It was a good party season f0r homemade baked goods: this year I discovered some great cookies. This is our cookie tray from last night’s party.

Starting at the top and moving clockwise: lemon-butter wreaths from our cookie gun; Maida Heatter’s Chocolate Cracks; black walnut bars made with black walnuts from our yard; shortbread with a caramel-pecan top layer; lemon-glazed persimmon bars; jubilee wafers.

We learned a new way to “frost” the chocolate cracks, which by themselves aren’t so Christmasy, but they’re really chewy and fudgey, so you want to invite them to the party.  We add peppermint extract and frost them with Shirley Corriher’s technique: roll the dough balls in granulated sugar first, then in powdered sugar. The granulated sugar layer prevents the moisture in the cookie from wetting the powdered sugar, so the cookies stay frosty-looking.

I only make black walnut bars every couple of years. Black walnuts, they’re a lot of work. You have to gather them in either a basket (that you never want to use again for anything else) or a paper bag. Let them sit in the basement until the hulls soften and turn dark brown (and the bottom of the bag disintegrates). Pour  them onto the driveway in the tracks of the car tires. Run over them to remove the hulls. Wear gloves to pick them up and wipe them off, or even rinse them off. Back in the basket to dry. Crack with a heavy rock. Pick meticulously. One hour of picking will give you about 1 cup of nuts. Hardly anyone sells black walnuts — they’re a pain and they don’t keep well — so if you want them, you do them yourself. Their dark, almost fermented flavor is ideal for adding to a toffee cookie bar.

Lemon-glazed persimmon bars: I’ve looked for years for something to do with the persimmons that are abundant most years in the yard. In the past, I sometimes made persimmon pudding, which is a pudding in the English sense of something baked and of a soft, spoonable texture. The bars are easier to eat, to transport and to serve. They are nicely spiced, and dates add some extra chew. The recipe is from Epicurious and I love it so much I wish I could move to a persimmon island and eat them full-time.  A photo of persimmon puree.

Jubilee wafers came from the 1973 Joy of Cooking. I wanted a refrigerator dough that I could make in advance, then shape and decorate later. I’ve made every roll cookie in the Joy, I thought, but somehow I overlooked Jubilee wafers.  Jubilee wafers call for a lot of honey, a lot of spice, and half a cup of bourbon. Jubilee, I’ll say. They were also supposed to have nuts and fruit, but I left those out. It’s a chewy, spicy cookie with a little touch of jubilee. A keeper.

Not on the tray were Jennifer’s little miniature gingerbreads, made from a great Williams Sonoma Thanksgiving cookbook recipe. Good molasses flavor, lighter texture than most gingerbreads, with a little orange flavor. And Ashley’s layered stacks of sugar cookie alternating with jam. They looked like accordions, sort of, and I admired all the work that went into them, and how good they were.

Not in a long time have I done so much cooking and had so little to show for it as last night. You know the feeling?

It was just a tuna loin and my neighbor’s Watermelon Curry Sauce. On the table in 20 minutes, right? I’ll start it around 6, we’ll eat around 6:30, right? What can possibly go wrong?

By 8, I’d cooked almost everything in the kitchen except for the entree. Instant pudding for dessert. Torta Freddo Gianduia for a more elaborate dessert because, dear friends, you understand, I was desperate for chocolate. Edamame. Cumin-lime slaw. Watermelon Curry Sauce. A hot dog. A baked potato. Carrot sticks.

But not the tuna loin. Because, you see, it was an eye of round that looked like a tuna loin masquerading as an eye of round. It started life as an eye of round from K&S Market. It had been in the freezer for two months and I had forgotten what it was. It had a seafood label. It looked like a big tuna loin. At $7, it seemed a little cheap for tuna loin, but then, K&S has 1 pound of picked lump crabmeat for $10, so why not a $7 tuna loin?

It thawed slowly in the meat drawer, becoming nicely translucent with a promising rich red texture. My neighbor shared a watermelon curry sauce she stumbled across in Belize this year.

I was about 1 hour into cooking at this point, and had made just about everything else. I had a sit-down for a while. Then I fed Sweet Cheeks (it was pretty late by this time) and my other neighbor dropped by during her evening walk. The tuna was at room temperature, so I unwrapped it and prepared to cut it into steaks.

