Rolls, product placement, and a gift in every box!

This week’s post was inspired by a small 144-page hardcover cookbook titled All About Home Baking and published by the Consumer Service Department of the General Foods Corporation in June 1936. 

It’s a great little book that features a black and yellow plaid cover and includes loads of black and white pictures, as well as several full-colour plates. All About Home Baking begins with a word from, well, someone in the Consumer Service Department. The only person actually named in the book can be found on the very last page, 144, crediting the photographs to an H. I. Williams. Intrigued, I conducted an extensive search for the said person and eventually discovered that the H. I. stood for Harney Isham Williams, or Hi Williams for short. Turns out, Mr. Williams was one of the leading food and advertising photographers of his day. One of his photographs, titled Chocolate Chip Cookie, is part of the Metropolitan Museum of Fine Art’s collection in New York City:

All About Home Baking begins with an introduction titled “It’s a Wise Woman Who Knows Her Baking Rules” and ensues with “Have you ever wished you were blessed with a ‘born knack for baking’? Stop your wishing! There's no such thing to be had! Baking skills is made and not born.” Well thank goodness for that. I can imagine the sigh of relief from the thousands of homemakers across America, finally let off the hook for over kneading their dough or (dear heavens) using the wrong ingredient. (“See Ralph! You’re mother’s wrong! Not EVERYBODY is born with a knack for baking! Says right here!”) No, as the book points out “it takes no special gift, no magic touch, to work wonders with a mixing bowl… Here, in this book, there are tested ways to perfect baking. Whether you're a beginner or an old hand at the game, the things you learn here will make your baking better, easier, and more fun!” And isn’t that what every good homemaker wanted – more fun in the kitchen?

The introduction goes on to describe some basic rules: be orderly, use good tools, and choose good ingredients. In fact, a whole chapter is devoted to explaining the type of baking powder, flour, and other ingredients required to achieve success, and that it is imperative homemakers use the exact ingredients listed in the recipes. The book features “23 Easy Picture Lessons – The Keys to Baking Success” that consist of pictorial illustrations of the steps and tips to achieve some “basic” recipes. As I view the photos, I can just imagine Hi adjusting his camera, suggesting “Miss Turner” tilt the bowl ever so slightly to her left. No, her other left. Though upon further study, the hands do appear to be rather manly and so it may have been a “Mr. Turner” who beat the eggs for 10 minutes (can you imagine?), then beat in sugar gradually. The initial lessons are followed by “Other Recipes Made Like…” whatever was just made, so after mastering the Calumet One-egg Cake, you can try the Raisin Cup Cakes or the Boston Cream Pie which uses the same techniques. Very clever indeed.

Flipping through the pages seeking something to bake, a full-colour image caught my eye and 72 pages later, I came upon the recipe: Quick Cinnamon Rolls. What a great idea for a Sunday morning! 

I skimmed the ingredients to make sure I had everything on hand. Well, I had flour, but not Swans Down Cake Flour, nor did I have Calumet Baking Powder but though the book warned me that NOT using these ingredients could result in disappointment, I went ahead and pulled out my food stuffs. 

But as I reached for my brown sugar and headed to the other cupboard for cinnamon, I couldn’t help but wonder about the brands mentioned in the recipes. So I ventured over to the computer and let my fingers do the tapping. General Foods Corporation…

We go back to 1895 when Charles William Post created the Postum Cereal Company. Ironically, his first product was not cereal but a roasted, cereal-based beverage called Postum.  The drink was a combination of wheat-grain, bran, and molasses, and was marketed as a healthy alternative to caffeine - one that could be fed to children. Mr. Post was an astute businessman who believed in advertising and marketing. By 1905, he was spending $400,000 a year on advertising and his Postum Cereal Company had earned more than $10 million dollars. That’s a lot of cereal. Post died in 1914, but he instilled this belief in his daughter Marjorie Merriweather Post who took over the business upon his death. Six years later, Marjorie, a smart cookie herself, married Edward F. Hutton, a Wall Street broker. Some of you may remember the 70s television ads “When E.F. Hutton talks, people listen.” In fact, he was the founder.

