Thanksgiving 2014: Carrot Cake from Joy McCabe

Our friend, Joy Georges McCabe, shares her recipes and kitchen tips on local station WBIR during Live at Five at Four, an afternoon show that once aired at five o’clock but now comes on at four. (Thus the name.)  She posted on Facebook that she was demonstrating how to make Carrot Cake (a dessert we both love), so we searched her website From the Kitchen of Joy McCabe for the recipe.  (By the way, it tastes yummy if the scrapings from the bottom  of the pans are any indication! Will be serving it tonight.)

So, here’s a little Thanksgiving gift from us to you: Joy’s Carrot Cake.

Carrot Cake

Cake

4 eggs

1 1/2 cups vegetable oil

2 cups sugar

2 cups plain flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 teaspoon baking soda

2 teaspoons cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon salt

3 cups grated carrots

Icing

1 8-oz. package cream cheese, softened

1 stick butter, softened

1 16-oz box 4x powdered sugar

1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla

1 cup pecans, chopped

Cake: Blend together eggs and oil.  Sift sugar and other dry ingredients together.  Add to egg mixture, mixing well.  Add carrots.  Blend well.  Pour mixture into 2 9-inch cake pans which have been greased and floured.  Bake at 375 degrees for 30-40 minutes.

Icing: Cake must be completely cool before frosting.  Cream together cream cheese and butter.  Add sugar, vanilla, and nuts, mixing well.  Frost the cake between layers, top and sides.  (We omitted frosting the sides and put more in the middle and on top.)

Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours — no matter when you sit down to celebrate together!

Hershey® Bar Cake, made from Hershey® bars and Hershey’s® Syrup has been a mainstay of my family since I received the recipe from a high school friend in El Dorado, Arkansas.  Since then, the sometimes finicky recipe has yielded a moist, dense, deep chocolate cake (well, most of the time) that has been the star of many after-dinner desserts and birthday celebrations for more than 50 or so years.

I say finicky because sometimes the cake bakes beautifully, sometimes it doesn’t.  It may be the weather.  It may be the oven.  It just may be me.  But if you can get this cake to turn out the way we like it — slightly undercooked yet not gooey, firm enough to cut with a fork — then you’ve got a treat that almost anyone will love.  At home, we serve it with good quality vanilla ice cream topped with rich, warm chocolate sauce.

The recipe is so old that it originally called for two 20-cent cans of syrup (not available now) and seven nickel candy bars!!! I’ve made some substitutions and included them in the full recipe below.

Basic steps: 

Cream butter & sugar. Add eggs one at a time, beating after each addition.

Add 1 can Hershey Syrup.

Add flour mixture alternatively with buttermilk. Then add vanilla.

Add 5 melted Hershey bars.

Bake at 325 degrees for about 1 hour and 10-20 minutes.

Hershey® Bar Cake

2 sticks butter (1 cup)

2 cups granulated sugar

4 eggs, at room temperature

1 can Hershey® Syrup

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon vanilla

2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

1 cup buttermilk

5 Hershey® bars (1.55 ounces each)

Preheat oven to 350°.  Let 2 sticks of butter and eggs come to room temperature.  Grease and flour 10″ tube pan.

Cream butter and sugar.  Add eggs one at a time, mixing after each addition.  Add syrup.  Sift dry ingredients.  Add to mixture alternatively with buttermilk.  Add vanilla. Melt Hershey© bars in microwavable measuring cup and add to mixture.

Bake at 325º for 1 hour and approximately 10 – 20 minutes more.  Test for doneness but do not let dry out completely.  You want this to be moist.  (I use a knife and look for it to come out with a little gooeyness clinging to it!)

For the bake sale at Holiday Helpings, we sold halves of the cake wrapped in plastic wrap and tied with burlap ribbon.  The tags were printed on cardstock and glued to scrapbooking paper.

Hope you enjoy making this cake.  Let us know if it works for you!  But even if it doesn’t, pull it out before it’s almost done and just eat it with a spoon.  Mmmm!

This post is #14 for National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo) 2013.

It’s called Holiday Helpings at First United Methodist Church in Knoxville, TN, and many ladies (and men, too) of the church work hours, days, weeks, and months in advance to ensure its success.  It works this way:  You place an order for soups, casseroles, rolls and sticky buns that are made and frozen in advance.  Then, the day of the sale, you pick up your order and maybe some homemade baked goods that are laid out temptingly in the multi-purpose room of the church.  This year we decided to order several items AND contribute to the Bake Sale.

In this post and our next one, we’re sharing what we cooked, wrapped, and tagged for this year’s FUMC Holiday Helpings. For all our contributions, the tags (which we think help the goods sell faster) were printed on cardstock and glued to leftover scrapbooking paper.  Tags were tied on with ribbon or twine.

First, Bert made his fabulous Slightly Spicy Munchies using the recipe on the side of the Wheat Chex® box and adding a little Slap Ya Mama seasoning, dry roasted peanuts, and cheese crackers. Easy to make.  Always sell well.

