We are heating up some deliciousness on June 12 for National Peanut Butter Cookie Day! This scrumptious food occasion permits treat sweethearts and peanut butter darlings to move back from the pies and cakes to enjoy a little peanut butter treat.
Alabama’s American farming augmentation instructor, George Washington Carver, advanced the peanut broadly. Notable for his advancements, Carver incorporated 105 nut recipes from different cookbooks, agrarian announcements, and different sources. In 1916, he made an Exploration Release called How to Develop the Peaut and 105 Different ways of Setting it up for Human Consumption. The notice included three recipes calling for squashed or hacked peanuts as one of its fixings. In any case, peanut butter cookies were not one of them.
It was in the early 1920s peanut butter began to be listed as an ingredient in cookies.
Incidentally, the peanut butter we know and love today didn’t become commercially available until the 1920s. In 1922, Joseph Rosefield kept the peanut oil from separating from the solids through this process. Afterward, he patented the process of homogenization and sold it to a company that began making a peanut butter called Peter Pan.
No one knows why we press criss-crossed fork marks into our peanut butter cookies before baking. However, homemade peanut butter cookies would just not be the same without a bit of decoration.
The best way to celebrate this cookie holiday is with some homemade peanut butter cookies, a glass of milk, and a friend. If you don’t feel like baking in the summer heat, visit your favorite baker and grab a dozen. Don’t forget to give them a shout-out and let them know how much you appreciate their mad cookie baking skills!
Share your peanut butter cookie recipe on social media using the hashtag #NationalPeanutButterCookieDay.
March 28th recognizes a decadent and delicious dessert on National Black Forest Cake Day. Black Forest cake is the English name for the German dessert Schwarzwalder Kirschtorte, meaning “Black Forest cherry torte.”
Most often, bakers layer several layers of chocolate cake with whipped cream and cherries between each layer to make Black Forest cake. Then they decorated the cake with whipped cream, maraschino cherries, and chocolate shavings. Some traditional recipes call for sour cherries between the layers and a Kirschwasser (a clear liquor distilled from tart cherries) to be added to the cake. In the United States, bakers usually do not use alcohol. However, in Germany, the liqueur is a mandatory ingredient. Otherwise, the cake can not legally be sold under the Schwarzwalder Kirschtorte name.
The cake is named after the specialty liquor (Schwarzwalder Kirschwasser) of the region of the Black Forest (Schwarzwald) mountain range in southwestern Germany.
Beyond the history of the cake, bakers and pastry chefs create elegant displays when baking Black Forest cake. The combination of rich chocolate layered with layers of contrasting color and bold red cherries offer bakers an opportunity to design remarkable pieces. Their decadent interpretations leave us with fantastic memories and a sweet piece of cake to enjoy, too.
With cake holidays, we can celebrate in many ways. Visit your favorite bakery and order a delicious black forest cake to bring home. Or, break out the cake pans and bake one up yourself. Show off your keen baking skills with one of these delicious recipes! You can also watch cake decorating shows to see what bakers design with a black forest recipe. What’s your favorite slice?
As you celebrate, be sure to use #BlackForestCakeDay to post on social media.
February 23rd annually recognizes a well-known food holiday, National Banana Bread Day. A moist, sweet, cake-like quick bread, banana bread is made with fully ripe, mashed bananas. Some recipes call for yeast, and then the finished banana bread is sliced, toasted and spread with butter.
With the popularization of baking soda and baking powder in the 1930s banana bread first became a standard feature of American cookbooks. It appeared in Pillsbury’s 1933 Balanced Recipes cookbook, too. Banana bread later gained further acceptance with the release of the original Chiquita Banana’s Recipe Book in 1950.
Despite the banana’s arrival in the United States in the 1870s, it took a while before they appeared as an ingredient in desserts.
Early Banana Bread
One early recipe came from The Vienna Model Bakery. It advertised banana bread as something new in the April 21, 1893, edition of St. Louis Post-Dispatch. A new restaurant/bakery chain owned by Gaff, Fleischmann & Company, The Viena Model Bakery was known for its baked goods and was likely one of the first to produce banana bread in the United States. The recipe was made with banana flour, which is made by drying strips of the fruit, then grinding it to a powder. This process had long been used in the West Indies.
In Hawaii during World War I, a surplus of bananas resulted from very few ships available to export the fruit. To prevent waste, alternative uses for bananas were developed. For example, bakeries started incorporating the fruit into their bread.
