Danish Cheese Loaf

This charming item was a gift from someone who knows my favourite kind of  vintage cookbook are those which contain both horrors for me to laugh at and things that might be OK to actually try and cook.

I’m not an expert in Danish dairy, but luckily that canyon has been bridged, by this handy-dandy guide to the cheeses of Denmark. What more could a girl want?

And I wasn’t joking about the range of recipes, either:

This is normal

This is not.

So what to choose?  When I realised ingredient list was basically a salad held together with dough (Walnuts! Blue cheese! Celery!), I knew I had to try it.

 

 

As I didn’t have any self-raising flour at home, I used plain and added some extra baking powder, but then fretted that I hadn’t added quite enough, also the dough felt rather heavy. I decided not to risk creating a flour-fat-seed brick and formed it into a round, flat loaf on a baking tray.

I also forgot about the celery – probably for the best.

Results
I enjoyed the amount of bits in this loaf greatly and would consider the proportions suitable for experimenting with any type of nut and crumble-able cheese. The black sesame seeds were overkill however, rendering the whole thing a bit fibrous and worthy.

If, like me, you have a mild fear of yeast, this is a fine recipe to keep in your arsenal.

Loafed by Elly

Apple Pudding-Pie

Of course I made this. I have a ready supply of apples and LOOK AT THE NAME:

Apple or peach pudding-pie or pie-pudding, no. 2, Yankee style

Amazing.

Recipe
Sweet milk, 1 cup
1 egg
Butter, 1 tablespoon, heaping
Baking powder,  1 teaspoon
Flour 1 cup or sufficient to make a rather thick batter (‘batter’ means like cake, better to handle with a spoon or easy to pour  out)
A little salt
Tart juicy apples to fill half an earthen pudding dish

Bacon Cornettes

Look at this wonderful thing! A friend liberated it from his grandmother’s bookshelves for me and I appreciate it so very much. If I had unlimited shelf space and an extra few hours in the week, I’d probably collect and blog about etiquette and entertaining manuals as well, but there’s only so much time a person should devote to horrified chuckling at kaleidoscopic interiors, conformist gender roles and devilled ham.

 

Herman the German Friendship Cake

Initially I had no plans to blog this as it’s not from a book, but after live-tweeting its assembly I thought I might as well. I remember my mother being given some of this starter about 25 years ago and I (who didn’t have to stir it daily or move it when doing other things in the kitchen), loved the resulting cake. The internet seems a little conflicted as to the origins – certainly Amish Friendship Bread is very similar.

Anyway, I was very pleased when a friend gave me some Herman starter in a yoghurt pot, in a Liberty’s bag, along with the strict advice that it was Day 3, and a piece of paper stating:

Praline Squares

I love a brownie, as recently discussed, so was excited to try this recipe.Hilariously, the Betty Crocker cookbook contains a mixture of  proper recipes made from ingredients and entries like ‘Angel Cake: One box of Betty Crocker Angel Cake Mix. Assemble according to instructions for a quick and easy dessert’. This is from the Southern menu (as is the illustration of the devil, above).

Chocolate Butterscotch Brownies

On a recent trip to Scotland, I visited Leakeys (Greyfriars Hall, Church Street, Inverness, IV1 1EY), the bookshop of your dreams – a hundred thousand volumes on tall wooden shelves in a converted 18th century church whose mezzanine also houses a café where incredibly friendly and efficient staff serve exactly the kind of food you want to eat in an area where it sloshes down with rain in August. My travelling companion, a fiction buyer-bookseller extraordinaire and glutton, was most impressed, stating that while popular, the bookshop-café combination is rarely well-executed.

American Classic Pancakes

I’ve only ever cooked English pancakes before, and had been planning to do that with these, but due to an incident on Twitter where I publicly denounced crêpes then subsequently saw that in this book English pancakes are listed in the Crêpe section I felt that it would be inappropriate to then make English pancakes as I would essentially be making crêpes, which seemed a little hypocritical. I realise that this line of reasoning is wobbly at best and tending towards the bizarre, but that’s how I, er, roll, Oh dear. Onwards to the pancakes. The recipe is from Pancakes, Crêpes and Waffles by Martha Lomask (1983).

Linzertorte

Guest Eurovision blog from Zakia follows:

I took on the Austrian cake Linzertorte which I was reliably informed by Alix would be “simple to make but look impressive”. That’s an aspiration to live by, which made me keen to try it out. It’s apparently the oldest cake recipe in the world, dating from 1693, and became internationally known from the 19^th century. This is one of the Marguerite Patten 1970s recipe cards.