We both took turns stirring and baking these Sugared Peanuts, a recipe passed down from Bert’s mom.  (See below.)  Of course, we would have had more of these for the sale, but you know how you just hafta sample what you’re sharing!!! (These make great stocking stuffers, too!)

We tried Hello Dolly Bars from a recipe found at www.myrecipes.com that we stumbled upon when searching the Southern Living website.  Click here for this easy-to-layer bar cookie that never fails!

Another recipe in the collection of 10 Best-Ever Bar Cookies and Brownies found at the Southern Living website (www.southernliving.com) was this one for Peach Melba Shortbread Bars. Click here for the easy recipe that looks as pretty as it tastes. A feminine blue and cream printed scrapbooking paper made the tags look almost delicate.

We tried a new recipe this year for Poppy Seed Cake (Click here), a moist cake that freezes well.  The recipe comes from my friend Joy McCabe who appears on WBIR cooking up great things for tailgates, brunches, and home entertaining. You’ll love her website: http://www.joymccabe.com

And those are some of our contributions to Holiday Helpings this year. We’d love to know what you make for bake sales because we’re always looking for new ideas!

Sugared Peanuts

1 cup granulated sugar

1/2 cup water

2 cups raw shelled peanuts, skins on

Dissolve sugar in water in saucepan over medium heat.  Add peanuts and continue to cook over medium heat, stirring frequently.  Cook until peanuts are completely sugared (coated, no syrup).  But be careful:  Don’t let the mixture turn back to sugar.

Pour and spread onto ungreased cookie sheet and bake at 300 degrees for approximately 30 minutes, stirring at 10 minute intervals.

This post is #13 for National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo) 2013.

Since the late ’90s, I’ve bought and sold stocks with the ladies of WEB Investment Club. When we started the started the club, most of us had no idea how to access stock market info online or place a trade.  Now we talk the talk of PE ratios, exchange funds, and the like, even though we sometimes buy on a whim!

Yes, we’ve also had our ups and downs — members have come and gone, the stock market almost wiped out our earnings (and everyone else’s) in ’08, and we’ve bought some dogs of the Dow and wondered What were we thinking? when they tanked. We’re now talking about what to do with Apple!

But through it all, we’ve remained friends.  Good friends.  The kind who don’t mind speaking up and saying What do you mean we should sell?  That’s my favorite stock!

And one more thing we have in common:  We like to have fun! That’s why we invite the husbands (well, sometimes) and share the joy!

Member Jeanne Misenheimer with her husband Stephen

With busy December schedules, we decided to forgo our usual Christmas affair with husbands until February and celebrate Valentine’s instead. Our host and hostess were Vandy Leake and her husband Don who invited us to their lovely West Knoxville home.

Don and Vandy Leake hosting the Valentine’s Day dinner for our investment club.

Now you have to know this about Vandy: she could have her own show on HGTV — she’s just that creative!  Her colorful touches and floral designs added a romantic ambience to the evening.

On the buffet table, blue and white pottery anchored an arrangement of forced white tulips and pink begonias.

Centerpiece created by Vandy Leake anchors the bountiful table.

Streams of knotted and curled french ribbons wound under and through the platters and casseroles brought by members.

In the sunroom, a ruffled pillow stenciled with LOVE found a home among the yellow and green pillows on the wicker settee.

Tulips burst forth in this coffee table arrangement of ferns and ivy in a silver urn . . .

and swags of ribbons and hearts in the sunroom were visible even from the entryway.

Gourmet dishes and comfort food proved that this investment club could easily turn into an eating club if the market goes south again!

Doris Carter anchored the table with husband Dave’s smoked salmon and special sauce.

Gale Pettit said she cooked the pork tenderloin in the oven, but we could have sworn it was smoked on husband Mike’s outdoor grill.

Trisha Clark filled a platter with tomatoes, mozzarella cheese and a balsamic vinegar/olive oil topping for the biggest caprese salad we had ever seen.

And Vandy’s stuffed new potatoes were a hit with most guests coming back for seconds!

Sandra Bowlin and her husband Gary let me take a picture of them right after dinner when they were feeling oh-so-full and happy!

It was good times, good food, and good friends.

Don, Vandy, Gary, Sandra, Trisha, Jim, Doris, Gale, Charlotte, Bert, Jack, Jeanne, Stephen, Dave, and Mike — right before the WEB Investment Club dinner!

Now, if we can just buy winning stocks as well as we can cook, we’ll have a Wall Street year to remember!

Corn Souffle

6 Tbs. sugar

6 Tbs. flour

2 tsp. salt

2 cans cream style corn

2 cans whole kernel corn, drained

1 1/4 cup milk

4 beaten eggs

2 Tbs. melted butter

Mix sugar, flour, salt, cream style corn, and whole kernel corn together. Mix mild and eggs thoroughly with melted butter.  Add to corn mixture and mix well. Bake in a greased casserole or souffle dish at 350 degrees for 1 hour. (If a deep dish is used, increase baking time until middle is almost set.) Serves 8-10

Happy Valentine’s Day from an investment club that knows what it takes to stay the course — and still remain friends!

