Lulu's Recipe for Cajun Sass - Sandra Hill Page 0,64
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As always, I wish you smiles in your reading.
Sandra Hill
Tante Lulu’s Peachy Praline Cobbler Cake
The cake:
white cake mix
3 whole eggs
1/3 cup oil
1 cup water
The streusel:
1/2 cup brown sugar (more or less, depending on taste)
2 pkgs (1.23 oz each) peaches and cream instant oatmeal
2 1.5 oz. pecan pralines, chopped (reserve 2 tbsp for garnish)
1/4 cup (1/2 stick) butter, melted
Fruit:
1 medium peach, sliced thin, or 1 small can peaches, thoroughly drained
The frosting:
1 cup milk
4 tbsp cornstarch
1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup Crisco
2 cups granulated sugar
pinch of salt
2 tsp vanilla
The cake: Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Make cake batter and put into two round greased and floured cake pans. Mix streusel and sprinkle over top of both cakes. Bake 35 minutes or until toothpick inserted in center comes out clean. Let cakes cool.
The frosting: Cook milk and cornstarch until thick, stirring often. Cool. Cream all remaining ingredients, adding the cornstarch mixture gradually. It should be fluffy and not overly sweet.
Place one of the cooled layers, streusel side up, on a cake platter. Frost, topping with half the sliced peaches. Cover with the second cake, streusel side up. Frost top and sides. Garnish with sliced peaches in a pinwheel pattern, finishing with sprinkle of remaining chopped pralines.
Notes:
This is a very rich cake because of the streusel and instant oatmeal. If using plain oatmeal, the amount of brown sugar can be altered, to taste.
Peach juice, if available, can be substituted for some or all of the water in the cake.
Any white frosting can be used, keeping in mind how sweet the cake already is. A Crisco frosting (which can be found anywhere on the Internet) tends to be less sweet, which some people like.
Of course, the white cake can be made from scratch.
Last bit of instructions from Tante Lulu: “Set out a pitcher of sweet tea, chère. Invite over your friends and family. Then, laissez les bon temp rouler! Let the good times roll!”
Excerpt from When Lulu was Hot
Present Day
Sentimental Journey…
Louise Rivard, best known up and down the bayou as Tante Lulu, was celebrating her ninetieth birthday. For the second year in a row.
Or was it the third?
Maybe the fourth.
Whatever! she thought. Age is just a number, like I always say. Some fools are old fogies at fifty, like rusted-out jalopies, bless their hearts, creepin’ along the highway of life. Me, on the other hand, I still have a bucket-load of va-voom under my hood, and miles to go before I bite the dust.
Bucket-load, bucket list, get it?
Ha, ha, ha! There’s a hole in my bucket, there’s a hole in my bucket…
Talking to herself was nothing new for Louise. Answering herself was another matter, especially when she answered in song. And, no, it had nothing to do with her age or that alls-hammer some seniors got. It was just that sometimes she was more fun than the people around her; so, she had to amuse herself.
Anyways, like she told her niece Charmaine last week, “Ninety is the new seventy.”
“If that’s true, then forty is the new twenty. Hal-le-lu-jah! Heck, I’ll settle fer thirty.” Charmaine, ever conscious of her age and appearance, had done a little boogie dance around Louise’s kitchen to celebrate. “Maybe I’ll have T-shirts made up fer mah beauty spas with that message. ‘Forty Is the New Thirty’ on the front, and on the back, ‘And We Can Help. Cut & Die Hair Salon, Houma, Louisiana.’”
Charmaine owned a string of hair salons and beauty spas in Southern Louisiana. A self-proclaimed bimbo with a brain, she was always looking out for the main chance.
Which isn’t a bad thing, necessarily, in my opinion.
Actually, Louise’s birthday had already passed, and been celebrated in grand style with a pool party at her nephew Luc’s house. Even so, today her LeDeux great-nephews and -nieces, along with a few great-greats, were treating her to a belated gift, some kind of secret destination road trip. There were so many of the family tagging along that they were a highway caravan. Pick-up trucks, expensive sedans like Luc’s BMW, even Louise’s vintage, lavender Chevy Impala convertible, named Lillian, being driven by her great-great-niece Mary Lou, who was constantly pleading for first dibs on the vehicle in Louise’s will.
To which, Louise always answered, “I ain’t dead yet, girl. Mebbe I’ll get buried in it, ’stead of some boring wood casket. Wouldn’t that shock St. Peter if I came roarin’ through the Pearly Gates? Not to worry. St. Jude would be out front, wavin’ me in.”
St. Jude