Twas the night before Chirstmas...

... when all through the house.
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.
So to the kitchen I went, wooden spoon in hand.
To cook up a frenzy as a one-woman baking band!

Chirstmas! Food! Stuff yourself stupid until you can't move and pass out!

I always love coming home for Christmas - the fridge is full to breaking point with half the contents on Marks & Spencer and there are so many exciting cheeses, chocolates, wines and more that I could easily eat myself silly for a good month without leaving the house to refuel. So, as if there wasn't enough to consume already I decided yesterday that how better to get in the festive spirit than to bake cinnamon stars and mincemeat cheecake and then slump in front of the TV to watch Love Actually (again). So that's exactly what I did...

Now I'm not a fair-weather cinnamon-junkie, oh no for me it's a year-round obsession that can fortunately be flaunted publicly as the official 'essence of Christmas' as soon as the Starbucks red cups come out. It might have been gold, frankincense and myrrh that the three wise men brought to baby Jesus that night but really who knows what frankincense and myrrh smell like (gold is gold who cares what it smells like when it looks so pretty), I think we should update the tale and bring on cinnamon, cloves and, oh go on then, gold. Anyway before I re-write the entire story of Christmas, thankfully it's not just me that's obsessed with cinnamon: the Americans LOVE the stuff and the Germans are pretty fond of it too, bringing us our first creation:

Cinnamon Star Biscuits

(makes about 40 depending ohn the size of your stars)

300g plain flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp mixed spice
1/2 to 1 tsp cinnamon (depending on the level of obsession...)
100g softened unsalted butter
200g golden caster sugar
1 large egg, beaten

Sift the flour, baking powder, spices and a pinch of salt together. Cream together the butter and sugar together until pale and fluffy, then gradually beat in the egg (left).


Add the dry ingredients and mix thoroughly, add drops of cold water as needed to bind the dough.

Press the dough into a disc and wrap (in clingfilm or a plastic bag) and pop in the fridge for at least 30 minutes.

Heat the oven to 180 (160 if it's fan). Well flour your surface (don't want your stars to get stuck and deformed now do you? I totally didn't do that the first time, uhum...) and your rolling pin and roll the dough out to about the thickness of a pound coin. Stamp out your shapes (stars are the classic but go rogue and go for Christmas trees if you fancy a bigger biscuit) and keep re-balling and re-rolling and stamping until you've rinsed out your dough for all it's worth.

Lay on parchment-lined baking trays and pop in the oven for 15-20 minutes or until they are gorgeously lightly golden. Let cool (and do a taste test, of course). You could ice them to be trad but I didn't bother because that'd only dilute the cinnamon...







But my festive baking frenzy didn't stop there. I'm not a huge fan of Christmas pudding. To be honest, I think I may have never had it on Christmas Day (I may, shh, never have had it at all...). My grandmother alway used to bake the most gloriously fluffy, goo-ily meringue-y pavlova for Christmas dinner. I know, higly unconventional but how could you opt for a solid fruitcake over that glory? Everytime. Anyway my grandmother has now stopped baking so I thought it was high time I took up the alternative Day dessert mantle. I saw Nigel Slater's Mincemeat Cheesecake recipe in the OFM a few weeks back and that was it. Suitably festive and suitably tempting, he'd done it. And a new era of family Christmas dessert is born (hopefully).

Christmas Cheesecake
serves 8-10

As Nige says, you might find that your cheesecake cracks across the top as it cools (mine did - I maintain it adds to the 'homemade' look - and you can hide it with a bit of festive holly...). But if you are anti-cracks, Nige suggests you bake it in a water bath. so insted of placing on a baking tray, half-fill a roasting tin with water and lower the uncooked cheesecake into it and bake as suggested.

