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.

haha...I have dried all sorts of beans in my cupboard for making yummy chili that you need to cook all day long. ;)

I am a planner though. There's no doubt about that. If you see my posts about my study habits you'll see evidence of it there too. I get stressed when I haven't got things organized and it just makes life easier if you have a timetable, even if it's just a mental one to keep you on track. :)

From what Monster said, fruitcake is different in the US. At least wedding cake is (whereas ours is similar to Christmas cake - the amount of alcohol is wwhat preserves it)

I've never had a problem with fruitcake, in fact as a non-cake person a small piece is probably my favourite. I just can't bear the marzipan and royal icing. It even looks like a cast!

Tell you what though - if we end up doing edibles for secret santa you should send a piece of your cake. Show the merkins how it's done down under :)

Would you post the recipe?

I don't like marzipan either, but I do put what's refered to as plastic icing on it. I think I posted a pic of one of my christmas cakes a couple of years ago somewhere around here. I'll see if I can find it.

Of course, the decorations have to change every year. I'll definitely post pics of this years one once it's finished.

Sure thing dar. I'll do that a bit later on today. :)

Here's a picture of the cake I did two years ago.

Dark Fruit Cake
 

This my mum's old recipe which used to be her mother's. Back in those days everything was still in the old measurements, so I'm going to just give you the recipe as it's written. I'm going to add a bit more liquid to the recipe this year though so it's just a little bit more moist.

Ingredients

2 - 3 lb Mixed fruit (I get all sorts of exotic dried fruit including crystalized ginger)
1 glass of rum or brandy (this year I'm using brandy)
8 oz butter
8 oz brown sugar (I use muscovado)
6 eggs
3 cups all purpose flour
1 tspn bicarb soda
2 tspn parisienne essence (this is just a browning agent)
1 tblspn mixed spice
1 tblspn ground ginger
1 tspn instant coffee powder
1 tspn cocoa

(At this point, the only other instruction my mum's recipe has is: bake about 3.5 to 4 hours. I'll give you the method she taught me though. That might make it easier.)

Method

Place all dried fruit into a large bowl and pour over brandy. (I usually use 2 cups instead of 1, so did my mum) Leave to soak for about 2 weeks, stiring occasionally.

1. In a mixing bowl, add softened butter and sugar. Beat until creamed.

2. In a separate bowl, add all dry ingredients together. In another bowl crack room temperature eggs.

3. Alternately add eggs and dry ingredients to butter and sugar mixture on a low speed until the mixture reaches a smooth consistency, add in parisenne essence and mix thoroughly.

4. Remove bowl from mixing machine and add fruit mixture. Stir gently until all fruit is evenly distributed throughout cake batter.

5. Line a large cake pan with baking paper.

6. Pour cake mixture into pan.

7. Place filled cake pan into large roasting pan half filled with water. (this helps to keep the cake moist as it's cooking)

8. Place cake in a low heat oven. (about 150 celcius)

9. Bake for about 3.5 hours.

10. When cake is cooked, remove from oven and leave in cake pan to cool. (At this stage you can put slits in the top of the cake and pour additional brandy or rum over the cake if you desire. I don't do this, but some recipes suggest you can and it would be fine with this one.)

11. When cake is completely cool, remove it from the pan but leave the baking paper around the cake till you're ready to decorate or serve.

Wow your cake looks gorgeous! I hope your family appreciates all your hard work just for them! :)

They sure do. Actually, my husband comes from a very small family. More or less just him and his mother (who was what you'd call an abusive alcoholic when he was kid. Now she's just an alcoholic) and they never really did much about Christmas.

I remember the first Christmas we had together. I told him about it during the lead up, and he saw all my preparations, and to be honest, he was dreading it. Thought he'd hate all the fuss and noise.

In the end, he said to me the next day that it was the best Christmas he'd ever had.

The funny thing is, the day after last Christmas I was overwraught after having had words with my father about a family issue and said I didn't want to worry about Christmas next (this) year, and he's been the one telling me to get excited about it, and I'll regret it if I don't etc, and that he wants me to do all the usual stuff because it part of what makes me special to him. Apparently he likes the way these things bring our extended family together, and having come from virtually nothing, it means all the more to him.

So in short, yes they do. The kids just love everything about how we celebrate Christmas in our house and I just love seeing my family have fun and enjoy the fruits of my labours. :)

Sounds like you could leave the parisienne essence out. Looks delicious... old-school desserts are usually the best ones.

Yeah...I could leave it out. I did actually leave it out one year and wondered why it wasn't as dark as usual. lol D'oh!

It is a good recipe. The fruit smells delicious, but I think I can attribute that to the good quality brandy Dazza brought back through duty free. :)

Yesterday I went to get some christmas stuff, and found that I could get a whole heap of chocolate bauble ornaments for the tree, so this year, our tree is going to be chocolate coated. :)

Hope they're Cadburys.
We used to fight over the tree chocs, till one of us had one. Ewwwww, cheap choc off the market! Visiting friends' Mums thought we were ideal little Christian children, because we would offer them to guests :D

Some of them are lindt, so they'll be yumm. I think some of the others are generic, but I don't think the kids will care. :)

Actually, I'm exaggerating. That was one Christmas :)
They were grim though.

