Hamming it up with Betty Crocker

Yesterday I made my first Chiffon Cake, for church coffee hour. It was the Lovelight Chocolate Chiffon Cake out of the classic Betty Crocker Guide to Easy Entertaining!

It is a rule I have for coffee hour: Every week I make at least one thing that is new. It keeps things exciting.

Above is a picture of the Lovelight Chocolate Chiffon Cake going into the oven. And here it is coming out:

Beautiful as the cake is, I could not help laughing about the chapter the recipe came from. It was going piously to church, yet it came from the chapter titled Stag Parties.

How many cookbooks these days will you find with a chapter called Stag Parties?

It is funny because sex is everywhere, much more than it was several decades ago, but oh, you cannot mention stag parties. But anyway.

"Most men have a weakness for chocolate cake," Betty Crocker writes in this cookbook.

And sure enough!

The guys at St. Anthony's, they loved this cake! Well, the ladies did, too. And the children. But I am not about to contradict Betty Crocker. She was right!

You know me, I am always behind, and I was making the frosting at literally the last minute -- i.e., this morning before church. So I made a frosting that Betty recommended called Chocolate Fluff. You took two cups of heavy cream and whipped it up with a cup of powdered sugar and a half cup of cocoa. The result was amazing. Like ice cream. Addictive. Amazing.

You had to sit the cake in the fridge until it was time to serve it. And so during Mass the cake sat in the fridge in the St. Anthony's social hall. It tastes good cold, I discovered. There is something very satisfying about this sweet, chilled cake.

But next time I will make the other icing Betty recommended.

It is White Mountain Icing!

My Facebook friend Janice is a professional pastry chef and she was urging me to try it. She said it was old school but it will be so worth it! Plus, what I love about it is you get to use -- shhhhh -- corn syrup.

It is just a little more complicated than I had time for this morning. In addition I should get a candy thermometer. Why does someone like me not have a candy thermometer? Yet I do not.

The cake shared the buffet with another St. Anthony's novelty -- ham.

We got a couple of hams at Albrecht Discount and heated them up in the oven! This was another first for me. We were doing this because it was the Octave of Easter. Lou, one of the gentlemen of St. Anthony's, had to help me.

We hit a snag when I realized there were no roasting pans in the kitchen. What to do? What to do??? But miraculously in a cupboard we found a beat-up cookie sheet. Wait, it was my cookie sheet! I had been wondering what had happened to it. Here it was. And right when and where I needed it!

And so we roasted the hams -- in foil pans, set on the cookie sheet. Lou said they would be done by the time we got out of Mass and sure enough.

Lou being a prince among men also made the glaze in a saucepan he found God knows where.

I slipped out during the sermon to apply the glaze to the ham.

End result, as we say here in Buffalo, there was much rejoicing.

Ham. Is there anything better?

And 99 cents a pound at Aldi.

We will be doing this again!

High on the hog

Over the weekend I went to Albrecht Discount and I bought a ham. It could not be helped! There were these beautiful hams sitting there just as if it were Easter. And they were 99 cents a pound, a magnificent thing.

 So here I am with this ham in the fridge. Yesterday it occurred to me to check to make sure it was cooked. You always have to do that because once, I remember, my Easter ham was not cooked. Surprise, surprise! Luckily I found out in time so I could cook it. If you have an uncooked ham it is not the end of the world but you have to stick it in the oven for a few hours.

Well, guess what, this ham was not cooked! Instead of "Fully Cooked" it says: "Ready To Cook."

Two nice things came out of this adventure. Well, three nice things.

No. 1, the house took on this beautiful aroma of ham roasting. These are hectic days and I do not often have this pleasure, of smelling something cooking slowly in the oven.

No. 2, I diced up some of the ham and made Pasta Fagioli with Ham, Mushrooms and Herbs" from Bon Appetit One-Dish Meals, this great cookbook I bought at a library sale. When I get a ham I like to spread it around, dicing it into little pieces and enjoying it this way and that way.

No. 3, while the ham was roasting I was working on my Pennario project. And I found a recording of his I had no idea existed. It is in a university collection which, this very day I will begin to bug them.

Not to ham it up but this is a great discovery for me and for music. Slow cooking is great for this kind of thing, you know?

Put something in the oven and you stay right there in the house.

Things get done!

Hamming it up

Suddenly summer! Boom cars, motorcycles, lawn mowers, people yelling: "Omigod your butt is hanging out!"

Yesterday I took two hours out of my work and we had a ham dinner at my mom's. I picked up another 99 cents a pound ham at Aldi and we gathered in the back yard and ate it.

It was very Martha Stewart because the picnic table was way in the back of this suburban back yard, next to this storage shed. Ever notice how in Martha Stewart magazine, people put picnic tables miles from civilization?


I remember one photo spread where the table was set up over the water, at the end of a dock. Not only was this one old man's chair inches from tipping over into the water, but ... imagine schlepping all your dishes all the way out there!

And then someone would invariably speak up and ask, "Where's the salt?" And you would have to go back and get it!

That sure would make it a challenge to dine al fresco.

What about Al Jolson?


I was just reading lastnight in one of Leonard Pennario's diaries that Jolson was not his cup of tea. I love when Pennario uses that expression. "Not my cup of tea."

The ham dinner yesterday at my mom's was the usual chaos with kids running around but we let the kids run around the back yard and so it was not too bad. Annie came over to visit. She is the yellow Lab from next door. Annie is kind of old and sedate and she had some ham and rolled around with the kids. So that kept them occupied.

Our 12-year-old, Rosie, made me a wreath of flowers for my hair. That was one of the sweetest things anyone had ever given me. That is a picture of me up above with the flowers Rosie gave me in my hair.

But back to what really matters, which is the ham. I was fishing for compliments so I said to my mom, "Mom, so, did the ham live up to the memories of the Easter ham we had?"

And my mom said: "No, the Easter ham was better."

Doesn't it kill you when mothers behave like that? Then she wanted to make me feel better so she said: "Well, maybe I was just hungrier then."

Here is me with the flowers in my hair digesting that ham-handed compliment.


But that is OK. I speak Mom and I know she really did not mean that the ham was not her cup of tea.

Knowing me, next Sunday I will do it all over again.