Amish Midnight Cake

By Kevin Williams

We are on Day Three of our week-long partnering with My Patchwork Quilt to showcase some of the best of Amish cooking and baking while I am bonding with our newborn, catching up on sleep, or changing diapers.....Today Patricia shares something called Midnight Cake.  Mmmmmm, not sure why they call it that?  Maybe because it is so decadent you'll want to sneak down to the fridge at midnight to eat it?  It looks amazing.  This type of cake calls squarely into the rich Amish baking tradition of simple but amazing cakes.  Click here for the recipe and to read more!

By the way, here is a little of background about "Patchwork Quilt Patricia" who writes and cooks up a storm for her blog:

She is a native of southeast Arkansas and lived in there until moving to Florida to teach school after graduating from college. After marrying her husband, who was in the Air Force, they moved to seven different states until he later decided to enroll in law school.  So Patricia and her husband moved back to Arkansas to attend law school and eventually practice law. Patricia went back to teaching and they stayed in Arkansas for almost a decade before moving to  Ventura, CA where they lived for 20 years and raised a family. Patricia taught middle school there.  Then they moved to Kansas City 8 years ago to be closer to their sons - one lives in KC and the other one lives in Colorado Springs.

PATCHWORK QUILT:

"After being in the classroom for 25 years, I felt a void in my life after retiring," Patricia says.

Patricia continues:

"My daughter-in-law in Colorado started a blog and with a little help from her and a lot of trial and error on my part My Patchwork Quilt was born. I felt I still had so much to offer and can't imagine what my life would be like if I didn't have it. Most people will refer to it as a cooking blog, but as I state on my blog, just as a patchwork quilt contains different block patterns, so are the interests in my life. I love to create my own ideas but I am also able to see things and then go home and recreate them, especially with sewing projects and quilts. As far as my skill/talent with cooking, I'm not sure. I think a lot of it has to be with my good genes. My grandmother was a fabulous cook. She was even the cook for a few years at the elementary/junior high school I attended. My mother and all my aunts were also fabulous cooks. My daddy had a service station and we lived in a trailer beside it. My mother said she regretted not teaching me how to cook, but the kitchens were just too small in the trailers that we lived in for the both of us. I remember watching my grandmother make biscuits in her wooden flour bowl. I am sure I must have done a lot of "watching". (My grandmother also taught me how to sew when I was 11 or 12 - my sewing/quilting posts are actually more popular than my recipes) On my own, I had a lot of successes and failures. (My husband still remembers the first dinner my roommate and I cooked for him and her boyfriend. Unfortunately it was one of the failures. ha) It took me several years to perfect my homemade buttermilk biscuit recipe that personally can't be beat. I have always said I prefer to bake instead of cooking. I guess I have been fortunate that my husband has and still is willing to try just about anything I make."

So, a huge "thank you" for Patricia for standing in for me while I've been away, we still have a couple of more recipes from her in the days ahead!