This was the snowscene inside…
And this was the snowscene outside…
Very early this morning we were woken by a ‘thundersnow’ – a thunderstorm and blizzard in one. All very rare for Seattle and particularly for us being so close to the lake. Seattle is now of course completely paralysed with more snow expected at the weekend- will we be able to escape for Christmas?
So on Friday the Minx and I worked on the Christmas Cake.
Here’s one for the parenting police. We made lots of tiny holes in the cake with a skewer and then poured a couple of tablespoons of brandy over the top. The Minx is spreading the brandy over the cake to make sure it got properly impregnated. We’ve done this about three times since the cake was baked.
Next I made a vast quantity of marzipan using Delia’s recipe which was super fiddly as the eggs and sugar are cooked over a gentle heat to make a meringue before the ground almonds are stirred in. It makes really good marzipan though.
Here is the cake all marzipanned and ready to go.
Because Christmas cake isn’t made in the US there are no kitsch Christmas cake decorations for sale either, so the Minx and I decided to make some out of marzipan. Santa is still waiting for his snow white beard made of royal icing. The Husband insists that no Christmas cake is complete without a ‘frozen pond’ made from card and tin foil, so he’s been told to make one of those, before I make some royal icing and assemble the whole thing by the middle of the week.
Despite the fact we have no money, I am SERIOUSLY considering spending $18 dollars on six of these from Petrossian {via I can’t remember which blog, let me know if it was you…}
The next step in the Christmas cake saga is to bind everything together with a simple sugar/butter/eggs/flour mixture. The only unusual thing is to use dark brown muscovado sugar which gives the mixture its dark colour and a unique taste. Interestingly this particular recipe (unlike, say, Delia’s) doesn’t use any of the traditional Christmassy spices such as cinnamon, nutmeg or mixed spice. The ‘Christmassy’ (for Brits anyway) taste and smell comes from the sugar and fruit.
Here’s the cake all ready to go into the oven for 4 hours. The recipe gives complicated instructions about lining the tin with a double thickness of greaseproof paper, wrapping brown paper round the prepared tin and then standing the cake on brown paper while cooking. I have no idea why you have to do this but we followed the instructions anyway.
Here’s the finished unwrapped cake. The next step is to wrap it in greaseproof paper and tin foil and then store it in an airtight tin, before ‘feeding’ it once a week with brandy. The cake will keep like this until the week before Christmas when I’ll take it out and ice it. The next step for me is looking out kitsch decorations online.
I assume that any Americans readers are staring to understand why this only gets made once a year.
Interestingly Christmas round these parts (or, as I should euphemistically say, ‘the holidays’) seems to be rather Germanic in flavour with plenty of gingerbread and not a sign of traditional English Christmas cakes, Christmas puddings or mince pies.
We missed our Christmas cake last year and so this year have decided to make one courtesy of all the glace’ fruit we shipped back from Vancouver recently (how funny that one of the British delicacies we miss most is glace’ fruit).
For those of you who’ve never seen one before, a traditional British Christmas cake is a dark and dense rich fruit cake, made some considerable time before the big day, left to ‘mature’ through the constant application of brandy and then coated with thick layers of almond paste and royal icing. It is a long and laborious process. We started ours yesterday, though in an ideal world you should start making your cakes and puddings about two months before the big day.
My ma-in-law has many splendid qualities, not least of which is her quite ridiculously good Christmas cake. A couple of years ago she gave me the recipe, though this is the first time I’ve actually made it. I was expecting some ancient family recipe carefully handed down through the generations, but instead discovered that it was a Waitrose recipe of very recent vintage. No matter, it’s absolutely delicious and the addition of less traditional ingredients such as dried apricots and glace’ pineapple means it isn’t as dark and dense as traditional cakes which are essentially a solid wall of raisins.
The first step, which the Minx and I completed yesterday, involved chopping and stirring an immense quantity of mixed dried fruits and nuts and then steeping them for 24 hours in orange juice and brandy.
An Atelier LZC tea towel covers up our nasty green countertop.
I promise I’m not being paid to shill for Trophy Cupcakes, but I thought you might like to see some of the essential supplies I bought for tonight’s election party.
They told me they’d had over 1,000 pre-orders for the Obama cupcakes and were baking them at the rate of 50 every half hour and still selling out. They weren’t making any John McCain photo ones (this is Seattle after all), but did have some with sugar elephants on them which did not seem to be selling…
Before we hit the neighbourhood to collect a quite spectacular quantity of candy, we decided to go trick or treating at the Wallingford Center – a small collection of indie shops housed in a beautiful old wooden school building.
