Christmas Decorations – Just six little pine cones!

A few weeks ago I looked over my little stash of Christmas decorations with a view to de-cluttering what was no longer needed and to ascertain whether I needed to buy anything.  Having decided that I could do with a few more gilded pine cones – one can never really have enough gilded pine cones – I searched Evilbay for a few likely suspects.

I found an interesting type, new to me, former shop decorations, apparently.  The listing said that they were larger than usual, which sounded fine to me – I already have quite a few of the small ones.

I got them super cheap, and the shipping took ages, presumably because the sellers were miffed that I had paid so little for them.  But today they finally arrived.

Oh my stars and little comets!!!!

A huge box arrived, and while I opened it I opined to my colleagues how ridiculous the habit of some vendors is to ship tiny things in huge boxes ….  Imagine my surprise when I found six super-sized cones in the box!  The largest ones are about a foot long!  Just imagine what they would look like on my little Christmas Tree, which stands just two feet high!  It’s going to topple over!

Well, while the cones are unsuitable for any but the tallest Christmas tree, they certainly provided a lot of cheap entertainment and innocent merriment in my office today.  By all accounts their arrival – and my horrified surprise! – were the funniest thing that has happened around the college for a long while.  Already a small queue is forming of people who want to borrow them for some extravaganza or other.

Oh well, maybe it wasn’t such a bad purchase after all!

Christmas Market in Paris

Yesterday I went to the Christmas Market at the Champs Elysees.  Basically it consists of lots of chalet style booths on either side of the street.  Starting at the FDR end, coming from the Tuileries (did you know tuileries means brick factory?  Well, OK, tile making workshops), I wended my way up the road on one side until the chalets stopped.  Then I went to the Virgin Superstore to buy some DVDs, crossed the road, and explored the other side.

Having been hardened by my de-cluttering, I didn’t buy anything at all.  Every time I saw something nice, alarm bells rang in my head and a loud booming voice kept repeating, This is Clutter!  This is Clutter!  Duh!  What a way to shop.  I did manage to buy two Schaumkuesse or whatever they are called in these politically correct times.  Basically egg-white and sugar mixed until stiff, put on a little waffle, and covered with chocolate.  Bise (?) de Noel, I seem to remember, they were called in France.  I looked it up at home, but all I got is Tete de Negre, which is now frowned upon.  Anyway, I ate two, and jolly good they were, too.  I plan to eat more at the London Christmas Market next week!

Since my inner voices did not allow me to buy anything, I looked for coins instead.  What a disappointment!  Not a single one did I find!  You would have thought that in a carefree environment where lots of people spend small amounts of money – ie no credit cards etc – lots of coins would be lost (and then found by me!), but no.  I can only assume that the numerous small children got them first.  Mind you, I can’t really complain about my coin haul yesterday, I found a total of 18 coins, including two US cents and one whole Euro, which is exceedingly rare.

Having made myself sick by eating too many of the above mentioned confectionaries I went to the Virgin store to buy DVDs.  It took me an hour to find four DVDs!  The trouble with the sort of French made films I like is that they usually have no subtitles, except possibly English ones.  Since I need French subtitles to learn French I am pretty much stuck with American movies translated into French.  I got It’s a Wonderful Life and Lady for a Day!  Also two others which made it into my Christmas presents basket.

After that I took many photos of those aspects of the Christmas Market which I found unusual.  I left out the little chalets, they are impossible to photograph since there are too many people in front of them, and anyway most Christmas Markets I go to have them.  Except in Paris they are white, whereas in Germany and England they are wood-coloured.  I prefer the wood-coloured ones, actually, they create a cosier atmosphere.  Not that it was cold this weekend in Paris.  Mid-teens, a bit of rain and wind, but nothing too bothersome.

Anyway, I had quite a good time! 

The animals move!!!!

Only one more month until Christmas! 

Another Busy Weekend in the Life of DB

I am having another productive and enjoyable weekend.  Friday evening A came over for a visit and nice long chat, and after she left I did a bit of light de-cluttering.  Yesterday I went to see P&D to chew the cud, exchange secrets, and plan a few festive occasions.  After that I baked my Poppy seed cake.

I momentarily considered sharing the recipe for this Poppy seed cake, but dismissed it swiftly.  I am not even sure I will make it again myself!  It is not only hideously time consuming and laborious, it also has the nasty after effect of tiny black seeds all over the house and my own person.  If I find one in my belly button tonight I will not be surprised!

I only made it because I had bought three packets (750gr) of poppy seeds six months ago in a fit of lunacy, and they were nearing their sell by date so I thought I had better do something about them.  This is what you do.  You pour boiling water over the poppy seeds, skim off the bits that swim on top after a while, and put the whole mess – and it is a mess – into a sieve (a large one!).  Then you put them back into a large bowl and pour boiling milk over them, and leave them overnight.  Since you are dealing with millions tiny seeds, which get stuck everywhere, the whole kitchen will be littered with them by now.  This includes the cloths and sponges you use trying to remove them, obviously.

