An Old-fashioned Treat - Seedcake

My new curtains put me in a nostalgic mood and awakened my desire for a calmer, slower, less complicated, more comforting world than the one we currently inhabit.  So I baked a seedcake.

Seedcake is the sort of cake that used to be served in nurseries.  It is very simple to make – no rare ingredients to track down for this cake – and has a solid, dependable sort of character.  You may remember that it is the cake that Bilbo Baggins had baked for his after supper morsel just before the dwarves descended upon him and changed his life forever!

Seedcake is almost impossible to buy these days, despite being so simple to make and satisfying to eat.  To make it, you need very few ingredients:

250 gr butter (room temperature)

250 gr sugar

500 gr flour

5 eggs

baking powder (mixed in with the flour)

caraway seeds

You whisk the butter until creamy, add the sugar, then the eggs one by one, then the flour spoonful by spoonful, then the seeds.  If the batter is too stiff you may want to add another egg, or a bit of milk.  Then pour batter into a cake form and bake at 175 C for one hour.

 

This is a very basic recipe.  You can make a Madeira cake instead by replacing the seeds with candied citrus fruit, or you can add nuts or raisins or pieces of chocolate instead.

The cake is best if wrapped in aluminium foil and left for a day or two; it becomes more moist that way.  How many seeds you put in depends on how much you like caraway seeds; I adore them, so I put in lots!

I had the first slice or two this afternoon, reading – what else – the first few chapters of The Hobbit.  Seedcake and The Hobbit go very well with William Morris type curtains…..

A Horribly Sticky Kitchen

I have rather a small kitchen, only nine feet long and five feet wide.  After I crammed in a fridgefreezer, cooker, and sink, there was very little space left for a table, storage, etc.  Most of these problems were solved when I bought a 1930s Hygena kitchen cupboard.  It has a pull out table and storage above and below, and aside from a little storage space underneath the sink it is all the cupboard space I have.  But since the skillets are hung above the sink, and the pots have their own dedicated potstand, everything I need fits quite neatly.

 

 

A tie hanger cum sausage storer!

 

 

These last few days I have been making candied orange peel (my favourate sweetmeat, terribly expensive when one tries to buy it in shops, and usually unavailable).  Friday I bought 20 oranges and 4 lemons (just for luck – I am not actually all that fond of candied lemon peel), squeezed out the juice, scooped out the remaining flesh, and boiled up the cut up peel three times in water to reduce the bitterness.  Then I made a thick sirup, dumped the peel in, and boiled it up.  Then I let it cool down.  Then I boiled it up again.  And cool down.  And so on and so forth until today (Sunday afternoon), when I fished out the peels one at a time and deposited them on racks for drying.

As you can see, I went a little overboard!  The kitchen is completely dominated by drying peels, and will be unusable for a few days.  Making candied anything is a sticky business, and the kitchen is a sticky mess. 

 When the peels have dried a bit and no longer drip I shall take them into the dining room, which is warmer, so they dry a bit faster.  When they are finally dry to the touch, I will cut them into smaller pieces and store in a glass jar.  I might even dip some of them in chocolate, if I can be bothered.

All these culinary projects seem great at the time, but once you get started they take ages and take over the house.  I was really truly going to sort out the attic this weekend, but after all the candying I am no longer in the mood.  I feel like mixing myself a stiff one and crashing out in front of the telly, but since I rarely drink alcohol and don’t have a television shall have to make do with a cup of tea and a game of solitaire.  And then it is back to knitting waistcoats and watching French movies!

What do you think of the balloon picture?  It is an oil painting I picked up a few years ago during one of my Charity Shop Shuffles for £2.  I suspect it has no artistic merit whatsoever, but it is so cheery it makes me happy every time I see it.  It hangs in the kitchen, goes well with the yellow walls.  I just took it to the dining room to photograph.

I wonder what excitement Easter Monday will hold?

