I know, it’s the new year, and everyone’s got all kinds of resolutions to exercise and eat healthier, and the last thing you need is more pictures of delicious sweet things. So, I promise this is the last of the Christmas sweets. This is a traditional yeast bread/cake often made by Moravians, usually at Christmas time, but sometimes other times of the year as well. My mom grew up in the Moravian Church, but doesn’t remember making sugar cake herself until I was little and she made it for the Candle Tea (a kind of church bazaar at Christmastime) at Raleigh Moravian Church in North Carolina. She got the recipe there from Mae Marshall.

You make a dough with yeast, let it rise and spread it into pans. Then comes the tastiest and most fun part — you punch holes in the dough and sprinkle it with brown sugar, cinnamon, and butter, then bake it. I think it’s far better served warm so the sugar is gooey, and it can be reheated in the oven, wrapped in foil to keep it moist, or with a very quick stint in the microwave. Don’t overheat it or it will get tough and dried out.

We don’t make this every year as it’s pretty labor intensive, but when we do it makes a bunch and so it makes great gifts. When we do make sugar cake, we save one for ourselves to eat on Christmas morning while we dig into our gifts.

Ingredients:

1 c mashed potatoes (from scratch or instant, see below)*
3/4 c butter or shortening
2 slightly beaten eggs
2 t salt
1 c hot potato water or hot water
7/8 c granulated sugar
2 pkg dry yeast**
4-5 c all purpose or bread flour
Cinnamon
Brown sugar
Butter

Mix potatoes, butter, and sugar, reserving a couple teaspoons. This should be very warm to help the yeast become active.

Proof the yeast: mix 1 c hot water with the yeast and reserved sugar. Stir, and wait for the yeast to bubble a bit to make sure it’s active.

Mix salt and flour in a large mixing bowl. Using a dough hook, mix in the yeast water, potato mixture, and beaten eggs. Dough should be pretty thick and resemble heavy muffin batter. (Add more flour if needed.)

Cover, let rise in a warm place until double. (We use the oven with the light on, and usually put some boiled water in a cup to make it nice and moist for the yeast.) It takes about 1 hour to rise.

Punch down once. Spread dough into 4-5 8″ greased layer pans or one large greased jelly roll pan. Let rise in a warm place again, again for about an hour.

When the dough has risen again, preheat the oven to 375 F (removing the pans first if thats where you let them rise!). Once the pans are well filled, you’re ready to punch. Dip your thumb in flour and punch holes in the cakes. Make lots of holes, close together and all the way to the edge. The more holes you make, the more bits of bubbly buttery brown sugar you’ll have!

Sprinkle the punched dough with cinnamon. Crumble light brown sugar across the cake. Melt butter and drizzle over all. Sorry I don’t really have amounts here; we always just eyeball it. Hopefully the pictures will give you some idea.

Bake at 375 F for 20 minutes. If you’re using multiple pans and need to bake on two racks, switch the pans top and bottom halfway through so they’ll brown evenly. They are done when the top is nice and golden and the bottoms are starting to brown a little as well.

If you make it in a jelly roll pan, you can cut it into several smaller cakes to give as gifts. The sugar cake also freezes well.

*Mashed potatoes:

If you cook a real potato, you’ll need 1 large to make 1 c mashed potatoes. Cook the potato in enough water that you’ll have a cup of it to use for the hot potato water. DO NOT add salt to the cooking water.

Alternatively, use instant potatoes/potato flakes. Use enough to make 1 c mashed potatoes, using half water and half milk for the liquid. Again, don’t add salt. In this case, you won’t have potato water and will have to just use hot water.

**When doubling the recipe, you don’t need to double the yeast.

This is another recipe that we always make at Christmas and that I don’t remember having any other time of year. They are a pecan shortbread cookie rolled in powdered sugar (the ones on the left in the picture). I’ve also seen similar cookies by other names, such as Mexican wedding cookies. We make ours in a skinny finger shape though, so we call them nutty fingers or lady fingers.

The recipe makes a bunch, but they are small and tend to go fast. They are slightly more labor intensive than some cookies, but they are absolutely delicious. The recipe comes from my grandmother, who always made them when my mom was growing up.

Ingredients:

9 T powdered sugar
2 c cake flour
Pinch of salt
1 1/2 sticks butter
1 t vanilla
1 T ice water
1 c chopped pecans
More powdered sugar for rolling

Preheat oven to 350 F. Sift together flour, sugar, and salt. Cut butter into flour mixture. Add vanilla, ice water, and pecans. Mix well, kind of squishing dough together with hands until just mixed. It makes a pretty crumbly dough, but it sticks together enough to mold into finger shapes.

Roll cookies into skinny logs maybe an inch and a half long (we think they are better pretty small like that). Place on a greased cookie sheet. They can be pretty close together as they don’t expand much when they bake. Try to make them as even in size as possible or some will be burned and some underdone. Bake at 350 F high up in the oven for about 15 minutes. You want them to get done, but not brown.

Let cool just slightly and remove to wire racks. When they are mostly cool (so the sugar doesn’t melt but will still stick) roll in powdered sugar.

Ingredients:

1 1/2 c chopped pecans, divided
1 c sugar
1 c butter, softened
1/3 c water
5 1.55 ounce milk or dark chocolate bars, chopped into small pieces (I prefer dark. And of course, the better the chocolate you use, the better the toffee)

Special Equipment:

Candy thermometer

Line a 15″x10″ jellyroll pan with heavy duty aluminum foil.l Lightly grease the foil. Sprinkle 1 c of the chopped pecans to within 1″ of the edge.

Bring sugar, butter, and 1/3 c water to a boil in a heavy saucepan over medium heat. Stir constantly about 12 minutes, or until a candy thermometer reads 300 degrees. This is the “hard crack stage.” You can also check this by dropping a few threads of the candy into a glass of ice water to cool. The threads should then crack when you bend them rather than stretching.

Pour over pecans. Quickly sprinkle with chocolate pieces (so they melt). Let stand 30 s. sprinkle with remaining 1/2 c of pecans. Chill 30 minutes (or until hard) and then break up the toffee into bite size pieces. Store in an airtight container.