Apple Roses

Pretty Food is a category I enjoy - artistic expression using the medium of food.

I saw many versions of these online, too many to keep track of, but finally nailed it. They are really pretty, and the symbolism of rose and apple matches both Rosh Hashanah and Shavuot. Symbolic foods are especially fun, in my book.

I had never worked with puff pastry before. It is readily available. Buy a two sheet package. It's nice to work with - I was always a little scared of it.

Muffin tin for a dozen - spray well with oil.

Two sheets puff pastry - 1.1 lbs
2-3 very red apples. The skin color is key here.

Blueberries, optional

Lemon juice
cinnamon/sugar mixture
flour for flouring the board you roll them out on
red jam (your choice of flavor) - a few tablespoons, or Rosh Hashanah, honey!
3 T melted butter or margarine (the puff pastry can be parve, if that is an issue). Then these are vegan.

Leave the puff pastry at room temperature ahead of working with for an hour or so.

Core the apples by cutting them in half and scooping out the core, or use a corer. (We have one in Chestertown.)
Slice them as thinly as you can. Some people use a mandolin, though I don't have one.

Put the sliced apples in a dish, cover with water and a little lemon juice so they don't discolor, and microwave for 3-4 minutes. You want them to be very pliable but not mushy. Strain them in a colander.

Flour a board for rolling out a sheet of puff pastry til it's about 12 x 14. Cut it, the shorter way, into 6 strips with a pizza cutter.

Spread the jam over each strip, and sprinkle with the cinnamon/sugar mixture.

Take 6 to seven apple slices and lay them across the top 1/4 of the strip, overlapping and extending beyond the top. Fold over the puff pastry and start rolling . If the apple slices slip out you can keep easing them back in. Flatten a bit and set in the greased muffin tin. 
Sprinkle more cinnamon/sugar on top of each, and spread melted butter or margarine on each to help it to crisp up.

I was running short of apples and threw in a few blueberries. They look really pretty!

Bake at 350 for about 35-40 minutes.

Sprinkle with powdered sugar before you serve, to gild the lily, so to speak!

PS it seems like you could poach the apples in some red wine and color them, which would be even prettier. Plan ahead and try it!

Naomi Klayman's Layered Fruit Salad

I often suggest to people, when they ask what to bring to a meal, to bring fruit salad. It's a lot of work to make!

Naomi brought this, and it was ingenious. The colors and contrast obviously make it beautiful, but the stripes are extra pretty.

She came up with the technique of holding the bowl horizontally, and layering it that way.

If you use a flat or slightly curved bowl/platter, you can do it directly. But her technique is a lot of fun.

I like "pretty food". This presentation qualifies! 

Blackberry Cobbler

I predict we'll be making this often. Micah's blackberry bushes are producing prodigious amounts of lucious blackberries, and their ripening is staggered throughout the summer. It's pretty quick to pick a quart of blackberries in this orchard!

It's from a The HIllbilly Kitchen, a very simple concept!

Spray a flat ovenproof dish. I use a Dansk round metal casserole or a ceramic casserole.

Preheat oven to 375.

Lots of 1s in this recipe.

1 quart berries - splashed with 1 t. vanilla
1 egg
1 stick of butter, melted
1 cup flour/s (any combination - you can include some oats)
1 cup sugar

Place the berries in the pan, splash the vanilla on them.

In a bowl, combine the flour, egg, and sugar until it's crumbly, with a big fork or fingers.

Drop it on the berries.

Pour the melted butter over the top. Sprinkle a little sugar on top (optional).

Bake for about 30 minutes.

Madjula's Sweet Potato Chocolate Mousse

This is from a Indian cooking website, Manjula's Kitchen, I started watching during the Pandemic when I was cooking a lot and up for learning more about Indian techniques. Though this recipe is thoroughly Southern California American. I found home cooking videos were good company. Eyal and Nadav are very down with this dessert! I have made it for them many times, and keep trying different ingredients.

