Failed Toffee Candy

 

So far I've made five batches of toffee (actually six, since one of them was a double batch), and three of them have turned out. The first one that failed was (I think) because I didn't cook it long enough. As for the other one, which was the double batch, my guess is that the butter wasn't good quality--not that it was rancid, but that it had too much water in it, or something like that. Or maybe I just didn't cook it long enough. For the first batch that failed, I just ate the chocolate off the top and threw away the rest. But I really didn't want to do that with the double batch, since it had an entire pound of butter (and a pound of sugar) in it.

By the way, if you're wondering what happens when toffee fails, it doesn't turn the color of toffee, and it looks and tastes like you melted butter , stirred sugar into it, and let it cool. And then there's a layer of melted chocolate on top. (Toffee does take time to set, so make sure you've let it cool overnight before you call it "failed.")

So I scraped the chocolate off the top and put the butter-sugar mixture back into the pan. I put it back over medium heat and cooked it awhile. I drained off quite a lot of liquid (the reason why I think the butter had too much water) , and then I saw some dark-brown color that looked like it was burning, and I decided it probably wouldn't turn into toffee, so I gave up on it. I took it off the heat, left the pot on the stove, and ate dinner. (end of a long day--can you tell?)

The next day I noticed it had hardened in the pot. Now it looked like maple sugar candy, except without the maple--but it had that texture. Sort of like toffee-flavored maple sugar candy. Anyway, I took a knife and chipped it out of the pot. Now it looked a bit like brown sugar but tasted a whole lot better.

Since it still had the toffee taste, I decided to make it into something else. I melted some dark chocolate, mixed in the crumbled failed toffee mixture, and added some sliced toasted almonds. I poured some into the toffee pan and dropped the rest by spoonfuls onto parchment paper. I cooled it in the fridge and cut it into squares. It's delicious. I can't stop eating it.

I'm going to make some more toffee today. Of course, I do want it to turn out, but if it doesn't, I can always make some more of this...

Esther Green's White Cookies to Frost

In our house, these cookies have become known as Esther Greens, but the full name is Esther Green's White Cookies to Frost. Every year I ask Mom who Esther Green was, and every year I seem to forget. Today I asked Mom again and learned (again) that two of Esther Green's daughters married two of my grandpa's brothers. I suppose that means she was Mom's great-aunt-in-law. Mom never met Esther Green, but we know her through these cookies. So her memory lives on.

Usually these are the last cookies we make. Mom doesn't like to make them earlier because they're so fragile. In the early part of December, the cookies we make go in cookie tins to be shipped, so it's not practical to make Esther Greens early--there are other cookies we have to make first. Sometimes they don't even get made until after Christmas! But they're one of my favorite cookies, so I decided to make them earlier this year because I can. I mixed up the dough while at a friend's house baking, and I baked them in my landlady's oven. (Thank you!!)

This recipe is charming because it's so sparse. It's typed on a 3" x 5" index card, and the word "chill" is misspelled as "shill." I suppose whoever typed it didn't want to throw out the card and start over. Even now that I have it typed up correctly on a computer, I still can't help thinking "make in roll, shill, and slice."

The recipe assumes quite a lot of cooking knowledge, so I'll do my best to spell out the things that everyone knew years ago when the recipe was first typed up. I haven't made much frosting, so a few years ago I got Mom to give me approximate quantities for the frosting recipe. It didn't help, at least not this year, but I'll definitely know how to do it in the future. (Which means there's a story coming. Mom laughed so hard when I told her. Keep reading.)

The frosting recipe doesn't give you much to go on. It only says:
Grate in orange rind, add orange juice, 10x sugar, and a lump of butter. Frost.

I also have a note written on there that says "add sugar until thick enough."