In 1925, the Postum Cereal Company began buying companies right and left (the Jell-O Company, the Minute Tapioca Company, Walter Baker (chocolates), Richard Hellmann Inc. (mayo), the Cheek-Neel Coffee Company), including… wait for it – Igleheart Brothers Inc., the makers of Swans Down cake flour AND the Calumet Baking Powder Company. Oh, and I forgot to mention the Diamond Crystal salt brand. (The recipe doesn’t specify this specific brand, but you'll note the can in the colour plate – the first product placement?) Four years later, Postum Cereal Company would become the General Foods Corporation. This led me to wonder if the average homemaker knew back then that the products promoted in this book were actually brands owned by the General Foods Corporation. Probably not any more than today’s homemaker knows that the body soap she uses (Dove), the soup she serves (Lipton), the mayonnaise she spreads on her BLT (Hellmann’s), or the ice-cream she feeds her children (Ben & Jerry’s) are all brands owned by Unilever – the same people who bring you the household cleaning product Vim, “because you’re home is for living, not just for cleaning!”

Back to our recipe. While researching online, I happened to come across an image that closely resembled the colour plate on page 11 in my book, the one of the cinnamon rolls. It looked very similar, but not quite the same. The exact same items were there but laid out differently, and the paper shelf liner was a different colour and cut. It was my daughter Rachel who noticed the difference in the rolls. The colour plate in my 1936 edition shows 16 rolls (scroll back up), even though the recipe specifies it makes 12. The other colour plate I discovered online is from the first edition published in 1933, the second printing, and shows 9 rolls. The recipe calls for an 8 x 8 square pan. My guess is that the good folks in the Consumer Service Department failed to notice this discrepancy in the book’s first edition, and upon discovering their error, realized that the recipe did not produce 12 rolls but rather nine. I like to imagine Hi being called in to re-shoot the nine rolls, tongue clicking while a cigarette dangled from the corner of his mouth. Sorry, that would be more fitting for a private eye, not a food photographer. AND I’m sure the people at General Foods would not have approved. I digress yet again.  

Quick Cinnamon Rolls it was. Well, quick they were, because I used my KitchenAid mixer with the paddle attachment to cut the shortening into the flour mixture and melted the butter in my microwave. But I did get distracted just long enough to over beat the dough, thus resulting in a denser roll. My bad. I also didn’t add currants or raisins because my daughter doesn’t like them.  All in all, not bad for a first attempt, and tasty none the less. 

Next time, I’ll be sure to keep an eye on the mixing and double the amount of butter and brown sugar in the pan to obtain a larger amount of caramel topping. Cause you can never have too much caramel topping. And maybe I’ll add some nuts. Walnuts or pecans… 

As a side note (aside from my usual digressions), my edition of All About Home Baking arrived with an added perk - a Toytown card tucked in between pages 70 and 71. These cards were inserted in boxes of Nabisco Shredded Wheat to encourage future purchases. The card in question, No. 16 Roadside Stand, was part of a series of 36 that displayed a building or part of a village that could be cut out and coloured. My research tells me the card dates from 1946. 

"Ask Mother to get more Nabisco Shredded Wheat so you can get all 36,

including a layout of the complete town."  

Have a great week!

A gem of a story, with liner notes

The inspiration for this post came in the form of a vintage photo of paper cup cake liners. After discovering that the cup cake was a distant cousin of the pound cake (see last post), the image of those faded little pleated paper cups got me wondering and so I let my fingers do the tapping. 

What we call cup liners are also referred to as paper cases, patty pans, and baking cups, depending on where you call home. So the story goes that “in the beginning”, cupcakes were baked in individual pottery cups, ramekins, moulds, or gem pans or irons. A gem pan? I had to look that up. According to the web, a gem is a type of bread, much like a muffin. But it's the pan itself that appears to be behind the name, since it looks like the facets of a gem. The pan is made up of compartments that can hold about a quarter cup of dough and is traditionally made of cast iron. Here's an example:

You’ll note that the "cups" have cut outs between them, which allowed for even heat distribution, but were still connected so that the heat could be transmitted through the iron. I suspect it was just a matter of time before one clever cook substituted bread batter for cake batter and discovered the cup cake. In fact, the earliest reference to a “cup cake” is apparently found in Amelia Simmons book, American Cookery (1796) where she mentions a “cake to be baked in small cups.” According to the Food Timeline Web site, the earliest mention of a cup cake recipe was found in Eliza Leslie’s cookbook Seventy-five Receipts, for Pastry, Cakes, and Sweetmeats, published in Boston in 1828. Once again, note the author credit, “By a lady of Philadelphia”.  

Did you know that the first edition of Sense and Sensibility in 1811 also was authored “By a lady”? Though it’s my understanding that Jane Austen chose to remain anonymous. Fascinating.

