Taylor's Fudgy Brownies

This rose bud china plate was given to me by Nana.
There was a piece of masking tape on the back that said,
"For Sheila From Quispamsis"
(where Poppy's father had a summer home)
There were also two smaller plates; the three plates
hang on the wall in Taylor's bedroom.

Taylor made these brownies for her 14th birthday party in November, because she doesn’t like cake. Yes, she has unusual food preferences and a “discriminating palate” - which is just a nice way of saying she’s a picky eater. These are one of Taylor’s favourite things to make - and eat - and she often makes these for class parties or a potluck.



Taylor (second from the right) and her friends
in a private party room at a Karaoke bar

When Mom lived at the “Rosemount Centre for Seniors” she would walk down Rosemount Av with Taylor and Mitchell and I, and we would have lunch at Wellington Sandwiches. The kids called this sandwich shop “Phil’s” - short for Philomena, the name of the owner and cook. Everyone’s favourite thing about Phil’s was the brownies. When a friend in the neighbourhood made me brownies for a birthday gift we all loved them so much we asked for the recipe. Turns out the recipe is from the container of Fry’s Cocoa. They are fudgy on the inside with a nice “crust” on top. Phil’s have a thick layer of icing, but we’ve tried these with icing and decided they don’t need it. So here you go, the recipe.

Taylor’s Fudgy Brownies

Preheat oven to 350°F

Ingredients:

1 ⅓ cups All Purpose flour

1 teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
1 cup butter
1 cup cocoa
2 cups sugar
4 eggs
1 ½ teaspoons vanilla
1 cup chopped nuts (optional)

Instructions:

Stir together flour, baking powder and salt in a small bowl. Melt butter in a large saucepan. Remove from heat. Stir in cocoa. Blend in dry ingredients and nuts (if using). Pour batter into greased 13 x 9 x 2-inch (3.5 L) rectangular baking pan. Bake 30-35 minutes until done (less time if it's in a dark pan).

Baking Tips:

Measuring margarine and butter:

My mom used to buy margarine in ½ cup squares, to make measuring easier. If you don’t want to use margarine you can buy sticks of butter; one stick is ½ cup. The wrapper also has measurements for smaller amounts like tablespoons. Save the foil or wax paper wrapper and use it to grease the pan when you’re baking.

Melting butter:
Rather than melting butter in a saucepan (as the recipe calls for) and then adding the other ingredients to the saucepan, you can melt butter in the microwave and then use a stand mixer to mix the batter. However, you need to be careful if you melt butter in the microwave. Cut the butter into small pieces and cover the glass bowl with paper towel; this can help prevent splattering or getting scalded. Melt on a low temperature or on "defrost" and keep an eye on it because you don't want it to boil or burn. Check it every 10-15 seconds until it is almost melted, with just a few solid pieces remaining (items in the microwave continue to cook after they are removed). Remove from the microwave and stir until it's completely melted.

In the "olden days" (as my kids say) they would take a piece of straw from a broom to test a cake (or brownies) but you can use a wooden toothpick. Test to see if they are done by poking the centre of the brownies and if the toothpick comes out clean they are done. If dough sticks to the toothpick they are not finished yet. When they are done the edges will look dry and start to pull away from the side of the pan. If you wait too long the edges will start to burn.
 

We have a non-stick Pyrex baking pan with a plastic lid for carrying
 - it has seen a lot of use!

Aunt Verna's Peanut Butter Cookies

This week we had a massive winter storm in Ottawa, setting a new city record for the most snow in one day; by the end of the day we had accumulated 51.5 cm (or 20 inches) of snow! It reminded me of a snowstorm we had in Nova Scotia when I was a kid. I remember the snow being almost as tall as me! Of course I wasn't very tall yet, but the significant thing about it was the sense of awe and wonder.

My father John Holmes with my younger brother Thomas and I

Because they lived further away, my cousins in Ontario and California usually visited Cape Breton in the summer, where they would be staying at the bungalow (what they call a cottage in Cape Breton).

Back row: Uncle Walter, Nana, Aunt Ruth, Pop
Front row: Natalie, Jan and Tara Leonard

 

We too spent time at the bungalow every summer, but my family also went to Cape Breton over the Christmas holidays. When I was little we spent Christmas Day in Sydney, but we only continued to do that for a few years after Thomas was born. Then we spent Christmas at home and travelled to Sydney for the rest of the Christmas holidays. I remember flying as a child but at some point we started taking the train instead - which we really enjoyed - and we usually travelled on Boxing Day.

Thomas and I on a winter train ride to Sydney

After our big snowfall in Ottawa I tried to shoo my kids out the door to go tobogganing, and it reminded me of a time one winter when we were staying at Nana and Pop’s house on St Peter’s Rd.

