Snow Topped Spice Cake

This is a really good cake as an alternative to Christmas Cake. It doesn't contain dried fruit, is very soft and light, yet really Christmassy with the spices. I've made it a few times, and each time it has been really successful.

It's a Nigella recipe from How to be a Domestic Goddess.

Snow-Topped Spice Cake

4 large eggs, separated, plus 2 extra large egg whites
125ml vegetable oil
125ml water
2 tbsp runny honey
200g dark muscovado sugar
75g ground almonds
150g plain flour
2 tsps baking powder
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
pinch of salt
1 tsp ground ginger
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp all-spice
1/4 tsp ground cloves
zest of 1/2 an orange
100g caster sugar
250g royal icing sugar

Preheat the oven to 180c.
Whisk together the yolks and oil, then add the water, honey and dark muscovado sugar. Add the almonds, flour, baking powder, bicarb, salt, spices and zest, folding in gently. In another bowl, beat the egg whites until soft peaks form and then gradually add the caster sugar. Fold the whites into the cake mixture, and pour into a well buttered 25cm Bundt tin. Cook for 45 minutes, or until the cake is springy on top and beginning to shrink away from the edges. Let the cake cool in its tin on a rack for 25 minutes before turning it out.

When the cake is completely cool, make up the icing. You want it to be pretty thick, or it will disappear into the cake. Drizzle the top of the cake with the icing.

Chocolate Peppermint Brownies

I love the combination of chocolate and peppermint, so I decided to give my regular brownies a Christmassy twist today with the addition of peppermint icing. I had recently bought some paste-style food colouring, and I wanted to try it out, so I combined the two.

I used the Chocolate Brownie recipe in Nigella's How to be a Domestic Goddess which is not on her website, but I imagine any brownie recipe would work. As I don't eat nuts, I leave the walnuts out, and I don't know how well nuts work with peppermint, so I would stick to a plain chocolate brownie.

I then made up plain glace icing, with about 300g icing sugar and 6 tablespoons of hot water. I then added half a capful of peppermint flavouring. I reserved about two tablespoons of the white icing, and spread the rest over the brownies. I then used my red food colouring to dye the leftover icing a candy cane pink, which I piped in stripes across the brownies. To hide my terrible icing, I 'feathered' it using a skewer.

The final combination works really well!

Cranberry and Orange Muffins

I had these on my 'to-bake' list over Christmas, but after spending most of Christmas Eve in the kitchen, I couldn't face doing them. The snow has kept me off work today and yesterday, so I had a chance to make them.

I made them with 150g fresh cranberries, which was delicious, mostly because I had the packet in the fridge. The muffins themselves were really light and not too sweet. I had run out of muffin cases so I buttered the inside of the muffin tin. It seemed to work and at least you don't get the rubbish!

Christmas Morning Muffins



200g plain flour
3 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
75g demerara sugar
good grating fresh nutmeg
1 clementine or small orange
approximately 50ml milk
60g unsalted butter, melted
1 large egg
150g dried cranberries

12-bun muffin tin

for the topping:

2 teaspoons demerara sugar
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

Method:
Preheat the oven to 200ºC/gas mark 6.

1. In a large bowl, combine the flour, baking powder, bicarb and sugar, and grate over a generous amount of fresh nutmeg.

2. Squeeze the orange or clementine juice into a measuring jug, then pour in milk on top till it comes up to the 150ml mark. Add the melted butter and the egg, and beat to combine.

3. Pour the jug of liquid ingredients into the bowl of dry ingredients and stir till the ingredients are more or less combined, remembering that a lumpy batter makes light muffins.

4. Last of all, lightly fold in the cranberries and fill the muffin cups. The amount of cranberries specified here makes for heavily fruited muffins; if you want them sparser, use half the amount.

5. Mix together the demerara sugar and ground cinnamon and sprinkle over the tops of the muffins.

6. Stick them in the oven and bake for 20 minutes

Stollen

I'd never made Stollen before, and this was my first Fresh from the Oven challenge.

I'm definitely not an experienced bread-maker away from the bread machine, but it seemed close enough to a cake and it was a good first challenge. Stollen is a traditional German cake, usually eaten during the Christmas season, when it is called Weihnachtsstollen or Christstollen. There is a roll of marzipan running through it which is supposed to represent the baby Jesus in the manger. It's amazing how these tenuous connections were formed.

The dough was incredibly sticky - I wondered if the egg should be added before the second kneading. Also, our temperamental oven started playing tricks, and the outside was slightly scorched, but inside it tasted really good. I have to admit I substituted ground almonds for the flaked almonds as I'm not very keen on things with a nutty texture, but I was glad I had a go.

Stollen


based on a Simon Rimmer recipe

100ml/3½fl oz warm milk
6g (1 sachet) fast action yeast or 2 tsp dried yeast or 20g fresh yeast
pinch salt
1 tsp caster sugar
225g/8oz plain flour, plus extra for dusting
1 tsp ground mixed spice
200g/7oz mixed dried fruit (including glacé cherries)
25g/1oz flaked almonds
50g/2oz unsalted butter
1 free-range egg, beaten
250g/9oz marzipan


To finish
rum
25g/1oz butter, melted
50g/2oz icing sugar

Method

1. Place the milk and yeast into a bowl and mix well. Leave to sit for 5-6 minutes.

2. Meanwhile, sift the salt, sugar, flour and mixed spice into a large bowl. Add the dried fruit, almonds and butter and mix well then stir in the yeasty milk and mix well.