So I decided to do some logical thinking. Since it says orange rind and juice, it probably meant one orange, right? That means for my double batch of cookies, I'd need two oranges. So I got the zest from two oranges (using a handheld not-sharp-enough cheese grater, because I didn't want to wash a full size grater and cutting board after doing dishes all day) and juiced the oranges using my hands (because I don't have any sort of juicer). I decided that a lump of butter was probably 2 T., because if you get much bigger than that, it's not a lump anymore. I put zest, juice, and butter in my pan over low heat. Then I started adding confectioners' sugar until it was thick enough

By the time I had added a pound of confectioners' sugar, I started to think that I had probably used too much orange juice, but I kept adding sugar because it didn't seem thick enough. In all, I used a pound and a half of confectioners' sugar, which was all I had. Then I started frosting the cookies, and I realized I had made the frosting too thick. For it to be spreadable at all, I had to keep it hot, and since it was hot, it was burning my fingers and I kept yelping and running my fingers under cold water. Finally it occurred to me that I could add some more liquid and make it thinner. Since I didn't want to cut open another orange, I got some milk and stirred about 1 T. milk into the frosting. Then I could turn down the heat and frost the cookies without yelping.

When I finished frosting, I still had quite a lot of frosting left, so I took my landlady a sample of Esther Greens, and she really liked them, so I begged her to take the rest of the frosting off my hands. Then I asked to borrow some powdered sugar.

Anyway, without further ado, here are...

Esther Green's White Cookies to Frost

Cream:
1/2 c. butter
1/2 c. oleo (margarine)

Add:
1/2 c. 10x sugar (confectioners' sugar)
1 t. vanilla
2 c. flour
1/4 c. pecans, chopped (there are a zillion ways to chop nuts, but since I don't have a nut-chopper, I like to chop nuts by putting them in a plastic bag and whacking them with a meat mallet)

Make in roll, chill, and slice. Bake at 400 degrees for 6-8 minutes.

Expanded directions:
Cream together butter and margarine. You may want to soften them first (a minute or two at power level 1 on the microwave will soften butter quickly). Add confectioners' sugar and vanilla and beat at high speed until light and fluffy. (I always have trouble imagining that a mix of butter, margarine, and sugar could ever be "light," but that's what the recipes usually say. I try to imagine it being fluffy like clouds.) Using a lower speed on the mixer, beat in flour a cup at a time until well mixed. Add pecans and beat until just mixed. On wax paper or plastic wrap, form dough into a rectangular log about 2-3 inches wide and an inch high. Chill. Slice cookies, put on a cookie sheet, and bake at 400 degrees for 6-8 minutes, until almost browned or lightly browned, depending on how you like them. I think the lightly browned ones will be less fragile. Cool cookies completely before frosting.

Frosting:
Get the zest from a medium-sized orange (i.e., wash it and then grate the peel using the small holes on the grater, but only the orange part of the peel--you don't want the white stuff, because that's bitter). Juice half the orange and put the juice and zest in a small pot over low heat. Add 2 T. butter. Start with 2-3 T. of powdered sugar and add powdered sugar GRADUALLY until thick enough. It will also thicken as you cook it. You still want it to be pretty thin but not watery. Frost cookies and let cool. The frosting will harden on the cookies.

Italian Chews

This recipe comes from a lady named Jenny who lived down the street from my mom when my mom was little. Jenny had no children of her own, but all the kids in the neighborhood loved her. She had a thick Italian accent and a really big heart. When we make this recipe, my mom recalls Jenny and how kind she was to all the neighborhood kids.

These cookies are also incredibly good. My mom sends cookie tins every year to some of our relatives, and most of the tins have an assortment of six or seven kinds of cookies, but a couple of relatives want Italian Chews only, and my mom is happy to oblige. So we make lots and lots of Italian Chews.

Italian Chews

3/4 c. soft butter
2 T. granulated sugar
1 2/3 c. flour

3 eggs, separated
2 1/4 c. light brown sugar (or 1 pound of brown sugar--if you use a 1 pound box, you don't have to measure)
1 c. finely chopped walnuts
3/4 c. flaked coconut
Confectioners' sugar for dusting

Crust: Cream butter; add granulated sugar, beat until light. Add flour and mix well. Pat into 13x9x2" pan; bake at 350° for 15 minutes.