1 large sweet potato, boiled
½ cup coconut milk full fat, chilled - 

    or a 4 oz can of evaporated milk

    or 4 oz (or so) of sweetened condensed milk. THEN ELIMINATE THE SUGAR.

    or 1/3 c. powdered milk + water or milk. Amount is flexible. 1/3 to 1/2 c does it.
4 Tbsp cacao powder
4 Tbsp sugar
2 tsp vanilla extract
¼ tsp cinnamon powder

Peel sweet potato. In a bowl, add cocoa, sugar, coconut milk, vanilla and cinnamon. Use an immersion blender until smooth - it makes the pudding creamier than a potato masher.
Refrigerate for at least an hour before serving.

Serving Suggestions from Madjula
When it is fully blended, scoop the Pudding into the individual serving bowls and refrigerate for an hour. Remove the Pudding from the refrigerator after it has chilled. Serve the Pudding with your choice of topping. I like to garnish with sliced almonds. You may top with fresh fruit, or seeds. Also, chocolate pudding tastes great as a dip or spread.

Pasta Grannies Lemon Pudding

 I love watching Pasta Grannies, a YouTube channel produced by a British food ethnographer, Vicky Bennison, who interviews elder cooks all over Italy to learn their regional specialties.

I never make anything from their brief vignettes but this lemon pudding really spoke to me, and it's delicious. Low sugar - basically eggs and lemon. Double it for this quartet of pictures - baked for Passover 2022 in Chestertown.

3 eggs, separated in bowls you can beat in 

2 to 3 T sugar

1 lemon

option: add 1/2 cup of berries. I tried blueberries and it worked.

Boil the lemon until it is soft, and puree in a food processor. Let it cool. (Since you mix it with the egg yolks, if it's hot it will cook the yolks.)

Spray an 8" springform or souffle pan. The grannies also sugar the pan.

Beat the egg yolks and sugar, and mix in the puréed lemon.

Beat the whites until they form stiff peaks. Fold the whites into the yolks until the batter is uniform in color. Add berries if you like.

Bake at around 365 for a half hour or so in the Breville. Cover with foil if the top browns too fast.

It puffs up and deflates, making a nice concave holder for fresh berries. The nonnas serve it with whipped cream. Not my thing.

(The boiled citrus is like the clementine cake, but this is very light, hence more like a pudding.)

This would be fun to make on Pesach - refreshing, not too hard, and even parve/ gluten free.

Check out Claudia Roden's yogurt cake, which is the same basic idea with the addition of, you guessed it, yogurt. You can also add blueberries.

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Almond Flour (Parve) Brownies

Not vegan, but really good. And super easy. Pesadik! From the King Arthur flour website. These are Abba's favorites and I like them straight from the freezer for an after-dinner shot of fudgey deliciousness.

Heat oven (I use the Breville) to 350. Spray an 8" or 9" square pan. 

DO NOT DOUBLE THE RECIPE IN A LARGER PAN! I tried this in 2023 and it made a big mess - the brownies were not baked through, and impossible to get out of the pan.

5 T melted butter or parve margarine. (1/2 cup if you use vegetable oil, also fine)
1¾ c sugar
½ t salt
1 t vanilla extract
¾ c cocoa powder (Fairtrade!). Dutch-process or natural; sifted if particularly lumpy
3 large eggs
1½ c. almond flour
1 t. baking powder (It's optional and omitted for Pesach)

Melt margarine in large bowl. Add sugar to absorb heat (so it doesn't cook the eggs) and then add everything together with a spoon, whisk, or spatula. It's more like a paste than a batter.

Bake 33-36 minutes. Test with a toothpick.

Easily doubled, but DON'T BAKE IN ONE BIGGER PAN. These are hard to cut neatly. On Passover 2020, I made a double batch and froze a lot. When they were slightly defrosted it was easy to cut them into very small, neat squares. They are so rich, I recommend this strategy!

Gluten-Free Fairtrade Chocolate Covered Strawberries/Figs

These are fun and beautiful. A specialty of Laurie Hertz.

1 lb strawberries, washed and patted dry
(or another small fruit, like fresh figs or prunes)
1 chocolate bar (Equal Exchange Fairtrade preferred)
3 oz parve chocolate chips

Break chocolate bar and place in double boiler over boiling water along with the chips. For some reasons, the bar alone is a little too thin. The chips seem to have a thicker consistency. 