I haven’t seen a tuna with this much blood, I thought. And then the last wrapping came off and the impostor was unmasked: a beef eye of round. Big Fella offered to go purchase an entree. As you can imagine, he was ready to eat, and despite all the cooking, there was still not one damn thing for grown-ups to eat except a few stray edamame.

Fortunately a pound of thawed squid tubes was in the meat drawer. Squid tubes in the fridge doesn’t really register on the strange-meter in my kitchen, but my neighbor almost fell off the stool. (Note to self when among earthlings: Squid = not normal).

We made lime-garlic broiled squid. It was fine but not a good pairing for the Watermelon Curry Sauce, which made me sad. But there’s always a next time, another tilapia or tuna. And fortunately there was Torta Freddo Gianduia to redeem what was left of the day.

Watemelon Curry Sauce
My neighbor never makes it the same way twice and never uses a recipe, so I’m giving the amounts that worked for me.
3 to 5 cups chopped watermelon
1 teaspoon yellow curry powder
2 tablespoons butter
Puree the watermelon and pour it into a saucepan. Simmer until it is somewhat reduced, about 15 minues. Strain it into a bowl. It will be clear and smell like cooked cucumbers at this point, but have faith. Discard the solids. Clean the pan. Return the watermelon juice to the pan. Simmer until reduced and thickened somewhat. Add the curry powder and mix well. Add the butter and simmer until thick. Makes enough for two tuna steaks.

Torta Freddo Gianduia
This recipe has been in my “to try” notebook for years and years until now. It came from the Simple Cooking newsletter in the mid-1990s. It’s really just nuts and cookies folded into fudge and I imagine a PMS-y Italian cook made it up.

2 1/2 ounces (squares) unsweetened chocolate
1 large egg
1 egg yolk
1/2 cup sugar
Pinch of salt
5 tablespoons butter
1/2 cup toasted skinned hazelnuts
4 ounces crushed Danish butter cookies
Grate or chop the chocolate. Combine the egg, yolk, sugar and salt in a mixer or food processor. Beat for about 5 minutes. Stir in the chocolate.
Melt the butter in the top of a double boiler set over simmering water. When it’s all melted, Remove the top of the double boiler. Beat in the chocolate mixture. Return the top of the boiler. Cook the mixture over simmering water, stirring occasionally, until it is thick enough that a spoon dragged through it leaves a trail that lasts for several seconds. Remove the whole thing from the heat. Fold the nuts and cookies into the chocolate. Pour into a springform pan or tart pan with a removable bottom. Refrigerate for 1 hour to firm up. Cut into thin wedges. Makes 6 to 8 servings.

Vacation with the 21 closest members of the immediate family in a mountain house called a “cottage” that holds all of us. Lots of white porches and dirty bare feet and sweaty kids. The moms take the opportunity to drink instead of eat, and the kids scarf junk all day and all night until they collapse in their tracks.

There’s a dining hall on the grounds, run by Nashville’s renowned Emily Frith, offering fresh, small-batch, handmade, knock-your-socks-off food each day.

It’s impossible to gather/convince all 21 people to go, but we make a point of eating at least one lunch, and it never disappoints. Every day there’s freshly handmade gazpacho, black beans and yellow rice, and a great salad bar. The hot entree for the day was beefy mac-n-cheese, and the grills were fired up for grilled chicken and burgers.

Sweet Cheeks ate vegetables without being asked, so she earned a Ghirardelli brownie. Every table was full, and since we eat slowly, the brownies were gone by the time we got there. Once we told Emily how disappointed we were, she herself brought us one from the back. She’s got the heart of a servant, and the whisk of Martha Stewart. If you loved her sesame vinaigrette from back in the day, or you’ve heard of its deliciosity, you can buy it at the Chevron at the corner of Page Road and Harding.

In the contest to rename Chocolate Nut Berry Pie/Pinch Pie, you are all winners. Thank you for your thoughtful thoughts. It was so hard to decide. But the winning name came out of left field, from someone who doesn’t even read the blog. The winner: Meringue Berry Cloud. I like that it captures the whimsy of the dessert, gives some idea of what’s in it, but doesn’t read like an ingredient list

If it hadn’t been for the ringer, two titles were competing for the prize: Friendship Chocolate Strawberry Dream, and Meredith’s Chocolate Meringue with Fresh Berry Cream. Each gets a cookbook that I edited (so if there are errors, don’t tell me). Par 3 Tea Time at the Masters is a great book for casual entertaining. Click here for a description. And Neighbor to Neighbor is a collection of Tennessee recipes from the Tennessee Co-op, whose members have forgotten more about food than I’ll ever know. Click here for a tour of some of the recipes at their website.

