Crazy Christmas Cooking 2013

I have to say I really enjoy Christmas holidays. For one thing, having time off is good for recovering from the day to day stresses of a full time job, and it also offers a chance to catch up with family. But a big part of Christmas for me is the cooking! 

Food has been a big part of Christmas ever since I was a kid and with my three sisters and my mother, we would bake multitudes of slices and nibbles. This tradition has continued as we have grown and now we bring all sorts of slices and delicacies home to try. I must admit, I'm usually the one that talks them into trying something new, but it's rare that I don't get pestered for the recipe!

The beginnings of Christmas!

This year was a little different, as only two out of the four sisters would be able to make it to my parents (this is the down side of growing up in the country and moving to the city). My mother had been flat out with the business and the farm, as well as taking my father to be treated for his usual Christmas injury (my dad has a habit of injuring himself at Christmas, thankfully he got it out the way early this year). The sister who was visiting had a three month old daughter and as such was struggling to get enough sleep let alone do any cooking! So with this in mind I knew I'd have to step up and fill the house with all sorts of baked goodness!

The start of my Christmas Stash!

I set out a plan, starting about a month out from Christmas (which is why I haven't had much time for blogging) to bake a Christmas feast! I started with Christmas cakes, loosely based on my mum's recipe, however I'm a terrible one for measuring or following directions so I basically use this as an excuse to get rid of all the dried fruit in the house. Then go buy more! I had wonderful glacé peaches and black cherries from the markets as well as figs and dates combined with the standard sultanas, currents and raisins. Four cakes later and I was done! It is just as easy to make two cakes as one and as I wanted to give a few away as pressies, so I ended up making four.

More baked goodness!

It was then onto Christmas pudding. One of the aspects of Christmas I really enjoy is sharing food with people, so I ended up making two batches of Christmas puddings so I could give them to friends and family. I remember why I don't generally make Christmas pudding - it is hard work, and two batches are even harder! I was using mum's recipe again which has an error I always forget about. If you take it literally it says you need six pounds of fruit per batch of pudding mix! In reality you only need three, I think the recipe is just saying you can use three pounds of any fruit you want or you can use three pounds of the fruit specified. Suffice to say I went the any fruit I felt like option! I did make an important discovery about pudding mix though, if you run out time to cook it (which given that it takes about three hours to cook, this is an entirely reasonable thing to do) you can store it, ready to go, in the fridge overnight and it will still cook up fine the next day. Mum was very pleased that I was the one to experiment successfully with this.

A good mornings work!

With the hard graft out the way it was onto the nibbles. I had made a plan in my head to do shortbread, gingerbread, kourabiedes, Leia's craisin cookies, choc chip cookies, snickers slice, yum chuck and these jam shortbread biscuits I had seen in the back of a magazine. However the weather had other plans for me and as we reached 40 something degrees in the week leading up to Christmas, my grand baking plans were rapidly falling apart!

Pirate Adrienne (courtesy of Carl)

Still, a lot can be achieved if you manage it right and I decided that I could do a lot of the prep work without having to actually turn the oven on. My poor food processor got a serious workout, since it was already out from making breadcrumbs for the puddings, I figured it was more than capable of making the gingerbread and shortbread dough. Trying to work in the cool of the evening but early enough that the noise of the food processor didn't upset the neighbours was a bit of a trial, but over a couple of days I had a ball of ginger bread and shortbread dough stashed neatly in the freezer. Both only took about 10 minutes to throw together but it felt like an hour in the heat.

While this was happening I was also putting together layers of the snickers slice. Each layer takes between 5 and 20 minutes to put together, but as this is best spread over multiple days (to allow the slice to set), it's not a lot of work. Though when I got to the caramel stage I flatly refused to make it until the weather dropped below 35 degrees!

Who can play the fastest? (courtesy of Carl)

Which left me Saturday morning to complete it, bake the gingerbread and shortbread, and make the craisin cookies and kourabiedes before heading over for an early Christmas lunch with Carl's family. I decided to scrap the choc chip cookies and jam cookies and I thought I'd make the yum chuck on the Sunday, as it is was a special request from one of my sisters. Believe it or not, I actually managed to cook everything and have packages ready to go for everyone by midday and by 1pm Carl and I were enjoying a Christmas feast with his family. 

The final farewell (courtesy of Carl)

This actually marked the end of my Christmas baking, my good intentions to make yum chuck on the Sunday went out the window, as did my intentions to ride a time trial! This was at least in part due to a late Saturday night as we celebrated the summer solstice with the always amazing Spiral Dance in a gorgeous renovated theatre. As it turned out, this was to be the last gig that my good friend Rick would be the drummer for, having been with the band over seven years, he had decided he needed some new challenges. So a bitter sweet night was had by all as we danced the night away, celebrating the solstice with good friends and good company. Holidays had begun! 

Happy Solstice! (courtesy of Carl)