Classic Southern Desserts

Peanut Brittle was my father’s favorite dessert. His cousin Frances made it for him every Christmas and brought it in a big box tied with a red ribbon. He sort of hoarded that peanut brittle, because my mother never made it. And I don’t know why she never made it, because she’s a great cook! Anyway, this is definitely a classic Southern dessert. It’s also an addictive Southern dessert! Warning: this dessert gives you very messy hands.

Southern Peanut Brittle

1 1/2 cups sugar

1/2 cup light corn syrup

2 tbsp. water

1 1/2 cups small raw peanuts, shelled (surely I don’t need to tell you to shell them first)

1/4 tsp. salt

1 tsp. baking soda

1 1/2 tsp. butter (it’s okay to substitute margarine)

Cook the sugar, corn yrup and water until the mixture spins a thread. Add the raw peanus and cook, stirring often, until the mixure is light brown. Remove from the heat. Add the salt, baking soda and butter. Stir well, until mixed. Pour on a buttered cookie sheet. Spread the mixture out with a spatula. Loose from the cookie sheet. Using your hands, stretch and pull the peanut brittle until it is thin. Let cook, and then break into pieces. This makes about 25 to 30 pieces.

Chocolate fudge is a classic this time of year. Here’s an old recipe that you’ll love to make. According to the food editor of a newspaper in Georgia I once worked for, there are two common mistakes with fudge. First, don’t beat the cooked candy until it cools to a lukewarm temperature. Otherwise, your fudge will have that grainy taste. Second, mix it well, so you’ll get that famous fudge creaminess.

Chocolate Fudge

2 sticks butter or margarine

4 1/2 cups sugar

7 oz. marshmallow cream

14 1/2 oz. evaporated milk

8 (1 1/2 oz.) chocolate bars, broken into pieces

12 oz. chocolate chips

2 cups chopped walnuts or pecans

Combine the butter, sugar, marshmallow cream and evaporated milk in a suacepan. Bring to a boil over medium to low heat,stirring constantly until the sugar dissolves. Boil steadily over low heat for about 7 minutes, stirring occasionally. Keep the mixture at a low boil. Remove from heat. Let mixture cool to lukewarm. Add chocolate bars, chocolate chips and nuts. Stir until chocolate is completely melted and blended. Pour into two buttered 9-inch square pans. Cool until firm, and cut.

My mother may be the last living person on earth who makes fruitcakes. Her mother before her — my maternal grandmother made them, and I’m guessing my great-grandmother made them, too. A fruitcake is definitely a classic Southern dessert, but by the time I’m a grandmother, it will also be an extinct Southern dessert. And, I for one, am glad.

I hate fruitcake. It’s way too chewy, and all those candied fruits aren’t anything like real fruit. They’re shiny and slippery and look like what you use at Halloween to scare kids by telling them they’re holding eyeballs. And heavy, oh my gosh. Yes, fruitcake it supposed to be “dense” cake, and it certainly is. But any cake that fills you up for hours after two bites is way too dense for me.

We always had a fruitcake during the holidays when I was little, and my mother served it after every meal. I don’t know if my father liked it or not, or if he was just keeping the peace. For a while, my mother got into frozen fruit cake in miniature muffin papers. That was even worse.

So before fruitcake dies out all together, I’m giving it one last chance. (By talking about it; not eating it). Got any good fruitcake stories?

Pralines, of course, are classic for New Orleans. A good praline conjures up memories of walking through the French Quarter, listening to jazz and having some New Orleans goodies at Cafe du Monde. If you’ve never been to New Orleans, put it on your list of cities to visit. I haven’t been there since Katrina, but I’ve heard the city is putting itself together with spirit and pride.

Here’s an easy recipes for their famous pralines.

