food

Poppy seed coffee cake

/ Dave S. Koster / 5 Comments

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This past week at work, I had a brown-bag lunch presentation where I spent basically 0 hours preparing, in spite of having about two months to do so. I kept telling myself, ah, I’ll focus on it right beforehand so I have the presentation all fresh in my mind and I don’t stumble. That said, I also realized the weekend before that I was in no way going to be actually prepared. So, I decided the best remedy was to bring some food to share. Everyone likes free food. It wasn’t going to do a lot for those calling in from Fairbanks and Juneau (sorry guys), but I thought it might help a bit on the Anchorage side. I pulled out my go-to sharing dish – poppy seed coffee cakes. It’s a family favorite that comes down from my moms side and it’s possibly my favorite comfort food. If it didn’t take two days to prepare, I’d make it every month until I was 375 pounds and required someone to physically roll me around. As it is, the size of the recipe is such that I only make it about once a year or so. Plus, I’ve been wanting to try it with some adjustments to be allergy friendly.

Needless to say, after blowing my weekend getting it together, I forgot the pies and home on the day. I had to run around the corner and buy some bread. The bread was good, and it turns out I’ve been doing this job long enough (last year not withstanding) that I can literally talk about it for hours off the top of my head, which is what I did for an hour. I think the presentation went okay, though I think I bit off too much to chew.

I did manage to remember the coffee cakes on Friday and they received positive reviews, which is good, because, as I said, I’d have eaten both pies I brought by myself. You can’t really find anything like this in the wild, short of an eastern European bakery, and even then it’s not nearly so good as this one. My favorite way to eat it is just this side of frozen. I did make some adjustments for allergies, which involved using Full-fat coconut milk cut with cashew milk, and goose eggs instead of chicken eggs. The use of the coconut milk made a tasty dough, but the consistency and rise was not what I am accustomed to. If you can, I’d recommend sticking to the ingredients listed below.

A couple warnings: This makes 6 pies and takes 2 days, so be prepared for a weekend effort & plenty left over to share.

Dough:

  • 3 Eggs (1 goose egg or 2 duck eggs)
  • ½ C. sugar
  • 1 C. cream
  • 1 tsp vanilla
  • ¾ C. Shortening (Lard works too, I do not recommend butter, it will make it too rich)
  • 4 C. all-purpose flower
  • 1 Cake of active dry yeast

Mix the dry ingredients & yeast, and cut in the shortening, like a pie dough except with yeast. Mix up the dough ingredients until you’ve got a nice soft ball of dough. Wrap this in cling-wrap and put it into the fridge overnight.

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THE NEXT DAY!

Preheat the oven to 350. Take the ball of dough out of the fridge and split into 6 pieces (or 5 if you want a slightly thicker crust). Roll them out to fit 8” pie-pans. It’s easiest if you do this while it’s still cold, much like a pie-dough. Let these rise in the pans for about 30 minutes after you’ve rolled them out. Make up the filling and topping while you wait:

Filling

  • 1 12oz can poppy seed filling
  • 1 C. applesauce
  • 1 C. raisins (I use golden)
  • 2 eggs (2 small duck eggs)
  • 2 Tbsp. Sugar
  • 2 Tbsp. Flour

Beat the eggs, add in the rest of the wet ingredients including the poppyseed filling. Whisk in the flour and sugar. When the pies are done rising, pour a thin layer of filling into each.

Topping:

  • 1 C. Flour
  • 1 C. Sugar
  • ¼ lb. Butter (If you must, butter flavor Crisco works okay too)
  • A sprinkling of cinnamon or nutmeg

Mix the dry ingredients, then cut in the butter. This is a crumble topping and so should be a bit lumpy. Sprinkle evenly over the top of the filling in the pies.

Bake these at 350 for about 20 minutes. The crust should be just golden brown. Let cool and enjoy.

Cranberry Relish

/ Dave S. Koster / 1 Comment

** This article will be published in the 11/16 Edition of the Seward Journal Newspaper **


As I write this, Thanksgiving is two weeks away.  I am, or was, super excited about having my family all in the same place for the festivities. After Tuesday, however, I think festivities is a rather generous expectation for the day. The best analogy I can come up for the proceedings is the past week on social media, specifically Facebook. If you think about it, Facebook is just a giant Thanksgiving dinner table. Think about it, all of your friends and family are going to be there along with at least a few people only one other person knows. Everyone is listening to all the conversations and, for better or worse, looking to jump in on one. Undoubtedly, someone will lead with a prayer meme before everybody goes around throwing up memes about what they’re thankful for. After that comes the food pictures and recipie discussions. Maybe you’ll get pleseant conversation about the kids, which leads to one person gushing about their job and everyone else complaning heartily about theirs. Eventually though, the politics memes start. It’s going to start subtly by someone tossing out a funny meme about the candidate they didn’t support, which they also imagine, incorrectly, everyone else will find funny too. Then there’s a response, and the whole dinner table starts to roll down hill until, eventually, at least two people are shouting and the rest of us are chasing the wine to the bottom of the bottle, and reaching for the liquor cabinet. At the end of it someone will throw their hands up and storm out, with the standard, ‘I’m taking a break from Facebook for a while’, and a few others will walk away from the proceedings and go back to posting about the Seahawks again.

This year, that’s where we’re at, pretty much all of us, I think. I’m super optimistic that after already reaching the point of angry red-faced shouting on Facebook, everyone knows to not bring up politics for even a second, it’s a slippery slope. In any case, if it does get there, because it will, I’ve got the perfect recipie that you can knock up by just throwing ingredients into a blender. 

What you need:

– 1 Navel orange (unpeeled)
– 1 bag of store-bought cranberries
– 1 Cup of white sugar

Directions:

Put all of that into a blender, and it’ll be fine if your huffing and puffing and shouting or totally distracted and thinking about this argument or that. If you like, you can throw in a few tablespoons of Grand Marnier.