From My Kitchen to Yours .....
I’ve never been a big fan of a coconut cake until now. Have you ever heard of the phrase “you better leave well enough alone”. Well that applies to this recipe. I didn’t change a thing. Okay maybe one thing I added Dr. Oetker stabilizer. I found this recipe out of our local newspaper, as I was reading this recipe I just knew I had to make it. The only downside or maybe not downside it takes two days to make it. According to our newspaper this is a recipe from Kim Ode.
Unless you don’t like whipped cream, what is not to like about room soezen (cream puffs) and surprisingly they are very easy to make.
Our English ancestors brought us the fruit pies. They added a topping of biscuit dough to them and placed a heavy lid on top so that the biscuit dough could rise and brown, that’s how the cobbler was born. Today in the South, most of the restaurants and the Barbecue restaurants have peach cobbler on the menu. A Peach cobbler is as American as Apple Pie, it is a tradition and one that I have come to love.
During the sixteenth century, Brits from Europe brought the tradition of making pumpkin pies for dessert to West Africa. The tradition was soon brought to America during slavery, where the African slaves transformed the dessert into something sweeter using yams, then sweet potatoes. Coincidentally, yams and black-eyed peas was a common food slaves were fed during the Middle Passage.
The name of the food was inconsistent at first, because the yam and sweet potato come from two different types of plants. The word yam in African dialects was either “Oyame or Yam Yam” or a few other terms with a few other meanings. Yams are monocots from the Dioscorea family. Sweet potatoes are from the Morning Glory plant family.
Sweet potato pie recipes made a cookbook debut in the 18th century. In the late part of the 19th century, Fannie Famer featured a recipe for glazed sweet potatoes in the Boston Cooking School Cookbook. Soon after, inventor George Washington Carver began to find various uses for the sweet potato, including in a candied version. He released over 100 uses for the vegetable.
As the slaves made the pie for large gatherings in celebration and as a part of family meals, the tradition has continued for family gatherings and black family reunions today.
(Photo: Sweet Potato Pie recipe by African slave Abby Fisher in 1881)
I have never bought a slice of gingerbread loaf from Starbucks, but heard good reviews about it. To me they are way too expensive. So I went on the internet and found a few recipes. Mixed and matched, and here is the result. I have been told it taste pretty darn close to the real thing.