it's about our wonderful, wonderful Savior, Jesus.  Don't forget to sing happy birthday to Him tomorrow!

MONKEY CAKE

4 cans buttermilk biscuits

2/3 c. sugar

1 tsp. cinnamon

Syrup:

½ c. sugar

½ c. brown sugar

¾ c. butter

Combine 2/3 c. sugar and 1 tsp. cinnamon in bowl or plastic bag.  Either cut each biscuit into quarters OR leave whole and shake or roll biscuits in sugar mixture.  If left whole, line up in loaf pans in 2 rows of 10 biscuits each per pan.  If cut up, put half in each loaf pan or all in one bundt pan.

In saucepan, combine ½ c. sugar, ½ c. brown sugar and butter.  Bring to a boil, stirring occasionally.  Pour over biscuits.  Bake at 350 degrees for about 30 minutes.  Turn out onto a plate immediately.  Serve warm.

This started out to be about family, but ended up being about dessert.

I love my family.  This will probably not be a deep, spiritual post other than to say that I am thankful to God for my wonderful husband, my kids, my parents & in-laws and my relationship with all of them.  Hey, every family has their dysfunction and ours is no exception, but that just means we're human.

This picture is from the "February birthdays" get-together my mom always has.  My husband, Dad & father-in-law all have February birthdays.  This usually involves pie and this year there was even cake!

 Daffodil cake and strawberry pie in February=a welcome touch of spring.

 Thanks Mom!

This is Katie and her fiancee.  Aren't they cute?  We are deep into wedding plans already for the summer of 2013.  I'm sure you'll be reading more about that in the future.

 This is from a separate party for my father-in-law.  The funny thing is that we couldn't find any matches to light the candles, so all his efforts were only for the photo op!

This is my mother-in-law trying out Katie's new iPhone.  I just got a kick out of this, so I threw it in.

Now, Wayne's birthday isn't for a couple of days yet, but I cheated and gave him his present early.  He's the last one of us who was Kindle-less, so we had to remedy that situation.  Aren't our girls precious with their Dad?

 We went to Baltimore on President's Day weekend in order to attend a bridal show and do some sightseeing.  We found that most museums in Baltimore are closed on Mondays, so that was unfortunate.  But we found plenty to do anyway.

We always wanted to take the kids to the Maryland Science Center, so now was the chance as it was one of the few places open (I know, I know, we could have gone to the aquarium, but we've been there, done that).  I think we were about 10 years too late for the age of our kids, but we had fun with the hands-on stuff anyway, as well as seeing an IMAX movie of Shackleton's antarctic adventures and a planetarium show about black holes.  Yes, we are geeks and we don't mind people knowing that.

Then, we took a lovely walk around the harbor to get to Little Italy.  A friend had told us about a marvelous Italian bakery there.  Thanks Tesha! 

 As you can see, Katie is practically giddy with excitement.  We do love our desserts.

And there it is.

It is an extremely popular place, but we got a table and settled in to have dinner.

Ahem.  I am ashamed to say, this is just my plate.  Hey, they are MINI cannolis and cream puffs, thank you very much.

 Wayne opted for gelato.  (I did share some of mine, and brought a bunch home.  I'm not a total glutton).

 Katie's giddiness did not subside for some time.

And yes, I think Bekah's eclair was bigger than her face, haha!

The end.

P.S.  After the last couple of weeks, Wayne & I decided we need to improve our eating habits.  No, seriously?  You think so?

Hotta Chocolatta

The weather is getting cool.  The leaves have changed a lot just within the last couple days.  Of course, that means it's time to put aside your iced tea and fix yourself some COCOA!  When I was growing up, we didn't drink hot chocolate at my house, we drank cocoa.  We generally made it with milk heated in a pan on the stove (before the days of our first microwave oven which came to our kitchen in the late 70s I believe), with Nestle's Quik powder stirred in.  We put marshmallows in sometimes, I'm sure.  The milk would have been whole or 2%, depending what decade we were in at the time.  Yes, I remember the milkman delivering milk in glass bottles with a layer of cream on top when I was a wee girl.  The 2% plastic 2-gallon jugs with spouts from High's and the plastic bags of milk from Martin's came later.

I just had a cup of cocoa with marshmallows.  Thanks to Pandora introducing me to new old music all the time, what went through my head was "Hotta hotta chocolatta, flip a dippa da da dada da da."  Unfortunately, I don't have a good memory for lyrics.  Fortunately, the internet has an excellent memory for lyrics.  This fun and not so famous ditty was recorded by the DeJohn Sisters (who?) in 1956 and by Ella Fitzgerald sometime.  Don't the DeJohn Sisters look like they had fun together?

Looking at the picture, I had to wonder what their first names were.  They were Julie and Dux De John (born DiGiovanni).  Dux?  C'mon, what was it really?  No one names their baby girl Dux.

