Southern Pecan Pie

Butter and Love was the name of my mom’s church cookbook. You know the sort -- spiral-bound, crammed led with casserole creations and a month’s worth of Jell-O salads. My mom’s contribution was her pecan pie.

Let me be honest, though. Even though it seemed like half our town had a hankering for my mom’s pecan pie, there’s nothing special about the recipe. It’s nearly identical to any you might find on a bottle of corn syrup or a bag of pecans. But don’t think for a second this is one to pass up.

Nope: this pie is incredible.

For years, I’ve loved reimagining dessert classics. Chocolate pudding, campfire s’mores, strawberry shortcake: I’ve deconstructed and reconstructed, snuck out gluten, axed the dairy, replace corn syrup with agave. I’ve made my own Funfetti sprinkes (fondant and a pastry tip)! But when I make my mom’s pecan pie, I keep it simple.

And that means relying on the convenience products that my mom--like so many ‘80s moms--loved. I can still picture my mom at the grocery store, checkout line, reminding the bag boy not to put anything on top of those frozen crusts. They’re a pain to get home without breaking--probably more trouble than making your own pastry. Frozen pie crust, you may ask? Absolutely. Not that that was the secret of this recipe. My mom’s pie was made with butter and love. And corn syrup.

Banana Pudding Pie

Every southern baker makes banana pudding. It's the quintessential icebox dessert: an ingenious combination of crunchy and creamy ingredients melded into sweet perfection by the magic powers of your fridge. I have to admit, though, that I have a few bones to pick with the traditional version of banana pudding. I bet you know what I’m talking about: too often, the classic is a lumpy mess of soft banana slices and soggy vanilla wafers. Not here. Personally, I think everything sweet improves with some texture. Whether it’s dark chocolate shavings or chunky sea salt flakes or the sprinkles in my Confetti Cookies, a crisp bite adds dimension to sweetness. In this recipe, the pie’s crust brings the crunch. It’s that texture that makes the flavor of bananas--buttery, mildly tangy--come alive. And topping the slices with a dusting of crushed vanilla wafers doesn’t hurt either.

Sometimes after working all week, at home all I want is a pie. I don't want to be in my own kitchen long--and certainly not long enough to cook and chill and whip a custard, make and parbake a crust. That’s why I love this recipe: it’s assembled in thirty minutes, ready to serve in an hour. And while this recipe is full of shortcuts and food coloring and even artificial flavoring, you’re not compromising any deliciousness. Whipping instant pudding into heavy cream isn’t cheating, but a super resourceful trick: essentially you're setting the pie with gelatin, without the pesky work of blooming. And, there’s no shame in a bit of yellow food color to counteract the grayness of the ripest-ripe bananas, especially when the end result is a decadent mash-up between banana cream pie and banana pudding that’s anything but mushy.

Banana Pudding Pie

2 tablespoons plus 2 teaspoons sugar

1 8 ounce package cream cheese

5 small, ripe bananas

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon yellow food coloring***

1 teaspoon banana extract***

2 cups heavy cream

1 large box instant vanilla pudding (5.1 oz size)

1 9 inch prepared graham or nilla wafer crust

In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, beat the cream cheese and sugar until smooth and light. In a food processor or blender, combine 3 of the bananas, salt, yellow food coloring, and banana extract. Blend until it's extremely smooth, about 5 minutes. At this point, it's gonna look way too yellow and you're likely to think you’ve made a mistake. Scrape the neon banana mixture into the cream cheese mixture. Mix until combined and smooth. Transfer to a bowl and set aside. Clean or rinse the mixer bowl and grab the whip attachment. Whip the heavy cream and pudding mix until stiff. Keep a close eye on it. You don't want to over whip it. And it will whip a lot quicker than regular heavy cream. It has pudding in it! Fold the banana mixture into the whipped pudding mixture until combined and smooth. Take about half of the pie filling and spread it into the bottom of the pie shell. Peel and thinly slice the remaining 2 bananas and cover the surface of the filling. Spread the remaining filling on top of the banana layer. It's way too much filling for a level pie, so mound it up in the middle. Stick it back in the fridge and let it chill until you're ready to serve. The fresh banana layer may darken a bit, but it will keep for a few days. If it lasts that long!

***Both of these ingredients are optional. The extract just bumps up the flavor of the pie. It evokes the memory of banana candy or a classic banana cream pie. The food coloring covers up the greyish color of puréed banana. If you're cool with that, feel free to leave it out. I use McCormick brand for both.