Yeah...a bit like some of the cheap generic brand easter goodies we get here I suspect.

I guess I could always try one of the ornaments and see how they taste. ;)

I just hope your place is air-conditioned, Ali. Melted chocolate on the carpet would suck.

We don't have carpet. Tiled throughout. :)

If we had carpet the house would smell because of the cats...and be more trouble to keep clean.

One year I made these German cookies that literally took DAYS to make.


they were freaking awful.

I'm not too fond of the German Stollen cakes either. They're always so dry. I prefer just to make gingerbread cookies instead. Much nicer. :)

Cake day today. :)

The cake is in the oven now, along with 8 fruitcake muffins and one V small cake which may or may not end up being a gift.

OK, here's my mini christmas cake (naked) and 7 of the 8 muffins. I had to do a taste test of course, and it was yum yum yummy. :)

Attachment 20343

Ooooh!
Looks lovely. I'd eat it as it is, before being contaminated by marzipan and icing :)

I've come here from the peanut thread, for a bit of reminiscing, because I realised Christmases past were not the same as Christmases present.

I've said before, and no doubt will again - we grew up poor in the 70s. Not dirt poor, not below the poverty line poor, but working class poor, council estate poor. We had a holiday every year, and that was more important than having a car (we hired one to go camping). We shopped on the market, dragging fruit and veg over a mile in a shopping trolley rather than get the bus. We didn't eat out unless Dad's brothers came to see us, and they paid - we didn't have take-aways until I was at least 10 and that was only Mum & Dad as a real treat.

But Christmas... Christmas!
Mum & Dad were part of the church Christmas Hamper group. I didn't realise until years afterwards that some people gave to the fund who didn't actually want a hamper. So although my parents used it as a weekly savings fund (Dad was paid weekly in cash) they effectively got more than they paid in, in goods. For years I remember Christmas really arriving with Father Harris dropping off the hamper. He'd always stay for a cup of tea, but I think he stayed to witness our excitement on opening it. He's still in touch with my parents now.

I can't explain how amazing it was without sounding like I was a starving orphan. We always had enough to eat, but this was pre-packaged food. Food in exciting tins and packets and boxes. Bird's Trifle, fruit cocktail, tinned ham, tinned pineapple, Christmas pudding, shortbread, tinned hotdogs (which no-one ate at the time, but that's another story).

Over Christmas there was another bonanza of food. There was food for the taking, eat what you want. Always nuts out (as previously mentioned) but also sausage rolls - tray after tray of them. Mince pies. sliced turkey - help yourself, even between meals! Leftover roast potatoes - eaten cold in pre-microwave days, but still good. As we grew older there were also leftover fish dishes - prawns, salmon, scampi. All available in the fridge. And Pickles! Pickled onions, red cabbage, piccalilli, beetroot. Cheese! Always big cheese eaters, we excelled ourselves at Christmas - Stilton, Brie, Camenbert, Boursin (well it was the 70s).

The amazing thing - and I can't stress it enough - was that it was all available and you could help yourself. Even bread, which was closely monitored the rest of the year. There were a couple of loaves in the shed (attached to the house, not a spidery thing at the bottom of the garden) where they froze quite effectively before we had a freezer.

It's not the same now of course. You need a certain type of deprivation to glory in gluttony. But it shines in my memory anyway, like a slice of cherry in a fruit cake.

i didn't know sausage rolls were christmas food in the UK. I can't remember ever having them over here for that purpose.

Most of the other stuff you mentioned we've always had though. Even though our Christmases are blazing hot here, we've usually had a roast pork and some kind of bird along with ham and fish dishes. Roast veges, sweets on the table such as coconut ice, fudge, white christmas, rumballs (all of which I'll be making again this year) and of course nuts. For us when we were kids it was the cashews which were such a treat. Mum used to get the mixed bag of salted nuts and us kids would pick out the cashews because they were so expensive and we didn't have them besides at christmas. My family was middle class when I was a kid. Dad was a manager of an electrical workshop, so I guess we had it better than lots of others, but not as good as plenty either. I was lucky though. Our Christmases were always awesome and I guess I have just tried to keep the traditions going for my kids. They seem to like it although they have life much easier than I did (as is generally the case) so a lot of the treat items aren't such treats for them as they were for me.

You 'ad it lucky! We 'ad to live in a pond, work down at t' mill for 23 hours every day...

The more I hear of other people and their families, the more I know my family is whack.

last year for Christmas we had tacos! My 17 year old son said, "when you guys said you were having tacos for Christmas I thought you were kidding!"

This Christmas, hot roast beef sandwiches, hash brown casserole and assorted other side items.

It is weird Bri, although Dazza and I went to have Christmas lunch with his mum a few years ago and we were served beef stroganoff which I thought was weird, then the next year we went for Christmas with her the day before and had take away chinese. lol It was bloody weird to me. Pretty standard for them though apparently.

