Christmas Cake

So this is how I spent my morning. A bit of frenzied weighing, chopping and mixing, then several hours of inhaling delicious cake-baking smells. Mmmmm..

Anyway, here's what I did!

This is not my own recipe, it's a Sue Lawrence Christmas cake recipe with a few tweaks for personal taste.

The tweaks being that I don't like cinnamon, ground cloves, mixed peel or brandy so I've made some substitutions - ground ginger instead of the cinnamon and ground cloves, chopped dried figs (and actually a few chopped dates this year as well) instead of the mixed peel, and whisky instead of brandy. I always use whisky instead of brandy in Christmas cakes and it always works well! And this is what I like so much about Christmas cakes, they with stand quite a bit of tweaking - I've tried quite a few recipes over the years, substituting when they call for such horrors as mixed peel, glace cherries, cinnamon and nutmeg. They've all been fine, but I like the Sue Lawrence recipe as a base the best so it's the one I've stuck with for the last few years.

I tried one recipe one year which called for a couple of tablespoons of treacle which was a bit of a 'mare because a) treacle is such a pain to work with and got everywhere and b) I don't use treacle for anything else so I had the tin sitting oozing in the cupboard until the end of time (or until I got fed up with it).

Ingredients:
250g self-raising flour
1 ½ tsp mixed spice
three-quarters of a teaspoon of ground ginger
50g ground almonds
400g currants
250g sultanas
400g raisins
50g dried figs, chopped
50g dried apricots, chopped
50g walnuts, roughly chopped
50g whole (unblanched) almonds, roughly chopped
250g unsalted butter, softened
200g dark muscovado sugar
grated zest and juice of 1 unwaxed lemon
5 large free-range eggs
100ml whisky (any cheap stuff). Plus will need some for 'feeding'.

Method
1. Preheat the oven to 150°C/330F/Gas 2, and prepare tin (grease and line with baking parchment).
[Actually I don't preheat the oven until just before stage 3 because it takes me forever to do all the weighing out and chopping]

2. Sift the flour spices and ground almonds into a bowl. Then add the currants, sultanas, raisins, figs, dried apricots and nuts. Stir thoroughly.

3. In a separate bowl cream the butter, sugar and lemon zest until fluffy, then beat in the eggs one by one, adding a teaspoon of the flour mixture with each egg.

4. Stir the egg mixture into the flour mixture with the lemon juice and whisky.

5. Spoon into the prepared tin. Level the top and bake for two hours. Very loosely cover with a sheet of greaseproof paper and continue to bake for another hour, making three hours in total - but test for readiness after two and three quarter hours' cooking. The cake is cooked when a skewer inserted into the middle comes out clean and the sides have started to shrink from the edges of the tin.

6. Remove to a wire rack to cool. Once completely cold, wrap in foil and store in an airtight container 'til Christmas. removing every two weeks to 'feed': unwrap, prick the top with a long skewer and spoon over 1-2 tbsp of whisky. Reseal as before.

Notes
The original recipe calls for 350g each of raisins, currants and sultanas but I vary the amounts of each from year to year (providing it adds up to 1050g) - I prefer a dark cake so tend to use fewer sultanas and make up the weights with raisins and currants. Last year the proportions were 450g raisins, 350g currants, 250g sultanas, but this year I fancied a higher proportion of currants.

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I have some dried fruit left so I'm considering making mincemeat next. I've never made it before - I usually buy a jar of mincemeat with good intentions, then not get round to making mince pies. Maybe I will this time!

Bring it on

I have a snow shovel and weather-proof boots. I am ready*!

I carry a spade in the boot of the car in the winter but really a snow shovel is much better. My search for unwaxed lemons took me to the supermarket today and they were selling snow-shovels, so there I was at the checkout with a snow-shovel, a bag of unwaxed lemons, some onions and a jar of coffee. Somehow it would have felt less silly if I'd had a huge trolley of shopping with the shovel perched on top.

I found myself humming the Harry Potter film music as I shopped - eventually it occurred to me that it was because I felt like I was lugging a broom around!

I had plans to make my Christmas cake today but by the time I got back from the shop it was really too late to start - it takes hours to cook and I'm not the kind of person who can leave the oven on while going to get the kids from school. I'd worry the house was burning down the whole time. Ridiculous really - I mean nothing ever goes wrong with the oven when I'm in the house, why would it in the 15 minutes I'm out? But there you go - it's my superpower, excessive worrying. Hard to save the world with it, admittedly, but then superpowers aren't always practical are they?

I might go and cut a few of what's left of the flowers in the garden - the kitchen window-sill is looking a bit drab today:
We had a few days of cold bright weather and I cleaned the kitchen window on Sunday because the low sunlight was really highlighting how spattered it was with, I dunno, washing up liquid maybe? Now normal service has been resumed and we're back to dreich, I feel I needn't have bothered! But a few of the last sweetpeas might perk the window-sill up a bit. Look at the Boy's tomato plant though! It was grown from seed at school then brought home and left to me to deal with (ha ha..). I was just wondering if he'd notice if I chucked it out, though I always feel tremendously guilty throwing plants out, when a little tomato appeared on it!