French Quarter Pralines

1 cup white sugar

1 cup light brown sugar

1/2 cream

1/4 cup butter (do not use margarine or you won’t get that rich praline taste)

2 cups coarsely chopped pecans

1 tsp. vanilla

In a heavy saucepan, mix the white sugar and brown sugar, ream and butter. Stir over low heat until the sugars dissolve and the mixture comes to a boil. Insert a candy thermometer, and cook at a slow boil, stirring constantly until the temperature reacfhes 238 degrees. Remove from the heat.

When the mixture is lukewarm, add the chopped nuts and vanilla extract. Drop by large spoonfuls onto a sheet of buttered waxed paper to form patties.

Package the patties individually in clear plastic wrap. Store in a container, covered tightly, in a cool place.

To make the pralines set up quicker, put them in the frig for a short time. Don’t worry about making the patties perfectly round. This is free form candy making.

A slice of good pie is probably my favorite dessert. Most pies are quick to put together, and — unlike a cake — if you make a mistake and it’s tastes awful, there’s not so much of it to sit around on the kitchen counter.

Lemon Chess Pie is definitely a classic Southern dessert. When you see the ingredients, you’ll probably wonder at using cornmeal. This isn’t a typo on my part; cornmeal really is an essential ingredient in Lemon Chess Pie.

Lemon Chess Pie

2 cups of sugar

1 tbsp. flour

1 tbsp. yellow cornmeal

4 eggs

1/2 cup melted butter or margarine

1/4 cup milk (either whole or 2 percent)

4 tbsp. grated lemon rind

9-inch pie shell, unbaked

Mix together the sugar, flour and cornmeal. Add the eggs, melted butter, milk, lemon rind and lemon juice. Beat well with electic mixer. Pour into the unbaked pie shell. Bake at 375 degrees for about 40 minutes, or until a knife inserted in the center comes out clean.

The cornmeal gives this pie a unique taste that makes it a superb dessert. Try a lemon chess pie for dessert this weekend!

Yesterday’s Sour Cream Pound Cake was delicious, but here’s a tried and true recipe that dresses up a little. Brown sugar pound cake is a tad sweeter  (lots of brown sugar!), but just as good.

Brown Sugar Pound Cake

1 cup of butter at room temperature(don’t substitute margarine)

1/2 cup Crisco

24 oz. brown sugar

5 eggs at room temperature

1 tsp. baking powder

3 1/2 cups sifted all-purpose flour

1 cup whole milk (if you really want to you can substitute 2 percent)

2 tsp. run or vanilla flavoring

Cream the butter and shortening until well mixed. Add sugar and mix. Add eggs, one at a time, beating after each one until you can’t see any yellow. Mix the baking powder with the flour. Add alternately with the milk. Stir in flavoring. Pour into a greased and floured bundt pan. Bake at 325 degrees about 1 hr and 15 minutes or until done. Check with a toothpick.

Let cool in bundt pan about 20 minutes; then turn out onto rack and cool completely. This cake is delicious topped with chocolate or lemon sauce. It’s great with fruit, too!

Pound cake freezes quite well. Be sure to wrap it securely and then place in a freezer bag.

Sour cream pound cake was a staple in our house. The great thing about pound cake is that you can change it up and have lots of different desserts. Top it with homemade chocolate sauce or lemon sauce. Serve it warm with ice cream. If you cook it too long and it’s a little dry, no problem. Just turn it into trifle or maybe bread pudding.

For some reason, my grandmother (on my mother’s side) said pound cake was a man’s favorite dessert. So when she made her Christmas cakes, she always included a pound cake because “men like it, you know.”

Here’s an easy and classic recipe for sour cream pound cake

Sour Cream Pound Cake

3 cups sugar

1 cup butter, at room temperature

6 eggs, at room temperature

1/2 tsp. salt

3 cups all-purpose flour

1 cup sour cream

1/4 tsp. baking soda

1 tsp. vanilla

Cream the sugar and butter together. Add eggs, one at a time, creaming after each other until you no longer see any yellow. Add salt to flour. Mix soda and sour cream in another bowl. Now, add flour and sour cream alternately to butter-egg mixutre, beating well. Add vanilla. Pour into a greased and floured bundt pan. Bake at 350 degrees for about 1 hr. 15 minutes to 1 hr. 30 min. Check with toothpick. Be careful not to overbake.