The next morning (my Saturday) you put the milk poppy seed mixture into a sieve again and let it drip dry.  Then you skip town, if you are wise, and let someone else deal with the mess.  I went to visit P&D.  But I had to return home eventually.

Now the recipe calls for grinding the seeds.  You can forget doing it in a little hand-grinder, the seeds are so small they slip right through.  Even mixing them with almonds and raisins as the recipe suggests doesn’t work.  A few years ago my indulgent and knowledgeable sister sent me a special poppy seed grinder, but it gave me no joy – after an hour of trying I gave up.  At this stage I am quite prepared to use the darn seeds as they are, unground and unsquished.  But I have already mixed them with the almonds and raisins, which need to be ground.  Dash dash dash!!!!  I run the mixture through my newly acquired little electric grinder.  It takes more than an hour!  Put in three spoonfuls, try to wipe the little seeds from the lid so you can fit the lid, grind for half a minute, extract mixture with almonds and raisins shredded and seeds still intact, curse to high heaven because seeds got into workings of grinder ….. 

It goes on and on.  Anyone with a less strong character would have bundled up the whole mess, bowls electric grinder, seed-mix and all, and buried them at the bottom of the garden.  But I stayed strong!

Having cursed my way through the seed grinding, I prepared a basic crumble dough.  Then I put crumble dough at the bottom and sides of two cake tins, decanted the seed mix to which I had added sugar, cream, and eggs, into the tins, added a layer of crumble on top, and shoved the lot into my new cooker.  An hour later the cakes were done.  I took them out, put them onto racks to cool off, and went to bed.  It was quite late.

This morning I had to go down and clean up whatever seeds I had overlooked the previous night, and cut up the cake and popped it into the freezer.  Then I had a piece for breakfast.  Never again!  In Germany you can buy the poppy seeds already ground in a tin, I might try that if I ever feel like eating poppy seed cake again.  It is furiously delicious.  But it is also very calorific.  And I will probably remember all those gosh darn seeds every time I eat the cake henceforth.

After that I did some laundry and cooked the Sunday roast.  Hanging up laundry is much easier now that I have slashed my garden into submission.  I have three clear lines where I can suspend my clothes from.  Previously most of the lines were overgrown by some ambitious vegetable or other, and I had to fit my clothes in here and there where I could find a gap in the growth.  But I am glad I finally asserted myself and showed the plants who is boss.  And if they try anything funny next year, I still have that hedge-trimmer!

Lunch was roast beef.  One of my favourite foods.  Just make the oven as hot as you dare, pat the meat dry, salt and paper the surface, put on a rack over a pan, bung into the oven with a meat thermometer, and in an hour or two food is ready.  I also had new potatoes and leeks.  For a special treat I fried red onions, added the beef juice, and also some sloe-sirup (jam works as well).  Made a great gravy!

View of Garden from Bathroom (Note the laundry!)

After lunch I did a bit more de-cluttering and invented a way to store my hats efficiently in a non-cluttering fashion, and discovered that the attic light broke.

Now I am sitting in the Nostalgia Studio looking out of the window willing the laundry to dry before it goes dark outside.  I hung it up at 10, but it grows dark so early these days, I am not sure everything will be dry in time.  There is a jay sitting outside the window, the size of a magpie.  Last Spring it robbed several nests in my garden, so I am not very welcoming.  And what does it have in its talons and is pecking at?

View of Garden from Nostalgia Studio (Note the laundry!)

Time for another cup of tea and the newspaper!  The outside world is going to have to take care of itself for a while.

The Bathroom (at the request of a reader)

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.

Having the Chimney Swept

I have not had my chimney swept for a few years, and it was getting high time, so I was very pleased when I found a company who was happy to send two sturdy sweeps out on a Saturday, for the reasonable sum of £35.  They were exactly on time and left no mess at all!

Nowadays chimney sweeps don’t climb onto the roof to lower a long-handled brush down the chimney (not do they send small children down the flue, which is just as well, since the size of mine would require a two year old toddler).  Instead of this top down approach they now use a bottom up method.

 

The two gentlemen taped a cloth over my open fire grate, and inserted a brush as well as a vacuum cleaner hose up the chimney.  The brush cleaned the chimney flue and the vacuum cleaner hovered up all the soot and dirt the brush dislodged.  When they were finished they vacuumed the area all around the fireplace and left it cleaner than they found it.

I observed them with eagle eyes, obviously, ready to pounce at the slightest infraction, but they were very good.  I also went outside, to watch the brush coming out on top of my chimney – doesn’t it look cool?