I’m not sure if Nana was shooing me out the door to play in the snow, or if I wanted to go myself, or if my brother came with me or not. What I will never forget was Nana giving me a cardboard box and telling me to go sliding on the hill in the schoolyard of Colby School behind their house. I have a feeling cardboard boxes were sturdier in those days, and maybe they had a waxed finish, but still, a cardboard box?! Needless-to-say, it didn’t really work very well. But it was memorable!

 

Many years later I saw this Peanuts strip and remembered my own adventure trying to slide down a hill in a cardboard box.

In her “Leonard Family Tales” Mom talks about coming in from outside and having a winter treat, "Coming home from skating, a treat would be cocoa [hot chocolate] with bread and molasses with butter, but the butter was put on after the molasses." Since I haven’t tackled bread-making yet, I thought I’d try these cookies on our big “snow day.”

I don’t know if Nana made peanut butter cookies, but MY mother sure did! This handwritten recipe, in the back of Nana’s cookbook, was not in Nana's handwriting like the other recipes. I suspect this was written by a child, but I’m not sure if it was my mom or Aunt Edna. I asked Aunt Edna if she baked much with her mom and her response was, “I didn’t bake much with Mom at all that I remember – she always asked me to dust??” This leads me to suspect that Nana was trying to keep Edna busy and out of the kitchen. More than likely the recipe was written by Mom. I love the child's printing and the little flourish on the letter "g."

So here you go, the recipe.

Aunt Verna’s Peanut Butter Cookies

Preheat oven to 350°F

Ingredients:

½ cup butter

½ cup peanut butter
½ cup sugar
½ cup brown sugar
1 egg
1 ¾ cup All Purpose flour
¼ tsp salt
½ tsp baking soda

Instructions:

Cream together butter and sugar. Add peanut butter and brown sugar and cream again. Add the egg and mix. Stir together dry ingredients and add. Use a teaspoon to scoop out dough and form balls the size of walnuts. Place the balls an inch apart on ungreased cookie sheets. Flatten the balls with a fork (dipped in water so it won't stick). Bake 8 -10 minutes and remove. The centre of the cookies may not look cooked but remove them anyway; they will puff up and then fall after they are removed. Makes 2 ½ - 3 dozen cookies.

Note: I cooked my first batch until the cookies puffed up and the edges looked cooked, but the edges were not browned. The second batch I cooked until the edges started to brown. I found the browned ones were too crispy and crumbly, while the others were nice and chewy. Mike suggested, having watched his mom make these, that they need to be smaller to make it easier to flatten with the fork. I have another recipe for peanut butter cookies that I used to make as a kid so I’ll have to try those at another time.

Baking Tip:

Measuring solid fats

Some things like shortening, butter or margarine, or in this case peanut butter, are hard to measure if they don’t come in ½ cup blocks or sticks. If you try to measure them in a measuring cup you have to make sure it is all pushed down and there are no air pockets. Then you have to use a spatula to scoop all that sticky peanut butter out of the measuring cup.

As an alternative, you can use a glass measuring cup. To measure out ½ cup of peanut butter for this recipe I filled a clear glass 2 cup measuring cup with 1 ½ cups water. Then, I scooped the peanut butter out of the jar and plopped it into the cup, and the water rose. Once the liquid hit 2 cups I knew that I had half a cup of peanut butter. It does not look appealing but it does make it easier.

Cookie dough is pretty thick and can be hard to mix
with a handheld mixer, but a stand mixer does the trick.

 

 

Great Aunt Edna's Oatmeal Cookies

My mother Verna made these oatmeal cookies quite often in our house, as did her mother before her. In the "Leonard Family Tales" Mom said Nana spent a lot of time in the kitchen. She said, "My mother made innumerable sweets. My father had a sweet tooth and he ate dessert every mealtime, and candy during the evening. He would eat chocolates - in fact, half a box of chocolates - every evening, and then he would have an evening snack of milk and some kind of sweets."

Nana and Poppy left the family home on St Peter's Rd and moved to a nursing home called "The Cove" when my cousin James was an infant. Pop would have been having a "day out" in this photo with James at the bungalow (what they call a cottage in Cape Breton). Pop died in 1981 when James would have been three so this might have been his last summer visiting with my cousins from California. I can imagine Pop eating these oatmeal cookies with a cold glass of milk in the evening.

Oatmeal Cookies

Preheat oven to 400°F
(hot oven)

Ingredients:

1 cup butter and shortening

1 cup brown sugar
2 scant cups oatmeal
2 scant cups All Purpose flour
¼ tsp cream of tartar
1 tsp baking soda
4 tbsp water
¼ tsp salt
1 tsp vanilla

Instructions:

Melt butter and shortening. Cream together butter and sugar. Dissolve baking soda in water and add vanilla, then add mixture to the dough. Stir together dry ingredients and add. Mix well. (The dough can be refrigerated at this point to make handling easier, or saved to bake later.) Use a teaspoon to scoop out dough and form balls the size of walnuts. Place two inches apart on ungreased cookie sheets (parchment paper makes clean-up easy and is compostable). Spread them very thin with a fork dipped in cold water. Bake 8-10 minutes (depending on the thickness) until the edges brown, and remove. Make sure the cookie doesn’t look raw in the centre. Cool for a few minutes on the cookie sheet and then transfer to cooling racks to finish cooling.

