The first recipe for Tuesday with Dorie BCM this month is Spiced Honey Cake. This is an unusual cake, flavoured with a syrup infused with peppercorns, orange zest, lavender and ginger rather than your traditional heavy Christmas spices.
When I went to make the cake, I realised that I had tossed out my dried lavender, so I used lavender and strawberry jam (which tastes disgustingly floral!) instead. I also realised that I didn't have fresh ginger, so I just used crushed ginger from a tube. Dried cherries are quite difficult to source here and are very expensive, so I used dried cranberries instead.
The resulting cake is quite pretty and festive, and not at all what I thought it might be like:
I was expecting a heavy, brown, treacly looking cake; this cake is light and golden.
Dorie recommends that the cake sits undisturbed for a day or two to allow the flavours to develop. After about half a day, I can say that you can definitely taste the flavours, especially the lavender. The cake is on the dry side, so I think the suggestion to dunk it is a good one. It might also be good served toasted for breakfast, if you like that sort of thing. (It is not really done here in Australia.)
To see what the other Dorie bakers made this week and what they thought of it, visit the LYL section of the TWD website.
This is the second post in my Christmas box series for this year. What would Christmas be without a Christmas cake? Do not despair if you have not started making one yet and you would like to - in his book, Bake It Great, former Great British Bakeoff contestant Luis Troyano has a terrific two-day Christmas cake, which can be made at the last minute. The recipe is also available on Google books here.
I started making my Christmas cake late this year myself. Normally I make it in about July, but this year, I even missed Stir It Up Sunday, and did not make my cake until well into November. Accordingly, Luis' two-day version, which involves boiling the fruit in alcohol rather than soaking it, was perfect for me.
My cake ended up being a bit brown on the bottom, but luckily, the too brown layer sliced away easily, leaving perfect, tasty fruit cake.
Instead of icing my cake with fondant, which would have been very fiddly given the bumpiness of this cake, I used royal icing to decorate it:
It looks pretty good to me - suitably frosty. I should have made the icing a tad thicker, as it remained a little moist and melted my holly and berry sprinkles, but that's OK. The taste was great, at least from my perspective.
I cut the cake into chunks to give to my friends as part of their Christmas boxes.
Stay tuned for more Christmas box posts.
Last Sunday, I did at Danish Christmas cooking class at Gewurzhaus in Hawksburn Village. Our class was led by Danish chef Marie Sanderson, who has worked for Heston Blumenthal, among others.
Marie started by preparing the duck. Here she is stuffing it with apples, onions and prunes before putting it into the oven to roast:
While we were waiting, Marie's helper made Gluhwein:
This is Marie stirring the cream through the cold rice pudding:
The first course was a warm rice pudding, which is not sweet and contains no sugar - in fact, it can be eaten for breakfast:
Here is the gluhwein, which makes you very cheerful at 11am:
Here, Marie is caramelising kipfler potatoes as a side dish:
This is the duck, roasted and out of the oven:
These are trays of the duck all cut up. Danes traditionally roast their duck the day before, then cut it up and reheat it and take it to the table like this:
This is Marie is putting together the roast dinner for all of us:
And here it is: Roast duck with apple, onion and prune stuffing, port wine gravy, braised cabbage, pickled cucumbers and caramelised potatoes:
Dessert was a cold rice pudding served with cherries in port syrup:
It was a very rich, very satisfying meal. Personally, I'd take some of the elements rather than serving them all together so it is a little less overwhelming, but I enjoyed the meal very much.
This month's Melbourne Cake Club theme is Traditions, for the festive season. Apart from Christmas Cake and Plum Pudding, there are no cake traditions in my family for Christmas. For that reason, I went for what may have been a tradition for my Prussian and German ancestors - Stollen. Stollen is a yeasted cake filled with dried fruits and marzipan, and which is glazed or dusted with icing sugar as the finishing touch.
The recipe for my Stollen came from Eat the Globe - you can find it here. I used raisins, cranberries, glace cherries and dried apricots in my Stollen. Here it is before glazing:
There is a marzipan log encased in the centre of the Stollen, which adds both moisture and flavour.
I decorated my Stollen with water icing, chopped pistachios and cranberries (red and green for Christmas):
The wee Christmas decoration posing with my Stollen came from the Scandanavian Christmas Bazaar that I attended on the weekend.
Here's a peek inside my Stollen - you can clearly see the marzipan in the middle:
Unfortunately I could not attend Cake Club this month because, after I made the Stollen, I ended up in the emergency department of the hospital and had to have a surgical procedure. This ended all of my plans for what was to be a busy week, but I am grateful that they worked out what was wrong with me and it has been fixed.
What are your Christmas food traditions? Have you ever made or tasted Stollen?
I chose this week's Eating with Ellie theme of "When life gives you lemons ...". I certainly feel that life has given me quite a few lemons of late, so the theme is appropriate.
I chose to make Ellie's No-Bake Lemon Bars, from So Easy. You can also find the recipe here under a different moniker.
These are just brilliant - all the luxury if cheesecake with fewer calories. I didn't use the pasteurized egg product - I don't even know what that is. I just used a little more lemon juice to bind it together, which worked fine. I found the base to be a little crumbly, but I notice that in the photo, Ellie's base looks crumbly too. I guess that is how it is meant to be, but if you want a firmer base, use a little more butter.
To see what everyone else made this week, visit the LYL section of the EwE website.
It's Christmas box time again, and preparations have been accelerated this year so that I can be ready as I see people.
The first item out of the box is decorated gingerbread. I used Bake at 350's gingerbread recipe, which is deep, dark and spicy:
To decorate the gingerbread, I cut out corresponding shapes in red rolled fondant that I had stencilled using royal icing with hearts, and I pasted the fondant to the biscuit with a light brush of water.
It is simple but effective to do, but after 36 cookies, I had had enough.
Stay tuned for more Christmas goodies.
This week, Margaret chose the theme of Pizza Night for Eating with Ellie.
I made Ellie's Lamb and Feta Pita Pizzas. These comprise lamb mince, pinenuts, tomatoes and onion atop a wholemeal pita base. They were quite delicious!
To see what the others made this week, visit the LYL section of the EwE website.
