One of my favorite things about cooking through my grandmother’s recipes is that it’s allowed me to uncover memories that I had completely forgotten were there. Case in point: funnel cakes.
I’d stumbled across the recipe early on in this project and tucked it away until summer. For me, funnel cakes are as quintessentially summer as tomatoes are. Growing up, we’d spend summers down by the shore, going to the boardwalk for rides and food. Funnel cakes, zeppoles, Korh’s custard, and cheesestakes were always ordered in mass quantities, and we’d scarf them down as we bounced between piers.
But when I teased the recipe card for funnel cakes on my Instagram, my cousin Christina messaged me. “Grandma always made the best ones,” she said. And it completely unlocked a separate memory for me: My grandmother, standing over a frying pan, funneling batter into a spiral shape. There are a good number of recipes that we’d collected from her archive that I haven’t eaten before, and I thought that funnel cakes were one of them. But the memory hit me with a bang—she’d made them, and I remembered them.
This was confirmed to me about a few hours after I finished cooking. I’d fried the cakes in the early afternoon and then took a little solo bike ride out to Brooklyn Bride Park while Ben was in Queens. When I got back to the apartment, I opened the front door and was hit with a familiar scent: Grandma. There was something about the lingering smell of vegetable oil that reminded me so much of walking into her house on a warm summer day to swim in the pool in the backyard.
So while tomatoes may always be the star of the show in summer, there’s something about a funnel cake that is absolutely perfect. It’s funny how the most random recipes can bring you back to different places, whether it’s the boardwalk on a balmy July night, or my grandmother’s kitchen, fresh from the pool, dripping water on the tiles near the fridge, while I watch her spiral batter into a spitting frying pan.
INGREDIENTS
2 eggs, beaten
1 1/2 cups milk
2 cups flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
See AlsoCarnival-Worthy Funnel CakePowdered sugar, for dusting
Vegetable oil
INSTRUCTIONS
Whisk together eggs and milk in a large bowl. Set aside.
In a second bowl, sift together flour, baking powder, and salt. Slowly add to egg and milk mixture, a little at a time, whisking between additions so that the batter becomes smooth.
In a large skillet, add about a 1/2 inch of oil and heat. To test whether the oil is hot enough, add a small drop of batter to the pan. If it rapidly bubbles, it’s ready to go.
Grab a funnel** and, holding your finger over the bottom, add about 1/2 cup of batter. Release your finger over the oil in a spiral motion. Don’t worry if it isn’t perfect—the more squiggly and uneven it looks, the better, in my opinion!
Fry until golden, and then flip carefully. Remove from oil and transfer to a wire rack over a cookie sheet so it can drain without getting soggy.
Sift powdered sugar over your finished cakes and serve warm.
** A funnel is preferred for funnel cakes, obviously, and is the easiest way to pull off this technique. But if you don’t have one, you can pour the batter into a plastic bag, massage it to one corner, and snip that corner. Then pipe the batter into the oil the way you would pipe frosting onto a cake. You’ll have a little less control of the batter, so go slow!
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