Recipe: Osborne Family Applesauce Birthday Cake

This cake is another of my amazing Great Aunt Ethel's legendary treats. She would make an applesauce cake every year for each one of her siblings on their birthday. Keep in mind that she had twelve siblings. Therefore, she got to practice making this cake a lot!

Unfortunately, this is not Aunt Ethel's exact recipe. That, sadly, has been lost to me, so this is my best effort at making the cake from memory. And, believe me, do I have memories of that cake. When you only get one slice, once per year, you savor every speck of it and commit the experience to memory.

The coup de grace, the icing on the cake, if you will is just that - the icing.

Aunt Ethel always made this cake with a peanut butter frosting. So simple, and so dang good.

So without further slobbering rambling, I give you, the traditional Osborne birthday treat, Applesauce Cake with Peanut Butter Frosting. :)

Cake Ingredients-

1/2 cup salted butter, room temperature

1 cup brown sugar

1 cup granulated sugar

2 eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla (can be left out if using boozy homemade applesauce)

1 1/4 cups cake flour

1 cup all purpose flour

2 teaspoons baking soda

3/4 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1/8 teaspoon nutmeg

2 cups applesauce  (Made from sliced apples that were left over from making "Apple Pie in a Jar" liqueur*.  But of course, your favorite store bought or traditional homemade applesauce would work just fine.)

1/2 cup golden raisins

Directions-

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

In a mixer fitted with a whisk attachment, cream the butter. Add the sugars and continue mixing. Add the eggs, 1 at a time, and vanilla, then mix until well blended and fluffy.

In a separate bowl, whisk together the dry ingredients. Add to the creamed mixture alternately with the applesauce. Fold in the raisins. Pour the batter into a greased and floured loaf pan and bake until firm to the touch, about 40 to 45 minutes. Let cool in the pan, then turn it out and allow to cool the rest of the way before frosting.

Frosting Ingredients-

1 stick butter, softened

1 cup creamy peanut butter

2 cups +/- confectioners sugar

3 tbsps +/- milk

Whip butter and peanut butter until well mixed. Add 2 cups confectioners sugar, a little bit at a time until well incorporated and fluffed up. If you're happy with the thickness/consistency of your frosting, stop there. If you'd like a more spreadable consistency (more icing than frosting), then add the milk, 1 tablespoon at a time, beating well between each addition, until you reach the desired consistency.

A really bad photo of a really good cake. This one made with cream cheese frosting, per my youngest monkey's request.

Slice up and serve, as dessert or as a really decadent birthday breakfast, with a big cup of strong coffee. :)

*Apple Pie in a Jar - Cored, thinly sliced apples, steeped in whipped vodka (or bourbon), brown sugar, vanilla bean and a cinnamon stick for 4 weeks. Add "Buttershots" liqueur for that extra buttery, caramelly flavor dimension. AMAZING.

Use it or Lose it - Buttermilk & Sweet Potatoes

This week's featured "everything must go!" ingredients are-

*Jewel Yams (actually a variety of sweet potato), about 2 pounds
*Goat Buttermilk, 1 quart
*Sour Cherries, 4 pounds
*Goats milk, 2 1/2 gallons
*Rendered Leaf Lard (pork), 1 cup +/-

It almost goes without saying that this time of the year, we'll have more milk than we know what to do with. Things could be worse! :)

This is our second year of having this very fortunate predicament, so we're slowly but surely learning how to use goat milk in things that we'd otherwise have used store bought cows milk in (white sauces, custards, etc.), as well as using it to make some of our own dairy products (cheese, butter) to replace or at the very least, reduce the amount of cow's milk dairy that we buy & consume.

We've also started socking a little bit of milk away in the deep freeze, for those dark days when the gals are lactating no-more, and we have a hankering for something creamy.

So, we popped 1/2 gallon of milk into the freezer for later use in cooking and/or soap making. We also pitted and froze the sour cherries for use in my very favorite jam, Summer Solstice preserves.

1 and 1/5th items down!

The buttermilk was homemade, using a quart (1/4 gallon) of whole goat's milk, warmed to 86 degrees, then inoculated with buttermilk culture and left to ripen overnight. What a delicious difference that little culture makes!

I used up the 3/4 of the buttermilk making a triple batch of buttermilk waffles that I also squirreled away in the freezer for a rainy day.

The rest of the buttermilk was used, along with 1 1/2 cups of the pureed yams, and 1/2 cup of the lard (in place of half of the butter), in a double batch of Martha Stewart's Sweet-Potato Biscuits. Heaven. on. earth.