In a clean bowl, beat egg whites until they form stiff peaks. (If the bowl isn't clean, or if there's even a tiny bit of yolk in the egg whites, they won't get stiff. Stiff peaks means that when you lift the beaters out of the egg whites, it makes a peak, and the top of the peak doesn't fold over at all.) Set egg whites aside in a separate bowl. Beat egg yolks; gradually beat in brown sugar. Add nuts and coconut and mix; then gently fold in egg whites, using a spatula. (If you don't fold gently, the egg whites will lose the air that you beat into them.) Spread on baked mixture. Bake 25-30 minutes. Cut in 54 squares and dust with confectioners' sugar.


How to do a "double batch": Mix up one single batch of crust. Pat into a 13 x 9 pan. Mix up another single batch of crust. Pat into another 13 x 9 pan. Bake at the same time. Note that if one pan is darker than the other, it will bake faster. Wash mixer bowl. Beat one set of egg whites. Set aside. Beat the other set of egg whites. Set aside in another bowl. Mix one batch-worth of the filling, fold in egg whites, and spread on crust. Bake. Mix the second batch of filling, fold in egg whites, spread on second crust, and bake.

Almond Spritz Cookies

 

I have to start off by saying THANK YOU to my mom for the spritz press she sent me. It's a Kuhn Rikon brand, and it works wonderfully. It's so easy to use. I think she found it at HomeGoods, and soon afterwards, I found it in the mail, to my surprise and delight. It actually has a few features that are nicer than my great-grandmother's cookie press (which we have at home, and which I've used for many years). I almost feel like a traitor saying that, but maybe one day my great-grandchildren will like this one the way I've enjoyed my great-grandmother's, and so it'll be all right.

Spritz cookies are fun because you put them through the press and they come out in wonderful shapes. They look so fancy! The directions say that they should be delicately browned, but if you burn them a little, don't worry, because the slightly burnt ones are the best. And, of course, the burnt ones don't look nice enough to give away, so you have to keep those...

If you haven't used a spritz press before, be patient with it. You raise the presser-thing up as high as it will go, insert dough in the tube (fill it as full as you can), put a disk with holes in it on the end, and screw the thing that keeps the disk in place over the disk. The cookie sheet must be cold and ungreased (it can't have a nonstick coating, and you can't use parchment paper or aluminum foil, because the dough has to stick to the cookie sheet). Put the cookie press on the sheet, click the handle, and raise the press just after you click. Every time you click the handle, enough dough for one cookie will come out. But the first four or five will never come out properly. For those, scrape the dough off the press and throw it back into the bowl. After that, you should start getting good cookies. The shape will change a little as they bake, since they spread out somewhat. Remove them from the cookie sheet with a very thin spatula as soon as they come out of the oven. Note that some shapes will cook faster than others, so expect variations in cooking time.

If, as you click the press, the dough starts coming out of places other than the holes in the disk, you haven't assembled it properly. Try to find out where it's undone, so you don't lose any more dough. You may have to throw some dough away if it's stained with metal ickiness (especially if your press is old). I've also heard the cookies will come out better if you don't use food coloring and if you don't refrigerate the dough.

I made a double batch of these cookies with my landlady a couple of days ago, and we had so much fun. We used every cookie sheet in the house (hers and mine combined), and we made lots and lots of cookies. We burnt some, and we broke some, and we ate some, but we still ended up with plenty of good ones. She's making plans to borrow my cookie press after I leave to go home for Christmas.


Almond Spritz Cookies

1 c. butter (must be butter)
3/4 c. sugar
1 egg or 3 yolks, beaten (note: if you make a meringue something, save the yolks for this)
2 1/2 c. flour
1/4 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. almond extract

Work butter until soft and cream with sugar until light. Add beaten egg and almond flavoring and beat smooth. Add the flour sifted with salt and baking powder. The dough may be rolled and cut with fancy cutters or molded in a cookie press. Fill the press and force onto ungreased cold cookie sheet. Bake in a hot oven at 400° until delicately browned.

