Sunday, April 11, 2021

#Spotlight and #Recipe: The Hasidic Rebbe's Son by Joan Lipinsky Cochran #cozymysteries


Cozy Mystery

2nd in Series

Setting - Florida

Perricot Publishing (March 30, 2021)

Number of Pages - 318 pages

Digital - ASIN : B08ZVF86VF

Synopsis:

Boca Raton reporter Becks Ruchinsky is stunned when her son, Gabe, brings an ultra-Orthodox friend home from college and asks her to hide him. Six days later, his body is found floating in a canal. When police deem his death an accident, Becks launches her own inquiry—a journey that takes her from secretive Hasidic enclaves to the seedy underbelly of South Beach’s glitzy club scene—to find his killer. What she discovers jeopardizes her son’s life and challenges her religious conviction.

The Hasidic Rebbe’s Son is an intriguing and compulsively readable mystery that contrasts the beauty of Hasidic tradition with the unbending rules that may lead to desperation and murder.


Review: Coming soon. 

Recipe from the book:

Becks Ruchinsky loves cooking almost as much as she enjoys poking her nose in other people’s business. She should know better, especially since her curiosity often draws her into murder investigations. Fortunately, Becks’ background as an investigative reporter provided her with the skills and connections she needs when looking into a suspicious death. In The Hasidic Rebbe’s Son, for example, a newspaper colleague-turned- private eye and, oddly enough, an elderly ultra-Orthodox yenta, helped Becks uncover the secrets that led to a Hasidic young man’s murder.  Becks has been a food writer and cookbook author since her son’s disability forced her to abandon her newspaper career and is now working on a collection of Southern desert recipes, most of them handed down by her Savannah-born mother. Here’s a recipe for Haggard Cake, one of Becks’ sons favorites. Despite the rather dismal name, it’s delicious and pretty easy to make. Enjoy! You can sign up for my mailing list to receive a free collection of Jewish recipes entitled “Homemade Jewish Cooking.”

 

Haggard Cake

By Becks Ruchinsky

Even though I was raised in Miami, I grew up under the influence of a Southern cook, my mother, who was raised in Savannah, Georgia. On special occasions like birthdays and school graduations, she’d go all out, making sweet tea, fried chicken and mashed potatoes. Dessert was almost always Haggard Cake. I rarely make it anymore – I struggle with my weight – but like to have it waiting when the boys visit. It’s classic Southern cooking in the sense that it includes coconut, pineapple and pecans. One of the best parts of making this cake is the easy icing. You cook a few ingredients on the stove for three minutes and pour that over the warm cake. Perfect for the lazy and time-pressed cook. And trust me, as weird as this recipe appears to be – no butter or eggs in the batter – it works.

 

Haggard Cake

 

BATTER

2 cups of flour

1½ cups of sugar

2 teaspoons of baking soda

Dash of salt

20 ounce can of crushed pineapple, undrained

1.       Preheat oven 20 350 degrees F. Grease and flour a 9 X 13 inch pan.

2.       Pour everything into a large bowl and mix well with a spoon. Pour into the pan and bake 35 minutes or until a toothpick or knife placed in the cake comes out clean. Leave in pan.

ICING

1 small can of evaporated milk

1 stick of butter or margarine

1½ cups sugar

1 cup coconut

1 cup chopped pecans

1 teaspoon vanilla

Dash of salt

 

1.       While the cake is baking, melt the butter and milk in a medium saucepan over low-medium heat, stirring constantly.

2.    2.  Once the butter is melted, add the sugar and stir to combine. Beat for two minutes in the saucepan with an immersion blender or hand-held mixer. A whisk is probably fine.  Add the vanilla, salt, coconut and chopped pecans.

3.       Pour over the cake while both are warm, and let the cake sit a few hours to absorb the liquid. 

About the author:

Joan Lipinsky Cochran is a South Florida-based writer whose crime and mystery novels focus on subcultures of American Judaism. In her latest novel, The Hasidic Rebbe’s Son, her protagonist is compelled to explore the glitzy South Beach nightclub scene and the secretive world of Hasidic Judaism to find a killer. It is the second in The Becks Ruchinsky Mystery Series. The first, The Yiddish Gangster’s Daughter, is the story of a woman whose world is upended – and life threatened – when she discovers her father was a member of the Jewish mafia.

Website www.joanlipinskycochran.com,

Facebook https://www.facebook.com/joanlipinskycochran/

Purchase Link - Amazon


 

 

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