How to make a DB style Waistcoat

 

 

Waistcoats are incredibly useful, but if you have the sort of shape which make wearing waistcoats for men unsuitable you are in a bit of a fix, because waistcoats made for women, if they exist at all, are decidedly sub-standard.  They are too skimpy, they have no pockets, they don’t open in the front (they are vests rather than waistcoats), and don’t even start me on the materials used and workmanship expended.  For a while I tried to circumvent these disadvantages by surgically altering men’s waistcoats and wear them, but the results were not encouraging, so I finally decided a few years ago to make my own.

 

Anyway.  I am writing this post, because one of my favourite colleagues waylaid me this morning to admire my waistcoat (the orange one) and insisted I tell her where I bought it.  Earlier this week another colleague couldn’t believe it when I told her that I had personally manufactured the long pink one, mainly, I suspect, on account of the beautiful large mother-of-pearl buttons (large and small ones alternating) which adorn this particular garment.  I know I am bragging here, but I have had so many enquiries as to where I bought my waistcoats that I feel the time has come for setting the record straight and providing instructions for making this useful knitwear.

 

I am not a knitting instructor, so assume you know how to do basic knitting and crocheting (say a scarf or pot holder).  These waistcoats look fancy, but are dead easy if you think things out first and plan ahead.  I am size 10/12, and will use that size as an example.  But please do not just follow it, even if this is your size.  Every yarn is different, and everyone knits with a different tension, so what is perfect for me may not work for you.  I am going to tell you how to create your own perfect pattern, rather than just provide my own.

 

First decide what material you want your waistcoat to be.  I have produced about a dozen waistcoats these last few years, mainly from wool but also from cashmere, baby alpaca, and cotton.  I can’t wholeheartedly recommend baby alpaca, the one I used sheds and pills like mad, but it certainly is heavenly soft.  Maybe the pilling will stop after a few washings.  My point is, the instructions below will work with any yarn.

 

How much yarn do you need?  This depends on the size of garment you want to produce, the thickness of the yarn, and the tension of your knitting.  If you knit very tightly and leave no little holes in your knitting you will need more than if you knit loosely.  I tend to make waistcoats which are reasonably body-hugging and go half way over my bum.  I use wool size 4 and knit with regular tension (so I am told).  I need between 400 and 500 grams of wool.

 

I recommend before you do anything else, find a knitted garment that fits you exactly as you would like the waistcoat to fit you.  This could be a cardigan, pullover, waistcoat, or even a dress, and will serve as a model.  Measure this garment to see how much square-footage of knitting you need to produce.  Start at the back.  For myself, I measure 20 inches wide and 24 inches high.  20x24=480.  Since you also have a front, multiply by 2, giving you almost 1,000 square inches.  Of course the front has the V-neck so needs a bit less, but you will need some yarn to knit the pockets.

 

Now go to a haberdashery and buy one ball of a yarn they have a lot of.  The idea is, you take the ball home, knit a tester to determine how much you need, and then go back to the shop to buy more of your chosen yarn.  If you are a knitter you will already know that it is crucial to make sure that all your yarn balls are from the same colouring lot – if the lot number is different the shade of the colour will be different, and believe me it shows!  That’s why it is important to buy as much wool as you need, if you come back two weeks later the store may not have the same colour lot any more.

 

Now you cast on 20 stitches and knit about 20 straight rows.  When I do this I get a piece the size of 3.5 x 2.5 =8.75 inches.  When you measured your garment you discovered that you need to produce 1000 square inches, and 1000 : 8.75 gives you 115, ie you need 115 times the amount of yarn you have just used to knit the 3.5 x 2.5 to knit your waistcoat.  Not you can either unravel the piece and measure the length of yarn it took to knit it and multiply this by 115.  Or you can go by weight, ie weigh the knitted piece and multiply by 115.  Let’s say you get 450 grams, which means you need 9 balls of yarn (they usually are sold in 50gr units).  If you are paranoid, like me, you buy one or two extra balls, just to be on the safe side.  Incidentally, you may want to use the tester knitting as the basis for one of the pockets!

 

Now you have the yarn and needles and are ready to start.  You cast on as many stitches as you decided you need – for me it is 100.  Cast them on, using needles one size smaller than your yarn size (needle 3 for yearn 4), to get a tighter hem.  For the first inch or two, do one knit one purl, or even two knit two purl.  Then switch to basic straight knitting and to the regular knitting needles (needle size 4 for yarn size 4).  Now knit until you get to the armpit.