Chocolate Fudge Candy Cookies

 

These are nice because they don't require a mixer (I only have a hand mixer). However, it takes a sturdy spoon to ply the dough out of the pot after it's chilled, and your spoon may bend a little (don't use your best spoon). A grapefruit spoon may be helpful. As to letting the dough chill, you can put it in your garage if it's cold enough. I don't have my own garage, so I put it just inside my door to take advantage of the cold window and the slight drafts. I would have put it in the fridge, but that was crammed full of boxes of butter and heads of celery.

My mom got this recipe from a co-worker of hers back in the 70s. One year she gave the recipe to a friend who didn't realize that you have to bake the cookies, and the friend wondered why her cookies didn't turn out like my mom's...


Chocolate Fudge Candy Cookies

In top of double boiler:
Melt 9 oz. chocolate chips (about 1 1/2 cups); 2 T. oleo (margarine) and a pinch of salt.

Add 1 can Eagle Brand Sweetened Condensed Milk.
Add 1 c. sifted flour. Mix well.

I put the cover on and let it cool off for awhile in the refrigerator.

Lightly grease cookie sheets. Form mixture into small balls and put on cookie sheets. Place 1 pecan or walnut on top (can also use M&Ms). Bake at 350º for 10-11 min. Makes 50-60.



This is especially good with dark chocolate chips. By the way, we don't use a double boiler for this. We just do it in a regular pot

Secret Kiss Cookies

I've been baking cookies lately. It's a tradition in our family: every December we run the "cookie factory." There are seven different kinds of cookies we make, and we usually make double batches of them because we give so many away. It's a little different here with my toaster oven, but I've done toffee and chocolate fudge cookies in my own kitchen, and I'm finding other kitchens to bake in, too. I pay in cookies. People seem to like that.

My favorite part about the "cookie factory" is that we can make Christmas a little brighter for some people who wouldn't have much Christmas cheer otherwise. And if that means we use 15 pounds of flour (we've been known to do that), that's fine with us. I've used at least 5 pounds so far.

All that to say, if any of you want to join in our tradition, I'm going to post our recipes. The first one, Secret Kiss Cookies, comes from a newspaper article that my grandma read many years ago. We've been making them ever since. This is a nice recipe for kids to help with, since they can unwrap the kisses and "hide" them inside the dough. (Since there are no eggs in the dough, it's also safe for kids to eat.) I made a double batch of these yesterday, and two boys (ages 5 and 8, I think) unwrapped 100+ kisses and rolled most of the cookies. I stood by pinching off the extra dough from their cookies, so that we could make as many as possible. When the time came to lick the bowl, we didn't have any trouble finding volunteers...





Secret Kiss Cookies

1 c. soft butter
1/2 c. sugar
1 tsp. vanilla
2 c. flour
1 c. finely chopped walnuts
1 package milk (or dark) chocolate kisses
Confectioners sugar

Beat at medium speed butter, sugar, and vanilla until light and fluffy. Add flour and nuts; beat at low speed till well blended. Chill dough. Remove foil from kisses. Using about a teaspoon of dough, shape it around a kiss and roll gently into a ball. Be sure to cover kiss completely. Place on ungreased cookiesheet. Bake in a preheated 375 oven for about 12 or until cookies are set but not brown. Cool slightly; remove to wire rack. While still warm, roll in confectioners sugar. Cool. Store in tightly covered container. Makes about 40 cookies.

Toffee

 

Yum. This recipe is almost too good to share, but my landlady convinced me.

This is a pretty easy recipe. It comes from this wonderful cookbook, and it's not that hard, but make sure to be careful. Sugar burns are probably the worst kitchen burns, so wear close-toed shoes, use potholders or oven mitts, and by all means, don't taste any of it until you're absolutely sure it's cool. If you want to try it while cooking, spoon some out and let it harden or run it under cold water before you try it.

Prepare a 5" x 7" baking dish by buttering it (using a stick of butter). Don't use a nonstick pan unless you don't mind if the coating gets scratched--toffee is terribly hard to cut. In the bottom of the pan, put a single layer of sliced or slivered almonds.

On a cutting board, cut 4-6 oz. of chocolate into fine shavings. Put aside, but have it ready.

