Christmas Cooking 2020

I like to share my Christmas cooking with you and I introduced some new ideas this year.

As always I made a couple of Stollen. The one on the left is for my son who will pop round to collect it before Christmas.

Thinking of yeasted makes, I also made a loaf of breadwhich has been turned into breadcrumbs, now in the freezer, for when I want to make stuffing.

As well as Stollen, I also like Christmas cake, though a proper sized one can be a lot to eat just for me. (My son does not like Christmas cake very much.)

Also, while I love the marzipan on a Christmas cake, I am not so keen on the icing, so this year I decided to make something different.

I never make one of these really dark, almost black, fruit cakes like you sometimes find with wedding cakes. The cake I make is from a recipe for Dundee cake in an old Marguerite Patten (some of you may remember the name) recipe book that a friend bought me before I was married.

So using just one egg I made these. Another thing I am especially fond of is Simnel cake with a marzipan layer in the middle, so that is what I added, though of course you can’t see it.

I then used the rest of he marzipan I had made to make these. Stuck them to the top of the cakes with a little marmalade and popped them under the grill.Again thinking of Simnel cake.

Then to finish off, I added a little glace icing.

I have to admit, I have already eaten one of them (Just to check they were okay of course!)

And although some may think this is too much marzipan, hearing that it was something that could be added to mince pies. I decided to make a few to see how I liked them.

I had already made a jar of mincemeat. (This year I actually used butter instead of suet, as I don’t normally make anything else with suet, so I tend to put the remains of the packet in the fridge and forget about it.)

My other Christmas make was cranberry sauce. I decided to use the 300g of cranberries so it gave me three small jars.

On Friday I decided that I would make some mince pies and having read about mince pies with marzipan, I looked for a few ideas and made these for the freezer. As I was also making my regular oat cakes and small loaf of bread, I made one more, which I cooked, and when I was finished, sat down with a large cup of tea to see what they were like. You may notice the stars could be better but this is because I only have two star cutters. The one I used for the marzipan for the cakes and a large red plastic one. The red one was really too big so I used it and then had to cut down the points.

I really enjoyed my mince pie. So I look forward to eating some more and all my other goodies when Christmas comes around.

I really believe in making the twelve days of Christmas something a bit special!