 

In my experience I use exactly one quarter of the yarn for the back up to the armpit, so I always knit that part first.  That way I know whether I have enough yard to finish the waistcoat.  If I bought a bit too little, I can make the waistcoat a bit shorter.

 

Now you have to figure out how to do the hole for the arms.  I did it by using my model garment.  For me, if I cast off 4 stitches in the first row, then 3 stitches, then 2, and then 6 times 1, I get an indentation just right for me.  I had to experiment to find this out, by laying my knitted indentation onto the model garment and see whether I needed to cast off more or fewer stitches in each row.  Since this is the back, obviously you cast off on each side.  Once I finished casting off for the armholes I am left with 70 stitches on my needle.

 

Now you continue to knit straight rows until the back is about as high as is comfortable.  Remember, you will add a crocheted rim to the armholes, and this will reduce them somewhat, so do make them nice and large.  Also, these waistcoats are made to wear over other garments, so it is nice to have enough space in the armholes.  Using my example, I aim for 10 to 12 inches from the start of the armhole to the top of the waistcoat.

 

When you are just a few rows from the top, start shaping it.  You need to do two things; shape the shoulders, and shape the back.  You cast off for the shoulders and the back in the same rows!  I cast off the stitches for the back and those for the shoulders in three sections.  For each shoulder I have 21 stitches, so I cast them off 3x7, starting at the side where the armholes are.  This leaves me 28 stitches for the back, which I cast of 10 on each side and 8 in the middle.  Please note that this results in a very high neck.  If you prefer a lower neckline, you can start casting off stitches for the back before you cast off the stitches for the shoulder.

 

Now you are ready to do the two front pieces.  Since they will get a crocheted border they can be a bit narrower then the back, so I cast on 46, rather than 50, stitches for each front section.  For the hem and the arm-indentations do to the front what you did to the back, remembering that you are dealing with two different sides – ie in one you cast off while on the knit side, in the other while on the purl side.  When you start to cast off for the armholes, also cast off one stitch every other row on the side opposite to the arm – this will create the V-neck line.  If you cast off in every line, you will run out of stitches and get an opening which will be a V at the bottom and a tunnel at the top.  You will continue to cast off for the V-neck after you finished casting off for the armhole!  When you have as many stitches left on the needle as you used for each shoulder – for me 21 – you stop casting off for the V-neckline and just knit straight rows until the front peace is as long as the back piece, and then you cast off the shoulder-stitches to mirror what you did for the back.

 

Now you can sew the three pieces together, at the shoulders and on the two sides, resulting in a garment that looks like a waistcoat, but not quite finished.  Now it is time to switch from knitting to crocheting!

 

If you knit the edge of a waistcoat it will be a bit floppy, and the waistcoat will look untidy.  And knitting buttonholes is awkward.  So I decided to crochet the armpits and the edge of the waistcoat, and this is the touch that makes my waistcoats special and original.  I use the basic crochet stitch used for making potholders and such like.

 

When crocheting onto knitting you need to keep in mind that knitting has a different tension/structure than crocheting.  It is easy to end up with a crocheted border which will be either too big or too small.  The first line you crochet is the most important, do take your time and if necessary unravel and start again.  Frequently lay down the garment flat and make sure the crocheting is right for the knitting.  If the crocheting pulls the knitting out of shape you need to reduce the number of stitches you have made into the knitting.  If the knitting appears to be in any way wrinkled vis-à-vis the crocheting you need to take up additional stitches.  It is difficult to describe this exactly, but once you get started you will know what I mean.  Don’t be disheartened – I had to unravel my borders quite a few times before I finally got the hang of it.

First do the armholes.  I start at the bottom and work my way around about 5 or 6 times.  When ever I am at the bottom part, the 6 stitches before and after the exact bottom stitch, I tighten my crocheting.  Instead of pulling through twice, I just pull though once, which results in a closer and narrower border.  This makes the garment more comfortable to wear.  Also, do not crochet into the hole at the very bottom – ie miss out one stitch.  This will reduce the border a little each time, and helps to shape it.