Confetti Cookies

Every Christmas, my mom gave countless friends and relatives gorgeous tins and platters heaped with elaborate cookies and candies. These confetti cookies were always part of that holiday collection. They began as my mom's sugar cookie recipe, and were transformed by a shower of red or green sugar.

Now, I like to make these treats year-round. After all, when confetti’s involved, can’t any day be a celebration?

My secret is to use as many types of sprinkles as possible. I especially like jimmies (or “Toppers,” if you want to get sprinkle-technical) stirred into the dough: they bleed prettily, spotting the cookies with tiny bursts of color. Then, before baking, I cover the formed cookies with a combination of the crunchy round ones (“quins”) and the tiny spherical ones (“nonpareils”). Those are only options, though. As long as you love the colors and shapes you’re using, you can’t go wrong!

Tip: Sometimes, a good sprinkle selection is hard to find. When I made the cookies pictured, I had at least 4 kinds of sprinkles, but I still bought tubs of Pillsbury Funfetti frosting just to have their special blend on top of the can. If you’re not near a candymaking or craft shop, don’t be shy about buying tubs of Funfetti and putting those sprinkles to good use.

Confetti Cookies

1 1/2 cups sugar

8 ounces (2 sticks) unsalted butter

2 eggs

1 cup grapeseed oil

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon cream of tartar

4 cups all purpose flour

2 tablespoons sprinkles

An additional 2 tablespoons to 1/4 cup confetti sprinkles (depending on your mood)

Cream together the sugar and butter until fluffy. Add the eggs one at a time until combined. Drizzle in the oil and vanilla and continue to mix. Add the salt, baking soda, cream of tartar, and flour. Mix well. Add the 2 tablespoons of sprinkles and barely mix just until incorporated. (I like to chill the dough overnight.) Scoop into balls. Sprinkle with (or roll in) additional confetti and bake at 350 degrees until light golden, 10 to 12 minutes. 

Gooey Butter Cookies

When I moved to St. Louis, I sampled all the gooey butter cake I could find. I love when I visit a place with a signature, regional dessert--something that barely exists outside the city--and in the STL that dessert is, without question, gooey butter cake. Every grocery store bake shop stocks it in towers of aluminum 8x8” pans; entire bakeries are devoted to producing the cake in dozens of wild variations (one coffee shop boasts 76 flavors … and counting); and some nicer restaurants try to elevate it, foregoing the traditional square slice for a clean, sleek round. The sugary filling, the heavy dusting of powdered sugar, somewhere between a blondie and a nut-less slice of pecan pie in texture: I loved everything about gooey butter cake.

Then I discovered the cookie version.

In St. Louis, I frequented an old Irish pub in the Shaw neighborhood. It was one of those charming and truly one-of-a-kind places: half antique shop, half restaurant that served “the best burger in town,” according to some people (myself included). Even after a seriously good cheeseburger, sometimes--okay, most times--I still need my sweets. This pub’s dessert menu was simple: a little laminated card that hung from a hook in the wall beside each table. There were only a few items, but one of those was a gooey butter cookie. I’d never seen gooey butter cookies before. No details, no description: well, my curiosity was sure piqued.

What I discovered was that, for a dollar, you got served on an unassuming paper plate, pure vanilla gooey-ness, crisp edges, a top crackled with powdered sugar: the biggest, most delicious cookie ever.

From then on, every time I ate at the pub I asked about those cookies. I learned they were kept in a fridge behind the bar; that they were the pride and joy of one of the waitresses, who baked them at home and brought them in. (If this is true, it’s most likely illegal, but I don’t care. Just keep the cookies coming.)

Later, I discovered the secret to gooey butter cookies was, more often than not, cake mix. I was pretty sure when I ate them at the pub they were made with cake mix--their color was a little too yellow to be real. But at the time, despite all my questions, I never requested the recipe. Instead, I hit Google to start searching on my own.

One of my favorite things about being a pastry chef is a challenge. Every recipe I found on the Internet began with a boxed cake mix and ended with a bright yellow cookie. Now, I love shortcuts, but I was working at a James Beard-nominated restaurant at the time, the sort of place where skinned pigs hung in the walk-in cooler so chefs could butcher themselves: there was something that just didn’t feel right about making the waitress’s cookie. I couldn’t see myself bringing cake mix to the restaurant kitchen. What would people think?!

