y’know those big 4″ muffin-top pans? Great for hamburger buns. Set up the breadmaker for making dough, and drop a slightly flattened ball in each of 6 muffin-places. Makes great hamburger buns.
We’ve still got a couple of pieces of the pineapple upside down cake left. It was so thoughtful of Jane to do that for me—Mum always made that cake for my birthday, ever since I was a teenager, and I’m not inclined to bake my own birthday cake, so I wasn’t going to do it…I’d just resigned myself that I wasn’t going to have that for my birthday again.
But Jane, bless her, and I know my mum would definitely approve—found a real good recipe, and organized it all without saying a word, until the makings showed up in the groceries. She aced her very first one, right down to getting it flipped out of the pan, which is no small trick!–and not only that, her tweak to the recipe (adding a cup of fine-chopped pecans) makes it a cinch to freeze. It doesn’t go soggy, it unfreezes on the countertop in about an hour, and it’s really good. Uses an amazing amount of butter and brown sugar. And oh, it’s good. Well, tonight we do in the last of it.
I’ve a similar story, in a way. Once when I was 12 or 13, my Mom asked what kind of birthday cake I wanted. I told her I really didn’t like cake all that much, if’n I had my druthers a blueberry pie was what I’d most like. After that, it was “traditional”, a Blueberry pie for my birthday! 🙂
I must say I never quite understood birthdays. Maybe it’s because of my Asperger’s, but it was always much like any other day to me. Seemed to me that birthdays would make more sense if they were our mothers’ celebrations–they remembered its meaningfulness! 😉 I never remembered much of anything until 5 or 6!
I look on it as a time for parties—Jane gives one for me, and then in October, I give one for her, and then there’s Halloween, and Thanksgiving, and then Christmas, and New Year’s and we can party from September first til January first of the new year. That’s not a bad thing.
I frequently make my spouse Pineapple Upside Down Cake for birthday, although last week (said birthday), the request was for a spice cake with cream cheese frosting. I grew up with a fair amount of upside down cake but rarely did my mother (and therefor me) make fancy, two-layer cakes with real frosting so I was a bit anxious making the spice cake. Quite easy, it turns out and looks very impressive to my eyes when layered and frosted. I think I may make some more “real” cakes (the scary kinds) but I do so love upside down cake and it goes together so quickly. I’ve most always used canned pineapple rings and sometimes put marichino cherries in the holes. However, lacking a can of rings one impulsive moment of wanting upside down cake, I used little, diced triangles: doesn’t look as satisfyingly geometric but it rally covered the bottom of the brown sugar and buttered pan well and cut up with no wrestling how best to get a dull knife to divide the rings.
My mother used crushed pineapple (but never cherries). It makes a good upside-down cake, and you don’t have to fight with the pineapple slices.
Red velvet cake was always my choice for birthday dessert; Mom’s was great! The local grocery store now makes a version that’s close, and sold by the two-inch square, but it’s hard to fit into the carb restrictions that I’m under. And on my birthday, I call my mother: to thank her and Dad for fooling around as they did. It seems fitting.
Spice cake with penuche frosting?
Ooh, ooh, I love penuche! It’s my favorite fudge and also sauce on icecream. Perhaps I will indeed make a spice cake for myself with it (the cream cheese frosting is my spouse’s favorite). I believe penuche is a New England regional flavor/combo but would be interested to hear from others. It is essentially brown sugar, butter and a bit of rum.
Hamburgers on homemade buns — NOMS! I think the best part of home-baked birthday cakes is the someone who wants to do something special for someone they care about — especially if it involves secrets and surprises — and brown sugar! So glad you each have that someone.