 

Note: I refrigerated the dough before baking these cookies so they didn't flatten as much as they would have if they had been cooked right away.

Nana’s blue recipe card credits Edna Farquhar for this recipe. This Edna was our Poppy’s (Charles Edwin Leonard) sister, so she was "Aunt Edna" to Verna, Harry, Walter and Edna Leonard.

Baking Tips:

Measuring brown sugar

When you measure brown sugar the recipes usually call for “packed” brown sugar, even if it's not indicated in the instructions. To “pack” brown sugar, use a spoon to scoop a small amount of brown sugar into the measuring cup and press down with the spoon. Add more and press again. Continue until the measuring cup is full.

Various measurements of a cup
A "scant cup" is a cup minus one or two teaspoons. A "heaping cup" is a cup with an additional one or two teaspoons. For liquids it's referred to as a "generous cup." Liquids are best measured in a clear measuring cup with a spout. Dry ingredients are measure in a measuring cup without a spout.

Family recipes - and a blog - made with love





The food that we make and share as a family is part of our heritage. As a wedding gift to my cousins in California, I wanted to share with them the Leonard heritage in the form of recipes - from Cape Breton, from Nova Scotia, and from Canada. This gift comes from myself and my Holmes-Hayden family, but also from my mother, known to my cousins as Aunt Verna (my mother's maiden name was Leonard).

 

A family dinner at 32 St Peter's Road, Sydney, Nova Scotia, 1966
Clockwise from the left: John Leonard, Poppy, Aunt Mary,
Verna (my mom), Aunt Edna, and in front Nana

 

My grandparents, Charlie and Rowena Leonard, had nine grandchildren and we all called them Nana and Poppy (or Pop). The youngest of those grandchildren were my Aunt Edna's children Alyson and James (Edna was fourteen years younger than my mom). Alyson and James Bingham were also the last of my cousins to get married; James and his wife Daniella were married not long after my mother died, and Alyson married James Brandle this past summer.

 

James and Alyson Bingham with Pop at St Peter's Road

 

Mom tried to stay very involved in the lives of her seven nieces and nephews. Even though her younger sister Edna lived in California, Mom tried to visit and be there for special occasions like graduations. She no doubt would have wanted to be there for the weddings.

When James and Daniella were married I had this idea to organize and share with them recipes from my mother and grandmother. Shortly after their wedding I became very ill and unfortunately the project got dropped. This past summer, when James' older sister Alyson got married, I decided to unearth this project and give it a second try.

 

When I first asked relatives to send me some family recipes Aunt Ruth sent some index cards with recipes, and in brackets Aunt Ruth wrote, "A Leonard favourite." So I have to credit her as the inspiration for the name of this blog. Along with Ruth's recipes there were a few blue recipe cards that were originally Nana's, in her own handwriting. I was very touched to receive those but felt that I should somehow share those with all of my cousins.

 

 

When I recently decided to revisit this idea, Ruth also sent me Nana's original cookbook, which had a lot of writing on the inside covers. Mom once told me that Nana didn't know how to cook a thing when she first got married, so I suspect that explains why this cookbook is so well-worn. Many of the handwritten recipes just had ingredients, and an oven setting (low, moderate or hot) so Aunt Ruth has been answering lots of my questions as I have been working on deciphering the recipes and writing instructions.

 

 

In 1999 Mom gave all of the Leonards copies of her research on the family tree, which she called "Leonard Family and Descendants 1700-2000," as well as copies of the "Leonard Family Tales" - her stories about the lives of she and her two younger brothers, Harry and Walter, and her sister Edna. Before she died she also told me that she wanted each of her nieces and nephews to have one of her paintings. So in keeping with Mom's example, it seemed appropriate that a wedding gift for our youngest cousins would be family recipes - and some stories and photos thrown into the mix. Rather than writing the recipes on index cards, I thought a blog would be the best way to share them. It's also a little less overwhelming if I work on it one recipe at a time. My goal is to test these recipes, write instructions, take photos, and post it on the blog. Stay tuned for bread, brownies, birthday cakes, and more.

 

Me making what looks like dinner rolls
(probably two years old, based on the haircut)

Mom baked with me as a child, and my twins Mitchell and Taylor started baking when they were quite young. They are fourteen now, and pretty independent in the kitchen, so I will also share some of their favourite things to bake. For my cousins - not just the ones in California - I hope you will be inspired to try these recipes for yourself, and share these experiences, with your own children, your students, or your nieces and nephews.

 

Mitchell and Taylor making gingerbread cookies for Christmas
(26-months-old)