But I digress. So we can see how muffin/cupcake pans evolved over time. But when did the paper liner come into being, and why? Prior to liners, bakers had to use oil or fat and flour to ensure their cakes did not stick to pans.  As I conducted my online research, I found a multitude of sites that repeated the exact same information: “paper liners did not come into use until after WWI when the James River Corporation began manufacturing the liners on machines that had been making artillery shells just a few years before.” Yet upon further research, I was unable to validate this claim. It sounds very romantic, ammunition to cupcake liners, but I’m not convinced. 

According to the Food Timeline Web site, the paper cup was introduced to serve food with – not bake in. One excerpt I came across recommended homemakers not waste their money purchasing muffin pans but rather, use paper cups instead which could be set directly “on the oven grill.” May be convenient, but any wise homemaker back then would have opted for the $0.59 pan (on sale), rather than keep paying $0.15 for a box of 85 liners. Unless the goal was making an impression at the next PTA meeting.

In my attempt to date cups, I did find a US federal trademark registration for Betty Brite paper baking cups filed in 1955 by the American Lace Paper Company of Milwaukee.

These baking cups were manufactured by the Frank M. Sayford Company in Connecticut. Unfortunately, I was unable to date them. These were "scorch resistant". How convenient!

These lovelies are Barbie brand “treated” paper cups that I found listed at the Black Oak Vintage Shop on Etsy. I tried finding information on the Barbie brand but got nowhere. That's not true. Lots of plastic but no paper.  

I did come across a fascinating article called “The Golden Age of Patty Pans” written by Peter Sheen which describes the patty pans (paper cups) in the La Trobe Collection housed at the State Library of Victoria in Australia. The article refers to the golden age of the paper cups as being from 1930 to 1950, so this dates the cupcake liner back to 1930, at least down under.

Ultimately, paper baking cups were introduced to save cleaning time and provide a sanitary way of handling individual cakes. They also help keep cup cakes moist.

So after all this research, I decided to make the cupcake recipe found in Miss Leslie’s 1828 cookbook:

Cup Cake

5 eggs.Two large teacupfulls of molasses.The same of brown sugar, rolled fine.The same of fresh butter.One cup of rich milk.Five cups of flour, sifted.Half a cup of powdered allspice and cloves.Half a cup of ginger.

Cut up the butter in the milk, and warm them slightly. Warm also the molasses, and stir it into the milk and butter: then stir in, gradually, the sugar, and set it away to get cool.Beat the eggs very light, and stir them into the mixture alternately with the flour. Add the ginger and other spice, and stir the whole very hard. Butter small tins, nearly fill them with the mixture, and bake the cakes in a moderate oven.

Half a teacupful of molasses. Yes, I measured everything with the teacup.

After stirring very hard, I baked them at 350º F but had to keep an eye on them because the recipe failed to provide a baking time. Did you notice that the recipe called for cloves? Well, I just happened to have on hand a bottle of cloves passed down from my mother who passed it down from her mother, my grandmother Alice Gervais Bouffard. And as you can see, the bottle is not empty so I just HAD to use a couple of sprinkles to “vintage” up my recipe.

Also passed down from “Memeille Bouffard” is the Bake-Rite waffle texture muffin pan. So in the end, I didn’t use paper cups because I'm almost certain neither did Miss Leslie. And this is what the final product looked like:

I may have overcooked them a tad. They smelled real nice, though - molasses and spices - but they were, let's just say, rather dense. What I can't figure out is why they all had an indent on the bottom, like some wine bottles do. I wonder if my vintage cloves had anything to do with it... or maybe the pan.

Oh well, so ends our misadventure in vintage baking this week. You win some, you lose some.

If anyone needs hockey pucks, I've got a few scented ones you can have.

Bonne semaine !

You CAN have your cake and it too!

This week at culinary school, we were introduced to the “gâteau quatre-quarts”. The literal translation of this is “four-quarters” or “four-fourths” cake. I thought this a very strange name for a cake, though names for other French pastries have befuddled me in the past. Like the “opéra” (not related to anything musically inclined), the “éclair” (has nothing to do with an electrostatic discharge), or the “mille feuille” (seriously, is ANYONE going to count them???) But I digress.     