Definitely agree with that. We love surprising each other—and our birthdays lie a convenient distance from Christmas and from each other—and New Year’s is for that last little gift we just had maybe nxs, eh? And then of course there’s Valentines, which is mostly silly cards; and St Paddy’s! that’s finding a restaurant with the best corned beef—we have the most delightful year! Then of course convention season hits—is it any wonder with all those potential cake and pie and Champagne occasions we struggle with diets? 😉
I always make my own birthday cake and take it to work to share. I love to bake, but know I WILL eat the entire cake if it’s in the house! And I tend to be adventurous on my birthday cakes: cherry-almond cake, Westhaven date cake (an old favorite snack cake with dates, pecans, and chocolate chips), tres leches, boiled oatmeal cake with broiled coconut icing (tastes like raw oatmeal cookie dough with german chocolate cake icing), lemon-rosemary crumb cake. And, not that I did this one for a birthday, apple-bacon-maple coffee cake, and salted caramel chocolate chip cookie bars. My department tends to be both apprehensive and happy when my birthday rolls around! 🙂
I am contemplating making up some Depression-era recipes and taking them to work. Vinegar cobbler is top of the list, except that it says to serve warm, which means making it in the morning before work. Doable, if I REALLY feel like it. But I am so not a morning person!
Your co-workers have to love you! That’s neat!
Vinegar cobbler? What on earth? I’m curious.
I like that idea for homemade burger buns, but don’t have the muffin top tins. It’s been a while since I used my bread machine, think I’ll do so tomorrow morning.
I wish I could frost a cake so it looks really good, but I haven’t come close yet. The cake tastes good, but looks, ehhh, IMHO.
Tomorrow night, it’ll be an omelet, even though I can’t get BBC-America on my TV, apparently, and will have to wait for the latest Doctor Who ep from iTunes. What does an omelet have to do with the Doctor? Shouldn’t it be a soufflé after the recent episode? Well, it’s a simple pun from said ep that now has me in the mood for an omelet.
Eggs, stir, min. eight!
Allons-y!
I’m most of the way through Out of Time by Lynn Abbey and I’ve been really enjoying the mix of skeptic science, time and ancient beliefs, and a nice dollop of Saxon and Norman history. Great protagonist. Wonky dysfunctional star-crossed lover couple that Emma is trying to help. I still have an alarm bell or two about each of Bran and Jen, even so. Emma’s mindset and starting situation seem closer to mine than I’d like to admit. And I’m very intrigued by all that’s going on. Not what I expected the books to be, but that’s no minus. I am finding this one’s well worth the read.
A language note: During the book, Lynn has Emma (rightly) trying to make out the Saxon English and Norman French. At one point, a char says both please and pray, but likely in Saxon, 11th century English but before Norman French had merged into it to begin Middle English, Anglo-Norman. To pray was probably to beggen or to bidden or to beseechen, depending on shade of meaning. Maybe to ascian. But the simple please? Maybe to bidden? I don’t know. It struck me that two of the most important, essential words for getting along with people that we use today…are French in origin and not kept from their Saxon equivalents, even though the Saxon English had words for both. but instead we say please, pleasure (plaisir, plaît) and pray, prayer (prier, prière). To bid or beg or beseech we’re the only middle and modern Saxon words that came to mind, not knowing Old English or enough German or Dutch. Yet the Saxons would have said Saxon equivalents for please, pray…polite, courtesy, and many others that are from French conquest…that later went native, assimilated.
Yes, it’s all very far from the strangely named “pineapple” and “grapefruit,” neither of which look remotely piney, apple-y, or grapey, just fruity. Pineapple upside down cake, though, is most wondrous.
fascinating stuff – for those words please, pray…polite, courtesy, google translate gives in Dutch alsjeblieft, bid … beleefd, met dank
and in german Bitte, beten … höflich, Höflichkeit
and in Danish please, bede (means ask)… høflig, høflighed (so the Vikings maybe gave us please, unless that’s just google translate/the Danes have adopted the english please – I know for thanks they say tak, oh and bedes also means please)
welsh has weddio or gweddio for pray/ask is that related to the bed sound the germanic and scandinavian languages seem to cluster on?
please and pray/ask must be very basic words –
I’m working google translate for all it’s worth here which is not much!
