When your little it seems as if you have to wait forever for Christmas Day to arrive.
Not so much when your a grown up.
And yet today, I had my fair share of it.
Instead of watching the skies for Santa's sleigh however, I was obsessively checking out the windows for snowflakes. We had been promised twelve inches of snow but it seemed to take forever and a day before the first few pitiful spits of it started coming down. Even then it was very slow going and my patience was wearing thin and what with all my running back and forth to the window I thought I might be at risk of wearing thin myself. It seemed nourishment was in order and so I set out to do some baking of the non-holiday variety and whip up a Lazy Daisy Cake.
Now one of the best things about a Lazy Daisy Cake (a.k.a Lightning Cake) is that it is
extremely quick (like lightning!) to make up.
This is a very good thing when you are running low on patience.
Best thing #2 about Lazy Daisy Cake is that it has the most amazingly easy and delicious topping in the world. Nothing more than butter, cream, and brown sugar...YUM!
And best thing #3 about making up a Lazy Daisy Cake is that it gives me the opportunity to spend time with my favorite cookbook of all time, The Fanny Farmer Cookbook.
Not just any Fanny Farmer Cookbook mind you, it has to be the eleventh edition, have a gold cover, and, if your lucky, messages from the past!
My copy used to belong to a woman named Olive (love that name!) who had a friend named Polly (ditto!) I know this because of an envelope I found tucked in the pages containing a brief correspondence between the two and a shared recipe. Oh, and according to the note they also shared some opera glasses...
Olive appears to have been quite organized as documented in her menu plans.
She loved to edit recipes and....
...leave little notes here and there!
And her very own personalized index, what a great idea!
In the 25 minutes it took the cake to bake off I had just enough time for a quick visit with Olive. Combine that with a wipe down of the dishes and by the time I looked out the
window again the snow was flying!
Should you be interested in some non-holiday baking of your own....
Lightning Cake (Hot Milk Cake)
Small, delicious and easy. Excellent
either frosted or with a special topping
as in the recipe for Lazy Daisy Cake.
Set the oven at 375. Butter a square pan
8 by 8 by 2 inches.(Except I use a round cake pan!)
Beat until thick
-2 eggs
-1 teaspoon vanilla
Beat in a little at a time
-1 cup sugar
Sift together and stir in
-1 cup flour (For gluten free try Betty Crocker's Gluten Free Flour)
-1 teaspoon baking powder
-1/4 teaspoon salt
Heat until butter melts
-1/2 cup milk
-1 tablespoon butter
Stir into the first mixture and beat 1
minute or until smooth. Pour into the
pan.
Bake about 25 minutes.
Lazy Daisy Cake. Leave the baked cake
in the pan. Mix 3 tablespoons melted butter,
3 tablespoons brown sugar, 2 tablespoons
cream and 1/2 cup chopped nuts or coconut.
(No nuts or coconut for us!)
Spread over the cake. Put under the broiler and
cook until the topping is lightly browned.
Watch carefully and turn so the topping browns evenly.