 

For the central border, I start at one bottom end, crochet my way up to the neck, around the neck, and down the other side.  One both sides of the neck, where the seams of the back and front section are, miss out one crochet stitch, as per the armholes – this shapes the border and makes the waistcoat fit more snugly.  At the bottom of the other side, turn around and crochet your way back up the garment again.  You will notice that the armholes, where you crochet in a circle, have a nice knobbly pattern on the outside and a smooth pattern on the inside (if you did it correctly!).  But the central border will look different, although you are using the same basic crochet stitch, because you are working not in a circle, but are going backwards and forwards.

 

After you have done about five rows, make some buttonholes.  Their size depends on the size of the buttons you want to use.  I tend to use about one inch mother-of-pearl buttons which I buy second hand at antiques markets.  To accommodate them, I leave 5 stitch holes.  Starting at the bottom of the border, I crochet maybe half an inch to an inch.  Then I crochet 5 loops – I don’t crochet into the border, I just create a 5 loop section.  Then I count 5 holes in the border into which I would usually plunge my crochet hook.  Into the 6^th hole I crochet again.  Then I crochet another 10 stitches/holes, and repeat the looping, until I arrive at the start of my V-neck.  Now I continue my crocheting up the neck and around it and down the other side.  I turn and crochet up again and go around the neck and now I encounter the first 5 loop section.  I crochet into these loops!  This makes beautiful buttonholes.  Since the buttonholes should be in the middle of the border, I knit another five rows on top of them and then I stop.

 

Now all that remains is to make two pockets and sew them onto the waistcoat, and to add the buttons.  I tend to knit the pockets and crochet around them, or sometimes just crochet on top of them – just suit yourself.  Once you have finished your waistcoat, wash it in hot water, wring out, roll into a towel, leave for ten minutes, roll into a second towel, leave for ten minutes, and hang up on a clothes hanger to dry.  The process of washing and drying on a hanger will go a long way towards evening out any irregularities in your knitting.  Dry it with the buttons closed, and while the garment is drying yoy may also need to pull the border a little, in case it is smaller than the knitted part of the garment. 

 

This is rather a lot of writing for just a simple waistcoat, but it took me quite a while to figure all this out and personally I find the instructions one can buy not terribly helpful.  They tend not to mention an awful lot of things!

 

Once you have made one of these waistcoats you will find that they are really very easy to make, and look much fancier than they really are.  They are perfect with scarves, of course, and very versatile.  In winter wear them with cardigans, in spring/autumn by themselves, in summer unbuttoned. 

 

I found the cotton one I made for La Bourboule especially handy while taking treatments.  You are sitting on a stool, water dripping into your sinuses, and need a handkerchief – your waistcoat pockets are full of them!  You need to store your eyeglasses, but not too far away – your waistcoat pockets are deep and user friendly!  You are a little chilly walking to the Grand Thermes at 8 am – your waistcoat keeps you warm.  And combined with a shirt and scarf it looks very dressy, much better than the sweatshirts and such like people usually wear on these occasions.  When you finish your ablutions and the weather has warmed up, you open your waistcoat and let it hang loose – you are cool yet still look good.  And because it is cotton it doesn’t mind getting wet! 

I am currently knitting a purple one for La Bourboule, the solitary beige one I took last time got a bit boring in the three weeks I have there!

 

 

 

Christmas Magic: Bees Wax Candles and Sugar Plums

The Christmas preparations continue at a good clip.  On the weekend I dipped candles and made two versions of sugar plums.

Making Bees Wax Candles 

I am passionately fond of candles, especially real bees wax candles.  These are quite expensive, which is only right, considering the amount of work involved by millions of subjugated insects.  I assume vegetarians don’t approve of them, given the exploitative nature of their origin, but I am lamentably unscrupulous when it comes to plundering Nature’s renewable resources.

