08/30/2009 - 0 COMMENTS
Eva Spicher lived from about 1922 to 1997. Somewhere along the way I have a recipie card that I asked my mom to send me for this recipie and it gives credit to my Grandma Spicher (Eva). As you'll see from the recipie there is really nothing good for you in these, just stuff that's really good. That's probably why they turn out tasting so good. If you try them, email me to let me know what you think.
First make the dough. To make the dough, heat 1.5 cup milk to scalding hot (not boiling). While that's heating, in a mixing bowl, add 0.5 cup Sugar, 2tsp salt, 0.5 cup shortening (crisco) and solid shortening, not a liquid. Blend the shortening + salt + shortening with the mixer until it's all nice and smooth together. Add in the hot milk and blend that together. It goes bad if you don't mix the crisco + dry ingredients before you add the milk in last. Get 2 eggs in a bowl and beat them well. Let the crisco mixture come back down to luke warm and now add in the eggs. I'm guessing if you do it while the crisco mixture is too hot you might cook the eggs when you put them in. You don't want that. Disolve 2 packages of yeast (as the recipie says) in 0.5 cup warm water. Just for note, we had Quick Rise yeast and it worked out good for us. Not sure, but guessing that regular yeast is what Grandma had back in the day and it would also work well. Add the yeast mixture in with the Crisco + Eggs mixture. Use 7 to 8 cups flour, start adding it into the mix. We used 3 cups of wheat flour and 4 cups of white. I would probably only do 2 cups wheat next try as the wheat flour tends to make stuff like this more dry and more dense. Certainly don't go all wheat, you won't like the final product. Add flour in until you think it can't possibly take any more. Then put the dough ball in a warm place with a damp towel covering it for a while to rise to about 2x as big as it was. With the Quick Rise yeast it was about 40 minutes for us. In that first picture, it's already at this point.
Cut the dough in half and spread out to about 3/8 inch thick. 1/2 is too thick, 1/4 is too thin... You get the idea..
Butter it up and at this point you're already into it for Crisco anyhow, so don't get cheap on the butter either.
Sprinkle it with a liberal amount of sugar, then cinnamon. You'll think you're going gonzo on both at this stage, but in the final product not feel like you were crazy enough with it.
Apply a ton of raisins. More than you see here, I would consider this to be the minimum. Nuts are optional, but we do them and do a lot of them.
Roll it up and transfer to a cutting board.
You're going for 12, so cut it in half, then cut each half in half. Then cut the remaining pieces into 3 each. That's the best way to get to 12 fairly even pieces.
Have a pretty sharp knive for this so you cut through raisins, nuts and dough with less pulling or smushing.
You need 2 pans 9 x 13. Add a 1/2 pint of heavy cream (yes doctor, we heard you when we pulled out the Crisco), and 3/4 cup or so of brown sugar.
Set them out in the cream / sugar mixture...
After you have both pans laid out like this, they need to be covered with a damp towel and put in a warm place again for another 45 minutes or so to rise again.
They rose and now it's time to bake. 350 degrees F for 30 minutes. We needed to pull ours at about 25 minutes so keep an eye on them. I'm not sure if the wheat flour made that difference or not.
Let them sit a good 10 to 15 minutes when you pull them out, but not over night. You want to flip them while the gooey is gooey and not when it has them glued to the bottom of the dish. You also don't want it to be so hot it runs out the side.
The flip... and pull the pan off...
Now we're talkin...
Spread the gooey out...
Hey... Conscience.. quiet up there, if we were making broccoli that would be a different page entry.. this is about Grandma!!!
Let the party begin here... By the way, start making these at 1pm or 11am or sometime in the day. We started at 6 or 7 pm and didn't get done until about 11:30.
When we were putting the raisins on, it seemed like a lot. At this part of the game, they're not as thick as you'd think, so just add a LOT of them. Also a lot of the sugar/cinnamon too.
So, yah... these are really really really good... seemingly on some sort of vector graph with how bad they are for you too.
Ok, so all of that with ingredients mixed all over the page. I'll try to list them out here in one spot. 1/2 cup Warm Water
2 pkg Yeast
1.5 cup Milk
1/2 cup sugar (for the dough, another cup for the sprinkling part)
2 tsp salt
2 eggs
1/2 cup shortening/crisco solid not liquid
7 to 8 cups flour
1 pint heavy cream
1.5 cups brown sugar
big box of raisins
bunch of chopped up nuts