For the base:
65g butter
300g digestive biscuits or shortbread (it's Scottish innit so obviously went for shortbread)

For the filling:
600g full fat cream cheese
200g  golden caster sugar
4 eggs plus one extra yolk
zest of one small orange (plus some extra to garnish)
few drops vanilla extract
300g sour cream
250g mincemeat

You want a round cake tin with a removable base about 22cm in diameter and 7.5cm deep. Line it with baking parchment. To make the base first smash up your shortbread (or biscuits). Food processor would be best, but in its absence I improvised with a mashing mallet and angry thoughts.

Melt the butter in a large saucepan and mix in the shortbread crumbs. Tip the glistening crumb mix into the tin and smooth out (don't mash it down). Put in the firdge for half an hour to set.

While it's in there, set the oven to 140 and make the filling. Put the cream cheese and sugar in a bowl (or food processor) and blend for a couple of minutes until smooth. Add the eggs then the extra yolk one by one, beating thoroughly and scrapping the sides inward if needed. Add the zest and the vanilla extract and blend with the food processor or hand blender. With just a spoon or spatula, mix in the soured cream. Then fold in the mincemeat gently.

 

Take the base out the fridge and place it on a piece of baking parchment on a baking tray. Pour in the filling mixture. Bake in the oven for an hour. The middle will still seem uncooked and wobbly but do not fear. After the hour, turn the oven off but leave the cheesecake in the hour for another hour with the door shut. After, remove from the oven, allow to cool then set in the fridge overnight (do this, you don't want a wobbly cheesecake). In the morning (Christmas morning!), remove from the fridge and garnish with orange zest, and if you fancy, holly. Merry Christmas!

Roon-ing around (and no nothing to do with Wayne)

It's hard not to love macaroons (macarons en Francais). Small, perfectly formed, melt in the mouth. But being an impoverish journo the one thing I don't love it the price (£1 a macaroon!! But they're tiny!!!) and they've stopped sending me free ones... So... I thought... how hard can they be to make? Uhum...

So make your own macaroons. There are plenty of recipes out there so Saturday morning and I set to work. I had two recipes: Ottolenghi and Delicious Magazine. So of course, erring on the side of caution why not combine them?! But what flavour, what flavour... the trusted Ottolenghi offered up salt peanut and caramel, lime and basil and chocolate, while Delicious opts for a myriad of flavour extracts or chocolate.... mmmm. But it had to be raspberry.

The first stumbling block came when 'the big Tescos' didn't have raspberry flavour extract. Ok, I thought, I'll get really raspberries, we'll work this.

Macaroons are essentially almondy meringue sandwiches, so the basis to the recipe is sugar, egg whites and ground almonds. Easy! Laduree, watch out.

I kicked off on the Delicious recipe (sorry, Otto, I love you really and this may have been my first mistake) but mostly because it called for bigger qualities (175g icing sugar, 125g ground almonds, 3 large egg whites, 75g caster sugar) compared to Otto's (110g icing sugar, 60g ground almonds, 2 large egg whites, 40g caster sugar) and I was greedy.

The method though is pretty much standard:

Pre-heat the over to 160 (less if you're is fan, not accounted for in the Otto recipe, error two). Sieve the icing sugar and ground almonds into a bowl.

Crack the eggs into a bowl and whisk until thick and glossy, adding the caster sugar as the peaks form.

Of course, I couldn't resist the classic test: tipping the bowl upside down. Gingerly, very gingerly...

Phew. Fold bit by bit, either the meringue into the almond/icing sugar or the almond/icing sugar into the meringue (recipe dependant). Now add your flavouring. Working with my fresh raspberries, I decided the best option would be to blitz them in the food processor and then sieve them to take out the pips. So I added the juice which gave a satisfying pinky colour to the mixture. Now comes the fun/messy bit: piping! So armed with a icing piping bag (John Lewis or a specialist cooking shop will help you out), fill the bag halfway and then pipe only a baking paper lined tray. You're aiming for blobs about 3cm wide, about the size of a two pound coin. They don't swell like cookies when you bake them so space them but you don't need loads of room.

Bang them on the kitchen surface so they form a good 'foot' (you know that distinctive puffy, rough base). Leave for 15 minutes uncovered before you pop them in the oven for about 12-15 minutes.