The “gateau quatre-quarts”, explained my pastry instructor, is named for the fact that the recipe is made up of equal parts of four ingredients: flour, sugar, butter, and eggs. In fact, it’s the weight of the eggs that determines the weight of the other ingredients. So if you have 100 g of eggs, you need an equal amount of flour, sugar, and butter. Apparently, you can change the quantities to reduce or increase the recipe and, as long as you use equal proportions of every ingredient, your cake will come out perfect every time. (Must test this theory one day.) If you think about it, it’s probably the simplest cake in the world to make. So it wasn’t until the darn thing was pulled out of the oven that I realized the “quatre-quarts” was in fact… wait for it… a pound cake! 

So THAT’S how you make a pound cake! Honestly, I’d never made one until then. This led me to go in search of the cake’s origins, and what I found was pretty interesting, and confusing. While some sources indicate that the quatre-quarts originated in Brittany, a region in the north-west of France, others swear the pound cake is a British invention dating back to the early 1700s. Here's a book written "By a lady": 

A recipe for pound cake can be traced back to the book Art of Cookery published in 1747. The "lady" turned out to be Hannah Glasse, confirmed as the author by historian Madeline Hope Dodds in 1938 - 191 years later! Until then, botanist John Hill had taken credit for writing the book. We've come a long way, haven't we... And speaking of coming a long way, was I glad to have my electric mixer for this job. Yes, I cheated. And so will you. Glasse's recipe instructs us to hand beat the batter for one hour!  (see entry below) Considering the lack of any leavening agent, this was to ensure enough air was introduced into the batter. Thank you, KitchenAid!

 (Notice the long s that looks like an f in "...wooden fpoon...")

According to another source, Linda Stradley’s Web site “What's Cooking America”, the first cookbook written by an American and published in the US is the 1796 cookbook American Cookery: or, The Art of Dressing Viands, Fish, Poultry and Vegetables, and the Best Modes of Making Puff-pastes, Pies, Tarts, Puddings, Custards and Preserves, and all kinds of Cakes, from the Imperial Plumb to plain Cake by Amelia Simmons, an American orphan which included two recipes for pound cake. The book was printed by Hudson and Goodwin "For the author" which suggests that Simmons paid for the printing herself. 

While back in France, the 1893 edition of the Larousse dictionary refers to the quatre-quarts as a “gâteau domestique”. The suggestion is that the cake was made and consumed by the less educated. In the days when so many people could not read, the convention of using equal parts would have made recipes much easy to remember. I suppose that’s also the logic behind a relative of the pound cake – the 1234 cake – and naming cakes for their measurements: 1 cup butter, 2 cups sugar, 3 cups flour, and 4 eggs. Another relative of the pound cake is the cupcake. Two theories appear to exist behind the origin of the cupcake; the name refers to the amount of ingredients used (a cup of…); or that the cake was baked in a cup. It would seem that small pound cakes baked in individual-portion pans were quite popular in the 18^th century, including “Queen Cakes”. It wasn’t until the Industrial Revolution in the early 1900s that artificial leaveners, baking powder/soda, were used to achieve a lighter cake.

According to my culinary instructor, the “quatre-quart” was a staple during wartime, since it contained butter and sugar and hence provided soldiers with the much-needed energy to battle on. The men would divide their pieces and wrap them in individual portions to nibble on as they travelled. Of course, I thought. That makes sense. The fat in the butter, the energy of the sugar, the protein of the eggs. So I went online and looked for something to validate this claim. Now, which war was he talking about? WWI? WWII? The Vietnam War? The Seven Years War maybe? And as I scanned pages and pages of links, I began getting a little overwhelmed with recipes and under whelmed with facts. I did come across several American Civil War pound cake recipes but nothing to validate my instructor’s claim. In fact, it would appear that the pound cake literally disappeared during WWII because butter and sugar were being rationed.

This Canadian ad for Magic Baking Powder from 1944 featured a recipe for pound cake that replaced the rationed sugar with honey, claiming it sought to “...protect your precious ingredients...”

I love vintage ads. Oh, and here's another interesting tidbit I came across. Did you know Van Halen recorded a song called Poundcake in 1991? The Web has a number of interesting discussions as to the song’s meaning. Baking wasn't one of them. But once again, I digress.

I did come across some fascinating Web sites that linked pound cakes to US army rations. What the army once referred to as C-Rations, individually prepared wet rations, was replaced in 1958 with the MCI – Meal, Combat, Individual ration. The latter included pound cake, a favourite part of the MCI, according to one site.  It was available in the D-2 (Cake) unit, along with fruitcake and cinnamon-nut roll. D stood for “dessert”. 