But since my unscruples aren’t matched by my resources, I buy the wax in large amounts and dip my own candles.  Like most of the ancient crafts it is not difficult, just time consuming.  I spent six hour making 24 candles!  OK, so I had several breaks, but it is still a long time.  I consider it time well spent, nevertheless.  I spend so much time working with my head and creating ephemeralia that I always welcome an opportunity to do something which results in actual material things.  That’s why cooking, baking, gardening, and knitting make up such a large part of my life.

Anyway.  If you want to follow in my footsteps, this is what you do.  Get a tall slim cooking pot – I have one intended to boil asparagus.  I can boil the asparagus just as easily laying down as standing up, so have requisitioned it for my candle-making.  Obviously the bigger the pot you are using for your dipping the more wax you need!  I make a lot of candles, so having a pot which holds two litres of wax is no problem.  When I am finished I just let the wax dry in the pot and store it away until the next time.  Then I melt it on the stove, add more wax to top it up, and start dipping again. 

Put pot on stove on a very low flame and fill with wax.  While the wax melts do something else, because it will take ages – one hour in my case.  Make sure the pot is as full as you want your candles to be long, and top it up as the level sinks.  Get a long thick pole or stick, and lay the two ends so that you can hang the candles over the pole – I rest one end on the stove and the other on a work surface.  Make sure the stick is a thick one - if it is too thin the ends of your candles may touch and stick together!

Cut the wick you intend to coat with wax into strips a bit more than twice as long as the candles you want – you will create one candle on each end.  Cut a goodish many – you don’t want to go to all this trouble for half a dozen candles.

When the wax in your pot is completely melted, take hold of a wick string and, holding it in the middle, dip the two ends into the wax, and pull it out quickly.  Hang over the pole to dry.  Do it to the next piece of wick, etc etc.  When you finished the last wick, go back to the first and repeat the dipping.  Every time you dip, a layer of wax is added to the wick, and slowly building up the candle.  You will be surprised how often you have to do this before you have a decent sized candle!

Take care not to leave the candle in the melted wax longer that a split second, because otherwise the wax you put onto the wick in previous dippings will melt off again and your candle will shrink!  It is easy to leave just the bottom part of the candle too long in the melted wax and end up with candles which are thicker in the middle than on the bottom, so take care!

When the candles are as thick around as you want them leave them hanging overnight on the pole so they can dry completely, and then they are ready for use. 

Making Sugar Plums

Who hasn’t read the famous poem by Henry Livingston, The Night Before Christmas,

'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;
The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,
In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there;

The children were nestled all snug in their beds,
While visions of sugar-plums danced in their heads;
And mamma in her 'kerchief, and I in my cap,
Had just settled down for a long winter's nap,       etc etc?

And who never wondered what these Sugar Plums were which the children were dreaming of?  Why weren’t they dreaming about marzipan, or sugared almonds, or chocolate?  Why this obsession with plums?

Our ancestors were confusing about plums.  There are any number of compound plum-words which refer to things which have nothing whatever to do with the purple fruit.  Plum-pudding for example contains no plums, nor does plum cake, and don’t even start me on a ‘plumy’ accent!  The word plum was used in many different ways over the years.  It often denoted raisins and other dried fruit, and was employed as a catch all term for ‘sugar & spice and all things nice’ – which explains why children were dreaming of them.  They weren’t dreaming of plums at all, but of all sorts of nice sweet fruity delicious things that could be found in a Christmas stocking.

That said, Sugar Plums did exist in their own right!  Plums were dipped in sugar and dried in a slow oven.  Periodically they were taken out and re-dipped in sugar, until they were ‘sugar-dried’.  I make them sometimes, and it takes a long time.  The are quite delicious.  You can also make Sugar Plums by candying them, like other fruit (orange slices, pineapple, green walnuts, etc).  Again, it takes a long time.

 

Lastly, there are Sugar Plums which are a sort of fruit & nut truffle, and these are the very best of all – I would certainly dream of them if I was a child!  They are a delicious concoction of all things that make Christmas special.  If you are looking for a recipe I must disappoint you, because I just throw them together, and each time the result is different.  But this is what you can do to create your own Sugar Plums.

