I came up with a good one for DH's birthday. It's traditional for me to bake a Brownies Cockaigne cake with a milk-chocolate bar melted over the top, but he's on a low-sugar diet this year, so I meant to make a quarter recipe and put in as many walnuts as it would stick together.
I'd forgotten to buy baking chocolate, and I dare not buy our annual pound of butter before corn season, so I had to substitute baking cocoa and walnut oil. And it turned out that we'd eaten all the walnuts, but there were plenty of pecans. Glancing back and forth from the bookmarked page in _The Joy of Cooking_ (1964) and the emergency page in _Betty Crocker's New Picture Cookbook_ (1961): Oil a very small loaf pan and put half an inch of chopped pecans in the bottom. Beat one egg and 1/8 teaspoon salt to a froth. Beat in 1/2 cup sugar and a teaspoon of vanilla. Beat in 1/4 cup walnut oil. Drop the whisk and pick up a spoon. Stir in 6 tablespoons of baking cocoa and a quarter cup of whole-wheat bread flour. (Easiest to measure as three fluid ounces of cocoa and two fluid ounces of flour, if you have a one-ounce cup aka coffee measure.) Add pecans, pack into loaf pan, cover surface with pecan halves, bake at 350F maybe half an hour. Check every five minutes after ten or fifteen. -- Joy Beeson http://joybeeson.home.comcast.net/ http://roughsewing.home.comcast.net/ http://n3f.home.comcast.net/ -- Writers' Exchange http://www.timeswrsw.com/craig/cam/ (local weather) west of Fort Wayne, Indiana, U.S.A. where irises are at peak. To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] containing the line: unsubscribe lace-chat [EMAIL PROTECTED] For help, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
