PHOTO: A serving of brown sugar dumplings, a very typical Amish dessert recipe…very creative, delicious, and uses very basic ingredients.
Looking for a dessert that isa piece of cake to make but isn’t actually a piece of cake? This might be it! I have to admit when I saw the recipe for “brown sugar dumplings” I was skeptical. First of all, the recipe was very sparse in instructions. The recipe came to me from an Amish woman in Pennsylvania. As is typical of many Amish recipes, there was no baking time given, no pan size, basically a lot of guess-work (for me, but for an Amish cook, it’s all written in their head). But I’m a gamer so I thought in the name of “research” I’d try it and I have to say this is a neat dessert, easy to make and with just the right amount of sweet, not too, too rich as I had feared.
- 1 /2 cup white sugar
- 1 cup flour
- 2 teaspoons baking powder
- 1 /2 cup milk or water
- Syrup: 1 cup brown sugar, 2 cups hot water, 2 tablespoons butter
- In a medium saucepan put brown sugar, butter, and hot water.
- The brown sugar dissolves and you’ll be left with just liquid.
- Heat until the liquid is boiling.
- While the liquid heating, mix the dumpling ingredients in a bowl.
- At first the ingredients were too coarse and dry, like coarse crumbs.
- So I added a touch more milk and that seemed to do the trick.
- You want a dumpling dough that is somewhere between coarse crumbs and elastic bread dough. Pour the boiling syrup into an 8 X 8 square baking pan.
- Preheat oven to 350. Then drop the dough by teaspoon full into the liquid.
- Drop by spoon full in three rows of three.
- Put baking dish into the oven and then bake for about 30 minutes until the dumpling dough is golden.
- You’ll end up with a thick dumpling layer on top, with the liquid mixture on the bottom.
- Let cool then cut into squares and spoon into a dish.
- Add a dollop of whipped cream and spoon more syrup over that.
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