With an induction cooktop, but the chocolate directly in a small frying pan and set to 2 or 3. It will take 5-10 minutes to melt. 

Put a sheet of parchment paper on a flat tin. Dip each strawberry, holding it by the green stem. Shake off excess chocolate.

Set on the wax paper. If you  have extra chocolate, you can dip matzah, prunes, or add slivered almonds + raisins or craisins and make "haystacks". Or just dip matzah!

This was enough to dip 1 lb of strawberries + 1 lb of fresh figs.

It takes about 20 minutes for the chocolate to harden. You can speed it up by refrigerating.

Eyal dipping strawberries - last week of 4!

Chocolate Mousse Pie/Torte

This recipe was a Baker's Chocolate ad in a magazine decades ago. I noticed it would easily adapt to Passover, which it does. You basically whip up a big batch of chocolate mousse and bake half of it. It solidifies and creates a base, and when it cools, you poor in the rest of the mouse, chilled. It is not a hard cake to make, and you could think about making it any old time. Also, while not vegan (8 eggs!), it is gluten-free.

1 pkg. (8 sqs.) semi-sweet chocolate or 8 oz. semi-sweet chocolate chips
1/4 c. water or coffee
8 eggs, separated (use clean eggs with no cracks in shells)
1 1/2 tsp. vanilla (substitute cinnamon on Passover if you can't find vanilla)
2/3 c. sugar

Heat chocolate and water/coffee in a large glass bowl in the microwave in 30 second increments stirring until smooth. If you've switched to an induction, put in the chocolate and water, using a large sauce pan set at 1 or 2, and be patient. Some have a melt setting.

Stir in egg yolks; add vanilla. 

Beat egg whites in a large mixing bowl gradually adding the sugar,  until stiff peaks form, about 3 minutes.

Stir a small amount of the egg white mixture  into chocolate mixture to lighten it; then fold the chocolate mixture into remaining whites.

Pour 4 cups into a well-buttered 9" springform pan. Chill remaining mixture. (you can make it in a pie pan but I think the spring form gives a better presentation.)

Bake at 350 degrees for 25 minutes or until just set. Cool slightly; then chill 1 hour. Center will fall, forming shell.

Spoon chilled chocolate mousse into chilled shell. Chill 3 hours (or overnight.) [Sometimes the mousse just doesn't set; then it is a chocolate sauce!]

It's a cake that could use some garnish - grated pistachios, a dollop of whipped
cream if it's not a meat meal, some berries. Or maybe all three.

Also - this is really good frozen. You could intentionally freeze it, but for us we (surprisingly) had some leftover once and discovered it is great frozen.

Turns out the original recipe, though much more complicated, is Maida Heatter's, in the New York Times, a cake guru of the 70's-80s. Helen Feinberg makes some of her recipes. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1972/05/21/82224385.html?pageNumber=430  The main difference is she says to beat the egg yolks before adding them to the chocolate mixture. 

Chocolate Gingerbread

To go with the Limoncello Sauce.

I found this on line, it was perfect.  I made it when Jed and Anne, serious foodies, came to Philly to meet with Abba before their wedding.

Chocolate Gingerbread

135 grams (1 cup plus 1 tablespoon) all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
2 tablespoons natural cocoa powder
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground ginger
a pinch of ground nutmeg

1/4 teaspoon salt

4 tablespoons unsalted butter
1/2 cup packed brown sugar
1 egg
1/2 cup buttermilk
1/3 cup molasses
2 T flaxseed meal (optional)

2 tablespoons crystalized ginger chips
3/4 cup chocolate, coarsely chopped (mini-chocolate chips are fine)

Preheat the oven to 350F and lightly grease a baking pan (I used two small paper loaf pans, but you can also use an 8 inch round cake pan or a single full sized loaf pan).

Sift together the flour, baking soda, cocoa powder, cinnamon, ginger and salt. Set aside.