As you can see, I used a small-mouthed mason jar ring in lieu of a proper biscuit cutter. It worked just fine, and that makes one less thing I have to hunt for in my kitchen. ;)

So, having frozen the milk & cherries, baked the biscuits and made the waffles, I'm left with 1 3/4 gallons of milk, 1/2 cups of lard and 1 cup of sweet potato puree. I put the puree into a silicone freezer tray and chucked it into the freezer to set-up. I'll pop out my yam cubes and bag them up, to eventually be used in soup.

As for the milk, I'm going to try and bribe/sweet talk Billy into making a double batch of 30-minute mozzarella to be used on Friday Pizza Night. I'll hang on to the lard, since I'm not exactly under the gun to use it, like I am the more perishable goods on my use or lose hit list.

Whew! That was a lot of baking and dish-dirtying for one day. I'm wiped! Now, excuse me while I go snarf down my third butter and jam smothered Sweet Potato biscuit. Being the chef has its perks. :)

Totally off Topic

Most of you guys and gals probably have heard a little (or way too much) about my car accident this past May. I haven't written too much about it, because a) I didn't really feel like reliving it, b) This is technically not the right forum for my personal, non-homesteading kvetching, c) I didn't want to bore you all with sad, potentially grody details about my injuries and slow recovery.

All of that being said, I'm going to do it anyway.

Writing, like drinking a few glasses of lambrusco and listening to a Tori Amos cd beginning to end, is cathartic for me. And I need catharsis pretty badly right now. Thus commences my long-winded whine.

Here we go.

The accident happened in the Mojave desert. The prevailing theory is that my front passenger tire may have slipped off the edge of the roadway, onto the hard-packed sand of the high desert. I thus (Theoretically. I remember none of this.), over-corrected in my attempt to straighten out, steering too far to the left, causing the car to 360 several times in the middle of the road, before skidding off of the roadway completely, and commencing to rollover multiple times, eventually coming to rest in a shallow ravine/depression on the north(?) side of the road.

I, having no memory of the accident whatsoever, don't know at what point I was knocked unconscious, but I was. In fact, the only memory that I have (I think it's a memory. Maybe it's a dream?) of the accident end of things was coming to, however marginally, to the sound of someone saying my name over and over, and explaining that I'd been in a car accident, and that they were going to get me out soon. (This might be a good time to mention that this took place while I was hanging upside downish, still belted into the drivers seat, while a firefighter/EMT attempted to verbally comfort me through my now non-existent windshield.) I remember asking about my girls, him assuring me that they were fine, which I didn't know whether or not to believe, then me repeating my city, state and my husband's cell phone number, over and over again.


At this same time, an EMT's were looking my girls over head to toe, and preparing to transport them to the hospital.


Apparently I blacked out again, because the following happened, unbeknownst to me. The Jaws of Life were brought in to pry my car apart. I lost a lot of blood. I really screwed up traffic for the people of Victorville for that afternoon. A life-flight helicopter had to find a safe place to land. I took my first (CRAZY EXPENSIVE) helicopter flight.


The next memory that I have, which I wish to hell I didn't, was the surgical resident/trainee/janitor stapling my tattered scalp closed. There is pain, and then there is having your head harshly, loudly, under-medicated-ly stapled-back-together pain. I literally passed out between staples, only to wake up screaming with each new ta-chunk of the stapler.


Then I mostly slept for 2 or 3 or 4 days.


I woke when I heard Billy's voice. I remember being confused and annoyed by the neck brace, troubled that I couldn't really see much out of my right eye, and really confused about why my left arm wouldn't work. I had to be reminded that I was in a car accident, and that the girls were ok. Billy said that I asked the same question a hundred different times, as though he hadn't just told me that the girls were fine, and being cared for by my sister-in-law. Every time I realized that the girls weren't there, I experienced a fresh bout of panic, and had to be told the whole story over again.


This brain injury and it's after-effects, more than the physical pain, has really been the main thing that sucked (and continues to suck) about this accident and the recovery that follows. My fucking brain is messed up.


Memory loss, confusion, irritability, fatigue - the symptoms of Post-Concussion Syndrome are spot-muther-effing-on.


So on top of a heavily lacerated, shredded scalp, a broken elbow, a really scary looking contusion in the white of my eye, a broken thumb, road rash, and not one, but two, brain bleeds, I get to hang on to this lingering cognitive impairment. Super.


As much as I've healed, my noodle is still not back to rights, and it isn't clear whether it will ever be, and/or how much I'll get back.

Here's the thing - I liked my personality. In fact, this has made me realize just how frigging attached to it I was. And now, it's changed, maybe forever. I'm irritable, impatient, forgetful and flaky, none of which I would have identified with as being fundamental elements of my personality pre-wreck.