Assemble as many different dried fruit as you can lay your hands on, like apricots and wineberries and dates and figs, and mix them with nuts like hazelnuts and walnuts and almonds and pecans.  I also throw in some candied citrus fruit peel, because I have lots of it.  Aim for a half nuts half fruit mixture.  Make sure there are no stones or pits in the fruits.  Run the lot through a food processor/grinder.  The result should be a sticky mess with small pieces.  Sprinkle nice Christmassy spices, like cinnamon and cloves and cardamom, onto the mess.  Melt some butter and pour it over the mess – this will help to bind it together.  If you like dark chocolate, melt some and pour it over the mess.  Toss in some cocoa powder as well.  Got runny honey?  Decant over the mixture.  Feeling alcoholic?  Throw in some liqueur or rum (Amaretto is very good, as is Cointreau).  Now mix all this really really well, and put it in a cold place.

A few hours later, roll mixture into small balls and coat in something to stop them from being too sticky – sugar, crushed nuts, or cocoa powder (mixed with some sugar perhaps).  Put onto cookie tray and in a cool place.  Once thoroughly cooled place in little paper cups and tins.  That’s it.  Very easy, if a bit messy.  Don’t put cheap ingredients into sugar plums, you will taste the difference.  I don’t really expect anyone to dip their own candles or make their own candied peel and Stollen, but do make some sugar plums this year.  They are everything Christmas is and should be, and make great gifts, too!

The Christmas Season – Dresdner Christstollen

This is a famous recipe, and tricky to make, on account of the large amounts of butter, raisins, almonds, etc – yeast prefers to work with plain flour cakes.  Nevertheless it is a must for many German homes at Christmas time.  Lesser individuals buy it in shops, but yours truly prepares her own most years.  Partly because mine is better than the shop bought variety, partly because it makes a very good Christmas present!

There are any number of recipes, I am using an old one from before the war (the Boer War, if you must know!), suitably adapted for my situation and with a few personal improvements thrown in.  I have taken lots of photos, so you can see exactly what I am talking about.

My cookbook doesn’t give a proper list of ingredients at the beginning, but I give a list here for your convenience.

2 kg Flour

200 gr Beer-yeast (I have never been able to track this down, so use regular fresh or freeze dried yeast, a bit more than I would use for making regular cakes or bread)

1 l Milk

400 gr Sugar

Zest/Peel of two Lemons (organic, ideally)
1 Teaspoon Cardamon
¼ Teaspoon Macis
¼ Teaspoon Salt
400 gr Almonds & some bitter almond extract
500 gr Candied Citrus Peel
1 kg Raisins
300 gr Currants
900 gr Butter (plus some for basting later)
Liqueur?

Take the butter out of the fridge!

Get hold of the largest bowl in the house – it will need to accommodate an awful lot of ingredients!  Put in the flour, put bowl with flour in a warm place.

Mix yeast with sugar and warm milk.  Once the sugar is dissolved and the yeast starts to bubble, make a dale in the flour in your bowl and pour the milk/sugar/yeast mixture into it.  Mix some of the flour into the milk, just enough to make a thin slush – at this stage you don’t want a proper dough, just a sloshy pre-dough.  Put bowl in a warm place and cover with a clean kitchen towel.  Let the yeast grow and expand – this will probably take an hour, but it depends on your yeast, the temperature of your kitchen, how warm the milk was, etc etc.  Play it by ear.

While the yeast is multiplying, you prepare the other ingredients.  Wet the raisins and currants with the liqueur of your choice, maybe half a cup (optional).  If you use too much liquid you may need to add more flour later on.

 

The recipe calls for the almonds to be stripped naked, I never do this, being a prude.  The skins are healthy roughage, and I am leaving them on.  I grind them together with the candied citrus peel, because if you have proper citrus peel it will be sticky and grinding it with the almonds makes the job less messy.  In the past I always used a mechanical grinder, and these work very well.  Unfortunately I have some arthritis in my hands, and am trying to cut down on repetitive jobs that strain my wrists, so this year I bought a little electric grinder – a mini food processor, as they are called.  It worked very well, the consistency of the almonds and candied peel is exactly the same as what the hand grinder produced.  Since the electric grinder is quite small I had to grind several batches, but that is the same with the hand grinder so no problem. 