Cream the butter & brown sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in the egg. Mix the buttermilk, molasses and flaxseed meal (if using) together, and add all at once to the butter mixture. Don't worry if it looks a bit curdy. Add the flour mixture and mix just until you get a smooth batter. Fold in the crystalized ginger and chocolate chips being careful not to overmix.

Bake until a cake tester comes clean, about 25 to 30 minutes. Cool on a wire rack before serving.

Jane Brody's Cranberry Apple Crisp

This has always been a favorite recipe of mine, and Abba doesn't touch the stuff.  It is a one bowl recipe, you don't need to peel the apples, it is beautiful and very nutritious.  What more could you want?  In Abba's case, "chocolate".  It is vegan, a nice benefit.*

Found this online - it has a double amount
of the oatmeal crumble topping.  You can
also add extra sugar to the basic recipe.

Try to buy a few bags of cranberries when they are in season and just throw them in the freezer.  It is fun to have them for Passover, if they are there that long.

3 cups cranberries (1 12-ounce bag)
2 large apples, unpeeled, cored and chopped thin
½ cup sugar
1 teaspoon cinnamon
¼ cup flour, divided
¾ cup rolled oats (regular or quick)
½ cup chopped walnuts (optional)
3 tablespoons butter or margarine, melted
2 tablespoons brown sugar

Grease a 2 quart shallow baking dish well.

In a large bowl, combine the cranberries, apples, sugar, cinnamon, and 1 tablespoon of flour. 

Transfer the mixture into the greased  baking dish. 

In the same bowl (no need to wash it), combine the remaining flour, brown sugar, oats, and nuts. 

Stir in the melted butter or margarine and mix the ingredients well (the mixture should be crumbly). Sprinkle the oat mixture over the fruit mixture. 

Bake the crisp in a preheated 375 degree oven for 40 minutes or until the crisp is lightly browned. 

*for a gluten free version, I omitted the flour and used ground oats.  It was much runnier but still tastes great.

Limoncello Sauce

We had this at Joyce Norden's, where she served it with fruit sauce, a recipe from the Barefoot Contessa, Ina Gartner.  I thought it would be great over gingerbread brownies, and I was right.

But, also great with fruit salad.  The recipe says to add the limoncello to the fruit salad, but I added it to the yogurt sauce.

~7 ounces plain Greek yogurt
1/3 c. lemon curd
1 T. honey or agave
1/4 t. vanilla
1 to 2 T. limoncello

Mix all the ingredients.

Great with a fruit salad, and over gingerbread or brownies, or even better, gingerbread brownies.  You can have all 3, sauce + fruit + cake.

It was lovely over just plain blueberries.

It is rare that I ask for a recipe, so this is really good.  And easy.

Jane Brody's Blueberry Pie with Bran Crust

Jane Brody has been my cooking guide for 30 years.  Being a reader of her New York Times columns made me attentive when she published her big book.  When Zach was little, she had a cooking show on NPR, which I watched and further bonded with her.  Nina Wacholder gave me her second book, but I haven't used it quite as much.  Her recipes are good, solid, unpretentiously presented.  She has already healthed them up, taken out excess fat, used whole grains, et al, so you don't need to further modify them.  And her explanations and stories are realistic.  She seems like someone you'd want to have coffee with.
At the moment, I am looking for a new guru, since her recipes are now a generation old.  Will keep you posted.  This blueberry pie is a favorite for summer shabbat.  You can see some of my modifications from over the years, including where an errant blueberry stuck to the page.

Crust:
1½ c Bran Buds (or any all-bran cereal)
 1/4 c all-purpose flour
 2 T butter or margarine, melted
 1/2 cup apple or grape juice

Filling:
 4 c fresh blueberries (2 pints), rinsed
 6 T sugar or to taste
 2 T all-purpose flour
 1 T lemon juice
 1/8 tsp nutmeg or to taste
 2 t confectioners' sugar (optional)
Optional: Limoncello Sauce

Directions:
1. Combine the crust ingredients in a medium bowl. Blend the ingredients until they are well mixed and the cereal is partially softened. Press the mixture onto the bottom and sides of a greased 9-inch pie plate or springform pan, leaving no holes. [The springform pan makes for a beautiful presentation; the blueberries hold their shape fine.]