Measure 8 oz. of sugar on a kitchen scale. Put this into a small, sturdy pot and add 8 oz. of butter (two sticks). Use a spoon or butter knife to chop the butter into chunks. Put your pan over medium heat and start stirring. It'll take about 20 minutes to do the on-the-stove part.

When the butter is melted, add 1 t. vanilla. From here, the toffee will start to look stranger and stranger. It'll bubble a lot and be really slippery. Keep stirring until the sugar melts. When it has a light toffee-like color, and when it won't stick to a silicone spatula at all, and when there's water collecting around the edges on the top, it's done. Pour it evenly over the almonds and sprinkle the chocolate on top. The almonds will get toasted and the chocolate will melt because the sugar is so hot. Let the toffee harden overnight before you cut it.

When you cut the toffee, toffee shards will fly everywhere, so do yourself a favor and choose a spot that can be easily cleaned up. I mistakenly chose the kitchen table for the first batch, and now I have toffee shards all over the carpet. Use a sharp, sturdy knife. Don't expect to get even squares, because you won't. You'll get jagged pieces, plus a bunch of crumbs (which, of course, are the cook's prerogative). I intended to use the toffee crumbs in another cookie recipe, but then I realized they wouldn't stick around long enough to be used.

Note: After you put the toffee in the pan and cover it with the chocolate, the remaining toffee will harden pretty quickly in the pan, but it's too hot to eat right away. Scrape the leftover junk from the pan into a small bowl, and you can eat it from there after it hardens. It'll be a little grainier than the toffee will be, but it's a nice foretaste.

Further note: If you don't have a silicone spatula, don't stir the toffee with a plastic spatula, because the plastic spatula will melt. That's why they make silicone spatulas.


Update: If your toffee doesn't turn out, make it into some of this...

Chocolate-Oat Bars

This is a simple dessert, but I like it because it takes something luxurious (dark chocolate) and stretches it with two ordinary and cheap ingredients (half-and-half and oats).

Needless to say, it will only be as good as the chocolate you use. The best cheap source of baking chocolate I've found is Trader Joe's Pound Plus bars--you get more than a pound of chocolate for under $5, and it tastes good, too. But you can use any type of chocolate that you'd be willing to eat "as is."

Lately I've been reading the book Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking. It gives simple ratios for doughs and batters, mostly. If you like inventing recipes, it's a wonderful book and you should go buy it. The recipe here for ganache is from that cookbook. The other inventions are my own. This cookbook often measures by weight rather than volume because that makes the ratios work, so you'll need to get out the kitchen scale for this recipe.

You will need three ingredients: chocolate, half-and-half, and oats.

This recipe is based upon ganache, a chocolate and cream mixture. When ganache is hot, you can use it as chocolate sauce, like on ice cream. When it's cold, you can roll it into balls and make truffles out of it.

Measure out equal amounts of chocolate and half-and-half by weight. (The recipe calls for cream, not half-and-half, but it's a very flexible recipe and I didn't want to go buy cream.) I think I used 6 oz. chocolate and 6 oz. cream. Chop the chocolate into roughly equal-sized chunks and put it in a medium-sized bowl. It's better to err on the side of the bowl being too big. I know this--I really do--but for some reason I used a too-small bowl and made a mess as a result. Oh well.

Put the cream in a small pot and heat it gently (low to medium heat) on the stove for a few minutes. As soon as it starts to simmer (make a few bubbles that weren't there before), take it off the heat right away and pour it over the chocolate. DO NOT TOUCH for five minutes. After that, take a whisk (it must be a whisk--I tried a spoon and got the aforementioned mess, but a whisk worked perfectly) and gently stir the cream and chocolate together. Now you have ganache.

Get out the oats and pour in a lot. I must have used at least three cups, but it may have been more than that. Add as many as the ganache will comfortably hold. You want the ganache to hold the oats together, not the other way around.