Later:

What d'you reckon? Better?

*Actually I am not quite ready 'til I've got the kids new boots. Then I am ready.

The demon drink

Or to be more accurate, our first attempt at home-brewing. I love that picture above, it looks so peculiar. But it's just the bottles sitting inside the brewing tub.

So there we are. Doesn't look much but tastes quite nice! We used a home-brewing kit and had fun doing it.

A Walk in the Park

After two days stuck inside with the unwell child, today the sun came out and Miss M had perked up enough for a trip to the country park.

I am actually Too Tired To Blog - good night!

Reasons To Be Cheerful: the search for optimism

It's Reasons To Be Cheerful time again and I'm discovering that for me the end of the week is not the optimum time for optimism! I've had a peely-wally Miss Mouse off school yesterday and today so a lot of my time and energy has been taken with that. But there are always reasons, so here we go:

1) Things we'd forgotten. My brother recently got a slide scanner and has been working through a box of colour slides (remember them?) that our parents re-found among their stuff. They'd thought the slides were long lost so were delighted, but as their slide projector was long lost they'd no way of seeing what there was. So most evenings my brother scans a few slides and bungs them in Dropbox for us to look at. Here's a classic:

These are old pictures that haven't seen the light of day for decades (that's me in that picture). Some of the slides have quite a bit of damage to them - see the purple spots on that one? But just to see them at all is fantastic!

2) A bit of silly telly. New season of The Big Bang Theory - yay!

3) A smidge of sunshine and a coffee outside is better than nothing. I like being outside but sometimes there's not much opportunity. I've borrowed this idea this from The Philosophy of Lists, another Making Winterer, who has decided to try to have a cuppa outside every day. I know I won't manage it every day - the climate and my garden are against me - but every half-decent day I'll make the effort. Today I sneaked out into the garden while Miss M was watching Numberjacks and bloody blissful it was too (stir crazy? me?). I did the same thing yesterday and it was somewhat less blissful. Cat2 discovered she could climb up the old bit of trellis (remnant of a piece of fence) in the corner and get up onto the garage roof.


Getting down of course was less easy. It all got a bit farcical - Miss Mouse was feverish and asleep so I was tiptoeing around trying to extend a ladder quietly* while hissing at the cat. I got a ladder up but she was having much too much fun scampering about the roof to come anywhere near me. Eventually she made her own way down but I don't know how. Teleportation most likely. This cat has ladder phobia - the noise of ladders that is. Every time there are window-cleaners are in the street she runs round the house growling out of all the windows. Maybe this has cured her! What's funny about the growling is that our other cat, her brother, has picked up the habit from her and now thinks that ladders are a legitimate threat!

So, yeah, peaceful cup of coffee in the fresh air!

*Not possible.

Making Winter : toast

The smell of that buttered toast simply talked to Toad, and with no uncertain voice; talked of warm kitchens, of breakfasts on bright frosty mornings, of cosy parlour firesides on winter evenings, when one's ramble was over and slippered feet were propped on the fender; of the purring of contented cats, and the twitter of sleepy canaries.

Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

It would have to be the twitter of Twitter for me, and I don't have a fender or a fireside unfortunately, but I do like a bit of toast.

This post is mostly because I was reading The Wind in the Willows to my son last night and got to the bit above in the chapter about the annoying Mr Toad's escape from prison. I can't stand Toad, the book would be so much better without him. Ratty and Mole pottering about in boats and bumping into demigods - what could be nicer? I do like that description of toast though, and it occurred to me as I read it how appropriate it is for Making Winter, finding pleasure in the small things in winter. Toast is all very well in summer but in winter it's an indulgence. All the better if it's made with nice bread, rather than the cheap brown bread I got in a hurry yesterday, but even cheap-bread-toast is nice on a cold day. My Beloved occasionally makes bread with our breadmaker (mostly used for pizza dough) and has recently branched out into making the most delicious oat-rich rolls. Honestly they'd make you drool...

Making Winter : baking

Aaah, it's all so idyllic - pottering round with the ingredients, happily sifting flour*, enjoying the warm smell of baking drifting through the house. So cosy, so familiar..


.. so disastrous.

I do like baking but sometimes it Just Goes Wrong, and that's what happened today. The recipe was for banana bread, which I'm not that keen on really, but I had some bananas going mushy and I thought the kids might like it. I'm not sure what happened - it was looking fine on the top, and the skewer came out clean but when I took it out of the tin the middle was mushy and the bottom third was glued to the tin. I bunged it back in the oven for a bit longer on the off-chance, but it didn't really work out. I'm not too worried - at least it wasn't my Christmas cake! I'm planning on doing that next week and I would cry if that went wrong! I'm not sure I can be bothered trying the banana bread again, though I think that was what my brother baked a lot of last year and his was fine. Maybe I should get his recipe.

Still, the house is full of baking smells, could be worse!

* Apparently some people hate sifting flour and icing sugar and begrudge the time it takes - it's my favourite bit of the whole process! I sift even when I don't have to just because I like it!