This recipe was printed in The Maui News on April 12, 1918, for banana bread: 2/3 banana 1/3 flour Yeast, coconut milk or water There was also rationing of staple food items such as flour. Banana flour was a suggested substitute. It was touted as a health food and recommended for a vegetarian diet.
This, of course, is not the quick bread we know today. A recipe submitted by Mrs. Dean in the February 18, 1918, issue of The Garden Island paper for a banana muffin might more closely resemble the quick bread we think of today.
1 cup cornmeal 3-1/2 teaspoons of baking powder 2 tablespoons of sugar 1 sifted banana 3/4 cup rye flour 1 teaspoon salt 3/4 cup milk 1 egg 1 tablespoon Crisco Mix dry ingredients, add banana, milk and egg and Crisco.
Quick Bread and Muffin
The difference between a quick bread and a muffin in baking has a lot to do with the type of fat and how it is mixed creating a different crumb or texture to the bread.
In 1927, Unifruit (a wholesale produce company) offered a free cookbook called From the Tropics to Your Table. The book offered recipes full of bananas as ingredients including banana muffins and breads. This little cookbook would have been handy during the Great Depression which was just around the corner. At the time, families utilized every scrap of food, including overripe bananas. They cooked overripe bananas, as well as other fruits and vegetables, into breads, stews and other dishes when flavor and texture were not as appealing raw.
Bake your favorite version of banana bread to celebrate. With so many varieties to try – banana nut, chocolate banana and more – you can make more than one! Invite someone to join you or give a loaf or two away. The celebration is just too good not to share! We like ours warm from the oven with butter!
Use #NationalBananaBreadDay to post on social media.
February 10th, National Cream Cheese Brownie Day shines a spotlight on an irresistible dessert bar. Combining chocolate and cream cheese has long been a favorite in the bakery. When it’s added to a brownie recipe the results are spectacular.
The brownie has been around since the 1800s but was first documented in 1906 in The Boston Cooking School Cook Book. There are hundreds of cream cheese brownie recipes. However, we also enjoy them cut up into parfaits or mixed into ice cream. Add a dollop of whipped cream, berries or a sprinkle of nuts and fruit and they become a decadent dessert in their own right.
Adding cream to the batter once it’s poured into the pan and swirling it around with a knife gives the finished product an elegant look. It even suggests a celebration when you look at it! No matter how you enjoy cream cheese brownies, we are sure that you will find one that you like.
Maybe you would like to bake a pan of these delicious brownies and share them with your family and friends! Enjoy my fun easy recipe. If you missed these Easy Loaded Brownies this recipe is great the whole year through.
Use #CreamCheeseBrownieDay to post on social media.
National Lemon Chiffon Cake Day on March 29th offers a bright and zesty celebration among the cake holidays.
For a nice refreshing spring dessert, chiffon cake is a very light cake made with vegetable oil, eggs, sugar, flour, baking powder, and flavorings. The fluffy texture is made by beating egg whites until stiff and folding them into the cake batter before baking. Chiffon cakes tend to be lower in saturated fat than butter cakes, potentially making them healthier than their butter-heavy counterparts.
The recipe for the chiffon cake was a closely guarded secret for years. In the 1920s, angel food cake was quite popular, but Henry Baker thought he could make a lighter, richer cake. The insurance salesman-turned-caterer tinkered with ingredients until in 1927 when he came upon the perfect combination of ingredients and methods to produce the airy richness he was looking for.
Keeping the recipe to himself, he offered his services to the Brown Derby Restaurant in Los Angeles which catered to Hollywood’s elite. Until 1947, Baker was the only person to bake chiffon cakes. Baker’s secret combination and methods relied on what bakers and chefs already knew about cakes and leavening. The lightness of angel food cakes relies on egg whites to create the loft and airiness. Traditional cakes used baking soda or powder for leavening. Baker combined both egg whites and baking powder to achieve a lightness like no other. And yet there was one other trick up Baker’s sleeve. Where angel food cake contained no butter, fat or shortening of any kind, Baker added vegetable oil.
While today adding vegetable oil to cake recipes is commonplace, back in 1927 these oils were a newer ingredient to home kitchens. His cakes continued to grow in popularity and as they did so did the variety of chiffon cakes he made. Then, in 1947, Baker sold his recipe to General Mills for an undisclosed amount. The rest is baking history.
HOW TO OBSERVE #LemonChiffonCakeDay
Challenge yourself to the lightness of chiffon. So many recipes offer us the zesty flavor we can’t resist! We’ve even found a few to try.
