Blue Cayenne

I gifted a few of these Rum-Raisin-Oatmeal Cookies to my neighbors. My neighbor confessed that her husband ate two of the cookies after breakfast as a “breakfast dessert.” 

No harm in that. Right? The cookies are oatmeal cookies, after all, and oatmeal is a respectable breakfast food.  The way I see it, most breakfast cereals are just deconstructed cookies anyway. (I rest my case! Eat a cookie.)

Whenever you eat them, these are very good Rum-Raisin Oatmeal cookies by any standard. The raisins, after a good soak in rum, are soft and taste almost caramelized in the baked cookie. This cookie recipe is adapted from one that appears in the cookie cookbook, 100 Cookies by Sarah Kieffer. The wafer-thin cookies are the result of Kieffer’s unique “pan banging method” of cookie baking: As the cookies bake in your oven, you lift the tray and let it crash onto the oven shelf several times. Sounds strange, but it works! Kinda cathartic, too!

You’ll be “happy as Larry,” as the old Australian idiom goes, to add this cookie to your repertoire. 

Here is a belated valentine from Blue Cayenne’s Chief Quality Officer, Juliet, and a delightfully-simple Lemon Cake recipe you should consider adding to your repertoire. (Forgive the lateness of our good wishes. Blue Cayenne’s editorial staff–that would be me–was laid up on Valentine’s Day by a nasty reaction to the second dose of Moderna’s Covid19 vaccine.)

This Lemon Cake is pound cake-ish. It’s texture is dense and moist like a traditional pound cake, but there are interesting variations to the simple one pound of butter, one pound of flour, one pound of eggs, one pound of sugar formula for pound cake that has been kicking around since the 18th Century. 

Making pound cakes used to be a real chore, but this cake is a cinch to whip up, even with its additions.

In the old days, eggs were the only leavening in the traditional pound cake and the cakes tended to be pretty heavy. Commercial baking powder wasn’t invented until 1843.

The mixing of the cake was tough, too. Mechanical mixers didn’t make their appearance until 1856. (The first kitchen mixers with electric motors came on the market in 1885, and the game-changing KitchenAid mixer wasn’t introduced by the Hobart Company until 1919.) This meant that cooks had to struggle to mix the heavy batter. Toni Tipton Martin, in a Southern Living piece, described the process of  laboriously “rubbing the butter to a cream” and then struggling to mix the ingredients with a wooden paddle. (My fifty-year-old KitchenAid mixer is one of the most treasured and most used pieces of equipment in my kitchen.  Like a Le Creuset cast iron pan, a KitchenAid  is a lifetime purchase. (Below is a photo of one of the original KitchenAid mixers and a photo of one similar to the one in my kitchen. Fortunately, the design of the mixer has changed quite a bit over the years.)

Here’s the Lemon Cake recipe. 

This recipe is adapted from one that appears on the Yellow Bliss Road site here.

Every month, Blue Cayenne features one post from our archive of more than 350 recipes. Here is a great soup recipe for a healthy winter soup. Enjoy!

Want to dive deeper into our recipe archive?  Just click one of the categories at the top of our page or use the category search drop down menu on the right side of the page.

Here’s that soup recipe:

Provincial Greens Soup