So I set to work developing a cake-mix-less cookie: I couldn’t be the only person who wanted a from scratch version. And, after lots of failed attempts, I cracked the cookie code--and discovered a handy homemade cake mix recipe in the process.

I lived in St. Louis for five years. I made some of my best friends there, and visit as often as possible. This cookie is my love letter to St. Louis--it’s almost as good as the original.

Gooey Butter Cookies

4 1/2 cups all purpose flour

4 teaspoons baking powder

1 1/2 teaspoons salt

1 pound cream cheese

2 sticks unsalted butter

3 cups sugar

2 eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Powdered sugar for rolling and dusting

Stir together the flour, baking powder, and salt. Set aside. In the bowl of an electric mixer with the paddle attachment, cream the cream cheese, butter, and sugar together until fluffy.  Add the eggs and vanilla extract. Incorporate the flour mixture. Chill for at least 30 minutes.  Scoop roughly 1 ounce balls and toss in powdered sugar.  Place on a baking tray a couple of inches apart.  Bake at 350 degrees until they spread and puff slightly. They will be really soft in the center. If they start to brown, they've gone too far.  Cool to room temperature. Dust with more powdered sugar. Transfer to an airtight plastic container and stick in the fridge. I suggest eating these guys ice cold. 

Cake

There’s a photo of me I’ve always loved. It was taken on December 22, 1979, five days before my first birthday. In the picture, I sit in a high chair, a toffee-haired baby in a striped shirt. In the foreground is my mom, young, petite, barely five-feet tall, with her sleeves rolled up. With one hand she holds a cake; with the other, she holds me back. Her young hand kept mine from getting too close to the single shining candle.

The expression on my face is clear: I want that cake. And why wouldn’t I? For my first birthday, my mom had baked something beautiful, just for me and no one else. It was a sunny yellow cake covered in vanilla frosting with a pale green border and clusters of holly berries.

Cake was my first memory. I was three, and my mom was busy. She was scraping clean the side of a mixing bowl, sifting flour, smoothing the batter in the pans with a clean spatula. I was always nearby in the kitchen, but it wasn’t until later that I realized I was watching an amazing baker. When I was three, I just wanted to be around that buttery smell, the warmth of the oven, my Mom’s sure movements, the anticipation of sweet.

My mom pulled the round pans out of the oven. Once the cake layers cooled a little, she carefully inverted them onto plates. The cakes were perfect: no cracks, no chunks still stuck to the pan. Perfectly pristine pastry.

She must’ve left the kitchen for a minute because, for a minute, I was alone: with the gold stove, the gold refrigerator, the orange and gold linoleum floor--and that golden yellow cake. Quickly, I tore off a tiny bit. The cake was still warm; I barely had to chew.

It was delicious--until she walked in the room. I was caught. I remember feeling worried: I could see on her face that those layers were no longer perfect. But I also remember feeling smug: I was a cute baby, and like all cute babies, I got away with everything. I wasn’t afraid of taking the heat--especially for cake.  

Believe it or not, my mom barely scolded me. Still, I felt guilty--okay, just a little--and maybe  my eyes started to water. But before I could get worked up, she was calming me down. “No sense crying over spilled milk,” she said, smoothing my hair. “It’s nothing a little frosting can’t fix.”

Later, I learned that my mom had taken cake decorating classes before I was born, but as a child all I knew was that when she decorated cakes, it looked effortless. All her pastry tips lived in a hinged plastic box. She never used an offset spatula--something most pastry chefs can’t do without. My mom decorated cakes with a table knife, and for the longest time I thought that was how everybody did it.

(Now I know that makes it harder.)

Baby boys and butter knifes: neither could interfere with her talent. She made beautiful cakes. She would form icing roses by hand and, as a child, I would watch, awed, hoping to one day be able to make them, too. She’d pipe each flower on to a little square of waxed paper and transfer them to a plate to rest. As they sat, they’d develop a crunchy, sugary shell. I just wanted to devour them all. And my mom would let me; I’d eat a couple--the ones she was least happy with. As I ate the rejects, I plotted which ones I’d hunt for once the cake was finished and served.

To this day, I still can’t make icing roses like she could. That’s probably why I’ve adopted a more renegade approach to cake decorating. But ever since I lunged for those icing holly berries, ever since I snuck that piece from those pristine layers, cake has been a part of my life. My mom is responsible for that, and I like to think seeing my cakes would make her smile.