I can't remember things worth a diddly, and I have a really hard time finding words some days, especially when I'm tired, which is often, seeing as I'm funneling copious amounts of energy into growing myself a new scalp and all.

I grieve for the time I've lost, the lack of lessons learned from this mess (it all seems pretty damn pointless), the strain on my relationships with friends and family, even the loss of my 12-year-old super-Subaru.

I am thankful for the fact that my girls weren't hurt worse (beyond the post-traumatic stress, which is definitely no small matter), that there wasn't another vehicle, cyclist or pedestrian involved, that I didn't die, that I/we have such an amazing community of family, friends and co-workers that saved our bacon with home cooked meals, gift cards for take-out, kid-sitting and SO much more, and for this crazy mess reminding me that I am small and the world is big.


I now return you to your regularly scheduled Granola Geek programming.

My Fridge Runneth Over

How can it be that we've only been milking our girl, Sidney, for about a month now? I have a serious case of milk fatigue! Our fridge is so full of half-gallon jars of goats milk and cartons of eggs that there is practically no room for anything else.

The batch of feta that I made last week came out too soft, so I'm challenging myself to a Chopped-style cook-off. I have eggs, goat milk & smooshy feta galore, plus a few items in the produce drawer which have entered the "use or lose" zone.

My available ingredients include-
*Feta, 2 lbs
*Eggs, 4 dozen
*Whole, Raw goat milk, 3 gallons
*Golden beets with greens attached, 1 bunch
*Dill fronds, 1 bunch
*Raspberries, 1 pint
*Cherries, 3/4 lb

I have (tentatively) on deck-

 *"Spanakopita" deviled eggs (Feta, dill & beet greens) Uses maybe 4 ounces of the feta, 15 eggs, all of the beet greens, and maybe 1/4 of the dill.

 *Goat's milk Chocolate pudding Uses 3 cups of goat milk and 3 eggs.

 *Roasted beet & feta salad with raspberry balsamic vinaigrette Uses all of the beetroot, all of the raspberries, and another 4 ounces or so of feta.

So that leaves us with cherries, dill, a pound and a half of not-well-formed feta, and a crapload of eggs & milk. Cherry ice cream? Feta & dill omelettes? Aidez-moi!

In addition to all of these dishes, I see another super cheese-a-thon in my near future. Maybe a harder cheese, that I can set to press/dry/age and forget about for a little while, rather than being under the gun to use before it goes sideways? I'm also thinking of starting a (weekly) challenge for myself and anyone else who might be interested called "Use it of Lose it", about creative ways to use/preserve/share the bounty from our gardens, critters, foraging, or even a really good sale at the market. Who's in? :)

Milk Mania

I'd love to include pictures with this post, but my camera was riding shotgun when I took my little tumble in the desert back in May, so my words will have to do until really nice Canon SLR's start raining from the sky. It could be a while...

Anyhoo, we're up to our eyeballs in milk lately, and still only milking one of our two lactating does right now. Bill's been doing the milking, which means that I'm the one who gets to figure out what the heck to do with all our milk.

Today we have 2 1/2 gallons on hand, so I'm making a mighty batch of cajeta, in addition to a small, first attempt at goats milk butter, which I learned about (how else?) via youtube.

Sidney's milk seems to either have higher butterfat than her Lamancha sisters' milk, or is somehow less homogenated, because after a day or two in the fridge, it gets a lovely layer of cream on top that is perfect for scooping off.

That being said, it takes FOREVER to get enough cream to make the whole shebang worth while.

Well, I've got nothin' but time... and goat milk. So here goes!

Homemade Goat Treats

So, I'm still not 100%. Some days, I don't even feel fifty percent. I can't do "real" farm chores yet, so I sit on my duff all day and think of stuff I can do.


We've recently started milking Sidney, our 2 1/2 year old Alpine doe. Rather, Bill has started milking her. He said that she is a decent milker, but she loses patience with being milked the second that her food is gone. I wondered if I could make a milking treat that would be too good to refuse. Ergo, the Goatmeal Cookies.


I googled "homemade goat treats" and got 90% items containing goat. No. So I sort of winged my "recipe"


Goatmeal Cookies
Makes 12-15 Half-dollar sized cookies


1 big carrot, grated finely
1/2 cup flaxseed meal
2 slices crumbled oat bread
2 tbsps +/- Unsulphured molasses
1 tbsp water
sea salt


I mixed and mashed all of the ingredients until the consistency was like overly moist stuffing, then shaped it into pinball sized rounds that I patted flat (a la a hamburger patty). I dusted the tops of the "cookies" with a little extra sea salt, since my goats are nuts for it! I baked them at 300 degrees on a non-stick foil lined cookie sheet for about 20 minutes, until firm and nearly free of moisture.