2. Bake the crust in a preheated 375° oven for about 12 minutes or until edges of the crust begin to brown. Let the crust cool on a rack before filling it.

3. To make the filling, in a medium saucepan with a tight cover, combine 2 cups (half) of the blueberries with the sugar, flour, lemon juice, and nutmeg. Cover the pan, and cook the filling, stirring it occasionally, over moderately low heat for about 5+ is minutes, until the sugar is dissolved and the berries begin to burst. Remove the filling from the heat.

4. Stir in remaining uncooked berries, and mix the filling well. Pour the filling into the prepared crust. Let the pie cool on a rack. If desired, sprinkle the top with the confectioners' sugar just before serving.

5. If you like, serve the Limoncello Sauce on the side. It is a scrumptious combination and a great color contrast.

Grandma Fritzie's Pumpkin Pie

My mom made the best pumpkin pie - it was moist and dense and smooth, mmmmmm.  Once I served it when Sharon Strassfeld was over and she was totally horrified, it seemed so Goyish to her. Parve pumpkin pie is ridiculous.  Forget it. I have made Mom's recipe a few times and it's never as good as hers was - maybe it's the crust, the oven, the pan, or just the memory.  But I pass it along.

One 9" unbaked pie shell (she originally made hers from scratch, but in time switched to pie crust sticks that you rolled out.)  Brides really worked at making good pie crusts - it was a mark of achievement. You could also skip the shell and just make it as a custard.

1 c. flour
1/2 t. salt
1/3 c. shortening like Crisco (this is a really old recipe!)
2 to 3 T water.
Mix and roll out flat into a large circle.  A flexible cutting board would be good for this.  Slip into the pie pan.  Flute the edges.  
Mom would take the left over pieces of pastry and sprinkle them with cinnamon and sugar and bake them.  What a treat!  Kind of like kichel.

Pie Filling:
1 can pumpkin* (what size?)
1 can evaporated milk* (what size?)
    *Libby's online "Famous Pumpkin Recipe" says a 12 oz can of evaporated milk and a 15 oz can of  pumpkin)
½ t. salt
2 eggs
1 T. sugar
⅔ brown sugar
1¼ t. cinnamon
½ t. ginger
½ t. nutmeg
¼ t. cloves

Mix all ingredients.  Pour into shell.  Bake at 450° for 15 minutes and 350° for 40-45 minutes.  The pie will be baked through solid and not jiggly.  Let cool.  Good at room temperature, and also good chilled.

Aunt Ruth's Super Easy Ice Box Cookies

Ice Box cookies do sound old-fashioned.  Essentially these were commercialized as slice-and-bake cookies, chilled vacuum-packed dough logs.  These are so simple it seems ridiculous to buy store-bought.  It's originally from Aunt Ceil, Grandpa Sam's oldest sister.  Ruth brought the recipe to Fargo and it became very popular.  Debi Osnowitz makes them with poppy seeds, via Maxine Liszt.  Ruth's are crispy and incredibly simple and good - quite addictive.  I like the poppyseed-less version better.

When I tasted Aunt Ruth's I asked what happened to the poppyseeds, since I remembered that different version. "Betsy, I live in a retirement community. You can't bake with poppyseeds, everyone has diverticulitis!" In other words, what kind of idiot are you?
When Ruth took the tin out of the freezer, I enjoyed a wave of nostalgia - the tin was the same design Mom used for all her wonderful baked goods - though not these cookies.  It was from fruit cake.  Ruth reminisced that Mom had brought over a prune bread, her signature recipe, when Ruth moved to Fargo as a new bride in 1952. (Ruth claims responsibility for my existence, but that's another story.)

Double Recipe

2 c. confectioners sugar
1 lb butter
4 c. flour (sure, put in some ww...)