I think that's why Dazza has realized Christmas isn't just another day anymore.

We now have a Boxing Day tradition of having salmon en croute and a prawn ring. Because my SIL really loves it and they usually come over on Boxing Day. Boxing Day always did have a bit of a fishy theme (I was cajoled into making salmon & cheese flan every year from 15 until I left) but it's a definite tradition now.

Not that I'm complaining, I love it too.
Although it's Boxing Day lunch I like best - jacket potatoes, sliced turkey, baked beans and pickles. There's something so simple and yet so wholesome about it.

I forgot to mention sweets on my Christmas food list. Again, it was the only tim we were allowed to eat them almost totally at will. Even at Easter we were monitored - especially after the year my brother went to bed with a headache and sicked chocolate up all over his duvet.

We always had pick n mix in a big Roses tin. Which was of course cheaper than buying Roses, but Dad always sneaked some in anyway. They came from Woolworth's, which had a great selection in those days, catering mostly for old ladies. They still do apparently, but the real money is in the kid's section, where you're charged an arm and a leg for things your parents bought as penny sweets. Still, I suppose they've gone up in line with house prices in the last 20 years!

We never made our own sweets (too messy, too expensive according to Mum) but we did make shortbread and mince pies.

BTW I don't know if sausage rolls are proper Christmas food outside our house. It's just that they're quick, easy and self contained. I'll take a photo of them this Christmas to prove it :)

SG, I had to google "prawn ring" -- I was imagining some sort of shrimp-fritter-doughnut thing! :lol:

Sundae, did you get the chocolate bar selections ?

6 or so assorted chocolate bars (and an inexplicable packet of rowntrees fruit pastilles) laid out in a plastic tray in the shape of a stocking and sold at an exhorbitant price! yey. For me, they epitomise Christmas sweetie excess...ahhh glorious. You've hit the nail on the head Sundae: all that food, not just there, (by there, I mean everywhere) but there to be eaten at will. Wow.

That's my family. They're desperate to reject anything that smacks of mainstream tradition. We often have Mexican food, and on several years we've had a soup potluck, where everyone brings a different kind of soup. When I hosted last year, I made a damn ham.

We're just mavericky, Clod. Mavericky.

Dana - yes!
We got a selection pack from someone every year.
And bearing in mind that a bar of chocolate was a treat after Mass every Sunday, to have six to be consumed at will was riches beyond compare!

Every now and then I'll buy my sister one for Christmas. I tell her Christmas isn't Christmas if you don't get a selection pack! But really I'm saying, remember what it was like when we shared our lives and you still liked me?

I think my subtext is too subtle.

Hell, I'm such a conformer, I chose not to rock the boat with my mainstream defiance, and still put some tamales and other random things out alongside my traditional fare just to be safe.

I had home made sushi as an horsdeavre two years ago. It was pretty funny watching my step mother get wasabi up her nose...even after she was told to go easy on it. The second time she did it was even funnier. :)

I got a fruitcake once. It was so heavy, I think it could kill a man if dropped on his head. I did not taste it. I made that mistake once.

I used to make cookies. But I kept eating them all. I used to cook, too . . . but somehow I still manage to eat.
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I'm A Celebrity... is sponsored by Iceland (cheap frozen food store, not the country) so after watching no tv for months I'm now watching two hours every night with 16 Iceland ads served up in between. I have found myself craving all their Christmassy buffet food, to the extent that if I had received my payment from EEA today I know I would have ended up going shopping, despite having the staples in the house.

The staples just don't include jalapeno poppers, mini Cornish Pasties, chicken goujons, mini cheesecakes etc etc etc though. Nom nom nom.

I will go and have beans on toast and feel virtuous, even though it's not by choice.

Not just sausage rolls, but SMALL sausage rolls so that you could have lots of them!

SG - they aren't really celebrities and that isn't really food - resist the temptation - RESIST! You must.

If you've got staples, why don't you make yourself some fruit mince pies (the ones without the mince.) All you need is water, butter, flour and sugar for the pastry and then make some fruit mince with mixed fruit. Stick the mixed fruit in a pot...bring it to the boil with some water, sugar and spices like nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves etc. Let it go syrupy and then fill your little prepared pastry shells. Pop the lids on and bake for 10 mins. Voila...your own simple little Christmas treats. ;)

I'm not a mince pie fan to be fair. And Mum has no mincemeat in the cupboards. And left me no fruit either (she did ask, I got veggies instead). As for the rest - they're not staples in my Mum's house :) She has chilli, vanilla essence, curry powder, Italian mixed herbs. I think that's it. She grew up in the 40s.

With all of us gone, she just buys mince pies in batches of six - makes much more sense. Also, I loathe my own shortcrust pastry. Bleugh.

Oh well...it was just a thought. :)

Ok. The weird menu is set: hot, home made roast beef sandwiches, hash brown casserole, mediterranian salad, pasta salad, salt rye wit spinach dip, lasangne, chips, assorted nosh's like veg and dip, chocolates, olives, nuts, cheeses.