 Left bowl ground almonds and candied peel, right bowl unground almonds and peel

 

You may be tempted to just buy already ground almonds, or even add mincemeat to your dough.  I advise against this.  The consistency of your dough would be different, which could result in the cake over or under baking.  Also the cake would be less moist – almonds which have been ground months ago are bound to be less fresh than those you grind minutes before you bake the cake.  If you think this recipe is too much work and you want to save yourself some trouble, I would advise to use a different recipe.  If you ‘simplify’ this one you will end up with a cake which is no better than a shop bought one, in my opinion.

The butter needs to be soft, but not melted.  Since you took it out of the fridge several hours ago, it will be almost right by now.  Cut it into many small pieces into a bowl and stir it vigorously with a spoon.  If you can’t stir it the butter needs to warm up a bit more.

 

Wash and scrub your lemons and scrape the zest off with a grater.  Only use the zest (yellow bit), none of the white bit should be grated.

Now all your ingredients are ready, and it is time to check on the pre-dough in the large bowl.  If it has expanded and is bubbling nicely, you can proceed to add the spices and salt and lemon zest and knead it really really well.

 

 

The word ‘knead’ is probably derived from ‘kneel’, because that is the best way to knead a dough like this one properly.  Put the bowl on the floor, kneel in front of it, and knead it until you have a nice round ball, neither sticking to your hands nor bone dry.  It should have the consistency of bread dough.  The kneading should take about half an hour – put on the radio so you don’t get bored and give up before the dough is properly done.

 

 

Now cover the dough in your bowl again with the towel and let it rise again for a while, until you are satisfied that it has risen enough to carry the weight of all those other ingredients.  Keep in mind that the parts of the dough that contain the yeast and will cause the cake to rise properly will be mixed with lots of butter and raisins and almonds and peel, none of which will make the cake rise.  So if you don’t let the starter dough rise long enough to gather its strength, as it were, it will have no chance to rise once all the other ingredients have been added.  Think of the other ingredients as burdens which have to be carried – lifted up – by the yeast dough.  If the yeast dough has not fermented properly it could perhaps give a good risen cake by itself, but with all the other ingredients added it will simply be overwhelmed and you will get a flat cake.  That is the reason why this is a difficult cake to make – there are so many ingredients that can’t contribute to the rising of the cake that it may remain flat.

 

Pre-heat oven to 200C (gas mark 6).

 

OK, now you have a good yeast dough, well leavened throughout and ready to carry all those other ingredients through the baking process.  If you have a seriously large bowl (like a washing up bowl), you can simply add all the ingredients not yet used into the bowl.  If you only have a bowl which is too small for holding all the ingredients at once, you may want to divide the dough into several pieces and knead it in batches.  Being the proud owner of a huge monster bowl I can do the mixing and kneading in one go.  I just throw all the remaining ingredients into my bowl, on top of my yeast dough.  Then I check my ingredients list, making sure I have not left anything off.  Then I place the bowl on the floor again, kneel down in front of it in a respectful manner, and knead and knead and knead.  It will take another half hour or so.  When you are satisfied with the result, cover again with the towel and put into a warm place for another half hour or so.  Once it has risen sufficiently, knead through one last time and divide into pieces for baking, either on a cookie sheet or in tins.

 

 

 

Stollen type cake has a typical shape, which is achieved as follows.  Form a 5 to 10 cm thick rectangle from your dough and lay it onto a cookie-sheet so that 1/3^rd is laid on top of the remaining 2/3rds.  It will look like this:  __---     Sort of like a slope, a rolling hill.  Anyway, whenever I try to do this the dough disobeys and I never get the typical stolen-shape but just a formless slab.  So I have given up and am using normal baking tins instead.  Since I give most of my stollen away this works quite well – I can give away individual little cakes rather than slabs of a cut up large cake. 

The amount of dough this recipe yields was enough to fill the following tins:

2 small round cake tins

2 medium round cake tins

2 medium rectangular cake tins

2 large rectangular cake tins.