Every recipe you will ever read for pound cake says to add the eggs one at a time, but I don’t know why. I guess you don’t mess with what works, so don’t try to cheat and add them all together.

And if you’re looking for love, remember “men like it, you know.”

When I was a little girl, nobody made cakes using a mix. I’m not sure when cake mixes were invented, but they didn’t come to small towns in the South until way after everybody else was buying them. I, for one, think there is absolutely nothing as good as a made-from-scratch-cake. Yes, they are a little denser and heavier than box cakes, but come on! That’s actually the way cakes are supposed to be — we just have all gotten used to the box cake.

My Mama made cakes all the time. Mardi Gras Party Cake, a recipe she got out of a magazine, was was one of her specialties. It had nuts and coconut and I’m not sure what else. My Cousin Sissie made the best caramel cake and lemon cheese cake you would ever taste. Back then, cooks made real caramel icing. You mix white sugar and brown sugar in a cast iron skillet and cook it slowly until it caramalizes. I’ve got a much easier caramel icing recipe I use that tastes almost as good.

I’m betting most of you have never heard of lemon cheese cake. It’s not cheesecake; it’s “cheese cake.” There’s no cream cheese in it at all. It’s actually a white cake with lemon curd for the filling. Nobody ever makes it anymore, but it’s one of my very favorites. I’ve been trying to perfect it for years, and when I do, I’ll share it with you.

In the next post, we’ll start with one of the Southern cook’s favorite cakes, the old-fashioned pound cake. It’s easy to dress up with a chocolate or lemon glaze, but it’s just as good plain.

Pecan Tassies

Bake these miniature pecan pies for your holiday party. They’re very rich, but very good. If you can get fresh pecans, all to the better. Nuts left in the shell will last much longer than the ones already shelled. But you can keep shelled pecans fresh close to nine months in the frig and about two years if frozen.

Pecan Tassies

½ cup butter or margarine, softened

3 oz. cream cheese, softened

1 cup flour

1 ½ cups brown sugar (you can use light or dark)

2 tbs. butter or margarine, melted

2 eggs, lightly beaten

1 tsp. vanilla

2/3 cup chopped pecans

To make the dough, beat the softened butter and cream cheese until cream. Add the flour gradually, beating well. Cover and chill in the frig for about two hours.

Shape the dough into 1-inch balls. You should get about 30. Press the balls into miniature muffin pans you have sprayed with cooking spray.

Combine the brown sugar, melted butter, eggs and vanilla. Stir in the pecans. Spoon about 1 tbsp. of the pecan mixture into each pastry shell.

Bake at 350 degrees for about 20 to 25 minutes. When tassies are done, remove them from the pans immediately, and cool on racks

Pecan pie is one of those ultimate Southern desserts. Yes, we eat it for Thanksgiving and at about a million meals around Christmas. But we have it plenty of other times, too. Never in the spring and summer, though. Pecan pie is definitely a cold weather (or at least cool weather) dessert.

Here’s a classic and traditional recipe for pecan pie. In the next post, I’ll share an alternate recipe, called pecan tassies. These little bite-size pecan pies are frequently seen at parties, and they’re delicious.

Southern Pecan Pie

3 eggs

2/3 cup sugar

1/2 cu butter (real), melted

1 cup corn syrup (doesn’t matter if it’s light or dark)

1/4 tsp. salt

1 1/2 cups chopped pecans

1 unbaked pie shell (I always use the refrigerated ones)

Beat the eggs well. Add all the other ingredients. Stir to mix. Pour in chopped pecans, and stir once more. Pour into pie shell. Bake at 350 degrees for about 40 to 45 minutes or until the pie is firm.

Adding a little rum to this never hurts. Serve with whipped cream. This pie is good warm or at room temperature.