Both are terrific cookbooks that are fun to read, raise money for great causes, and both of them are full of recipes that are already indispensible in my kitchen. Here’s a link to the FRP cookbook marketplace.

Thanks to everyone who submitted a name. Come back again in the fall for another contest, and maybe win a grater.

Contest time! Name my birthday dessert and get a cookbook!

I bake myself a birthday cake each year because I love sugar, I love to bake, and I always want something so strange that no one else wants to bake it. Last year it was a Smores Cake Roll, a complicated recipe from In the Sweet Kitchen, my favorite baking book of the moment. Graham cracker sheet cake, marshmallow filling, chocolate ganache. Woooof.

This year I’m making a recipe from an old friend. It’s a meringue shell enriched with toasted pecans, chocolate chips and Ritz cracker crumbs, baked to dry it out and firm it up, then filed with strawberries in sweetened whipped cream. Deliciousness itself.

But it needs a new name. It’s true that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but it wouldn’t sell as well. This dessert has two names, and neither describes it well. My friend’s family has always called Chocolate Nut Berry Pie, which is unappealing as a potential flavor combination. Also, this dessert is only a pie in the sense that it’s in a pie plate.

The other name is its original name, given by one of the cookbook greats, maybe Marian Burros or Fannie Farmer or Marian Cunningham. She called it Pinch Pie. Also not a good fit — it’s not a pie, and you can’t make it in a pinch, because it includes fresh strawberries, nuts, soda crackers, whipped cream and pecans.

This dessert needs to sound as beautiful as it tastes.

See the dilemma? What can we call it?

As long as the potlucks and picnics of May continue, the greatest hits of Junior League cookbooks past and present will roll out of my kitchen on colorful disposable plates. It’s the kind of food you’re somehow supposed to feel guilty about, because it’s full of short cuts and prepared or ready-to-use products. As if those were bad.

Vegetable Squares are defensible junk food masquerading as a side dish or appetizer. Almost everyone will eat them.

Puppy Chow (Dawg Food if you attended the University of Georgia) is light, sweet and crisp, and so good you’ll have to force yourself to move away from the bowl. And it can be thrown together in about 20 minutes.

The season goes on — what are you bringing?

Vegetable Squares

I use homemade Dijon garlic vinaigrette in place of the ranch dressing mix, and use just 1/3 to 1/2 cup of mayonnaise.

2 (8-count) packages refrigerated crescent rolls

2 (8-ounce) packages cream cheese, softened

1/2 cup mayonnaise

1 envelope ranch salad dressing mix

1 bunch broccoli, cut into tiny florets, lightly steamed if you like

2 colored bell peppers, minced

1 zucchini, shredded

4 carrots, shredded

Chopped fresh chives or parsley, if desired

• Press the crescent rolls into a 9 x 12-inch baking pan, pressing the dough to seal the seams. Press it slightly up the sides of the pan to form a lip. Bake at 375 as directed on the package. Let cool.
• Mix the cream cheese, mayonniase and salad dressing mix until smooth. Spread it over the cooled crust. Layer the vegetables over the cream cheese mixture.
• Sprinkle with chives or parsley, if you dare, or if the children are older. Cut into about 32 bars. Makes 12 kid-size “side dish” servings or about 16 adult appetizer servings.

Puppy Chow

Pretzels make a good substitute for about half of the Chex. When we run out of Chex, we’ve substituted Golden Grahams and Cap’n Crunch.

1 stick (8 tablespoons) butter

1/3 cup peanut butter

2 cups semisweet chocolate chips or chopped white almond bark

9 cups Crispix or Corn Chex

4 cups (1 pound) confectioners’ sugar

• Melt the butter, peanut butter and chocolate in a saucepan, mixing well. Measure the cereal into a large bowl or soup pot. Pour the chocolate mixture over it and stir gently but quickly to coat.
• Pour the confectioners’ sugar into a large paper grocery sack (or a plastic sack without holes). Add the chocolate-covered cereal and toss to coat with confectioners’ sugar.
• Serve right away or store in ziptop plastic bags.
• Bake sale time: This recipe makes enough to fill 15 snack-size plastic bags.

