BTW, feel free to call me a food snob, and I should have mentioned this up front, but especially for a holiday like Thanksgiving, I only bake from scratch - no mixes, and especially nothing with chemical preservatives (besides the fact that I have non-negligible food snob tendencies, certain of my family members, my aunt in particular, are sensitive to certain preservatives). Plus we are a bunch of label-reading hippies. So though we might grudgingly tolerate something like pudding mix for kids’ everyday desserts, we would never buy pre-made pudding, and we certainly won’t eat Cool Whip, let alone on Thanksgiving.
I second this. If you want to get fancy, just before you add the pecan/syrup mixture to the crust, put in either (1) a layer of mini semisweet chocolate chips or (2) about 1/4 cup sweetened cream cheese (a little honey is fine) on the bottom of the crust, then add the pecan/syrup mixture. Bake as usual.
Both ideas are from Southern Living Magazine.
Love, Phil
Have you ever thought of doing a crisp? One of the desserts my side of the family always asks for is my Pear-Cranberry Crisp. It all goes into a 13 x 9 pan, so no special tools needed. The crisp topping I usually put pecans in it, but those are easily omitted.
On my in-law’s side of the family, they always ask for Pumpkin Flan. That also needs no special equipment, but it does need to have at least 6-8 hours of being chilled in the fridge to set.
As previously mentioned above, I am NOT going to risk a baby’s health, or possibly life, over a dessert choice. He is so allergic that if he touches a dish or a utensil that has touched nuts, he will need emergency medical treatment. So you can feel free to post recipes that require nuts, but I will ignore them.
Recipes, please? Chilling in the fridge shouldn’t be a problem; I will be there starting Tuesdday afternoon, so there is plenty of time for advance prep.
I’m not much of a baker. I am a lawyer. I think that Bete Noire thing may be illegal. I think you should make one and send it to me for testing. Maybe two, cuz…um…I’ll have to check it out under federal law. Yup, definitely two. Well, better make it three, in case I have to appeal. 
For the Pear-Cranberry Crisp:
1/2 bag fresh cranberries
1 cup red wine
1/2 vanilla bean
1 cup sugar
8 ripe pears, peeled, cored, chopped
3 tablespoons dry Minute Tapioca (you can find this with the pudding mixes in your average supermarket, in a red box)
1 stick butter
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup flour
3/4 cup oats
2 teaspoons of your favorite spices (I’m very fond of using cardamom with the pears, but you can use whatever you like)
In a saucepan, bring the cranberries, red wine, vanilla bean, and sugar to a simmer until the berries burst. Let cool to room temperature, and remove vanilla bean. Stir in pears and tapioca, pour into a well-buttered 13 x 9 baking dish.
Mix together butter, brown sugar, flour, oats, and spices in a food processor, mixer, or by hand until the butter is well incorporated and the mixture will stick together when pressed.
Crumble the oat mixture on top of the fruit, pop into a 350 degree oven for about 40 minutes–the top should be browned and crunchy, the filling should be bubbly.
Serve warm and with big scoops of vanilla ice cream.
As for the pumpkin flan, this recipe is my favorite. I’ve never bothered to make the praline, though.
You and I can get together and feel the pavlova love. Drat, now I want one.
I’ve been wanting to try this no knead caramel cinnamon bun recipe, but it will have to be for a crowd or I’ll eat them all. The pecans are optional; obviously you’d leave them out. But it looks good and reasonably simple. You’re already doing one chocolate thing, I wouldn’t do another. Plus, if there were leftovers they’d be awesome for breakfast.
So perform the mental exercises necessary to substitute whipped cream for the Cool Whip - is it really so hard? Sorry, but I just find it weird that you’d feel the need to insert this comment into the thread at all - why is this necessary? We don’t need to know the reasons why you might not select a recipe. It just seems strange to me; here’s a bunch of people being helpful and making a great dessert thread for all of us as well as for your needs, and then this comes up. Weird.
By the time I substitute from-scratch pudding for the instant pudding (which is specifically mentioned as “very important” that it be instant), and whipped cream for the Cool-Whip, and bake cookies to substitute for the crumbled “cheap oatmeal cookies,” it’s an entirely different dessert, requiring three distinct sub-recipes. By the time I go to all that trouble, I can make something much more festive and special. To me, holiday cooking/baking are about making something special for my family, not about how little work I can get away with doing, and in my family it’s important for a variety of reasons, some health-related and some foodie-related, to use non-artificial, high-quality ingredients whenever feasible.
