Bringing Christmas

Food is such an important part of what makes christmas special in my family.  Sitting round a table with friends and family enjoying prawn cocktail, turkey, pigs in blankets and invariably overcooked sprouts. My sister used to say that I used to bring Christmas with me when I arrived home on Christmas Eve.  That was because I usually arrive with the Christmas Cake, Christmas Pudding, Mince Pies and (her favourite) Delia's Chocolate Log.  This year was no different, so even though my Uncle was cooking the main event we filled the car with ‘Christmas’ as we drove down to Kent.

This year's cake dispensed with the normal marzipan and royal icing.  The glazed fruit topping was quite effective and healthier than the 'normal' - although Mr Vitty missed his sugar rush

Chocolate log

Stollen for my Mum

Changing Christmas food traditions at christmas can be difficult -so changing the chocolate log recipe from Delia’s to Will Torrent’s from his Chocolate at Home Book was quite a risk.  I chose this recipe because it included a french meringue buttercream which I wanted to try and make.  It involves making a french meringue and then enriching it with butter and flavourings. It was quite straight forward and Mr Vitty said the buttercream tasted like Sara Lee Chocolate Gateaux - which I guess is a compliment ?!

Chocolate Cake Base

Meringue Butter Cream

Probably the strangest thing I've done with a cake - but it was subsequenly easy to roll

Ready for covering

As well as the chocolate log I made the Christmas Cake, Mince Pies and Christmas pudding.  I have made mincemeat in the past but generally find that enhancing the shop bought stuff serves just as well.  I therefore added some hazelnuts, flaked almonds, fresh orange juice and zest and a good slug of brandy to some quite basic mincemeat and made them up into mince pies with a mishmash of puff and shortcrust pastry and crème amande that I found lurking in the freezer.  The crème amande ones went down particularly well with my father-in-law.

The crème amande was left over from what has become a more recent christmas tradition - a gift of stollen for my Mum and work colleagues. The recipe I use is from Richard Bertinet's book Crust. It's less sweet than much of the shop bought stollen, freezes well and tastes really good.

Enriched Bread Dough

Fruit and nuts ready to be incorporated into the dough

Dough, creme amande and marzipan for the filling

Proved and ready for the oven

Baked and ready for eating

Christmas baking over for another year it's now just eating up the left overs and planning the New Year's diet and fitness kick.

Christmas Presents

Tablet and Coconut ice

I normally really like Christmas.  The lights, food, presents (and sometimes even being with family).  Its a time of year where I spend lots of time thinking about others – what do they want for Christmas? Should I give my diabetic Dad sweets he likes even though they’ll eventually kill him? How are we going to get to Kent/Cumbria/Back home as quickly as possible? and of course what are we going to eat on the way.

But this year it all got a bit much.  At the risk of sounding curmudgeonly I found myself wondering why I was shopping for Christmas presents for people who pretty much could have bought things themselves if they wanted them.  So partly to dispel the spirit of Scrooge I decided to put in time as well as money and made some presents for my family.

 

The real inspiration was my Nanny.  She’s 93 and in her younger days she was a dinner lady and great cook. I particularly remember her cakes and puddings – suet based of course, and very traditionally British.  At 93 there are various things she can’t eat but she loves coconut ice and fudge (both of which require condensed milk which kept Mr Vitty happily scraping out the residue of the tin).  They also sparked a fit of Christmas nostalga and became 'leftovers' for those family who 'don't do presents'.

Coconut Ice isn’t really cooking – more just mixing stuff together.  I used the Carnation Coconut Ice Recipe.  I made the traditional pink and white version but also made some chocolate by mixing in about 50g of melted dark chocolate to ¼ of the mixture.  I haven’t had coconut ice for years and it was a real taste of my childhood.  The most difficult thing about it was getting the mixture level in the tin (I failed miserably - do cooks spirit levels exist?)  Although I enjoyed it the texture wasn’t quite right, I think mainly due to the size of the dessicated coconut.  If I make it again I think I’ll either by shorter strands of coconut or blitz it slightly in my little chopping machine to make it a little smaller

 

The fudge was a Scottish Tablet recipe. Like many Scottish versions of sweets it’s fudge with bells on.  The texture of tablet is more crystalline than English fudge – probably due to the large amount of sugar that also makes it tooth achingly sweet.  I used a recipe that’s written in an old diary from 1994 that I scribbled down various recipes from friends, family, magazines etc.  This recipe dates from the time I spent at University in Edinburgh and brought back memories of good friends and battered mars bars.

Tablet Recipe

7oz Condensed Milk

1 Tablespoon Butter

2 lb Sugar

1 Cup Milk

Put all the ingredients in a large saucepan and bring slowly to the boil allowing the sugar to completely dissolve. Boil slowly until the mixture caramelises and reaches the soft ball stage.  Remove the pan from the heat and beat until the mixture begins to crystalise at the edges.  Pour into a buttered tin and allow to cool.

Although I've always made this without additional flavouring I think adding some stem ginger, vanilla or perhaps dried cranberries just before putting it in the tin could be nice.

 

 
 

A matter of taste: Bitter

A good gin and tonic is a careful balance of the sweet gin, sour lime and bitter tonic.  Bitterness is also a vital component of the flavour of beer, sprouts and coffee.  The bitterness of tonic water is due to quinine - a chemical which like many bitter compounds is poisonous (fortunately you'd have to drink alot of G&T before it made you ill!).  Perhaps because it prevented us being poisoned humans can detect very low levels of bitter tastes, we are up to 100 times more sensitive to bitter than to salt, sour, sweet or umami. The association of bitterness with poison may also be why we tend to dislike foods that are too bitter.

Bitter compounds come in a variety of shapes and sizes. These can be grouped into 5 different classes of compounds which have similar chemical properties.   In order to sense this diversity of compounds our taste cells have a variety of different sensors - as many as 80 different types. Everyone has a different combination and number of these sensors which influence the ability of different people to detect bitter tastes.

Some of the bitter compounds have similar shapes to those that we sense as sweet.  This means that compounds like artificial sweeteners don't always taste just 'sweet'.  When I eat or drink something containing the artificial sweetner Aspartame I can taste a bitter component and therefore dislike lots of low-sugar foods. 

Because we don't tend to like bitterness we try and reduce the bitter tastes in our food.  Yet some bitter compounds are good for us.  Some of them have anticancer properties and can help protect against heart disease.  In reducing bitterness we are losing these beneficial chemicals from our diets.  One class of these beneficial bitter compounds are glucosinolates.  These are responsible for the bitterness of brassicas like sprouts, cabbages and cauliflowers.  This has led to the breeding of vegetables with higher levels of glucosinolates.  One of these is Beneforte broccoli - developed at the John Innes Center and Institute of Food Research in Norwich.

 

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Bitter foods are also essential in creating a balanced plate of food, often counterbalancing sweetness or cutting through the fattiness of foods.  Given that we know most of our food isn't poisonous perhaps we need to learn to embrace the bitterness of foods - for our health and our palate.