3. Add the egg and stir to form a dough. Knead the dough for 5-6 minutes, then cover and leave to prove for 20 minutes. Uncover the dough and turn out onto a clean, floured work surface. Knock the dough back to reduce the volume, then knead the dough for 3-4 minutes.

4. Push the dough out by hand into a flat oval shape about 23cm x 18cm/9in x 7in. Roll the marzipan into a sausage shape about 6cm/2in shorter than the dough. Place the marzipan into the centre of the dough, then fold over the sides of the dough to seal in the marzipan. Then fold in the ends of the dough to contain the marzipan and help give the dough shape. Place the stollen seal-side down onto a greased baking tray. Cover and place somewhere warm to prove for one hour.

5. Preheat the oven to 180C/365F/Gas 4. Place the stollen on the baking tray into the oven to bake for 40 minutes, or until golden-brown and cooked through.

6. To finish, remove the stollen from the oven, brush with the rum then melted butter and dust liberally with icing sugar immediately. Allow the stollen to cool, then serve in slices.
 
 

Christmas Cakes

This is a whole new experience for me: I've made a fruit cake before but never a Christmas Cake, and I've never marzipanned and iced a Christmas Cake before.

The cake is a boiled fruit cake, Nigella's Easy-Action Christmas Cake. I made the actual cake about three weeks ago, and it has been sitting in the tin waiting for me to ice it. It was incredibly easy to make, as you just chuck all the fruit in a big saucepan with the butter, sugar, chestnut puree, rum, orange and lemon zest and juice. It all melts down, and then you add the eggs, flour and spices. At this point the kitchen smelt incredible. That mixture of citrus and spice. I absolutely love the smell of cloves and oranges, and usually adorn an orange or five with cloves. I might even do that this afternoon.

The marzipanning and icing was easier than anticipated, because I found a wonderful product: ready rolled icing and marzipan! And then I cut out the stars from the left-over icing. What I did find tricky was cutting the icing around the bottom of the cake - it seemed to go all raggedy, and next time I will have to find some thicker ribbon to cover it with! The stars are covered in glitter for a bit of festive sparkle.

One thing that did make it easier was that we were given a Wedding Present of a rotating board - I think you're supposed to put chutneys and things on it and spin it round so that everyone can reach, but I sat the cake on it and it worked pretty well!

A Christmas Ham

I've never cooked a ham before, and we wanted something a bit Christmassy for dinner yesterday. So a quick check on recipes followed by a longer trip to Sainsbury's, and I was ready.

The gammon was first boiled in a mixture of apple and cranberry juice, with onions, allspice and cinnamon in the pot. I had to watch it pretty carefully as our pan was only just big enough. After about two hours, I took it out of the pot and let it cook for a bit. Then I removed the skin, which wasn't nearly as tricky as I thought it would be, and criss-crossed the fat. This was trickier than I had anticipated - I did cut through to the meat once or twice - and put a clove into each intersection.

Next I made a glaze - nearly a whole pot of cranberry sauce, a touch of mustard and a teaspoon of honey were melted together and then poured over the clove-studded edge. It did look very pretty, I must say.

Then, when I had finally got the other bits and pieces of our dinner organised, being slightly held up by our boiler which decided to shut down on the coldest, snowiest evening of the year, the gammon went into a hot oven for 30 minutes.

The final dish was delicious.

Yes, we did have wholly unseasonal vegetables with it - I'm ashamed to confess that the spinach came from Spain and the Mange Tout came from Ethiopia. Back to the parsnips and sprouts for the rest of the week...

A bit of Christmas planning

So school has finally broken up and I am free to think about Christmas cooking... not that I haven't been thinking about it a lot recently. There is a plethora of cookery programmes on tv at the moment, and I have been quite inspired by Jamie's Family Christmas. I'm not normally a big fan of Jamie, being more of a Nigella girl myself, but his recipes on that programme do look pretty good.

I've not been doing much cooking this week due to several Christmas lunches and Tim cooking, but I have made the Christmas cake, which is sutting in a tin and ready to be marzipanned and iced next week. I also made some Christmas biscuits but I didn't ice them so I didn't think they were worth photographing.

I did, however, think it was worth photographing our Christmas tree - I am quite obsessed with it, and spend a good couple of hours decorating it last Saturday.

Over the Christmas holidays, I want to do lots of cooking. We are planning to have Goose on Christmas day, and have most of the normal trimmings - roast potatoes, sprouts, cranberry sauce, bread sauce, carrots, pigs-in-blankets... I do still need to make the Christmas pudding. Tim won one after doing an 11k run last Sunday, but I don't think it's quite nice enough! I love bread sauce, and I love making it, infusing the milk with a clove-studded onion, soaking the breadcrumbs... delicious. I should make it more often than just at Christmas!

But I also want to do some Christmas periphery stuff - braised red cabbage for the goose, a chestnut dessert, Christmas muffins, Christmas popcorn... Plus there's also biscuits for cheese, chutneys, pickles... Maybe I'm being a little ambitious.

There's a lot I want to do in the house this Christmas too as it will be our first Christmas as a married couple. We are at home for Christmas day, and so I want it gleaming and organised. The spare room has turned into a bit of a nightmare - as well as having our desk and laundry in there, it also houses boxes which have yet to be unpacked, and the cat is trying to take over the bed. So I want to blitz the spare room and also the stairs down to the cellar, which are very dark, dusty and a little bit spooky. This is the first school holiday I've had living here - we were on our honeymoon over half term - and I tend to put off home jobs until holidays!

Finally, I have to find some desserts for New Years Eve - we are having a murder mystery party, set in France at the end of WW2... so far I'm thinking of a chocolate mousse, but I also need something else. Suggestions please?