Then don’t make it.
I’m sure you’ve made the person who took the time to give you that recipe feel very special.
Look, I don’t want to make this thread into an argument. But I can only make one, or maximum two in any case, of the many recipes everyone has posted here, so I was trying to give some guidance about what things are going to work for my family.
These threads provide information for more than just you (after all, that’s why we read them). Despite being the OP, you are not high queen of the thread. I swear, this must be the third thread I’ve read today with helpful contributions nastilly smacked down by the OPs.
I don’t think anyone here gives one whit about your family. Dopers help dopers, and you practically spit on jsgoddesss’s contribution. You sure as shit ain’t getting my recipe for (homemade, preservative free) banana bread.
Wow, are you guys seriously telling me that you’re offended by my stated desire to make something from scratch for a major holiday gathering of my entire extended family? Would you be offended if I said I didn’t want to make, say, a wedding cake from a boxed mix? And when I have even provided health-related reasons for not wanting to use artificial ingredients, like the fact that certain preservatives will send my aunt into an asthma attack?
Seriously, if I’m hungry on a Tuesday night, I have no qualms about whipping up a box of mac and cheese. But Thanksgiving is a holiday, a special occasion when everyone in the family pulls out all the stops to make their best effort. And no, I’m not of the school of thought that instant pudding is the best effort of anyone who actually loves to cook.
Yeesh, I hope I haven’t offended anyone previously when I’ve post recipe suggestions in Cafe Society - someone probably thought it was unrealistic to, say, soak dried beans or make stock from scratch. There are different schools of thought when it comes to cooking, and yes, I tend to come from a different one than some of the posters here apparently do. But I honestly can’t fathom why some posters here are apparently so offended by a desire to stick to natural ingredients.
Just to be clear, my contribution was ignored (which is fine). It was lobotomyboy63’s recipe that was sneered at (and which I think looks easy and delicious).
I’ve made this cake twice this month and plan on it again for Thanksgiving. If you are shy of the whiskey (which is minimal), you can do cream cheese frosting and still have an awesome cake. I liked this one so much, I brought it to my own birthday dinner :).
Pumpkin Cake with Whiskey Cream:
P.S - Pioneer Woman is a kitchen goddess.
You know what? The whole damn thread just became moot.
The FL trip was supposed to include not only Thanksgiving, but a 50th anniversary party for my (older) aunt and uncle on Saturday. The party, which was being “organized” by my supremely flaky cousins, was supposed to be at a restaurant. My last trip to FL for my grandmother’s 90th birthday party was completely turned upside-down and switched to a different day the day before it was supposed to take place, which meant I never got to see my best childhood friend that trip. So this time, I decided to follow up ahead of time and see whether they had decided on a time, restaurant, etc. yet.
Well, they turned everything upside-down again without telling me. When I talked to my younger aunt a couple of days ago, she had no idea what was going on, even though she’d been told to go ahead and order a cake. Just now my flaky cousin e-mailed and told me that Saturday was completely off, and we were just going to celebrate Thanksgiving, the anniversary, and my cousin’s daughter’s birthday all at the same time, at the house of my aunt who didn’t know what was going on as of a couple of days ago.
So there has already been a huge, formal, wedding-style cake ordered from a bakery, which means I doubt I will be baking anything at all. So if people want to continue posting Thanksgiving recipe ideas, I hope everyone will find them helpful, but it doesn’t look like I’m baking anything at all for Thanksgiving.
Even if you don’t go south, I nominate a sweet potato pie, since it’s a Southern thing, suits Thanksgiving, is akin to pumpkin, has honey in it, and can be made with hand tools and an oven in short order.
I’ve never seen one with honey in it - do you have a recipe? I sometimes make sweet potato pie with leftover Thanksgiving sweet potatoes (mine usually include crushed pineapple, ginger, and bourbon, among other things); maybe I could do that on Saturday, as it looks like there is no whole-family gathering happening then after all.
(I’m definitely going to Florida - it’s just that there will only be one big family gathering this trip instead of two.)