In spite of the fact that the traditional pound cake has but four ingredients, a gazillion recipes and variations can be found on the Web. These are normally baked in loaf or bundt pans, but I did come across round layer varieties as well. Several types of frostings have also been developed for added taste. And as mentioned on several sites, and to which I can attest, the “quatre-quarts” tastes even better the next day.

While modern recipes have added baking powder and vanilla or other essences, I chose to recreate the original recipe: I used four eggs, which weighed in at 198 g. Hence, my recipe included 198 g of sugar, 198 g of flour, and 198 of butter.

I creamed the sugar and eggs together in a stainless steel bowl until light and fluffy, added the butter (softened in the microwave), and folded in the flour. I then poured the batter into a greased loaf pan and baked it in preheated oven at 180 C (350 F) for one hour. 

Because I chose a longer loaf pan, my cake didn't rise as much but in no way did it affect the appearance or taste. Here it is in all its buttery goodness!

I'm acutally surprised at how tasty it is, even though it has no salt or vanilla!

The waffle-textured pan used in this recipe is a Bake-Rite Tinware, 210.

If anyone knows what the number means, let me know. 

So pound for pound, a cake, by any other name, is still a cake. And after 300 years, this recipe has survived the test of time. It really does take the cake (ba-dum-bum!)

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to have my cholesterol levels checked. For you know what they say, an ounce of prevention is worth a... pound of cure. 

Bon appétit!

Got Bisquick? Let's party!

Now where were we... ah yes. Chocolate. I ended my last post suggesting that my next post would involve chocolate and my friend Betty even said "please", so I thought I'd dig around and find something from one of our most beloved fictional homemakers, Betty Crocker.   

I didn't know this, and suspect you didn't either. The name Betty Crocker was developed in 1921 by the Washburn Crosby Company (now General Mills) to personalize responses to consumer questions. The company chose the name Betty because it was "viewed as a cheery, all-American name." It was paired with the last name Crocker, in honour of William Crocker, a Washburn Crosby Company director. The name was actually created by Marjorie Husted who was a home economist. Which makes me think of my home ec classes at Massey-Vanier... Remember Betty?

But I digress. As I searched through the Interweb for one of Ms. Crocker's recipes featuring chocolate, I noticed on more than one occasion that certain recipes contained Bisquick. Bisquick in cookies? I keep a box handy to make quick biscuits and have topped my chicken pot pies with the mix, but it would never have occurred to me to use it in a dessert. How clever of General Mills to have incorporated the mix in Betty's repertoire!

So intrigued by this that I continued my research and discovered Betty Crocker’s Bisquick Party Book published in 1957 by General Mills and its "97 gay new ideas and recipes. . . for coffee time through late T.V. . . .from appetizers to desserts!" Which begs the question, why 97? Why not 100? Betty appears to be mum on the subject. In fact, I'd never have used Bisquick and party in the same sentence, but I'm open to anything in this blog.  

So when did Bisquick hit the grocer's aisles? Well, dear reader, it was in 1930 after General Mills sales executive Carl Smith enjoyed a freshly baked biscuit one night while travelling on a Southern-Pacific train heading to San-Francisco. Surprised with the biscuit at such a late hour, he found his way to the galley and questioned the black chef* who was happy to share his secret: he'd pre-mixed the batter (lard, flour, baking powder, and salt) and stored it in the train's ice box before departure. After a few adjustments, General Mills marketed the idea and Bisquick became the first baking mix to hit grocery shelves. Once again proving the point that necessity IS the mother of invention. 

*According to Business Without Borders: The Story of General Mills by James Gray). Every other source I came across referred to a train chef but never mentioned the man's colour. I wanted to give credit where credit's due. 

Before choosing a recipe, I checked my cupboards to see what I had on hand in an effort to save hubby a trip to the store. (You're welcome, dear). With the basics on hand, I let my fingers do the tapping and came across Fudge Squares which met my two requirements: 1) finding a recipe with chocolate and 2) find a recipe with more than five ingredients. This one had six.

Turns out there's no fudge here. But this was a one-bowl job. I melted the chocolate and butter in the same bowl, my large yellow Pyrex mixing bowl (you know the one), then added the sugar, eggs, Bisquick, and chopped nuts. I did cheat by using parchment paper instead of greasing the bowl, so saved myself the clean-up there. I did use my Mom's vintage aluminum Wear-Ever square cake pan which still looks great and which has served me well over the years. 