 

I baked them in three batches.  Use second grate from the bottom.  It is inadvisable to put cake tins on more than one grate, somehow they never bake evenly.  Even having more than one cake tin on the same grate affects how they bake.  My first batch included one large and two small tins.  After one hour one of the small tins was done, but the other needed another 15 minutes.  The bigger tin took an extra 15 minutes as well.  Put some aluminium foil over the tins for the first 30 minutes or so of baking, to stop them from going brown at the top too quickly.  The baking time is supposed to be 1 hour, but for me it is always at least 15 minutes longer.  Keep checking by sticking a wooden toothpick into the cake – if it comes out with no dough clinging to it the cake is done.

While the first batch of tins bakes the next two batches sit around waiting and rising a little more.  I see no harm in this.

When your cakes are done, let them cool a little, then take them out of their tins and on to a rack.  Anoint them with melted butter and add icing sugar on top.  If you make the cookie sheet/rolling hill shape of stollen you can cover the whole thing in melted butter and sugar, but if you use tins you can only do the top, so your cakes will look less attractive (if you think a cake that looks like a ski-slope is attractive, that is).  So you could try to cover your cake with a glaze or even a marzipan covering.  Not authentic, but can be quite nice.

After the cakes have cooled down, wrap in heavy duty aluminium foil and store in a cool dark dry place for at least a week before eating.  I have kept some in the vegetable compartment of the fridge until Easter – this cake is a keeper, unless it gets eaten too soon, of course.

Secrets of success?  Use top grade ingredients, and be patient when it comes to kneading and letting it rise.  The ingredients for this cake don’t come cheap, so you want to do everything you can to make sure it is a success.

 

The whole process took me about seven hours, by the way, so make this cake on the weekend when you can stay in all day.

The Christmas Season – Making Candied Citrus Peel

There are two kinds of candied fruit.  The fancy kind that takes a long time and is eaten as a sweetmeat, and the basic kind that is quite fast to make and is used for baking and cooking.  This post is about making the basic kind.

It is very important that one obtains fruit that have not been subjected to herbicides, pesticides, or waxing, since the peel itself will be eaten.  Organic is ideal.  I ran all over Oxford looking for them, and after three days finally found them at Waitrose in Headington.  The more different types of citrus fruit one can get the better, grapefruit for example are really nice.  I only found oranges and lemons, which I will have to make do with until I find a greater variety of fruit.

I bought six lemons and six oranges.

 

First, wash the fruit in hot water and scrub a bit with a brush.  If you have not been able to buy untreated fruit, scrub especially hard!  Now dry fruit on a clean towel, cut in half and remove the juice.  You can drink it or use it to cook the fruit in (later! not at first!)  Then cut each half one or two more times.  You need to remove the inside of the fruit, until only the peel (including the white bit) remains, and this is easier when the pieces are not too large.

After having removed the inside, cut the peel into pieces.  I usually cut pieces of about an inch long and a quarter inch wide (3cm by ½ cm), but suit yourself.  Weigh the cut peel (I had a bit over 500gr).  You need the same weight in sugar (castor sugar is best, I ran out and added some brown sugar).

Put peel into pot, cover with water.  Bring to a boil.  Throw water away.  Cover peel with fresh water, bring to a boil, boil for 15 minutes, discard water.  Now you can use the juice, if you want to!  Heat it up with some water, and slowly add the sugar until it is all dissolved.  Bring to a boil.  Add the peel, bring to a boil.  Turn off heat, leave peel to soak in the sugary liquid overnight.  The next evening, bring to a boil and simmer on a low flame for two or three hours until the liquid is pretty much gone.
 

 

That’s the basic recipe.  If you want to add a special touch, pour some orange liqueur over the candied peels when they have cooled a little, stir well and leave overnight to cool down.  The next day fill into glasses.  This peel will be quite moist, a bit like orange marmalade, depending how long you boil it. 

I mainly use this peel for my Christmas baking, like Dresdner Christstollen.  I crank it through my old hand-grinder, usually well mixed with almonds, so that the grinder has a better grip – also it makes the proceedings a bit less sticky.  However, it is also very nice in sauces and – if you still make such things – steamed puddings.

Happy candying!