Vinegar cobbler is a real depression era recipe, basically strips of dough cooked up in a sugar syrup spiked with apple cider vinegar and a little vanilla. If you take the strips of dough, roll them up around some sugar and cinnamon, and pour the syrup on top, you get vinegar rolls. Apparently vinegar and sugar were cheaper to get than apples back then.
According to Wikipedia, it was named for its resemblance to pine cones which, until the 17th century were called “pine apples” The name “grapefruit” is an allusion to clusters of the fruit on the tree, which often appear similar to grapes. It’s a hybrid of the pomelo or shaddock (Citrus maxima), and the sweet orange (Citrus sinensis).
That Google translator must be hiccuping on Danish, if it’s giving “please” as a Danish word, unless Danes use the English word that much, which is doubtful.
Hmm, they have bede, very close to bid, bade, bidden, the same ancestral source.
I’d think the Welsh words are not related…though if they happen to share the same root word clear back to Indo-European, or if they borrowed a Germanic word, maybe.
Höfflich, høflig look like hope or help with Grimm’s Law (Germanic consonant shifts) applied. I might be squinting too hard, though.
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WOL, thanks, I never would’ve guessed.
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I got an early start, so by lunch, there will be fresh wheat bread, courtesy of the bread machine. This is only the third or fourth time I’ve used it, but this winter should give it a workout. — I still haven’t found where my local store hides the rice flour CJC suggested to improve the bread, but I’ll look again for it and tofu this week.
There’s tea steeping: Stash Tea brand, chocolate hazelnut. The first time, it was too strong and sweet, so I’ve used only two tea bags and half the sugar. (I have promised myself to cut back on sugar in tea, which I did not used to add routinely.) the tea makers recommend a dollop of cream or milk for this tea. We’ll see. The blend also has a little vanilla and a black tea base. Ordinarily, I don’t take cream in tea, but always in coffee. This tea is new to me, only the second kettle.
So it’s *very* homey and civilized around here today. The cats greatly approve, though the bread maker sound isn’t yet familiar. — Chicken strips for lunch; I added a couple of ounces of cranberry juice, which I think will be nice.
An eggs-stir-min.-eight omelet tonight, though I don’t expect to get the Doctor Who ep until tomorrow.
Still envious of those burger buns.
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Oh, and I’m now into the second Orion’s Children book, Behind Time.
For BCS- here’s the Dutch version:
to pray = ‘bidden’ (past tense ‘gebeden’), prayer = ‘gebed’;
begging, beseeching = ‘smeken’ sometimes in semi-fixed combination for emphasis ‘bidden en smeken’ (in which case I’d translate that as begging and beseeching, not praying);
‘beleefd’ = polite (I don’t know where that comes from, as the verb ‘beleven’ = to experience, and ‘leven’ = to live);
German höfflich = Dutch ‘hoffelijk’ (or old-fashioned ‘hoofs’)= courteous; it comes from the way people at court =’aan het Hof’ were supposed to behave.
Please may be related to Dutch ‘plezier’ = a pleasure, something nice, or fun. As a verb it’s old-fashioned, ‘om iemand te plezieren’ (to pleasure someone) is nowadays said as ‘Iemand een plezier doen’ = to do someone a favour, to do something nice for someone. Kids having fun = ‘hebben plezier’. In century-old spellings I’ve seen it written as ‘pleizier’, which sounds even closer to pleasure.
In modern Belgian the adjective ‘plezant’ (dutch ‘plezierig’) means pleasant.
The two most-used politeness words are really phrases which have become words, and both exist in at least two variants (a more and a less formal one):
– ‘alstublieft / alsjeblieft’ (sometimes, speaking informally but never written shortened to ‘alstu’ or ‘ashe’)= ‘als het u belieft’ (‘u’ = formal you with -t- added for pronounciation, ‘je’ = informal you)= literally: if it pleases you = please, but it’s also used when handing someone something, in which case it translates into something like ‘here you go / that’s for you’; the verb ‘believen’ (to please) is old-fashioned and seldom used. The Dutch phrase was already widely used at a time when the higher social strata still spoke French and used ‘s’il vous plait’, so I don’t know if the one can be descended from the other.
