Drain mushrooms. Mash cheese with small amount of cream. Add salt and Worcestershire sauce. Add mushrooms and mix. Chill thoroughly so mixture will be easy to handle and then shape into ball and roll it in finely minced parsley. Serve with melba toast rounds.
We were asked to make these as wedding favors for a friend, and we kind of rolled our eyes. Buckeyes? Really? But they're so ... boring. Peanut butter filling, rolled into balls and dipped in chocolate to resemble horse chestnuts. Sure, they're a favorite of Ohio natives, where the buckeye is the official state tree; and sure, they're easy enough to make. But where's the challenge? The excitement? Didn't they want something fancier for a wedding?
Moist, dark, spicy, but not too sweet, this is classic gingerbread. The addition of black pepper has a historical hook: it was a common ingredient in gingerbreads of the past. We think it brings alive the other spices.
Ingredients
This glorious cream cheese, caper, caraway seed, and paprika combination, spread over sour black bread or over slices of any dark or brown bread, is rhapsodically unbeatable.
Shellagh Connelly, chef/owner of Mildred Pierce Cafe in St. Paul (and a woman who understands breakfast food down to her soul), created the dish for her breakfast menu. For me, my version illustrates an important point—cream cheese is one of the most underrated ingredients in the market.