Now spread out a large piece of wax paper or parchment paper on the countertop and tape it down. (Parchment paper works better, but wax paper is much cheaper and it will do, so that's what I chose.) You should have at least two feet of it. Put the ganache mixture on the wax paper and spread it out with a spatula. Put another piece of wax paper over the top of the ganache mixture, and press down with your hands so that it's all about the same thickness, 1/4 to 1/2 inch. Now leave it to harden. If you have fridge space, it'll harden pretty fast in the fridge, maybe in an hour or so. I have no fridge space, so I left it on the countertop for six hours.

When it's hardened, peel off the top layer of wax paper and then replace the wax paper on top. Now flip it over (wax paper on the bottom) and remove the wax paper from the top. Now it's been loosened from the wax paper. Slide it onto a large cutting board and cut it into small squares (a large cleaver works nicely for this).

 

Store the bars in a container in the fridge. Yum.

Note: If you want your chocolate bars to be sweeter, you can add corn syrup to the ganache, or you can dust the bars with powdered sugar at the end.

Oatmeal Dark Chocolate Chip Cookie Bars

When I was looking for a recipe for chocolate chip cookie bars, I knew it wouldn't exactly be healthy, but at least I wanted one that had some good stuff (read: fiber) in it and wasn't too sugary. I liked this recipe because it has (roughly) equal amounts of cookie dough and oats, so one day I made it in someone else's oven and discovered it had way too much sugar. The pan size it requires is too big to fit in my toaster oven, so today I modified the recipe for my 9 x 6.5" pan, cut way back on the sugar, and substituted dark chocolate chips. I was delighted with the result, so I'm posting it here.

 

Oatmeal Dark Chocolate Chip Cookie Bars

Ingredients:
1/2 cup (1 stick) butter, softened (you can soften it in the microwave on power 1--it usually takes 30 sec to 2 min)
3/8 cup brown sugar, packed
1 egg yolk
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
3/4 cup all-purpose flour (can use mix of white and wheat flour)
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 pinch of salt (this is what happens when you halve a recipe...)
1 1/2 cups rolled ("old-fashioned") oats
6 ounces (1 cup) dark chocolate chips

Instructions:
1. Cream butter and sugar with electric mixer on high.
2. Beat in egg and vanilla.
3. Mix flour, salt, and baking soda in a separate bowl.
4. Add flour mixture to butter-sugar mixture, beating on low or medium.
5. Stir in oats, beating on low. Last, add chocolate chips and stir them in the same way. (If the dough is too stiff, you might want to use your hands instead.) You can substitute raisins or chopped nuts for some of the chocolate chips, if you prefer.
6. Flatten cookie dough into a greased 9 x 6.5" baking dish. It's ok for there to be a few cracks in the dough, but mostly it should be flat.
7. Bake at 350 degrees for 20-25 minutes, or until lightly golden and cookies are set in the middle. If you're unsure, test with a knife (it'll probably get chocolate on it, but it shouldn't come out with any cookie dough on it).
8. Cool for 20 minutes; cut into 1-inch squares.

To use a 9 x 13" pan, follow these directions:

Ingredients:
1 cup (2 sticks) butter, softened (you can soften it in the microwave on power 1--it usually takes 1-2 min)
3/4 cup brown sugar, packed
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour (can use mix of white and wheat flour)
1 teaspoon baking soda
pinch of salt
3 cups rolled ("old-fashioned") oats
12 ounces (2 cups) dark chocolate chips

Follow instructions above for mixing. Bake in a 9 x 13" pan for 30-35 minutes.

Baked Barley Pudding

After I had dinner last night, I started in on this recipe. I came across it because a cookbook that someone had given me included a recipe for a dessert with barley in it. I didn't like the particular recipe, but I was intrigued by the possibility of a dessert with barley. I did some google searches, and eventually I settled on this recipe from Taste of Home.

The recipe I used was for a very rich rice pudding, but with barley instead. I lightened it quite a bit, though. I love rice pudding, and I've experimented in the past with lighter versions of it, so I have an idea of how that works. Besides, dessert with protein is a good idea when you're eating vegetarian. (The More-with-Less cookbook has a lot to say about how desserts can have nutritional value.)

