Nanny Kelley's Black Joe Cake

This cake is the absolute best chocolate cake on the planet! Moist and rich, we usually make some creamy peanut butter icing for it but it is also wonderful with a light and airy cooked icing too!
This is the cake that everyone asks me to bring to any pot lucks, community dinners and get togethers. It has withstood the test of time!
Enjoy!


Nanny Kelley's Black Joe Cake

2 cups all purpose flour
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking powder
2 tsp baking soda
3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa (I prefer Hershey's, naturally) Suze's note!
2 cups sugar
1 cup vegetable oil
1 cup hot black coffee
1 cup milk
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 tablespoons mayonnaise

Sift all the dry ingredients and add oil, coffee milk and mayonnaise. Mix for two minutes. Add the eggs and the vanilla flavoring and mix well for two minutes more. This batter will not be thick.
Pour into two greased and floured 9 inch cake pans.
Bake at 325 degrees for 25-30 minutes or longer depending on your oven. Start checking with a toothpick at 25 minutes and take it from there.
Cool the cake for fifteen minutes before removing from the pans. Cool the cakes on wire racks.


Light and Airy Cooked Icing

I cup milk
5 tablespoons all purpose flour
1/2 cup butter, softened
1/2 cup shortening
1 cup sugar
1 tsp vanilla

Combine milk and flour in a saucepan and cook until thick. Cover and refrigerate. In mixing bowl, beat butter, shortening, sugar and vanilla till creamy. And the chilled milk and flour mixture and beat for ten minutes or more. Frost the cooled cake.

Nanny's Cracker Pudding

This cracker pudding is incredible! Sweet, creamy with a little bit of the cracker lumps...Just what I needed after a long, hard day at ........ school! :)

Nanny's Cracker Pudding

1 quart milk
2 eggs
Scant 1/2 cup sugar
Vanilla to taste
1 cup Ritz crackers
Baker angel flake coconut (short kind)

Heat milk but don't scald or burn. Add sugar and dissolve. Crush crackers and add to the milk.
Turn off the heat under the milk. Take a small amount and slowly beat into the eggs, making sure the pudding base is cooled a bit.
Once its well mixed, put it back into the pudding base and cook a bit longer.
Add the coconut, stir.

Nanny's Roly Polys!

There really is no recipe for these treats but I never want to forget them!
My grandmother often made pot pie. Usually chicken, sometimes beef and on rare occasions I can even remember sugar pea pot pie and once made with clams.
When she had leftover pot pie dough, which I remember as being every time, and now I doubt by accident, she would make us these little pinwheels as a treat!
They were so good and to us they were so special!
Play with the level and sweetness and spice that suits you!

Nanny's Roly Polys

Leftover pot pie dough, rolled into a rectangle
Sugar
Cinnamon
Softened butter


Spread the softened butter over the rectangle of dough.
Sprinkle with cinnamon and sugar, to taste. (I usually use the ratio that we like for cinnamon toast).
Roll the dough as you would for a pumpkin roll, etc.
Slice into 1 1/2 inch pieces and place cut side down on a lightly greased cookie sheet.
I use Pam, and only use it sparingly since the butter from the polies will melt out onto the sheet.

Bake until light brown and bubbling. I used a 350-375 degree oven.

Enjoy!

A Recipe For Homemade Cup Cheese!

I was given this recipe by a fantastic Mom who loves gardening and earth/nature as much as I do!
She is an expert at making her own cottage cheese and from that came the recipe for the Cup Cheese. I am trying the recipe this weekend, so I'll post a review for it here.

Hello Suze,

Yes, I do have a recipe for Amish cup cheese. This recipe was given to me by a Mennonite friend of mine. She grew up here in Lancaster PA.