The song was written by Milton Drake and Vic Mizzy. I think it's fun that it took two guys to write these lyrics.  Can you just picture the conversation that brought this about?  Read the lyrics and tell me what you think:

Hotta hotta chocolatta

Flip a dip a whippa cream in the middle of a

Hotta hotta chocolatta; pick ‘er up and drink ‘er down

Square cake, round cake,  piece of pound cake;

Grab a chunk and dunk a hunk in the middle of a

hotta, hotta chocolatta; pick ‘er up and drink ‘er down

When you’re going loco; you’re out of your cocoa

Go down to the old jukery spot, and you gotta drink a lotta

hotta hotta chocolatta

Flip a dip a whippa cream in the middle of a

Hotta hotta chocolatta; pick ‘er up and drink ‘er down

Either they really liked their cocoa, or they had added a little something extra to their hotta chocolatta that I don't put in mine. They must have been sitting at a diner with a red checkered tablecloth when they got their inspiration.  I'm thinking those lyrics got written down on a napkin.

I like cocoa because it's chocolate, it's warm, it's chocolate, it's creamy, it's chocolate, it's pretty and it's chocolate.  

So, right now, go fix yourself a hotta chocolatta-- whether it's Swiss Miss, skim milk with Hershey's syrup & marshmallows (my usual version these days) or something fancy with a dip a whippa cream.  I like the idea of adding a piece of cake to the experience, although I'm not personally a dunker.  While you're sipping, click on this link and listen to the perkiest (and maybe only) hot chocolate song of all time!

Hotta Chocolatta on youtube

This is a lovely hot chocolate & bagel I had at the Wellsboro Diner.  Mmmm.

Homemade Awesome Sauce

Today was APPLESAUCE DAY.  The great thing was that Bekah had off school because of flooding (which affected us in no way at all, so it was basically a free day for her and a bonus for me).

Our creek is high, but it's not even over the road, which is not flooding in our neck of the woods.  Very fortunate for us!

On APPLESAUCE DAY, I load up my best big kettle and my jars or freezer boxes and head off to Mom's house.  She has already bought the apples and lovingly washed the pesticides off of them and dragged out all her big kettles, pans, cutting boards, knives--- and Victorio.  But I am getting ahead of myself.  Here's the apples.  The variety is Summer Rambo (which Mom insists makes the bestest of all applesauces, and she's Mom, so she must be right.)  They don't remind me at all of Rambo though-- they don't look sweaty and mean and like they have a vendetta in mind.

Now this blog today is also a tutorial (just for you, Emily!  And anyone else who wants to know how we do it).

So, after the apples are washed, cut them off the core.  Don't peel them, don't slice them.  Just whack big pieces of apple off of the core.  Watch these experts at work:

Put 1/4 to 1/2 inch of water in the bottom of a large kettle.  We like stainless steel.  And if you have a rack to put in the bottom, that's nice.  It helps keep the apples from sticking and scorching.  Then, as you cut up the apples, toss them into the kettle until it is full to the top.

Well, I forgot to take a picture of "full to the top"-- but I think you can handle that.

Then put the kettle on the stove, put a lid on and turn the burner to high.  Once they start cooking, STIR THEM FREQUENTLY.  I emphasize this because you don't want to scorch your apples, believe you me.

As they cook they'll start to get mushy.  When they get completely mushy, you're ready for the next step.  You have to remove the peels from the cooked apples and make them into... sauce!  You can use a foley food mill for this.  We used to.  But it's slower and messier and once you've met Victorio, you will cast Mr. Foley aside without even a qualm.

Here's my Dad assembling our magnificent Victorio for us.  I don't know exactly what this apparatus is actually called, but it says Victorio on it, so we just roll with that.  You should probably get one.

You pour the molten hot apples into the hopper in the top, trying not to let any cascade onto the floor or onto your own tender skin.  (Good luck with that).  Then you simply wind the crank and voila!  Applesauce comes out one chute and peels come out the other and you're coming down the home stretch.  We just love Victorio.  He is so efficient!

That is STEAM coming off of that stuff!  Be careful!  Then you have to IMMEDIATELY stir in however much sugar you want.  Mom likes hers sweet.  I like mine slightly less sweet.  Today we used 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 cups of sugar for each kettle-full of apples.  Ya just hafta taste it numerous times until it gets how you like.  You must do this expeditiously because the sugar prevents your applesauce from turning brown.  I nice light color is what we strive for in our family.  We're picky about such things.

Now, if you are going to put this in the freezer, pour the sauce into a container that you can sit in a sink full of cold water to cool it off.  If you're going to can it, don't worry about it, hot is good.

Once it has cooled off a bit, you can dip it into freezer boxes...

Let the boxes cool some more, refrigerate them to get them cold, then eventually put them in the freezer.  Done!  (I know, put the lids on first).

If you're canning (which I decided to do with mine this year.  Mom froze hers), pour it into clean jars, heat the lids, wipe the jar tops, put the lids on, screw the band on, and put in a hot water bath and process for 10 minutes.  I'm going to need my own hot water bath after this is all over.  (You'll have to look up more details on how to can food if you've never done it before).  Then take the jars out with your special jar lifter, let them cool, hope the jar lids pop indicating that they are sealed and then you're done.

Well, almost done.  Then you spend an hour and a half wiping applesauce off every surface of the kitchen and washing all those pots, knives, measuring cups, more pots, spoons, spatulas... you get the idea.  We did 2 bushels of apples today: we started at 9 a.m. and were completely done cleaning up by 2 p.m.  And we even stopped for lunch.  Mom makes the best chicken corn soup ever.  It had rivels in it!!!  We had snickerdoodles too.  Mmm.

All done!  Guess what we're having for supper tonight??  :)  After all-- it is AWESOME SAUCE, I mean APPLESAUCE DAY!