I must have been crazy to start another recipe when my kitchen looked like this:

 

but I did it anyway. I don't usually wash dishes as I go, because I don't have a drying rack; I lay them on the counter to dry them. And when I'm cooking, I don't have any counter space to spare, so the dishes wait.

The recipe said to bake it in 8 ramekins, but I don't have that many, so this is what I managed to scare up:

 

They almost look pathetic, don't they?

Meanwhile, I cooked the barley in the water and added the milk after 10 minutes, as per directions. It said to bring to a boil and simmer uncovered, and I think I turned the heat down too low, or my stove may have overheated and turned off (it does that from time to time), or maybe I should have covered it. Of course, the problem with covering it is that the water can't evaporate. Anyway, I was way over the amount of time the recipe said to cook the barley, and I still wasn't sure if it was "almost tender." How do you know if something is almost tender?

 

Finally I decided it had cooked enough and I took it off the stove and stirred in the half-and-half, sugar, eggs, and vanilla. It called for 1/2 cup of sugar, but that seemed like a lot as I was pouring it in, so I didn't use the entire 1/2 cup. It was still way too much sugar.

Now it's time to put away the stove and get out the oven. First I had to clear off this whole counterspace:

 

I got the oven preheating, and pretty soon I put the 9 x 9 pan in the oven. There was no room for the smaller pan and its ramekin, so it had to wait for the next batch.

 

I was most of the way through the cooking time when I realized I had forgotten to add the cinnamon and the golden raisins. Oops. At least there was still one unbaked ramekin, so I gave it some raisins and cinnamon.

After about 35 minutes, the two little ramekins were done, and the second big one went in. I also rotated the pan, because things in the back of the oven burn easily. I belatedly added the cinnamon to the top of the two little ramekins, and I tried to drop a few raisins through the hole(s) created when I stuck the knife in to see if it was done.

 

I gave the ramekins a few minutes to cool before I took a spoon and attacked one of them. It was liquidy, which I expected since it had just come out of the oven. It had way too much sugar (I got a sugar-headache), and the barley was really chewy. Live and learn.

For the next half-hour, I kept checking the big ramekins every 7 minutes. I think I dropped at least two knives on the floor. I was getting tired and frustrated. Finally the big ramekins were ready. If you look closely, you can see a raisin on the skin on top of the left one, from when I tried to add the raisins after it came out of the oven.

 

I was so glad when they were done, and I was even happier when they were cool enough to put in the fridge. I managed to eat both of the little ones, since I didn't have a place for them in the fridge. I probably could have put them under the freezer, but things put there tend to freeze (ever tried to cook with half-frozen eggs?) and I was afraid the glass might break.

Today I did dishes. Lots and lots and lots of dishes. Then I really, really cleaned the kitchen sink, because it needed it.

I had some more of the barley pudding this afternoon. When I went to bed last night, I was contemplating throwing it in the trash, but I decided it wasn't that bad and I didn't want to waste it. It actually tasted a lot better today, though it's still too sugary.

In light of all I learned, here is my modified version of the recipe. I may actually try it again, but not at the end of a long day of cooking.

Baked Barley Pudding

1-1/4 cups water
1/2 cup uncooked medium pearl barley
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 cups milk
1 cup half-and-half (may use 1/4 cup skim milk and 3/4 cup half-and-half)
1/3 cup sugar (or less)
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 cup golden raisins
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon

The directions are copied straight from their website. Make sure you cook the barley long enough, and don't forget to add the raisins and cinnamon...

Directions

In a large saucepan, bring water to a boil. Stir in barley and salt. Reduce heat; simmer, uncovered, for 15 minutes, stirring occasionally. Add milk; cook over medium-low heat for 10 minutes or until barley is almost tender, stirring frequently. In a bowl, whisk the cream, sugar, eggs and vanilla; gradually stir into the barley mixture.

Spoon into eight greased 6-oz. custard cups. Sprinkle with raisins and cinnamon. Place custard cups in two 9-in. square baking pans. Fill both pans with boiling water to a depth of 1 in. Bake, uncovered, at 350° for 30-35 minutes or until a knife inserted near the center comes out clean. Store in the refrigerator. Yield: 8 servings.