After that the chimney sweeps let off a smoke bomb in my grate, to test whether the flue was fully functioning.  I went outside again and watched the smoke escape from the top of my chimney – tried to photograph this, but the weather was too overcast for the smoke to show much.

Anyway, my chimney got a clean bill of health, and the upcoming cold season holds no more fears for me.  I have a stack of kindling and a large rubbish bin full of smokeless coal, apples in the fridge and chestnuts in my cupboard – long grim Winter here I come!

The Christmas Season – (Wrapping) Christmas Presents

Perhaps you think this is a wee tad early?  Well, let me tell you, I start wrapping Christmas presents as soon as I buy them, ideally in January.  If you wrap a present as soon as you buy it, there is every chance that you will have forgotten what is inside the package by the time Christmas comes around.  That’s what I do, anyway, with my own presents.

I have a basket of everything necessary for wrapping gifts on top of my wardrobe.  All sorts of papers, ribbons, little decorations, scotch tape, scissors, eraser (for erasing the prices pencilled on the fly leaf of second hand books), etc.  Piled next to it are presents that need wrapping.  Every so often I take down the basket and unwrapped presents and have a little wrapping party on the floor of the Nostalgia Studio.

Tonight was one of those occasions.  I need to get ready several packages for overseas recipients, and there were a few last minute entries for myself as well.  Recently wrapping paper has become rather thin, which is irritating for people like me who like to recycle their wrapping paper.  My advice is, buy the best quality – ie thick! – paper you can lay your hands on for presents to yourself or people from whom you can snatch the paper back after they have unwrapped their gifts.  For people who you suspect just throw their used wrapping paper away use the usual, thin, easily torn, variety of paper.

The same principle holds for ribbons and other decorations, of course.  I have some ribbon I have used half a dozen times, and it still looks lovely.  Well worth paying the extra money for.

Some gifts are tricky to wrap because they are rather bulky and/or awkward.  For these I use simple brown paper, which is both cheap and sturdy.  When decorated with an abundance of fancy ribbon is looks quite nice, really.  Usually I favour red and green and golden paper, because I consider it most Christmassy. 

I am uniquely lucky in being the proud owner of a four poster bed.  That means I have a bed with a roof, and on top of that roof I store my wrapped presents.  That way they are out of the way, but whenever I feel the urge I can climb onto my stepladder and have a peek and gloat in anticipation.

This year most people get perishables from me, as part of my de-cluttering drive.  It doesn’t seem right to de-clutter my house while re-rubbishing everyone else’s homes.  So people will get home made alcohol, candles, cookies, cakes, pralines, and anything else my fertile imagination can concoct.  Obviously I can’t wrap that yet, this being the beginning of the production cycle.  But I have already made a good start.

Yesterday I mixed the dough for Pfefferkuchen, the one that needs to sit in a warm place for three weeks, then gets baked, then needs another two weeks sitting in a tin to get soft.  I am not covering this recipe in my blog, because it is tricky and often even I don’t get it right, after 30 years of making it.  It involves potash and continuous heat, which was easy in the olden days when people had ranges that were stoked 24/7, but in this day and age it is a bit of a struggle.  Nevertheless, I have high hope for this dough, and if it works out it will make its way into several presentation boxes for my favourite friends.

This Saturday I will start the Dresdner Christstollen, the one I made the candied citrus peel for.  Again not an easy recipe, given the significant amounts of butter involved, but I shall endeavour to photograph the proceedings and give the recipe as well, in case anyone feels inspired.  I bought a huge bowl for it today, the one I used in the past had to be given over to the birds after their bath cracked last winter – the recipe results in rather a lot of dough, I am afraid.

Another Christmas surprise – both for me and the potential recipients – is my Elderberryport.  It is my favourite tipple, dreadfully expensive and hard to come by.  So ten years ago I decided to make the stuff myself.  I gathered the berries and followed the recipe to a t, and when I had laid down three gallons read the recipe again and discovered that it needs to sit for ten years before it can be drunk.  Since then I made another gallon for several years, until I ran out of space.  Also I reflected that if the recipe was a dud I would be stuck with about 8 gallons of potentially lethal wine, and decided to cease making any more until I had tasted the results.  Since then the 8 demijohns have been sitting in the Mouserleum gathering dust and all but forgotten.  However, when I recently de-cluttered the Mouserleum I had a look at the tags on the demijohns and discovered to my surprised that the ten years were up and the wine is ready to be decanted and tasted!  As soon as I can lay my hands on a few empty bottles I will assemble a group of stout-hearted friends and open the first sealed demijohn!  If the stuff is any good, a few bottles will be passed on to trusted friends.  If not I will - well, I don’t know what I will do.  After waiting for ten years it had better be good!  I shall report in due course.

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!