Christmas baking is its own special category – and don’t we know it. And normally, it’s a tradition I happily participate in.
This time round – the weekends got a bit overly full in December. So for once, the baking has fallen by the wayside.
Part of me would like to mourn this a bit more – and part of me knows I made the sensible decision this year.
But even if I’m not there, mixing bowl at the ready, I can still write about it, can’t I?
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Christmas Past
There are such strong precepts for Christmas baking, for starters.
A special date designated for when you put together your Christmas puddings (in the British tradition, at any rate), Stir-Up Sunday.
One year, purely out of coincidence, I was making a Christmas cake on that date. (I’ve not yet attempted a Christmas pudding.)
Small D was a great (and very proud) helper, but, as we soon discover with Christmas cakes, they do take quite a lot of eating up. Even if you are keen on all the constituent parts.
(I am a self-appointed helper to anyone who doesn’t want the marzipan layer, of course.)
I don’t think my mother made Christmas pudding – for a long time, not everyone at home liked it. But she did make Christmas cake – and mince pies.
Part of her homage to traditions in fruit cake making was to wrap the cake tin in newspaper, something to do with helping the cake cook slowly and not dry out too much, I think.
I don’t think there was ever a great deal of decorating of the top. Being Good Eaters, the focus was much more on tucking in, I suspect.
The mince pies were an early instruction in the importance of letting baking cool before sampling it. There’s nothing quite like hot mincemeat to scald the roof of your mouth.
Truth be told, it was probably more about Mum getting on and making them. But I think I was in the kitchen at times when the mince pies were being made, playing with leftover bits of pastry and making them into shapes.
I can also remember Mum’s mum buying those boxes of candied orange and lemon rind – the kind you tend to get in the shops in the lead up to Christmas.
Granny’s specialism was lemon cake, a plain sponge with lemon in the sponge and in the glace icing that went over the cake. The candied peel was cut up into little fan shapes to decorate the top of the cake.
I did know of other Christmas baking, through my childhood cookbook. There were exciting options like stringing popcorn, frosted fruit (always fancied that one), and chocolate log (aka buy made swiss roll, chop it in a particular way, stick icing on, and pretend you are eating a log).
If you haven’t grown up with the tradition of making edible decorations, your requests to your mother to try doing so may not fall on receptive ears. At any rate, they still remain untried (for now).
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And that was that, really, for quite some time. It was when I was married, and experimenting with my own cooking, that I discovered other options for Christmas baking.
I had had a heads up, though. The year that the flat included a German flatmate, she was underwhelmed at our lack of Christmas preparations – including on the baking front.
Our ignorance was to be our reward, as we were served treats like Zimtsterne (cinnamon stars) and Vanillekipferl (little crescents made with almonds). I’m pretty sure she had to make double batches of both.
Fast forward a year or two. Gaining a biscuit cookbook (back in the days of commandeering cheap cookbooks in the bargain shops), I discovered a whole series of extra Christmassy options to try.
There were the tree-shaped biscuits with jelly sweets, which were meant to look like baubles. I don’t think I got the right kind of sweets – they looked OK, but did not melt in the mouth. (The sweets went harder, rather than softer. They biscuits did not get repeated.)
There was a phase of making Italian biscotti for presents – the fun there being cooking them, slicing and turning them on their sides, then cooking them a bit more.
I had a good recipe from a magazine, and made a few different kinds – which went down well with relatives as little foody presents.
Then the lebkuchen took over – and became the main Christmassy baking. I’ve written about lebkuchen quite a bit, but let’s just say that, although it’s an effort on the beating the ingredients together, it’s one that rewards.
The plus point of making a large batch of lebkuchen is that you are then all done when it comes to presents for school, sports teachers, other friends where you don’t exchange presents properly but want to give a little something.
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Christmas Present
Baking changes when you are adapting it for food intolerances. Luckily, lebkuchen works quite well in this regard (biscuits seem to be OK if you are swapping in alternative flour and butter options. No worries about things rising.).
This Christmas, with two of us off wheat and dairy, I could have persevered. But actually, there’s a lot of other cooking that goes with this territory, and it doesn’t always leave you raring to go on the baking front.
So this time round, it seems my best response is to admire others’ efforts. Looking on at various options for building gingerbread houses (maybe another use for the lebkuchen recipe).
The Czech friends who make multiple biscuit types, as well as special tree decorations that look like gingerbread but are actually made of saltdough. (Good job we were informed which was which.)
Our German friend, discovering that Dan was without stollen, leapt to the rescue, and provided proper Christstollen from Dresden, as well as the beautiful moulded Spekulatius biscuits.
Maybe the future is in the dried cranberry (or ‘craisin’), which has become a bit of a hit at home recently. I’m sure some form of biscuit with cranberries in would feel suitably Christmassy.
I’m also considering the decorative possibilities of hanging metal biscuit cutters on the Christmas tree.
Sometimes the gleam of the metal, and the promise of biscuit, is just the right level of excitement for Christmas.