SW+: THE SWEET SIDE OF CHRISTMAS
Christmas baking 101. A largely traditional take!!
Hello! Welcome to today’s SW+ all about nailing Christmas baking (for the savoury stuff, check out last year’s Christmas Dinner 101). This is a paid subscriber only edition of the newsletter — every other month I tackle a big topic in one go, so that you have these handy reference guides at your fingertips, e.g. on slow-cooking, on all the best ways to cook potatoes etc. Thank you for being here!
THE SWEET SIDE OF CHRISTMAS
I am largely a Christmas traditionalist. A lot of people like to complain about British Christmas food and to those people, I say: jog on! Around these parts, we love it all (well, almost all): the roast turkey, the red cabbage, the Brussels sprouts AND YES, THE CHRISTMAS PUDDING TOO. If you feel similarly: welcome.
Hopefully, then, it’s going to make sense that today’s post includes a very traditional Christmas pudding recipe (courtesy of my great great grandmother), and an old-fashioned mince pie recipe (courtesy of my gran). But there are a few modern ideas too: the egg nog affogato, in particular, is a grown-up dessert that nods to Christmas whilst being altogether a little more restrained. And folks, I have played around with the Christmas cake — taking it in a more wholesome and less flashy direction — since it is the one Christmas tradition that I’ve never much cared for.
Here’s the full rundown of what to expect:
The value of getting ahead
My go-to, no-cook mincemeat recipe
My gran’s mince pies (with her famous shortcrust pastry)
How to use up leftover mincemeat
Christmas cake, gone off-piste
Violet Tanswell’s Christmas pudding (plus, reluctantly, an alternative)
An outrageous use for panettone
A festive, not-too-sweet dinner party dessert
An ode to molasses
My favourite (and simplest! and sparkly!) Christmas cookie
A deeply moreish, edible Christmas gift
A foolproof chocolate, sour cherry and Amaretto yule log centrepiece
Plus the most Christmassy playlist!!
I hope you enjoy these recipes, and do let me know if you make any of them!
1. The value of getting ahead
The advent of Christmas guarantees two things:
Big flavours
A certain degree of stress for the designated Christmas cook
For both of these reasons, it pays to get ahead — especially when it comes to all the sweet stuff. Not only will it save your sanity as the main day approaches but, perhaps more importantly, it will vastly improve the flavour of almost everything that you bake.
The big flavours that dominate the Christmas baking landscape — the concentrated, resin-y dried fruits (raisins! currants!); the potent spices (clove! nutmeg!); the darkest of sugars (muscovado! molasses!); all the booze (brandy! rum!) — are exactly the kind of flavours that benefit most from maturation.
Such big flavours can easily bully — or fight amongst themselves for dominance — but given time (we’ve talked about this before), they harmonise and deepen and balance out.
Tradition dictates that you mix up the Christmas pudding on Stir Up Sunday, mere weeks before the big day. If you ask me, a pudding that’s been matured for between 6 and 18 months is infinitely better, so rather than make Christmas pudding every year, I make it every two years, around 6 months ahead of Christmas. This results in a 6-month matured pudding the first year, and an 18-month matured pudding the second year. I use Stir Up Sundays to make mincemeat instead, giving it a few weeks to mature ahead of going in the mince pies.
Likewise, the longer you can soak the fruit for the Christmas cake, the better — sometimes I even do this in the days just after Christmas, using up all the odds and sods of dried fruit that I don’t want languishing in my cupboards for the rest of the year. Given enough booze and a cool, dry spot it will keep until the following year. Or pop it in one of the back corners of the fridge (a reminder, by the way, that this will change your life).
Your get-ahead list
Soak the fruit for the cake up to 1 year ahead
Make the Christmas pudding 6 months ahead — I make two puddings to last me across two Christmases
Make and freeze a double batch of shortcrust pastry for the mince pies up to 2 months in advance
Use Stir up Sunday to make the mincemeat (instead of the Christmas pudding) — I make a big enough batch to last me 2 years
Make molasses fudge for gifts up to 1 week in advance
Speaking of getting ahead, a reminder that you can find a whole Christmas dinner menu with shopping list and prep schedule right here:
2. My go-to, no-cook mincemeat recipe