The goaties dug them! Woohoo! Next batch I'll try adding some grated apple as well, and maybe some kelp powder or sunflower seeds too. It sure is gratifying to feel like, even though I'm not the one taking care of our critters, in my own way, I am taking of them. ;)

Broody Beasties

Spring isn't exactly busting out all over here, but babies are... sort of.

Before we left for our road trip, we put my very critter savvy cousin in charge of our chickens, goats and bunnies. And just like a child does when left with a sitter, my babies decided to use this opportunity to do something completely out of character and negate all of my pre-vacay  preparations, by choosing that one eventuality for which I was not prepared - my girls went all kinds of broody.

The majority of our flock (besides the old biddys) are around 15 months old. That means that this is only the second Spring of their lives, and the first one during which they were fertile. Add to that my genius move re: bringing home days old baby chicks from the feed store to sneak under an amiable Mama bird for raising, way back in April. Unbeknownst to me at the time, I was fanning the flames of passion in my hens, particularly the Australorps, many of whom caught baby fever in a BIG way.

We had just one laydie sitting when we left. A plump and cranky 'Lorpie named Blackberry who got very puffy and growly when we came anywhere near her. She would sooner die than give up her eggs! That being said, every second or third day, we'd find that she'd eaten one of two of the eggs (Ew.), presumably because she wouldn't leave her eggs for any length of time or for any reason at all, including eating and drinking to keep herself alive. We tried bringing pellets, water and water soaked stale bread to her, to see her through this all-encompassing bout of urgent maternity. She sat and sat. Weeks went by, no babies. But it was just the one hen, so it was harmless, right?

Yeah, no.

By the time we got back, there were 6 hens sitting and mountains of eggs. We had 2 Ameracaunas and one Australorp sharing a single nest box, crammed head to tail in there, each parked on top of 10 or so eggs. Were there any chicks to be had for all this trouble, any? Nope. Not a one.

But there was something, oh yes indeed, there was something.

The smell. Dear God, the smell.

On a warmish, windy day, the breeze would carry the funk to the trampoline, where the girls merrily bounced. Until the evil blast hit, that is, then they'd come running inside, coughing and whining.

Think about it - near on 3 weeks or a month since the coop was mucked, dozens and dozens (maybe a hundred?) rapidly aging, Mama-warmed eggs, and 6 hens eating, sleeping and pooping in the same place for 3 weeks or a month - this is a recipe for epic stank if ever there was one.

I, of course, was in the very beginning stages of recovering from my car accident, and therefore was of no help at all, except to suggest that maybe it was time to transfer the eggs to our incubator for whatever time remained of their gestation, and release our hennies from their self-imposed bondage. I'd read that dipping (or dunking) a broody hen in cool/cold water "resets" her by lowering her body temperature, which naturally increases while sitting, thus breaking the spell and freeing our gals to eat and poop in new locales. How was I supposed to know that Bill would take my drug-induced, second-hand farm babble as gospel?

Well, he did. On Sunday, Bill dunked the hens while the kids clumsily moved eggs from nest to incubator. A few rotten eggs were discovered in the process, a few of which were broken inside the house. And we'd thought that the hot funk wind had been bad...

The eggs that were somehow deemed hatch-worthy were crammed into the incubator and set to finish "cooking" in the back room.

Today was the fourth, and last, day inside. The smell near the incubator had been funky. As of this afternoon, it was a gag-worthy, sulfury, toxic cloud that overtook our house. Not having had any hatch, wiggle or show other obvious signs of life, we ditched the lot. :(

A large can of Lysol and some liberally applied white vinegar spray later, our air is almost back to normal. The hens are coming back to life as if woken from a long, half-forgotten dream, with no detectable traces baby envy left whatsoever.

That's the chickens. Geniuses they are not, but (mostly) sweet none the less.

We also had our pregnant Alpine doe kid during this same fertile frenzy - a single, big, fat healthy buckling.

He was born at my cousin's place, as she very generously offered to take a very pregnant Sidney and her half sister, (unfortunately not pregnant) Sophie, home for the kidding. Sid's little guy will not come home with our girls, as he will be given to the breeder as payment for the stud fee. But - we get a sweet doe in milk in the bargain, so all's well that ends well.

So goes our second Spring of living in the Hollow. Summer, if it ever arrives should be...interesting.