Eat Christmas Cookies 3 - Mexican wedding cakes

Susan of Food Blogga is hosting Eat Christmas Cookies Season 3. It's easy to join in - all you have to do is bake Christmas cookies and follow the directions at the event link above to have your entry posted. You can check out the progressive Christmas cookie roundup here.

I have chosen to make a cookie that I have been curious about for a long time - Mexican wedding cakes, also known as Russian tea cakes. They are a nutty, buttery shortbread biscuit rolled in icing sugar, and look just like a snowy landscape.

I used this recipe found in the Epicure section of The Age.

The recipe is confusing in one respect in that it says to roll out the cookie dough to a 40cm piece. I initially thought this meant to roll it flat with a rolling pin - but it actually means to roll the dough into 40cm logs, like this:

You cut slices off the chilled logs to form the cookies:

which you roll in icing sugar while still warm after baking, then again once they have cooled down. Simple!

Head on over to Susan's site to see all the other great Christmas cookies - and we'd love to see yours too!

Christmas muffins

Christmas is getting closer - hooray! My team at work is going to Christmas drinks at the historic Regatta Hotel in Toowong this afternoon. It is a large airy hotel with huge verandahs - perfect for a town which swelters in the heat and humidity every summer. My favourite piece of Regatta Hotel history is that Sigrid Thornton's mum, Merle, and a friend once chained themselves to the bar of the hotel to protest against women not being able to enter the public bar in hotels in Australia as late as the 1960s - this ban seems ludicrous now!

In keeping with the Christmas spirit, I'm going to share another fruit mince recipe that I made for the bake sale - this time in the form of Christmas muffins. The recipe again comes from the Christmas baking supplement to the December 2009 issue of Australian Good Food magazine. Unfortunately, I didn't get to taste these, because I wasn't buying back my own baked goods, but they sure smelled good.

To make these muffins, you will need:

1 1/2 cups fruit mince
125ml vegetable oil
80ml milk
1 lightly beaten egg
200g self-raising flour (I used the wholemeal variety)
75g sugar

Preheat your oven to 200 degrees Celsius, and line 4 x 12 hole mini muffin tins or 1 x 12 hole muffin tin with muffin papers.

Place the mince, oil, milk and beaten egg into a bowl and stir well to combine. Add the sifted flour and sugar, and stir until just combined.

Fill the muffin papers 2/3 full, and bake for 15 minutes (for minis) or 25 minutes (for full size muffins) in the preheated oven or until cooked through. Remove the muffins from the oven and unmould from the tins immediately. (If you don't, the papers tend to steam off.)

Enjoy!

Fruit mince pies

Good morning everyone! It's wacky Wednesday, and today as promised, I will reveal what I did with some of my fruit mince.

We had a bake sale to raise money for the Salvation Army on Monday, so one of the treats that I made was fruit mince pies. These are a traditional British Christmas treat that we have imported. They consist of a shortcrust pastry shell filled with fruit mince, and topped with more shortcrust pastry - often in a fancy shape like a star or a heart.

The dough recipe that I used, from the Australian Good Food Christmas Baking supplement (December 2009), was very short and buttery indeed - which meant that I had a very hard time making the pies in the exceptionally hot weather that we've had. Also, it meant that the pies were quite flaky and crumbly, so they didn't travel well between my house and work. I can't comment on the taste, because I donated all the pies, but if you have a yen to try these, the recipe is as follows:

300g sifted plain flour
1/4 teaspoon sifted baking powder
185g chopped butter
2 egg yolks
2 tablespoons lemon juice
1 cup fruit mince
1 eggwhite

Preheat your oven to 200 degrees Celsius, and grease 2 x 12 hole patty cake tins. (These are smaller than muffin tin holes, so if you don't have patty tins, you can use mini tart moulds.)

Put the sifted flour and baking powder into a bowl, and rub in the butter until it forms crumbs. Mix in the egg yolks and lemon juice to form a dough.

Knead the dough lightly, then divide it into two pieces, press each piece into a disc, and wrap in cling film and refrigerate for at least half an hour.

Remove the dough from the fridge. Roll out half of the pastry to 3mm thickness, then using a 6.5cm round cutter, cut out 24 circles and place into the patty tins or tart moulds.

Put 2 teaspoons of fruit mince into each pie shell. Roll out the remainder of the dough to 5mm thick, and using a star or heart shaped cutter, cut out 24 shapes and use these to top the pies. (I didn't have quite enough dough, so I topped 4 of my pies with leftover gingerbread dough.)

