Canadian

Chocolate Pound Cake

Mix and then let cool:

½ pound soft margarine. (Do not use butter... it spoils the texture)

10 tablespoon cocoa (Be generous with it... heaping tablespoons please!)

3 cups sugar

1 ½ cups boiling water

Here is a great recipe that my wife got from the Harrowsmith cookbook. She is still tweaking it and will post her final version when done. In the meantime she says that her variation is to omit the orange rind, and add instead 1/4 - 1/2 tsp cardamom. The last cake she made, which I served at our weekly CSA pickup since it was made with zukes from our CSA Saffire Farms, she even added 1/2 cup of teff (an Etheopian grain) for the extra nutrition -- it added the teeniest little crunch, which was rather nice. She has also used up to 2.5 cups of zucchini in this recipe and it has worked fine.

The kids love this stuff - even after knowing it has so much zucchini in it. Indeed, you'd never guess. It simply tastes like a really awesome chocolate cake.

I've been pretty big into making desserts with vegetables as the late summer harvest goes into overdrive -- making a beet cake to use up those prolific, purple roots appearing in my CSA order seemed a no-brainer.

This is a slightly altered recipe, found to use up the rest of the squash and sweet potato from yesterday’s custard. It’s baking in the oven right now and, hopefully, will be another place I can use mashed veggies in a manner the kids will accept and enjoy.

This recipe started out as an approximation of what my grandmother would toss into a mixing bowl — “a little of this, a pinch of that” interpreted and transcribed by me into “cups” and “teaspoons”. After making many batches over several years, I finally tweaked it to a point where I was content to add it to my “Family Recipes” cookbook, and now I’m going to share it with you. It makes a large batch of wonderfully crisp cookies with a nice gingery bite.

Given my grandmother turns 90 this spring, it’s safe to say that this recipe is over 100 years old. The dough is pretty sticky, but the cookies are best when only a scant amount of flour is used when rolling it out for cutting — refrigerating the dough first helps quite a bit.

If you are like me, you like traditional cookie recipes that make a huge batch — the kind of cookies that only get better the longer they manage to stay in the cookie tin.

This recipe requires your largest bowl — something I love, as it’s the perfect excuse to get out the gigantic old stoneware mixing bowl that belonged to an elderly neighbour when I was a child. It makes up to 7 dozen cookies that only get moister and chewier the longer they last.

This recipe needs no fancy name. It’s flavour and moistness speak for themselves. This cake was a staple of childhood celebrations in my house while growing up — it makes a fabulous base for Black Forest Cake, but is also excellent with chocolate cream cheese icing and cinnamon hearts.

Of course, if I were to give it a fancy name, I’d probably call it “Triple Layer Fudge Cake”.. or something like that. ;)

This is a variation on my traditional squash pie, made for Thanksgiving and Christmas — my oldest likes the filling so much, that I thought doing it as simply a custard and adding in the sweet potato would give it a bit more of a nutitional punch without the extra fat that the pastry can bring.

I will tweak this a little the next time I make it and substitute honey for the brown and white sugars.

Like the taste of cabbage rolls but hate the effort of making them? This recipe provides all the flavour with a fraction of the work! I like to add a bit of cayenne for extra kick.

One of my favorite childhood memories are the many Saturday nights at the family table with a big plate of sweet baked beans, fresh brown bread and hot dogs. Baked beans are one of my favorite foods and, since moving to Ontario, I haven’t made them as frequently as I would like.

Why not? Apparently the beans we always used for baking beans just aren’t available here in Ottawa — I can find obscure beans from far-flung parts of the world, but I just can’t get ahold of the Jacob’s Cattle, Soldier, Yellow Eye or French Horticultural beans that my mother used for her Saturday night feasts.

Every year during my annual trip back to the coast, I stock up on my beans and horde them like gold — doling out each batch and making them stretch for as long as I can, knowing I won’t be able to replenish my stockpile until the next summer. Our unexpected and unfortunate trip back in January was a boon in one very pleasant respect: I now have beans — lots and lots of beans!