– ‘dankuwel / dankjewel / dankje / bedankt’ = ‘dank u wel’ = thank you well, thanks a lot (the first two, formal and informal) / thank you / thanks (be thanked). ‘Danken’ and ‘bedanken’ in Dutch means to thank (the first used more formally and for thanking God, the second used less formally, for thanking people but also for saying ‘no thanks’ to invitations, depending on the context.
Example 1: ‘Mag ik u heel hartelijk bedanken?’ (a bit oldfashioned or formal) = ‘Thank you wery much’ (literally: May I thank you very much, heartfelt?). ‘Bedankt voor het pakje/cadeau’ = Thanks for the present.
Example 2: ‘Ik bedank voor de uitnodiging’ = I decline the invitation. This can be tricky, if you want to thank someone for inviting you!
And then an added filip with these related words: the German verb ‘danken’ = Dutch ‘denken’ = to think.
*
Lynn hasn’t posted for a while and has locked commenting on her blog, so I don’t know where you could give her your feedback, except by posting your review on Amazon. I tried to tell her I liked them after I’d read all four, but the comments were locked.
I really dislike writing reviews, and am very bad at the spoiler-free kinds that are ‘de riguer’ nowadays, so I haven’t posted anything on Amazon yet. Sorry. I’ll try to re-read them and if she hasn’t got several good reviews up by then maybe I’ll manage to make myself take another try at writing these four reviews.
Oops… Belgian = Flemish!
Hanneke, thank you very much, that was a joy to read.
That brings to mind early, now archaic, English words like leve(n), to love or like, leman, a person (man?) who was well loved or trusted, and the phrase, “I would as lief” for, I’d rather, I’d prefer, from Shakespeare’s and Chaucer’s time.
I’ll email Lynn when I have my thoughts together. 🙂
@BCS, Sorry, I made a mistake with the german danken & denken, I got confused by the vowel switch in the noun Gedanken = thoughts (‘gedachten’ in Dutch). It’s been more than 30 years and I didn’t have my dictionary handy.
About English leve(n) and leman: Dutch old-fashioned verb ‘believen’ = to like, which is supplanted in modern Dutch by ‘houden van’ = to love or like; the English to believe / belief = Dutch ‘geloven'(verb) and ‘geloof'(noun).
‘Lief’ (pronounced rather like the English ‘leaf’) = dear or darling; ‘liefhebben’ = ‘beminnen'(oldfashioned) = to love; ‘geliefde’ = beloved, and in old books you can still find ‘teerbeminde’= tenderly beloved.
I would as lief is almost identical in Dutch, literally just as lief: = ‘Ik zou net zo lief‘.
BTW, you might drop Lynn a line on her blog re Orion’s Children: there’s hardly an author alive who doesn’t love to hear encouragement from readers, and Lynn’s been having a week…
http://lynnabbey.com/FaceOfChaos/
I’ll be posting a review on Amazon in the next day or two, and I’ll be sure to post on her blog. 🙂
I wonder if the Anglo-Saxon way of saying ‘please’ was something like ‘if you will’.
Poul Anderson wrote a short essay giving an idea of what English might have looked like without the Norman influence. It’s called “Uncleftish Beholding”, i.e. “Atomic Theory”.
Uncleftish Beholding
For most of its being, mankind did not know what things are made of, but could only guess. With the growth of worldken, we began to learn, and today we have a beholding of stuff and work that watching bears out, both in the workstead and in daily life.
The underlying kinds of stuff are the *firststuffs*, which link together in sundry ways to give rise to the rest. Formerly we knew of ninety-two firststuffs, from waterstuff, the lightest and barest, to ymirstuff, the heaviest. Now we have made more, such as aegirstuff and helstuff.
The rest is here
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!msg/alt.language.artificial/ZL4e3fD7eW0/_7p8bKwLJWkJ
I’ll be sure to check that. Neat stuff.
Ah, Poul, bless him! I so loved our conversations. He’d get off on things like this and I loved it.