I’ve been slowing you down and none of you told me! I’m so pleased with the eye-popping photos I get from our new family camera that I’ve been loading them in without any adjustments, because, you know, the camera is so much smarter than we are. How could we object to its decisions?

But apparently the photos are really pixel-packed, and since these stories are peppered with pictures, the pages are loading slowly. I had to stop logging on at work — there aren’t enough hamsters running fast enough.

Thank goodness for techno buddies. Yesterday, my NYC friend Kath gently explained that enormous photos slow down the page. Doh! I knew they were big, but I didn’t know they were THAT big. I’m like the old person in car blog ahead of yours with a blinker on, riding the brakes.

Can you forgive me if I bake you a gooey crock pot fudge spoon cake?

Hot Fudge Spoon Cake

This is good, rich, dense, and a good party trick, so it’s perfect for all-girl gatherings. And you can do it in the slow cooker, which is a useful thing in so many ways. The original was low fat, and used skim milk, egg whites and applesauce in place of the milk, eggs and oil.

• 3 cups milk

1 (5-ounce) package cook and serve pudding mix (any flavor) (but you know you’re going to buy chocolate)

1 (18-ounce) package chocolate cake mix

11/3 cups water

1/3 cup vegetable oil

3 eggs

Ice cream for serving

Combine the milk and pudding mix in a slow cooker and stir to combine well. Combine the cake mix, water, vegetable oil and eggs and mix well. Spoon the cake batter into the center of the pudding mix. It will look unpromising, but have faith. Cover the slow cooker and cook on low for 2 to 3 hours. (Two is probably not enough, three is probably too much.) The cake at the edges will be cakelike and the middle will be puddinglike, while there’s a whole underneath layer that seems liquid but eventually thickens to a sauce. Serve with vanilla ice cream. Makes 8 to 10 servings.

My day job is editing community cookbooks, but I’m not just an editor — I collect them on a small scale. This one, from the Dorcas Guild of the Magyar Reformed Church in Elyria, Ohio, is my prize. Every recipe in it is profoundly Hungarian, from lekvar cakes to cooked potato noodles. It must have been both a reflection of its community and simultaneously serves as a guide to the old country for the young cook. It must have been successful, because it was reprinted ten times from 1952 to 1956.

I read the book like a snapshot from another time and place. The thick, typed pages of dishes like baba leves bean soup, porkolt and kifli nut cookies conjure images with ladies in embroidered aprons, church basement kitchens, the row houses on the street. I’m not explaining it well, but life in an immigrant community is so far from my own experience as to be exotic and appealing.

All the recipes sound so deeply, satisfyingly homemade, and depend more on technique than on ingredients, which appeals to me, so I packed Hungarian Recipes along in the small stash of cookbooks I moved to England. I figured boredom, isolation, and long days of meal planning would force me to cook from it and learn those techniques.

After a few successful experiments, though, we grew busy being immigrants in our own immigrant community, tracking down much-missed foods like applesauce, marshmallows and fajita seasoning, and gathering for cobbled-together potlucks of macaroni and cheese, pinto bean burritos, skirt steak, country ham, fried corn.

I cook from the book occasionally when I can — it’s good, sturdy winter food that fills the house with good smells, if maybe a little cabbage-y. I made it last week for my dinner group. The menu was a rich ham and bean soup thickened with sour cream, golubki in a tomato/sour cream/sauerkraut sauce and paprika potatoes. Loads of meat (2 pounds), cabbage (1 head plus a big bag of sauerkraut), eggs (14), sour cream (2 pints) and lots of sauteed onions — there’s still a faint onion smell in the curtains.

From their centuries yoked to Austria, the Hungarians are masters at pastry-making and baking, and the baker in me is drawn to the extraordinarily expert techniques. To disgress here, I think the only cultures that can be entrusted with dessert are Russians, French, Hungarians and Americans. I mean, have you tried a Japanese dessert? Or a Brazilian one? Or a Tunisian one? Dairy products are important, and no one uses more of them than the Hungarians.