Brush the tops of the pies with the lightly beaten eggwhite, then bake the pies for 20 minutes or until golden. Leave the pies to cool in their tins; this is important because they are quite fragile due to the flaky nature of the pastry. To serve, remove the pies from their tins and dust with icing sugar.

Fruit mince pies are usually enjoyed as an afternoon tea treat with coffee or tea.

Hope your Christmas preparations are coming along nicely!

TWD - Sables

This week's Tuesday with Dorie challenge was Sables, chosen by our host, Bungalow Barbara. For the uninitiated, sables are an ultra-buttery shortbread biscuit, formed by rolling logs of chilled dough in sugar then slicing them into biscuits.


This recipe came together relatively quickly and easily. My cookies do not look as perfect as Dorie's, but then again, I'm a lawyer, not a pastry chef. I rolled the cookies in some clear Wilton decorating sugar that I received from Nikki in Blogging by Mail last year.


The resulting cookies were very buttery and melt in the mouth - not surprising given the amount of butter in them!


I gave this batch of cookies to my friend Ruth, who has managed to break her ankle, and has just had an operation to have her leg joined back together. She gets married in less than a month, and it is very, very hot here right now, so I do feel for her and hope really hard that the same won't happen to me - ever.


These appeared to be a favourite among the TWD group - to see how they went, go to the TWD blogroll. Barbara will post the recipe sometime on Tuesday, her time.

Fruit mince, Margaret Fulton style

Little Jack Horner sat in the corner,

Eating a Christmas pie.

He put in his thumb,

and pulled out a plum,

And said, 'What a good boy am I.'

Traditional nursery rhyme

One of the building blocks for many traditional Christmas goodies is fruit mince. As a child, I hated fruit mince, because of its rather dense, slightly cloying texture, and of course, it usually contains citrus zest - a big ewww ingredient for a child!

However, I am now more "mature" in my tastes - I drink red wine, I eat blue cheese, and I am happy to have the sharpness of citrus zest in my food. Happily, this also means that at Christmas, I can indulge in treats such as fruit mince pies.

I've never made my own fruit mince or fruit mince pies before, so this is a new adventure for me. There are literally hundreds of different recipes for fruit mince, as with every other Christmas treat, so to tone down the noise, I went straight to a recipe by Australia's original doyenne of home cooking, Margaret Fulton. This recipe is in Margaret's Fulton's Christmas, printed last year, and can also be found in the Australian Good Food Christmas Baking supplement with the December issue of Australian Good Food magazine, presumably because Suzanne Gibbs, Margaret's daughter, co-wrote the book and is a staff writer for Australian Good Food. There are no plums in Margaret's recipe, so Jack Horner will have to amuse himself in other ways.

Margaret's recipe makes a whopping nine cups of fruit mince; I scaled it down to two thirds. However, the original recipe in all its glory is as follows:

500g raisins
500g currants
500g sultanas
120g chopped blanched almonds
2 peeled, cored and grated Granny Smith apples
330g packed brown sugar
150g melted butter
185ml brandy or rum
1 teaspoon mixed spice
grated zest and juice of 2 oranges

Process the fruit and almonds together in a food processor until coarsely chopped. You may have to do this in batches, depending on the size and horse-power of your food processor, and depending on whether you make the full recipe.

Put the chopped fruit and nuts into a bowl, add the remaining ingredients, and stir well to combine.

Cover the fruit mince and chill for at least 2 days before using, stirring daily. You'll be surprised at how it sucks up all the liquid and becomes quite dense! The fruit mince will keep for several months stored in an airtight container in the refrigerator (if it lasts that long!).

On the weekend, I will be making some goodies for our work bake sale using the fruit mince. I will post about these soon.

Mini Christmas Puddings

Mrs. Cratchit entered, her face crimson, but smiling proudly, with the pudding resembling a cannon ball, all speckled, very firm, sprinkled with brandy in flames, and decorated with a sprig of holly stuck in the centre. Oh! The marvellous pudding!

Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

My favourite part of Christmas dinner is plum pudding and custard. I love the fabulous, fruity-alcohol smell, the rich smooth flavour, and the sweet custard flowing down the sides (brandy butter or cream optional). No matter how full I am after Christmas dinner, there is always room for Christmas pudding.

I have started my Christmas baking (although my cake was made in June!), and as part of the gift packages that I am giving to friends, I am including an individual boiled Christmas pudding each. I made these on the weekend when it was 35 degrees Celsius, and as I have no air conditioning, it may be considered a little enthusiastic of me to boil these inside for the required 4 hours! However, now they are done, and I am proud of them (although I can't taste them myself).

