VINTAGE: 1970's Apple-Carrot-Raisin Cake

If you have a sweet tooth then this apple-carrot-raisin cake with a load of cinnamon thrown in for good measure is one for you. It's another of my dug out and re-found vintage recipes - one found among a group of Detroit Free Press newspaper recipe clippings. While this is one undated, the rest all dated from the 1970's so I'm throwing caution to the wind and dating this to the same age.

As in it's description it's very much a pudding cake, it's moist and sweet and with the nutmeg and cinnamon has a festive feel for this time of year. While it only calls for 1/4 of a cup of butter (or marg) the apples and the carrots keep it amazingly moist even though it looks like sawdust before you place it into the oven.

It's one of those awesome bakes that doesn't take too long to put together (bar all the cutting up) and you can happily got watch your favorite show while it bakes away. I love how crispy the sugary lemon juice glaze makes it and finishes it off perfectly.

So if you're all fed up of Christmas cake, and pudding and have some left over carrots, give this a go and let me know how it turns out!

FOOD: Hot Cross Buns

Easter in the US is far more much about the religious meaning of the holiday over anything I've ever experienced in the UK. Food wise, Easter treats are more of the mini egg variety and marshmallow Peeps in comparison to chocolate eggs. Religious holidays aren't public holidays in the US so Good Friday and Easter Monday are same old working days. Last year Easter passed me by  - granted we can get our hands on cream eggs but they are smaller and, well I've now being craving hot cross buns for two years so something had to be done. And because I can't find them in stores it was time to get baking! 

To carry on the vintage recipe challenge I hunted and hunted in my vintage recipe books for something suitable, thing is there are so, so many variations on this recipe that it's hard to choose - even my mam was mailing me photocopies out of her vintage cookbooks and even a Mary Berry recipe. My choice was basically down to what I had in the cupboards and not having to go out of my way to buy anything special, my choice also took into consideration time - as with all yeast recipes it's all about the waiting - luckily this one is a "quick" recipe in comparison to many I found.

So this recipe comes from the 1949 New Recipes for Good Eating - a rather worn out and well used publication by Crisco and Procter and Gamble. The recipe for the icing comes from another booklet - a much older cookbook from 1917 and published by Fleischmann (a yeast brand) Excellent Recipes for Baking Raised Breads. Both cookbooks are far too damaged to sell, so I've rehomed them.

Hot Cross Buns - this recipe makes 18 to 20, 2½" buns and takes about 4 hours.

● 1 cake yeast (which is 2 ¼ tsps of dry yeast)

● 1/3 cup of white sugar

● 2/3 cup of warm milk

● 3½ cups of sifted flour

● ½ of melted butter (the recipe calls for Crisco but that's just lard)

● 3 eggs

● ¾ teaspoon of salt

● 1 teaspoon of cinnamon 

● 2/3 cup of raisins

In a bowl dissolve the yeast and sugar with the warm milk. Add one cup of the flour and beat until smooth. Then add in the butter, eggs, the remaining flour, salt and cinnamon. When mixed, stir in the raisins. Leave in a warm place for up to two hours - you could leave it for just an hour, but the longer the better. With all breads I make I always place over the bowl a tea towel which I dampened with warm water draped over the bowl for added heat for the yeast to get moving.

Once your mixture has risen to about double it's size, punch down (literally punch the mixture) and roll out onto a floured surface, you want to roll it down so it's around an inch in thickness, then cut until your bun shape.

Place on a prepared lined tin around 2" apart and again leave them for around an hour and a half until they double in size. Once they have risen, snip a small cross in the top and place into a preheated oven at 350F for 15 to 20 minutes. Out of the oven you're ready to add the frosting which can be added when they are still warm.

Plain Frosting

● 1 cup of powdered sugar
●  2 tablespoons of milk or water
● ¼ teaspoon of vanilla 

To keep up with tradition the frosting is normally added in a cross design.

It was certainly worth having a bake of these hot cross buns and they satisfied my cravings for Easter sugar. These buns have a bit more of a cinnamon pastry flavor (obviously due to the amount of cinnamon inside), they are great to be eaten alone or with butter and or jam if you're feeling the need for a treat and I'm more then a bit proud that they actually turned out pretty well. As for Easter itself we popped to a couple of estate sales, had a meal at our favourite seafood restaurant for our date night and curled up on the sofa reading what will sadly be the last book Ash by James Herbert who sadly passed the other week - his books got me reading horror.

What are your favorite treats for Easter? Have you ever tried to bake hot cross buns?

Vintage Recipe #1 Peanutty Cocoa Bread

One of the great things about fostering vintage recipe and cooking books until I find them new loving homes, is I get to pour over their delicious ideas, copy them out and use them myself. It's like giving the books a mini test run. If I had the money and the ability of never ever putting on weight I'd bake daily and since moving it's something I've come to enjoy more as I learn more about baking to the point of even wanting to try and bake hot cross buns for Easter - but that's for another week. So my mission is to share some of these gorgeously delicious vintage recipes with you. It might not necessarily be a weekly post, just as and when I get around to baking. 

The vintage recipe numero 1 is (not overly vintage recipe) one which comes from the 1982 Hershey's Chocolate and Cocoa Cookbook which makes use of tasty tasty Reesey peanut butter chips. Please excuse the lack of photographs gracing this post - the idea of the vintage recipe posts occurred minutes after taking said loaf out of the oven - the recipe book actually found a new home this weekend so i'm glad I tried and tested this recipe before hand.

But here goes the recipe for the first;

Peanutty Cocoa Bread - makes one loaf

● 1/3 cup of softened butter (or margarine)
● 1 cup of granulated sugar
● 3 eggs
● 2¼ cup of unsifted all-purpose flour
● 1/3 of cocoa powder
● 2 teaspoons of baking powder
● 1 teaspoon of cinamon
● ½ teaspoon of baking soda
● ¾ of a cup of milk
● 1 cup of (Reese's peanut butter chips)

Start with creaming your butter (or marg) with the sugar and eggs in a large bowl. In another bowl, combine the flour, cocoa, baking powder and soda and cinamon. Once mixed alternate adding the dry indegreidents with the milk into the creamed mixture.

Once well blended, stir in the peanut chips and pour the batter into a lined loaf tin. Bake in a preheated oven at 350°F for 60-65 minutes.

Until I moved to the US I was never aquainted with Reese cups, but oh my are they one of my favourite things about US food and sticking their mini cups in a loaf is just right on so many levels. If you're like me, serve it with butter (nom) - my grandmother got me into that habit.

If you'd love to see any particularly recipe but from a vintage cookbook let me know and I'll see if I have one!