Keiser Cookbook - grace grits and gardening

Milky Way Cake

November 4, 2014 By Talya Tate Boerner

If you are following along, you may remember I am recreating recipes from Keiser’s Kitchen, a recipe book created by the Keiser Elementary School PTA moms in 1969. A few weeks ago, I made the Yum Yum Cake. It was delicious. If you missed it, you’ll want to go back and check it out. This week’s dish is the Milky Way Cake. With company coming for Halloween weekend, it sounded like the perfect choice. Plus, I had a bag of those fun-sized Milky Ways. What a great way to use up leftover Halloween candy…

After having made only two of these vintage recipes, here’s the thing I’ve realized—the art of cooking has drastically changed. In only forty years, ingredients have evolved. Recipes are written differently. Like everything, there are trends in cooking. Foods go in and out of style, and the language of food changes.

I was reminded of the importance in handing down recipes. These recipes are part of our family stories.

I experienced this first-hand while making the Milky Way Cake, mainly because this recipe was contributed to the Keiser cookbook by my Aunt Lavern. For those of you who never knew her, Aunt Lavern had a sweet, generous spirit, loved family, friends and God, and was a fabulous cook. She even owned a little restaurant one time—her southern, down-home cooking was that good.

As I began making this cake, I imagined Aunt Lavern mixing the batter. I remembered the smells of her comfy kitchen. Several times I wanted to ask her questions, especially while trying to get the icing to “soft ball stage”. Even though my icing boiled over onto my stove and made a huge sticky mess, the cake turned out amazing. I think she was helping me.

The ingredients were basic.

I am no baker, but I truly believe this is the most beautiful icing I have ever made. It was smooth and creamy and rich like fudge.

Ummmmm.

Look at my lovely, giddy taste testers!

So you want the recipe, right?

Here it is…

Milky Way Cake

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Ingredients

4 Milky Way candy bars
1 stick oleo I used unsalted butter
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1/4 tsp baking soda
3/4 cup buttermilk
1/2 cup chopped pecans

Milky Way Icing

2 1/2 cups sugar
1 cup evaporated milk
6 oz semi-sweet chocolate chips
1 cup marshmallow cream
1 stick oleo I only used 1/2 stick in the icing

Instructions

Melt candy bars and 1/2 stick butter. Set aside.
Cream sugar and 1/2 stick butter in large bowl.
Add eggs.
To the sugar/egg mixture, alternatively add flour and buttermilk until mixed together.
Add melted chocolate/butter mixture and mix well.
Add pecans.
Bake at 325 degrees for 35 minutes or until done.

Milky Way Icing

Mix sugar and milk and cook in a double boiler until soft ball stage. Add chocolate chips, marshmallow cream and butter. Stir until melted.

Notes

Candy bars in general are much larger these days. Be sure to buy "regular" sized Milky Way bars. Or two "fun-sized" bars = one regular candy bar.
In the icing, I couldn't bring myself to add an entire stick of butter so I reduced the butter to 1/2 stick. This may be why my icing was fudge-like, but I thought this was the best part!

Here’s a helpful YouTube video that explains soft ball stage…

Aunt Lavern (left), Nana (right)

Grace Grits and Gardening

Farm. Food. Garden. Life.

Musical Pairing:

The Church – Under the Milky Way

Yum Yum Cake – old southern recipe!

October 9, 2014 By Talya Tate Boerner

Keiser’s Kitchen Cookbook

Last week I decided I would begin making recipes from the Keiser’s Kitchen cookbook, a cookbook compiled in 1969 by the Keiser Elementary School PTA moms as a Halloween fundraiser. First up: the Yum Yum Cake, a recipe submitted by Cleo Woodard.

Mrs. Woodard was a friend of my Nana’s. They were both members of the Sunshine Club. Although I know zero about the Sunshine Club’s mission, I bet the ladies did selfless things for the area and took turns bringing amazing desserts (like the Yum Yum Cake) to eat while discussing issues of the day. I remember snippets about Mrs. Woodard mainly because my sister and I, along with several of our friends, took ballet lessons in her home from her daughter, Annelle.

That’s me on the far right side wearing green. My sister is on the opposite side wearing the matching outfit in orange. We always matched. Always.

My best friend, Anita, is standing beside me with the perfectly pointed toe. There’s more I could say about this picture, but I should get on to the recipe. It’s a keeper.

Yum Yum Cake

(One thing to note about this and many of the dishes in the Keiser’s Kitchen cookbook…recipes call for margarine or oleo. I never buy margarine, and I’m not sure what oleo is. I substituted unsalted butter 1:1 with no problem.)

Yum Yum Cake

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Ingredients

2 cups self-rising flour
2 eggs
2 cups sugar
2 teaspoons baking soda
2 cups crushed pineapple drained

Icing

1 cup sugar
1 stick margarine I used butter
1 small can Pet milk 5 oz
1 cup coconut
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup chopped pecans

Instructions

Mix all ingredients and pour into a greased 9x13" pan.
Bake for 25 minutes or until it tests done in a 350 degree oven.
Ice while still warm.

Icing

Boil sugar, margarine and milk for two minutes (stir constantly).
Remove from heat. Add coconut, vanilla and pecans.
Pour over cake while still warm.

This cake lives up to its name. In fact, I think it should be called the Yum Yum Eat Em Up Cake. It tastes a bit like pineapple upside down cake. The icing makes it super moist and gooey. I’m pretty sure I said “yummmmmmmm” at least once while tasting it.

You will too.

Grace Grits and Gardening
Farm. Food. Garden. Life.

Keiser’s Kitchen – a foodie blast from the past

October 3, 2014 By Talya Tate Boerner

Fall in the part of the Delta where I grew up meant harvest, football and countdown to the Keiser Halloween Carnival. Friends, it was THE big event in our little town. I’ve written about my reign as Halloween Queen HERE if you’d like to get background information. The thing to know for purposes of this post is that the PTA mothers raised money for the school primarily so their kid and class representative could wear the coveted cardboard glittery crown.

A.BIG.DEAL.

Way back in Nineteen Hundred and Sixty-Nine (gasp), the year I was nominated Queen of the second grade class, our most successful fundraiser was the Keiser cookbook, aptly named Keiser’s Kitchen.

This cookbook belongs in a museum showcasing middle twentieth century PTA Mom handiwork.

Way before computers and high speed copy machines and your choice of cool fonts, regular construction paper covers were cut to size, manually stapled and hand lettered using a Bic marker. Someone (probably Momma) collected and typed the recipes on a clunky manual typewriter before running them off on the mimeograph machine in the teacher’s lounge. And I’m sure there was sniffing. Sniffing the mimeograph paper was the reward at the end… (if you don’t know what I mean, you are showing your young age.)

What a labor intensive project compared to today’s technology.

Our copy of Keiser’s Kitchen is priceless.

During the upcoming fall weeks, I plan to recreate these dishes as presented (along with maybe a little story about the Keiser mom who originally submitted the recipe). There are over thirty recipes, so I won’t do all of them because really, how many Jell-o salads does one need? But I plan to make lots of them. I think we need to remember these recipes, taste this simple, basic food lovingly made by our mothers who saw to it that we gathered around the supper table every night for a family meal.

I’ll warn you now, there will be no salted caramel frosting or balsamic anything. But sometimes maybe that’s what we need.

Stay tuned!

Grace Grits and Gardening

Farm. Food. Garden. Life.