The star turn of the Wallingford Center is Trophy Cupcakes, Seattle’s best cupcake shop, which has recently been discovered by Martha Stewart, which had gone to town on Halloween-themed cakes.
I really, really, REALLY ‘heart’ Vancouver. We last visited about thirteen years ago, and can’t quite believe it’s taken us this long to go back. And yes, the weather really was something else.
More piccies here and here. There is something indefinably and wonderfully European about Vancouver which we couldn’t quite put our finger on. Something to do with the width of the streets, the number of pedestrians and the lack of a dirty great freeway carving through the centre of the city. We can also highly recommend the Agro Cafe’ on Granville Island and Raincity Grill for one of the best meals I’ve had in North America.
This is for the many people OK, one person, who has been clamouring for the recipe.
I first encountered this under a friend’s pergola in the West Country (I believe she had pulled the recipe from a magazine) and haven’t stopped eating it since. It is divine.
Slice up a couple of nice, firm, shiny aubergines (eggplants – why are they called eggplants?) lengthwise. The slices should be about 1cm or half an inch thick, not so thin that they get burnt to a crisp and not so fat that they take for ever to cook. Coat the aubergine slices with olive oil (I find the spray stuff you can buy invaluable for this sort of thing) and then grill them. As in all things (sadly) too much oil is better than too little. They are sublime cooked on an outdoor gas grill or barbecue, but work very successfully on a normal indoor grill. Take care not to burn them.
When they are golden brown and soft as butter, take them off the grill and shred them into thin strips in a shallow bowl. If they seem ridiculously oily, pat them with some kitchen towel. Halve about a punnet of cherry tomatoes or other small, sweet tomatoes and stir them in.
In the meantime make a pesto in your food processor from a big bunch of mint, three or four tablespoons of shelled pistachios, a couple of cloves of garlic, some salt and pepper and a stalk of lemongrass if you have it to hand (it’s not necessary but adds a certain je ne sais quoi). Add the juice of half a lemon and enough olive oil to make a pesto-y paste. Then stir the pesto into the tomatoes and aubergines.
The great thing about this dish is that it gets better and better as the flavours mingle. Make it early on the day you’re going to serve it and it will sit quite happily in the fridge. I always make it with two aubergines so that I have plenty left over for lunches etc.
Serve with grilled chicken or lamb, a little rocket salad, a hunk of delicious bread and an enormous glass of rose’.
I can’t believe how long it is since I’ve blogged. I’m not sure what happened, but we’ve just been trying to make the most of the summer here in Seattle and my blogging mojo just seemed to get left on a beach somewhere. And funnily enough this is a busy time of year for mirrormirror what with all the pre-Christmas ordering and PR to work on.
Thank you so much for all your kind and concerned comments and emails – I’m sorry I just abandoned you without a word – and I’m touched (and somewhat astonished) that people have been missing my somewhat random musings.
But anyway, just to get things back on track.
Things I’ve been doing over the last month in no particular order.
– Loafing about on beaches (including another trip to Cannon Beach, still the most photogenic place on earth)
– Travelling on ferries
– Eating Dancing Deer chocolate brownies (perfect for picnics).
– Watching the Olympics (we managed to get a live stream of the BBC’s coverage to make up for the godawful coverage provided by NBC. You have to feel sorry for Americans sometimes.)
– Getting really stuck into Project Runway. And Project Rungay. Leanne is my hot, hot favourite. I just wish I’d found my way to her Etsy store before she got famous.
– Finally watching Season One of the The Tudors and realising it is much better than I thought it would be. And what a lustbunny Charles Brandon is.
– Researching my family tree. And finding out that I come from a long line of Londoners and craftspeople.
– Making aubergine (eggplant) and pistachio salad over and over again. It is SO good.
– Eating pistachio icecream. I like pistachios.
– Getting into a new school routine. The Minx is finally now going to school four days a week, although they are much shorter days, with more commuting. But finally it feels like I have time to focus on stuff.
– Photographing new stuff for the shop.
Things I have NOT been doing.
– Following my eating plan
– Exercising
– Gardening
– House stuff
– Reading and commenting on other blogs (except for Project Rungay and er, PerezHilton). Sorry fellow bloggers.
Normal blog service will now be resumed…
