I love making Christmas puddings. Each October I travel to Mum and Dad's house and make a day of it. I always make two, sometimes three. One to test before Christmas, one for big day, and one to eat in January, just to string out the holiday feeling a bit longer and feed any loitering holiday makers.
Mum throws the silver coins into the mixture and everyone who happens to be there stirs in a wish. Mum and I usually stir in a few extras for absent siblings. But it never goes quite according to plan. The silver coins go missing every second year (Mum likes to store them in a very "safe" place), we often have to improvise trivets out of coils of gardening wire, and they have been known to boil dry while we get on with other things. Whatever happens, there is pudding on the table on Christmas Day. Though this year they're forecasting 30C. Perhaps I should turn it into pudding icecream.
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This year the Goslings and I travelled to Port Fairy
to make a day of it with some of the family. |
I think the puddings will be delicious. I'll let you know. The cakes are another story altogether. They were a DISASTER. I don't want to relive it in detail - here's the abridged version. I have a spicy, delicious recipe with secret ingredients (actually, not a secret at all, they're green peppercorns) from a Family Circle Christmas book, circa 1983. It's a winner. I always make a massive batch of this mixture and turn it into a number of cakes of different sizes, for different people and occasions. So, it's a LOT of cake. The past couple of years I've tried to take some of the mystery out of baking a perfect fruit cake and studied up. I've drawn on advice from show judges, the CWA and a number of internet searches. Technically, I know what makes a prize winning cake. In practice, I produced several black lumps. I blame the oven. By the time I realised they couldn't possibly cook in the centre without the tops turning to charcoal it was too late. I've never made them in this oven before, but should have known it would be tricky - the cursed thing has ruined a number of efforts over the past two years. Anyway, I'm declaring 2012 the year of the fruitcake. I'm going to practice throughout the year until I can turn out a reliably delicious fruitcake. I like the idea because fruit cakes keep for AGES and I'm never tempted to eat the whole thing as quickly as possible, which is the case with every other cake. And the Gander doesn't like them, so they tend to last in this house. Here's a picture of this year's horrible Christmas cake. Consider it a "before" shot. I'll upload the "after"s during the year.
PS. I read recently in the Age that you can salvage a burnt Christmas cake by shaving off the black bits, stabbing it all over with a wooden skewer, drenching it in liqueur, and covering it with marzipan and royal icing. Which I would do if I had time to burn. I might get as far as the liqueur step.