Since discovering parchment paper at culinary school, I use it all the time. I could have cut the paper but it's the width of my roll and what was I going to do with a two inch piece? (I'm open to suggestions). 

The cake was cut into 16 squares. We did the math and each square equals 168 calories.

This bite would have cost me 42 calories. That is if I'd stuck to just one bite... 

Now these squares are not brownies per se, but more cake-like in texture and much less sweeter. I'd say they'd be the perfect companion to vanilla ice-cream and Hershey's chocolate sauce. A quick mention, the plate featured in the photos is Royal Doulton bone china, the Evesham pattern (H4821) made between 1942-59.

So as the box says: Bisquick is for pancakes, biscuits & more! 

Hope you enjoyed this adventure as much as I enjoyed bringing it to you. 

Be safe and have a great week!

Groats, gruel, gruau... it's all oatmeal to me!

So here goes. My first vintage recipe, found in The Healthy Life Cook Book by Florence Daniel, and published in 1915.

The Second Edition of the book features a preface by Mrs. Daniel that goes like this: "This little cookery book was originally published for that 'straighter' sect of food-reformers who abstain from the use of salt, yeast, etc." Having no clue as to what "food reformers" were, I let my fingers do the tapping and researched the term only to discover that it applied to vegetarians. For some strange reason, I somehow never considered that vegetarians might have existed back 1915.  This led me to read up on a brief history of vegetarianism which I found fascinating.


Back to our recipe. Our esteemed author called for Robinson's "Patent" Groats. What is a groat and why would it need a patent, I asked myself. I assumed this was oatmeal, considering that oatmeal was part of the recipe's name, but to be sure, I once again let my fingers do the tapping and found that groats are “hulled, or hulled and crushed grain of various kinds, chiefly oats, but also wheat, barley, and maize." According to the article, one was supposed to dissolve them in water or milk and they were "considered excellent nourishment for mothers, babies and invalids." I suddenly recalled a scene in one of my favourite movies, Oliver, based on Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist, where the boys in a workhouse were fed gruel at every meal. "More food please!" Poor Oliver. I find it interesting that "groats" sound like the French "gruau" for oatmeal. But once again, I digress.

For those not familiar with the term "castor" or "caster" sugar, it's simply super-fine granulated sugar. The term is commonly used in British cook books.

The recipe itself is very simple and includes but a few ingredients, and not surprising, no salt. 

Fine Oatmeal Biscuits

• 2 ounces flour
• 3 1/2 ounces Robinson's "Patent" Groats
• 2 ounces castor sugar
• 2 ounces butter
• 2 eggs

Cream the butter and sugar, add the eggs, then the flour and groats, which should be mixed together. Roll out thin and cut out with a cutter. Bake in a moderate oven until a light colour.

As you can see, this recipe should have been as simple as pie. So, in an effort to be transparent, I have a confession to make. Despite the fact that I have been in culinary school for four months... Despite the fact that I received 100% on my last examination... And despite the fact that I really, really should have known better - I made this simple yet significant error: when measuring out the ingredients,  I confused ounces for grams. I know, I know. The shame of it. But I promised myself I'd be completely honest in this venture so hence my mea culpa. As you can very well imagine, my 2 grams of butter and 2 grams of sugar looked fairly pitiful in my mixing bowl. After adding 2 eggs, 2 grams of flour and 3.5 grams of oatmeal, I looked at the wet mess and wondered where on earth I'd gone wrong. Wait. I was using large eggs. Were they too big? How big were eggs in 1915? Did I need to adjust my dry ingredients to compensate for the large eggs? And just like that, my brain decided to kick in gear and I realized my mistake. Knowing full well that 1 ounce = 28 grams, I quickly did the math and adjusted the recipe accordingly.

As the recipe indicated, the dough needed to be rolled out, but mine was too liquid so I added a little flour and left it to rest in the refrigerator for about 10 minutes. I then rolled out the "biscuits" to about 2 mm with my new adjustable rolling pin (Christmas present from hubby) and baked them in a 350 degree oven for 9 minutes.

And voila!

The gold-plated dessert plates were handed down to me from my grandmother 

Loretta (Lussier) Duriez  (1903-1999). 

They're tasty, though a little dry, but nice with a cup of tea. 

Well, that was fun and very informative indeed. For my next entry, I promise to find something with more than  five ingredients. Chocolate. Yes, something with chocolate would be nice. 

A bientôt!