2/3 c. poppyseeds (optional)

Single Recipe
1 c. confectioners sugar
1/2 lb butter (2 sticks)
2 c. flour

1/3 c. poppyseeds (optional)

Mix the ingredients by hand, like you're working clay, and roll out in three long salami logs.  These cookies don't spread a lot, so I think Ruth's are around 3" thick.
Cover and refrigerate overnight.

Heat oven to 375.
Slice and place on cookie tins - no need to oil them, there's so much butter in these.
Let them cool - they will crisp and harden.
Bake for 15-18 minutes, until they are beautifully browned like the ones above.  Mine didn't brown around the edges - doing some research on that!

Jo's Torte

This recipe is from an old, popular cookbook, Elegant But Easy. It's a lovely, very flexible dessert. Marian Burros, one of the authors, published a plum cake version in the NYTimes and it's legendary - the most popular recipe in NYTImes history. Jo Rosen served it to us, and I have made it dozens of times since. I like to make it in a glass-bottom spring form. I also purchased a bunch of smaller springform pans since it seems like we never actually finish a whole cake these days.

Dough:
1 c sugar
1/2 c butter (one stick) or 1/2 c olive oil
1 c. flour, sifted
1 t. baking powder
2 eggs
salt

Preheat oven to 350.

Cream sugar and butter.  Add flour, baking powder, salt and eggs.  Wet your hands and spread into a 9" springform  or a combination of smaller springform pans, evening the batter with a spatula.  I invested in a nonstick springform pan which works wonderfully. In a pinch you can use a pyrex rectangular pan but it's not as pretty.

Filling:
Fruit: choose one, or mixture of

• 1 pint blueberries - you can add about 25% more blueberries for a deeper dish. Frozen are fine.
• 2020 Pandemic - 1 pint blackberries + 1 ripe peach, baked in a 9" pan so it's higher. Needs at least 45 minutes. Gayanne's favorite is blackberries.
• 2023 Bumper Crop of strawberries in Chestertown version: a pint of sliced strawberries. Take a half pint extra strawberries and use Aunt Sally's trick, blend them with sugar and a little mint, for a sauce. Divine!
• 1.5 lbs Italian plums, pitted and quartered; they are yellow green when fresh but turn purple when baked * - see note at the bottom - substitute 1½ T. brandy for the lemon juice - This is nearly identical to the NYTime version here. There are tons of updates here. 
• As of 2024, Micah planted a fig tree for me (for us, but I asked, I think!). It has been fruiting wonderfully. The figs are small, red, juicy ones. Tried it in this cake today, about 15-20. Chopped them into small pieces and added pumpkin pie filling and some fig jam we had in the refridge (ideas from researching the internet.)
• Sliced, peeled apples
• Sliced apples or pears (2 medium) plus a half bag of cranberries, skip the lemon juice ; add extra sugar
• Sliced peaches 
• 1 can pumpkin + sugar + pumpkin pie spice + egg + soymilk or soy powder
• Sliced, peeled pears (about 3) brushed with a mixture of lemon curd, almond extract, and cinnamon
• or, if nothing is in season, or you need to save time, use a can of sliced apples or canned pie filling.

Lemon juice  (~ half a lemon squeezed, or bottled to taste)
Sugar

Cinnamon - use a heavy hand.

Flour, if fruit is very juicy like plums or peaches.  

Add fruit to top, covering the entire surface.  The fruit will sink into the torte - no need to worry about the aesthetics.

Sprinkle top with a little sugar, some lemon juice; cinnamon, sifting on a little extra flour for very juicy fruits like peaches or plums.  If you're using a two-part torte pan be sure to support it from the edges when you transfer it to the oven.

Bake at 350 for 40 to 45 minutes, til top is nicely browned.  When the cake is cool, detach the outer rim of the pan.
It's an easy recipe to double; it freezes well.
It's nice to have a footed cake plate for this - it's a beautiful presentation.

*Italian, or prune, plums are very juicy.

Abba likes this better than a traditional zwetchgenkuchen, plum open-face pie.
Prune plums are in season around the High Holidays, so it's a tradition, at least in Yekkeh (German Jewish) families, to make them for Rosh Hashanah. I posted some friends' versions here.