As fresh as it gets — seafood right from the boats!

My husband and I have spent the last days of summer at Pawleys Island for so many years, we’ve lost count.  But even though we know the routine of renting, the journey down highways and byways from Knoxville to South Carolina, and that great feeling when we see the ocean, we’ve found that the whole act of “getting there” just adds to the joy of travel.

And thus it was that we stumbled upon what has become our favorite shrimp dock — just by reading a sign along Highway 17 that runs through Georgetown.

Independent Seafood is just past the Harbor House Bed and Breakfast in Georgetown’s historic district.

We turn down a tree-lined street into the historic district where stately Southern homes make it a habit to turn heads of those driving by. Sometimes I think it’s almost as if they’re watching as tourists like us read aloud the dates in the oval markers and consider how porches, iron fences, and windows of wavy glass have maintained their character for so long.

Pretty soon, we see the place where we stop to fill our empty cooler: Independent Seafood.  It’s become a ritual, of sorts — leave home, stop at Columbia’s Farmers’ Market, then Cooper’s Country Store  in Salters, and take one last stop at Independent Seafood to get the goods for a first-night shrimp boil at the beach.

Independent Seafood Market Shrimp Dock

Independent Seafood’s a humble place really.  Right at water’s edge.  Plain concrete building with a back door opening to shrimp boats and workers and sometimes a stray cat or two who wander in, but not unexpectedly.

We move in for the kill, peering in at each bucket marked by shrimp size, thinking not only what we’ll need for that night, but maybe another night or two, mid-week.

Large shrimp in one bucket.

Medium shrimp for gumbo in another!

Trevor cracks jokes and tells us we’re not buying enough.  Heck, you need some shrimp boil or lump crabmeat —  croaker, too! (They’ve got it all.)

Trevor cuts up with the customers!

Lots more fish, seasonings, and frozen delights await.

Croaker on ice!

The house seasonings — hot or regular (which is hot to some folks)!

Crabcakes and assorted sea creature parts!

We buy mediums for gumbo and large ones for peel ‘n eat — packed in separate bags. Then we splurge and get the crabmeat, tossing all into the cooler.  One of the guys with a shovel big enough for circus scooper duty, scoops out crushed ice and layers it on top.  Then he totes it to our car for us! (Bert loves that!)

Baggin’ the shrimp!

On the way out, we turn down a different side street through the district just so we can ogle more gorgeous houses and lovely sit-a-spell porches before the home stretch to Pawleys.

Our dream: Low Country Boil (recipe below) with little more than some French bread and dessert from the Kudzu Bakery  on our own screened-in porch by the sea!

So, if you’re headed to one of the South Carolina beaches, and you pass through Georgetown, put Independent Seafood on your list of must-see places.  But, don’t forget your cooler.  You’ll want shrimp for supper, too!

Low Country Boil

Crab Boil (2 teaspoons per quart of water)

12 small red new potatoes

Six 4-inch pieces good smoked link sausage

6 ears fresh corn

3 pounds fresh shrimp (26 to 30 count per pound), unpeeled

Fill a large pot with enough water to cover all ingredients.  Add crab boil and heat until boiling.  Adjust crab boil to suit your taste. (I use Slap Ya Mama!) When boiling, add potatoes and sausage.  Cook on medium heat for 20 minutes. Add corn and cook for an additional 10 minutes.  Add shrimp and cook for no more than 3 minutes (do not overcook). Drain and serve with piping-hot bread and ice-cold beer.

from The Lady & Sons Savannah Country Cookbook

by Paula H. Deen

Independent Seafood Market Shrimp Dock

1 Cannon Street

Georgetown, SC 29440

843.546.6642

Filed under: Bed & Breakfast Inns, Destination, Food, Recipe, South Carolina, Travel Tagged: beach, Bed & Breakfast Inns, crab boil, fish, Lady & Sons, Low Country Boil, recipe, shrimp, South Carolina, Southern food, travel ]]> https://ohtheplaceswesee.com/2012/09/12/better-bring-a-cooler-independent-seafood-georgetown-sc/feed/ 9 rushasams 2012.7.IndependentSeafoodKudzu 003 2012.7.IndependentSeafoodKudzu 015 2012.7.IndependentSeafoodKudzu 004 2012.7.IndependentSeafoodKudzu 009 2012.7.IndependentSeafoodKudzu 008 2012.7.IndependentSeafoodKudzu 011 2012.7.IndependentSeafoodKudzu 010 2012.7.IndependentSeafoodKudzu 013 2012.7.IndependentSeafoodKudzu 012 2012.7.IndependentSeafoodKudzu 005