A GOOD recipe!

Heirloom Baking with the Brass Sisters is such a fun cookbook. These sisters collected and perfected old family recipes from "family cookbooks, original journals, scraps of paper, and grandmothers' kitchens." I love my mother's recipes best, so I enjoy looking through this cookbook with its sublime old-fashioned recipes and stories to go along with each one.

For a friend's birthday, I baked Frosted Pan Hermits, which are moist and luscious:

Frosted Pan Hermits

For Hermits:
1 1/2 cups flour
2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. cloves
(1/2 tsp. nutmeg, which I do NOT like, so I substituted 1/4 tsp. allspice)
1/2 tsp. cinnamon
1/4 cup plus 2 Tbsp. butter
1 cup brown sugar
1 egg
1/2 cup milk
1 cup raisins
1 cup chopped walnuts or pecans

For frosting:
2/3 cup confectioners' sugar
1/8 tsp. salt
1 Tbsp. butter
1 tsp. vanilla
2-6 tsp. milk, as needed (I used about 2 Tbsp.)

1. Set the oven rack in the middle position. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Line a 9 inch by 13 inch jelly roll pan (or other pan) with foil, shiny side up. Coat the foil with butter or vegetable spray.

2. To make the hermits: Sift together the dry ingredients.

3. Cream butter and brown sugar in the bowl of a standing mixer fitted with the paddle attachment. (I did all this by hand and later with a whisk.) Add egg. Add sifted dry ingredients alternately with milk. Fold the raisins and nuts into the batter.

4. Pour batter onto pan and spread until even. Bake 25 to 30 minutes, or until a tester inserted into the middle comes out clean. Turn once during baking. Place pan on rack Frost while warm.

5. To make the frosting: Sift confectioners' sugar and salt into a bowl. Add butter and whisk until combined. Add vanilla and enough milk to form a thin frosting. Pour frosting gently over warm pan and spread evenly. Allow to set. When completely cool, cut into squares. Store hermits in single layers between sheets of wax paper in a covered tin.

(If the frosting seems lumpy, it will melt when it is applied to the warm hermits. The frosting may crackle on top, too.)

Brass, Marilynn and Brass, Sheila. Heirloom Baking with the Brass Sisters. NY: Black Dog and Leventhal Publishers, 2006. 72-73.