Benne Seed Wafers

Lately, I have been on a cookie baking spree.  The Coconut Oat Cookies I made were a disappointment - too soft of a cookie.  I needed to bake again to get over my failure.  On to Benne Seed Wafers!

Benne Seed Wafers are a Charleston thing.  Enslaved Africans brought over the benne, or sesame, seed with them and planted it in their gardens.  The toasted seeds of the plants were incorporated with butter, sugar and flour to make sweet, nutty, buttery, crisp cookies.  I discovered them in the 1980’s for sale by the local ladies in the Market of Charleston.  From then on, every trip to Charleston required a small bag of Benne Seed Wafers.  These would be the perfect cookie to get me over that soft coconut disappointment.

I have been squirreling away recipes for Benne Seed Wafers for quite some time ( i.e., years).  Which one to use?  The Lee brothers from Charleston have a great recipe in their cookbook, Charleston Kitchen. Their recipe has more sugar and less flour which gives you more of a candy like cookie.  It would be perfect to recreate the Benne Seed Basket that a local restaurant used to have on their menu.  It wasn’t the cookie I was craving, so I had to look further.  The Lee brothers based their recipe on an early recipe in Charleston Receipts; a cookbook from the 1950’s.  I grew up with Charleston Receipts and grabbed my copy.  It offered three recipes for Benne Seed Cookies.  I picked a recipe and preheated the oven!

Benne Cookies
¾ cup butter                                    1 ¼ cup flour
1 ½ cup of brown sugar                  ½ cup sesame seed toasted                          
2 eggs                                              1 tsp vanilla
¼ tsp baking powder
 Cream butter and sugar together and mix with other ingredients, in the order given.  Drop with a teaspoon on parchment paper in pan far enough apart to allow spreading.  Bake at 325 for 7 minutes.


The cookies are difficult to make and definitely require some skill.  I had tried these many years ago when I was a less patient baker and ended up wearing most of the batter.  This time, I was better prepared with the right equipment (parchment paper) and a better attitude (more patient - much more patient).

The Benne Seed Wafers are a big hit!  I have eaten myself silly and my husband has called a moratorium on cookies for awhile.  I think this recipe is the one I’ve searched for and with a little tweaking and more experience baking them, they will be perfect!

On Making Baklava

When I was 14, my parents put me on a Greyhound Bus to travel 200 miles away to spend a weekend with my sister in college.  To this day, I don't know WHAT they were thinking.  There was no precedence in my family for trips on Greyhound buses.. or for them allowing their precious baby (of 6 kids) to travel alone. Much less to travel straight into a den of sin! Once arrived, I found myself immersed in the college party culture.

Frat parties, drinking beer at the local hole in the wall, staying up late.. these are the things I can mention.  There was one highlight of the trip that has stayed with me all these years.  A trip to a local drive in, The Spice.  The girls at Marjorie's college were forbidden from going there for some reason... so even this adventure was illicit.  I don't remember what we ate for lunch that day.  I do remember when we paid there was a glass domed cake stand filled with the most intriguing dessert.  My sister told me it was baklava and we HAD to share a piece.  It was the closest to heaven I had ever been.  Sweet with honey, filled with nuts, cinnamon, cloves and that pastry... what was it?

 
I asked the gentleman behind the counter if he could tell me how to make it.  "No, it's a family recipe."  Where could I get the unusual dough, I asked. "Family sends it from New York," I was told.  I was heartbroken to learn that making this dessert would be beyond my grasp. Baklava must have been gaining in popularity at that time, because soon afterwards there was a recipe for it in the Charleston News and Courier.  There was also a note that you could purchase the Filo dough at the Piggly Wiggly on Meeting Street.  Fortunately, my brother was in Med school in Charleston and drove by the Pig on his way home.  He became my hero when he presented me with a package of  Filo (which means leaves).

 My first attempt had filo and butter from one end of the kitchen to the other.  There are definitely some tricks to assembling it.  Cutting the filo pan size was once the biggest obstacle, but it is now pre-packaged in sheets cut to fit a 13X9X2 pan.   Through the years, I have made more pans of baklava than I can count.  With practice my technique has improved.  I enjoy layering the sugared, spiced pecans with filo.  Brushing each leaf with butter along the way.  More than making and eating baklava, is the pleasure I derive from sharing it with friends.

Cat Head Biscuits

Recently I heard about Cat Head biscuits.  So named because they are as big as a cat's head.  Imagine my surprise when I found a magazine in the grocery store full of "must try" recipes, including one for Cat Head Biscuits.  The magazine is "The Best of America's Test Kitchen",and had a hefty price of  $9.95. Feeling adventurous, I grabbed the magazine a quart of buttermilk and a box of cake flour and considered myself armed to "make biscuit", as we say in the South.

 Would My Biscuits Look Like This?

Suze ~ One of My Resident Cats

No stranger to making biscuit, I wondered how these would turn out as they are so big.  Would they cook in the middle or leave me with a soggy mess?  I'm not a big fan of "dumped" biscuits, preferring to roll them out and cut them with a biscuit cutter. My upbringing was such that the only people who pinch, pat or dump biscuits are those who can't use a rolling pin.  Never mind my apprehensions.  The people at the Test Kitchens must know more than me, right?  I would bake these anomalies, just as the recipe directed. 

Cat Head Biscuits 

1 1/2 c flour 

1 1/2 c cake flour

1 tbls baking powder 

1 tsp salt

1/2 tsp baking soda 

8 tbls butter 

4 tbls solid shortening 

1 1/4 c buttermilk

Combine the dry ingredients.  Cut in the butter and shortening. Stir in the buttermilk.  Grease a 1/2 cup measure and dump the dough by 1/2 cup-fulls into a greased 9 inch cake pan.  One biscuit in the middle and 5 around the edge (daisy style).  Bake at 425* for 20 to 25 minutes.

I must say, the biscuits came out delicious.  Those people in America's Test Kitchens are on to something. The Cat Head biscuits were very light because of the cake flour with a crispy top and bottom.  They were a tad sweet because of the buttermilk and had me wondering when do you cross the line between biscuits and cake. Just short of heavenly,  these biscuits are not well suited for slicing to slip in a piece of sausage and they broke apart while dabbing on jelly. This could be the ultimate biscuit recipe, but the next time I'll be using my rolling pin.