New variation: prepare a 1.5x batch in a lasagne pan, and cut like they are bars. So delicious. Bake about 35+ minutes at 350, convection setting.

Chestertown 2021: I found a very similar recipe online, looking for raspberries since we have so so many at 8221. Here's a video of it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgU2Q7SB87c

Basically, you spread half the batter, spread the raspberries on it, and then cover them with dollops of the remaining dough so you can still see the raspberries. 

150 g butter/margarine 150 g caster sugar 150 g ground almonds 150 g self raising flour 1 egg 1 tsp ground cinnamon 220 g raspberries

One-Bowl Banana Cake

I once found this in a magazine and loved the one bowl aspect. It's basically a banana bread but you can bake it flat in a pan so it's more like bars or cake. It is not consistent in how it comes out, probably depending on the moisture and size of the bananas and eggs. It's quicker than banana bread, or at least it seems like it is.

You can add chopped nuts and mini-chocolate chips. Bet it would be good with blueberries!
I like to frost it with straight chocolate chips. 

Hint: when you have ripe bananas, freeze them. You don't even need to put them in anything, they have their own wrappers. Just thaw them a half hour or so before you bake.

2 small to medium ripe bananas

1/3 c. vegetable oil

2 eggs

3/4 c. whole wheat flour

3/4 c. white flour

3/4 c. sugar

1 t. baking powder

1/4 t. baking soda

1/8 t. salt

~1/2 c. mini-chocolate chips (optional)

~1/2 c. chopped nuts, your choice (optional)
Chocolate chips for frosting. At least a few ounces, up to half a bag or so.

Heat oven to 350.
Spray a rectangular pan [this worked perfectly with a 1/4 sheet pan, in the Breville] with oil.

In bowl, mash bananas (a potato masher is perfect), and add eggs and oil, stirring. You could also do this in a blender or food processor and add the nuts, to grind them at the same time.

Add flour, sugar baking powder. baking soda, salt, + nuts and chocolate mini-chips, stirring until mixed. 

Add the banana/egg/oil mixture and stir in until thoroughly mixed. Use a spatula to scrape down the sides.

Bake for about 25 minutes until the kitchen smells great and the cake is lightly browned. You can turn the oven off for the last 5 minutes or so to reduce energy consumption - something I learned in the 1970's and still true today.

About 5 to 10 minutes after taking the cake out of the oven, sprinkle it with chocolate chips. Leave it for a few minutes and, with a spatula, spread the melted chocolate.

After the chocolate has hardened, cut into very small bars.  

Sinfully Scrumptious Toffee

I saw this recipe and made it for Sheva Brachot for Zach and Becca. It is easy and incredibly, sinfully scrumptious. It's a cross between candy and bars.

The recipe was in the Inquirer, but I adapted it some.

1/4 lb saltine crackers (About one sealed sleeve of them).

2 sticks butter = one cup

1 c brown sugar

2 c. semisweet chocolate chips

1/2 c. finely chopped nuts - walnuts, pecans, or almonds

Spray an 11 x 17 jelly roll pan well.

Preheat oven to 375-400

Cover the bottom of the pan with the saltines. You can break them and put the pieces if you have leftover space. Tighter is fine.

In a medium sauce pan combine butter and sugar. Head over medium heat to boiling, stirring often. Boil 3 minutes without stirring. Pour over crackers and spread evenly. Don't worry about the mixture going under the crackers.

Bake in the oven for about 5 minutes. They will be bubbling.

Take out and sprinkle the top evenly with the chocolate chips. After about 5 minutes, take a flat spatula or knife and spread the melting chips. Pour and finely chopped nuts into the melting chocolate, pressing down.

Cool completely. When it's set and hardened, it's not hard to pull apart. The saltines work as perforation. You can freeze these.

I believe you can substitute matzah and do this at Passover.

from the Inqy's version:

Per serving: 236 calories, 2 grams protein, 25 grams carbohydrates, 19 grams sugar, 15 grams fat, 21 milligrams cholesterol, 109 milligrams sodium, 2 grams dietary fiber.

Of course, what is a serving of this?!