I selected a grated chocolate torte with pudding frosting for dessert. First you separate 9 eggs, then you grate 8 ounces of chocolate and grind a pound of nuts. The result is a spectacularly flavorful cake, nicely chocolate, but light because it’s grated, not melted, and free of butter, so it’s not dense like a fudge cake. The frosting recipe was troublesome, and 4 d*mn ounces of d*mn expensive d*mn chocolate seized up in the top of a double boiler, so I sort reformulated the recipe. Fortunately it worked, and cake plus frosting resulted in a beautiful balance of rich and light.

Grated Chocolate Torte

9 egg whites

1 1/2 cups confectioners’ sugar

8 ounces bittersweet chocolate, grated

1/2 cup fine cracker crumbs

2 tablespoons all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

8 ounces nuts (almonds, walnuts), toasted, ground

1/4 cup white or sweet wine, such as Marsala, Madeira or sherry

Juice of 1 lemon

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Grease two 9-inch cake pans, or a 10-inch torte pan with a removeable bottom, then line the bottoms with waxed paper or parchment paper and grease the paper.

Beat the egg whites until soft peaks form (I add a pinch of salt and a pinch of cream of tartar for insurance). Add the confectioners’ sugar and beat until stiff. Combine the chocolate, crumbs and flour and nuts in a bowl. Fold into the egg whites along with the wine and lemon juice.

Spread the batter in the pan(s). Bake for 40 minutes until torte is set in the center and top appears dry. Cool 10 minutes in the pan. Run a knife around the edge to separate the torte from the pan. Invert onto a serving platter and remove the parchment.

Hungarian Pudding Frosting

4 ounces bittersweet chocolate, chopped

1 cup confectioners’ sugar

2 eggs (or 3 egg yolks)

1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter

1/2 cup heavy cream, whipped (optional)

Melt the chocolate in a double boiler set over simmering water. Quickly beat in the sugar and eggs. Remove from the heat, but keep the mixture over the water and beat until it’s thickened. (You may need to add a little cream.) Beat in the butter, 2 tablespoons at a time. If the frosting seems spreadable at this stage, use it to fill and frost the torte. If it seems thick, beat in whipped cream, then spread it over the torte.

You know that bumper sticker that you see occasionally, “What if schools had all that money they needed and the Pentagon had to hold a bake sale”? The Pentagon would be would do well to put our local elementary school in charge of it.

It’s a bake sale in the same sense that Niagara Falls is a creek – over the top, wildly exceeding any expectations you might have. What you see here is a fraction of one table.

You’d never know that inside those SUVs, under those tennis hats beat the hearts of professional pastry chefs. Dozens of perfectly decorated cupcakes cradled in specially-designed boxes. Dozens of brownies wrapped in seasonal cellophane and decorated with seasonal trinkets like plastic spiders, as an incentive to buy. Carefully decorated cookies heaped in a basket and priced to sell for pocket money. “Dirt cake” in colorful paper cups packed with a spoon. Goodie bags of three snickerdoodles and a chocolate kiss.

Mama knows what kids like. And has a marketing degree, too.

And then there are the items designed to bring out the parents’ checkbooks. Coffeecakes, focaccia, honey-oat bread, dinner rolls, Moravian sugar cake, challah, baguettes, sourdough.

But the prize goes to the mom whose cake-baking is her therapy and who apparently owns the largest deep freezer in town.

The first year I encountered Super Baker Mom, I brought in 3 homemade cakes, which took all weekend to make, and was proud. Super Baker Mom’s offerings numbered in the double digits. It’s grown each year since, and this year, the bake sale committee had to set up risers to hold all her cakes.

Thirty one-of-a-kind, professionally decorated cakes, priced around $35 apiece. Peanut butter, chocolate, pumpkin, blueberry, more chocolate, spice. You can hear the checkbooks spreading their legs flexing. The only slow seller was banana cake. Same thing happened when I baked a banana spice cake with caramel icing and orange sparkling sugar.

I was going to document the fabulous parade of cakes, but my pathetic camera (and, let’s face it, the clueless operator) couldn’t get it all in, and then the memory card ran out of space. We raised more than $1000 — the committee doesn’t trouble my artsy head with figures.