Christmas Food
 

Today I bought the ingredients I'll need for my christmas cake. I've just put all the dried fruit and cherries and ginger into a bowl and poured brandy over it to soak for a week or so, then I'm going to bake my rich fruitcake which I'll ice.

Soon after that I'll start making things like rum balls, coconut ice, fudge and all things nice.

What special treats do you prepare for Christmas?

You! You're the one! lol. My mum and I sometimes joke when seeing features in magazines about this or that Christmas preparation to be started in Autumn. I've said so many times: "Who does that? I don't know anybody who does that"

*smiles* you do that!

Mum hasn't made a Christmas cake in years, because none of us are big fans. But I do remember when she did, we started very early. In fact it was a little baffling, because I just couldn't equate what we were doing with something that happened months later.

She also used to make her own Christmas pudding, but again - we have it for the sake of form now, and she buys nearly the smallest one available (the actual smallest is for one person).

What she still does though is start buying up Christmas treats to put in her wardrobe. The pickles first - pickled onions, pickled red cabbage, piccalilli. Then tins of chocolates, biscuits for cheese etc. Less so now that we don't all descend on her en masse, but I'll bet she's started laying things away already.

pickles, ick. I would not favor someone who gave me pickled anything for Christmas.

I used to make cookies. But I kept eating them all. I used to cook, too . . . but somehow I still manage to eat.

I'm working on some handcrafts though.

I'm impressed with myself if I go so far as to remember to clip a coupon for pizza delivery these days. :) At one time we helped make & decorate cookies. The silver and gold metallic-looking balls were a special deal around Christmas. My grandmother made candy, stolen, the best sweet potatoes ever.

Not being a spelling Nazi, but you can see how stolen for Stollen gives a different impression in this sentence :)

:) and what's sad is that I did a quick search for the correct spelling (my grandmother had a recipe card, but her spelling reflected her pronunciation more often than not). Had I read the links that came up I would have realized the error :o

And always let me know if I make an error in spelling, grammar, etc. Everyone. I live to learn.

And you can't see me crying on my keyboard anyway, right? :)

You're just crying because your Grandma was a crook :)

Mine never made anything sweet - I'm sure she would have soured it if she tried - but the one good thing I can say about her, she made the best Yorkshire Puddings I have ever had. Probably used slug jizz...

My mother makes Stollen every year and I cannot for the life of me believe that people actually do that to fruit. Candied fruit is weird!

Wait, you MAKE fruitcake? I thought that you just got given one and immediately regifted it.

Mass produced fruitcake is an abomination, but homemade fruitcake is a delicacy. My Mom made them for a couple of years in my youth. It's a lot of work, but the results are yummy.

Each year I make a couple hundred sugar cookies and give them to family, friends, and classmates. I also make a few chocolate sugar cookies, and some chocolate-peppermint brownie bars, and box those up with the sugar cookies for some variety. The holidays are the time of year that I give in to my Martha-Stewart wannabe impulses.

When I was a little girl, I remember my great-grandmother used to make cookies that involved lard, wine, and flavored jams -- not sure what they are called. There used to be four generations of women sitting around the kitchen table, working on assembling the cookies. (Well, I didn't work -- mostly I just got yelled at for eating raw dough.) I got the recipe from my grandmother a few years ago, and I think I might want to try to make those cookies this year now that she and my great-grandmother have both passed away. It'd be time consuming, but a nice way to remember them since this will be my first holiday season since my grandma passed away in February.

I don't think making a rich dark fruitcake is all that difficult. It is expensive though with most recipes calling for somewhere between 6 and 12 eggs along with 2 to 3 lbs (yes I said pounds. That's how old my recipe is.) of brandy or rum soaked fruit. I think that's why it's a special treat for Christmas. There's no way I could justify making more than one per year.

I usually let the fruit soak for a couple of weeks, so I wont actually be making it till the middle of November, then it's got to sit for a couple more weeks before I put the heavy icing on it, so that'll take me to the begining of December, which means I'm right on target with my Christmas preparations. :)

*blinks* Now, see, I just cannot get my head around that level of forward planning. I won't even buy pulses that have to soak over night, because I won't end up using them.