Switching gears here for a minute from All the Proteins!! Week, I wanted to show you these “overthought” hand pies. You see, today is of course Juneteenth. I must admit that until I attended grad school some 25 years ago in someplace other than New England or Germany, I never really paid much attention to a whole lot of Black history — a fault that I will admit and have hopefully rectified. I’ll spare you the details of my grad school work except to say that it was eye-opening. In addition, I think that most of you know that I find cultural meaning and shared common beliefs through food — yes, for me, almost everything comes back to the food, whether it be Independence Day or Christmas. I did some more details research on the food traditions of Juneteenth, which is often celebrated with a menu of red foods to represent the perseverance of the enslaved. No, these Blackberry Peach Hand Pies aren’t red – there will be red on the menu soon as Strawberry week starts on Monday (and I have taken the day off to go Strawberry picking) — but they are a combination of ideas: Pies, and hand pies, a commonality between North and South, though these are inspired by a recipe from a little Georgia bakery. Peaches are common to both GA and TX. And I will always go back to Breaking Bread with family and friends as an important part of community building.
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Sweet Snacks
Sundae Funday! Happy Sunday everyone! It’s a beautiful day and I hope that there might be some ice cream in your future. When I was a little girl, the Italian gelato place that we went to didn’t have cones. You always got your frozen goodness in a dish, but they always added a small pizzelle. So that got me to thinking … isn’t a pizzelle just a flat cone? After looking at the ingredients for cones and pizzelle, yup, they are. These are extra-special though, so meant for Sundays (I mean Sundaes) with the chocolate and sprinkles.
My Aunt Ingrid had a plum tree in the backyard. And this one summer, there were a crazy amount of plums, so much so that when it was windy, it would rain plums all over the garden. They overwhelmed us that summer. So Ingrid suggested that she would give me one pfennig per plum that I collected into a bucket for the compost pile. I am guessing she though I would get bored soon enough, but I collected buckets and buckets full. In the end, I collected enough plums so that Ingrid bought me my first full album: Synchronicity by the Police. It was 1983 and I was eleven years old.
As it turns out, it wasn’t really red enough (just more cocoa-y), but I did find this recipe for Red Velvet Blossoms that also rolled the cookies in red sugar and I thought they looked neat, so here is one more submission for Chocolate Week. Using Hershey’s Hugs instead of Kisses is also a nice touch to get them to stand out. This is a recipe that I’ll add to the Valantine’s Day list too!
I was going to call these cookies “Clearing out the Pantry” or “Everything AND the Kitchen Sink Cookies” because they are loaded with as many varieties of chocolate chips as I could find: Semi-sweet chocolate, white chocolate, espresso chips and Bailey’s Chips. In fact, there are so many chips in the cookies that I had a hard time getting them to stick together. But in the end, they did, and combine all those chips with a chocolate cookie as the base and we have chocolate overload (appropriate given that is Chocolate-Week in the CSPS Bake/Cook-a-long).