Happy Thanksgiving and Cranberry Salad

This is very late obviously, but I am still trying to catch up from the semester.  My husband and I hosted Thanksgiving this year for his family and our extended family.  He made the turkey (isn't it beautiful) and I made mashed potatoes, wild rice stuffing, green beans, sauteed carrots, cheesecake and pumpkin bread with marscapone.  I also made the cranberry gelatin mold, but since it is my own creation I will share more on that later.

We have a lot of food allergies/needs so it is always a bit of a challenge to meet all of those.  My goal was to try to make as many items available to as many people as possible.  I managed to allow everyone to get all but one or two items.  The only place I didn't succeed was the cranberry gelatin as vegetarian gelatin is not consistent, and I ran out of time to troubleshoot.  Things turned out well though; we had a good variety as well as leftovers but not so many that I felt like people didn't like what was made.   The stuffing was a big hit, gluten-free, and vegetarian when I changed it to vegetable stock.  It also worked pretty well in the crockpot as long as I kept it on low and added extra liquid.  This was good as I had run out of stove/oven space. 

I think I may have found my Thanksgiving menu finally.  I like tradition, and so I wanted to find a menu that I could really master over the years.  I thought it should be interesting though.

 For our family, pie is always a losing battle. I have to make 4 pies for 8 people in order to ensure that everyone has something they like and are not allergic too.  Cheesecake works for everyone and pumpkin bread helped make it feel more festive.  They are pretty heavy desserts, but it is the least amount of work.

My family never really did the whole "cranberry" thing with thanksgiving.  I think at most we had the canned stuff.  I really love molded gelatins but find most of them unpalatable, so this was my big challenge to myself.  I did some reading online and combined elements from a couple different recipes.  What I came up with worked pretty well and I am overall pleased. 

 
I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving and that you have much to be thankful for.  I know I do.

Spiced Orange Cranberry Gelatin

1 bag  (12 oz.) cranberries

½ cup  sugar

1 navel orange, peeled, sectioned and chopped (zest the orange first)

1-1/2 cups  boiling water

2 pkg.  (3 oz each) JELL-O Cranberry Flavor Gelatin, or any red flavor (I used cranberry and raspberry -they only had one cranberry left at the store)

1 tsp.  or 1 packet of mulling spice

1-1/2 cups  cold water

1 Tbsp.  lemon juice

 

PLACE cranberries in food processor container; cover. Process until finely chopped; place in medium bowl. Add sugar, chopped orange segments and zest; mix well.

PREP a 6-cup mold with cooking spray.  Add fruit mixture.

BRING water with the mulling spice to a boil. Strain out the spices and stir boiling water into dry gelatin in large bowl at least 2 minutes until gelatin is completely dissolved. Stir in cold water and lemon juice.

ADD gelatin to mold.  Stir gently so the fruit is distributed throughout the gelatin.  Alternately, you can allow the gelatin to set for an hour and then add the fruit, but I wanted to go to bed so I did them all at once.

REFRIGERATE 6 hours or until firm. Unmold. Garnish as desired. Store leftover salad in refrigerator.  If the mold does not release, place in a dish of warm water to allow the mold to expand slightly and the gelatin to release from the sides.

Yellow Cake Mix Expermients or Uranium Pancakes

I have a confession to make.  I don’t like pancakes.  I really, really want to like pancakes.  It is cake you can have for breakfast.  It is portable cake that you can cover in all sorts of other goo.  How can I not like pancakes?

But the thing is that pancakes aren’t really cake.  The ratios of fat to starch and dry to liquid as well as the variance in leavening really make this an entirely different animal.  But, I order pancakes expecting them to taste like yellow cake and they never do.  I have tried all sorts of variations and recipes, and while I have made some fairly tasty pancakes, they don’t ever taste like what I want them to taste like…yellow cake.

My husband and I were discussing this, and he asked me the question that has been staring me in the face all this time…Why don’t I just make pancakes out of cake batter?  He has a point.  I mean really what is the worst that can happen.  If it doesn’t work, I can just pour the rest of the batter in a cake pan and throw it in the oven.  I would still have cake, and I may even discover a pancake I would actually like.

I decided I would do this with a cake mix because I wasn’t certain I wanted to invest the time it takes to make the cake batter from scratch.  As mentioned above, I am also aware of the differences between cake and pancake batter.   For one thing, cake batter is significantly thinner than pancake batter.  I really didn’t want to have cake batter running all over my griddle and the counter and the floor, etc when I poured into the pan.  

I opted to do a little research into the differences and see if there is a way that I could balance the batter without losing the yellow cake essence.  I started looking at recipes in my trusted sources (Alton Brown and Joy of Cooking)*.    Pancakes require a starch (all-purpose flour or a blend of flours  or what have you), some sort of fat, some sort of liquid, a leavening agent, and a binder (well and a flavoring agent but that really isn’t all that necessary with pancakes).  Cakes have similar requirements.  In the end though, the method by which heat is applied to each to create the chemical reactions necessary for either to turn out as intended is drastically different.  So the ratios and types of ingredients is going to change.

Cakes rise because of the leavener (generally some combination of baking soda and baking powder) ; however because of the slower cooking time, they don’t need as much as the pancakes do.  This is because the other thing that makes them rise is the steam that builds up inside the cakes.  The starch helps hold these pockets of steam until the protein in the eggs heats and binds together forming a spongy network that holds it shape even after the steam evaporates (I couldn’t find my chem paper for college a few years ago so I am probably not explaining that entirely correct).

Pancakes heat much faster.  It is the reason pancakes don’t use butter.  Butter is where the water to create the steam often comes from in cake recipes.  Butter melts too fast in pancakes so you end up with fat and no water (it already evaporated) before the pockets have formed.  Essentially it’s a great big mess, and pancakes really need to hold their own shape while heating.   The steam thing happens differently so more chemical leavening is required to get the necessary rise in the shorter-hotter cooking time.  Many of the ingredients also need to do a little double duty.  For instance many pancake recipes call for buttermilk as it adds fat and moisture at the same time and also helps with the leavening process.

While I understand the process, neither my chemistry or my algebra skills are really strong enough to determine what exactly I needed to do to give this experiment its best possible hope for success.  And, then I remembered that most ideas have been probably already been thought by someone else before you.  In the age of almost ubiquitous internet, someone has also probably blogged about it.

And it’s true.  The sites I had read confirmed my suspicions from above and provided some handy ratios.  I wasn’t willing to invest in a grocery store run for experimental breakfast, so I took their ratios and combined them with what I had in my pantry to come up with the following:

1 yellow cake mix

1-1.5 cups flour

Almost 1 tsp more of baking soda, about a tablespoon of sugar, and some extra salt (maybe a pinch or two)

2 cups vanilla almond milk

½ cup sour cream (I had some I wanted to use up)

2 eggs

A splash of vanilla

Cake mix is really clumpy and I ended up needing to use a hand mixer to get this to break down.  I worried this would over process the batter a bit, but it needed to be done.  Sifting might be a better option.

It actually worked pretty well.  I ended up with pancakes that tasted like yellow cake.   

These are a little too sweet to really be a breakfast food but they aren’t a bad snack.  It makes A LOT of batter so I ended up pouring the rest in a bundt pan with some chocolate chips and popping it in the oven.  I am not sure that these have converted me to a pancake eater, but I certainly had an enjoyable scientific experiment this morning.

*Yes, it is bad science to add too many variables.  I am however not looking for publication in a scientific journal or a prize for innovations in cake making, so I am not really troubled by this