I used a recipe by Emma Shearer of The Manse Restaurant in Adelaide which appeared in this month's Delicious magazine. It was perfect because it was already designed to make 6 individual puddings.

To make these puddings, you will need:

1/2 cup each of sultanas, currants, raisins and dates (I left out the dates)
1/4 cup dried mixed peel (I left this out)
grated zest of 1 orange
1/4 slivered almonds (I used flaked almonds)
1/2 cup brandy
1/2 cup plain flour
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon mixed spice (I used cloves)
1 1/2 cups fresh breadcrumbs
125g softened butter
1/4 cup brown sugar
2 tablespoons white sugar
2 eggs
100ml milk

Put the fruit, peel, zest and almonds into a bowl with the brandy, stir to combine, and leave to rest for at least 4 hours.

Grease six x 1 cup dariole moulds.

Sift the flour, spices and a pinch of salt together into a medium bowl, stir in the breadcrumbs, and set aside.

Put the brown sugar, white sugar and butter into the bowl of a stand mixer and beat on medium speed until light and creamy. Add the eggs, one at a time, and beat well.

Remove the bowl from the mixer, then fold in the fruit mixture, and finally, fold in the flour and milk.

Divide the batter evenly between the moulds and smooth the tops with the back of a spoon.

Cover each mould with a piece of pleated baking paper and a double layer of pleated foil, and seal tightly with string:



Put a saucer into the base of a large saucepan and stand the moulds on the plate. Pour water into the saucepan until it comes half way up the sides of the moulds. Cover the saucepan and bring the water to the boil, then turn down the heat so that the water comes to a simmering boil, and boil for 4 hours. You may need to top up the water (I checked on it every hour), being careful not to get any water into the moulds. (Because my saucer was not flat, a couple of the puddings unfortunately got a little damp during boiling, but are still OK.)

At the end of the cooking time, remove the moulds carefully from the water, and immediately remove the foil, paper and string:

Immediately unmould each pudding by running a knife around the edge of the pudding to loosen it from the mould, then carefully tipping it upside down onto a plate:

And voila - you have Christmas puddings! (Give the top of the mould a few taps if the pudding stubbornly clings to the mould.)

This is the first of my Christmas baking posts. More will come as I progress! (This will happen soon, as we have a Christmas bake sale for charity at work on Monday.)

TWD - Rosy Poached Pear and Pistachio Tart

This week's Tuesday with Dorie is hosted by Lauren of I'll Eat You, who has chosen the alliterative Rosy Poached Pear and Pistachio Tart for this week's recipe.


As you can see, this tart is an absolute feast for the eyes with the contrasting muted green and red, and would be a fabulous centrepiece at a dinner party. It also tastes obscenely good - the pastry cream contains pistachio nuts, which gives it an interesting flavour and texture as well as giving it a green hue, and the pears poached in red wine are tender and flavourful. The caramelised chopped pistachios on top add texture, and their hard crunchiness contrasts nicely with the softer filling beneath.


However, the drawback of making this tart is that it is major production. There are four separate components to make (five if you make the pouring syrup), and two of those components need several hours to chill. I ended up making this tart over 4 nights, starting with making and freezing the unbaked pie crust on day one, then making the pastry cream on day two, poaching the pears, baking the pie crust and caramelising the pistachios on day three, then finally assembling it and making the syrup on day four. Once again, you can't just decide to make this a couple of hours before guests arrive; you need to plan and set aside the time to make the various components and assemble the finished tart.


OK, enough of the analysis. There is only a photo of the finished product in Dorie's book, so I thought it would be fun to show you the step by step photos.


First, here are the poached pears, drained of the poaching syrup:





Aren't they a gorgeous colour? I poached my pears in a bottle of 1997 Mount Tambourine Black Shiraz that I had hoarded for years, then promptly ruined for drinking when the cork disintegrated into the wine on opening.


And here are the pears sliced in half to demonstrate the contrast between the coloured outer pear, which touched the poaching syrup, and the tender but uncoloured inner pear:





This is the pistachio pastry cream; you could choose to strain out the nuts, but I liked the texture that they added to the pastry cream:




These are my caramelised pistachios, which went slightly sticky even after one night:



And finally, here is the finished product, sliced to show the layers:



I made the optional syrup to go with my tart, figuring that any leftovers would be delicious poured over icecream:






I loved this tart, but because of the time intensive nature of this tart and the expense of the ingredients, it won't be in regular rotation here. However, for a special occasion, it is a real winner as an adult dessert.


To see the recipe, go to Lauren's site; and to see how the other TWD members went with this tart and what they thought, visit the TWD blogroll.