I have made acorn cakes!
“Cakes” is the best word I can think of to use. It reflects, incidentally, one of the only actual changes this experience has led me to make in Rabbit and Cougar – I changed the name of the nut “scones” they had, which seems now highly unlikely to me, to the more ambiguous and certainly possible, “cakes.”
My acorn flour yield was about one and a quarter cups. It dried coarser than I’d thought, but usable. The recipe I used – basically made up in the moment – was the following:
1.25 cups acorn flour
1 tbsp canola oil (Rabbit’s family would have access to seed and vegetable oils)
2 eggs
1 tbsp milk (the milk they have is more like goat milk than cow milk, but I didn’t have access to that)
2 tsp honey, plus more to serve with
I buttered a skillet (my friendly neighborhood Internet assures me that goat milk can be made into butter), mushed the flour into small patties, and fried them a little on each side.
It is worth noting here that nut flour has no gluten, so it does not rise and is difficult to make stick together. I knew this. It is part of why I had to prove to myself that food of some type could theoretically be made with nut flour alone.
How to describe the acorn cakes . . . Well, when they were cooking, they smelled eggy. During and after cooking, they resembled nothing so much as tiny hamburgers. Indeed, when my parents and I ate some of them, their texture was extremely hamburger-like, though their taste was somewhere vaguely between egg, honey, nut, and Rice Crispy treat.
I discovered, rather unfortunately, this morning, that my acorn cakes seem to be one of those foods that are all right when eaten warm, but pretty unappetizing once cooled. And here I’d thought they’d make a great breakfast food, being as they are a strange compromise between biscuit, egg, and meatless sausage.
All in all, a pretty successful first try! I’m quite pleased with the few minor changes I ended up making to Rabbit and Cougar thanks to this experiment.
Don’t they look like burgers?
Mmm, acorn cake.
Worthy of note: passing the kitchen table today, I saw a note NOT WRITTEN BY MYSELF that read simply, cattail flour? I fear I have infected my family.
October 7, 2009 at 4:08 am
Congratulations on your culinary success!
Your mentioning scones reminds me that when (I refuse to accept “if”) you visit me here in New Haven, it is imperative that you try some of the baked goods at my work. Our kitchen people make the most fabulous (American-style) scones – enormous and with different weird flavors every day. Strawberry cheesecake is probably my favorite so far. Today we had banana chocolate chip….
Oh, and I made chocolate chip cookies today! I think I added too much butter because the batter was really gooey and they stayed unusually soft, which was a bit of a disappointment because I like my cookies crunchy. I’ll have to experiment. My mother gave me her old Kitchenaid mixer so I have no excuse not to….
October 7, 2009 at 4:30 am
This is so neat. I love this level of dedication to authenticity.
Actually, for the novel I’m still attempting to begin, I’ve been working out food issues in my created world as well. (It’s my first secondary-world fantasy, too, so it’s all new to me.) I’ve been trying to figure out the implications of what kind of food is available– wheat, for instance, is not very common, but chocolate (unsweetened) is ubiquitous to the point of being seen almost as peasant fare. But that means I can’t just let my characters sit down to a plateful of scones with jam or whatever– at least not without taking the time to explain “oh, but it’s made from rice flour/maize/other non-wheat-grain.”