~Cup Cheese~

5 cups dry curds 1/4 cup butter

1 Tblsp. Baking soda 1/2 cup cream

1 tsp. salt

Add soda and salt to curds. Let set 3 to 4 hrs. In double boiler, crock pot, or iron skillet melt the butter. Add curds. Melt stirring occasionally, to keep from sticking to sides and bottom. When melted add sweet or sour cream. Let come to boil, pour into a dish. If a thinner cheese is desired, add more cream or milk. If the curds don't want to melt right you can put in the blender, before it's cold.

Tip: Even if it's lumpy it's still good, a special kind of cheese in itself...... Whatever suits your taste. Cheddar powder, sour cream and onion powder, maybe even fresh herbs. Crumbled bacon and thin cheese makes a good sauce, a thick cheese you can spread on bread, makes a nice sandwich. It's also good with pretzles or crackers.

Enjoy,

~Joyful Mama~ :)

Miss Lizzie West's Cornbread/Sussex County, DE

This is a wonderful recipe that was given to me by one of my neighbors shortly after we moved into our wonderful, old house here at the beach. This is a recipe that was a favorite of Miss Lizzie West, one of the former residents of our house. She was a wonderful old woman who was all that is good about the southern part of Sussex County, Delaware.

This is an Eastern Shore wet cornbread, not at all like the dry, crumbly version that I was accustomed to prior to moving here.

Miss Lizzie's Cornbread


4 cups of boiling water
2 cups of cornmeal
1 tsp. salt
1/2 stick of butter
2 eggs
1 cup of sugar
1 cup of milk
1 cup flour

Mix together, then add 1 cup of milk, again. Then mix all together with a mixer.
Grease baking pan. Bake in preheated 350 degree oven for one hour or until brown.
Miss Lizzie's sister, Margie, was a resident of a local nursing home and had some very interesting things to say about Miss Lizzie's experiences in our house. Suffice it to say, when we wondered about finding a lock of hair in the fireplace in the dining room, Miss Margie told our neighbor that Miss Lizzie often stated she saw a woman in green shoes, rocking in that room....and she had no head.....

Sadie Lebo's Famous Coconut Cake!

Sadie Lebo and I aren't related, but she was a dear, dear woman I met through our many trips to the now-defunct Reinholds Athletic Club. She was a waitress there and she and her husband, Popeye, were great people.
This cake was famous throughout the area and no one could ever hope to duplicate it.
Thanks to Sadie's daughter-in-law, Janet Miller for sharing it with me. When I was a Charge Nurse at the Denver Nursing Home, Janet's father was a patient there. I asked her about the recipe and she not only got it for me, she handed it to me, in Sadie's handwriting! I value this as I do my own grandmother's recipes. Thank you Janet, and thank you Sadie.

Sadie Lebo's Coconut Cake (as served at the Reinhold's AC)

2 cups of granulated sugar
1/2 cup of butter
4 egg yolks
Mix these three together.

2 cups of flour
Pinch of salt
3/4 cup of sweet milk
2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 cup of coconut
1 tsp vanilla
4 egg whites beaten stiff ( mix in last)

Cream the butter, sugar, egg yolks, adding ingredients alternately with the milk.
Add the vanilla, then coconut.
Lastly fold in egg whites.
Put in oven, bake at 360 degrees for 4o minutes.

Enjoy!

Nanny Kelley's Bread Pudding

This comes from a fading piece of paper, now tan with the 'receipt' written in ink, by my grandmother herself, Belva A Kelley.

This was a favorite of my late husbands. He adored her and her cooking. And she adored him right back :)

Nanny Kelley's Bread Pudding

1 1/2 cups of stale bread cubes
3 cups of milk
1/3 cup of sugar (you may alter this to taste)
2 eggs
pinch of salt
vanilla (I usually go with two tsps)

Scald milk and soak bread in it till soft.
Add sugar, beaten eggs, salt and flavoring.
Bake in moderate oven. The paper shows 325 degrees but there is a note in the margin that
says "I use 360 degrees.)
Note: She also wrote: You can add raisins if you like them.
Bake for 45 minutes.

I can tell you that I have always had to double this recipe. It disappeared too fast otherwise!