While the 'bread' of the sandwich as cooking, it's time to make the buttercream filling. Having had far too much meringue mix for my trays last time, I decided to switch back to my beloved Otto (sorry I deserted you!). So 100g unsalted soft butter and 45g icing sugar mixed together until pale coloured and smooth. Then add your flavouring (more pulverised raspberries).

Check the 'breads' regularly though (third mistake), you want them raised and hard but leave them too long and they'll go golden and overcooked. They should also be cooked enough that they come easily off the baking sheet and there's no meringue goo still holding them on. Mine were almost there but somehow both slighty over-and under-cooked.

Leave the meringues to cool before assembling the macaroons with a small spoonful of buttercream holding the sandwiches together, then leave somewhere cool to set.

So the verdict? Ok, so they're no Laduree, more homely than haute-caketure but they still disappeared between me and the Boy in ooh two days. Twenty of them. But for next time? Work on the meringue mixture (I think I might need a more precise scale). The flavouring needed to be a bit more intense... it was kind of like roses to rose water in terms of the raspberry flavour. And I need to play with the oven temperature and time (a constant battle with my oven). And oh, one last thing, I think they would've been better with a jam-y filling rather than buttercream. But apart from that they were deeeeeeeeelicious. And very much less than £1 each.

Tarting it up: Figgy custard tart

I would never say baking is my fortay. Discounting chocolate rice crispie/cornflake/insert-cereal-favourite-here 'cakes', I've attempted it twice. Peanut butter cookies that I made while nursing a rather nasty eye problem (you may think that cooking when you can't see properly doesn't sound like the best idea but it worked surprisingly well), were a instant success, and disappeared so fast I contemplated coming over all domestic goddess and baking biscuits and muffins and cupcakes every weekend, and becoming the best flatmate, like, ever.

Buoyed on by this success I decided I would really up my domestic goddess credentials by baking Choux Boy's parents some Scottish shortbread (well I'm Scottish, so they are Scottish alright) Christmas tree biscuits for last Christmas. I have to admit this was kind of spurred on by the thought of being outdone by Choux Boy himself, who had told me he was making my mother homemade chocolate truffles (in two varieties no less) for her Christmas. So the the challenge was well and truly set. Unfortunately my shortbread never did and after spending hours making dough, rolling dough, trying to work out why the dough had stuck to my kitchen table and cutting out perfect Chirstmas trees, they went in the oven looking perfect and Christmasy-y and came out looking, well splodged all over the baking tray in one big unset shorebread mess. So that was the end of that.

Until this weekend that is. Round two of impress Choux Boy's parents as they were coming round to see the new flat (first nerves) and for us to cook them dinner (second nerves). Choux Boy got in there first with his Lamb Cassoulet for mains so I was left with dessert. Rather liking figs, custard and a bit of a tart, and rather scarred for life off hot desserts by being force fed them at school dinners (the memory of eating vile rice pudding grain by grain as my friends all played outside still makes me shudder), chilled Figgy Custard Tart it was. Not too many baking ingredients to boot, I knew I was on to a winner.

Making the dough in the food processor caused a little early concern when the flour, butter, egg yolk, sugar and ground almond kept on breaking up into lots of little lumps, but some dedicated time with the wooden spoon and a drop or two of milk and we were set.

It's a lot more fragile than it looks in a big lump but hat gives it all its biscuity goodness.

The big ol' lump of dough ready to go in the fridge for a couple of hours

I could have used two people to do a bit of a lift and whisk the tart tin underneath with the rolled pasty, but Choux Boy was occupied making a mess with his skimming of the lamb fat, so I made do with some patching. 

The filling - sour cream, egg and honey

I slightly over cooked the edges of the pastry, and a bit of monitoring for a turn once it was all fillinged up and in the oven would've helped (it was slightly more golden, er, or brown on one side than the other) but it was as good as I imagined, a winner with Mackies (more Scottishness) ice cream and enough to serve five with a couple bits left over for the chefs tonight. Bring on more seasonal goodness!

Looking tarty!