Advent 4

Today's card contents were postponed. Life got scary/worrying/silly. So I amused Luke and Evsr with paper chains. Big hit :-)

Miserable and medication

Well I'm self medicating with chocolate covered coffee beans I forgot I bought Sunday!

I cut a chunk out of thumb last night and it hurts and throbs. I can do basic first aid so I'm ok. My only problem being is plasters don't stick to me. So using tape for now and I look like a cartoon character with it all taped up. Going to be interesting few days working around this one. Meanwhile. Mmmmmmm coffee beans and chocolate. Marriage made in heaven :-)

What's your go to treat for comfort?

Advent 3 with gingerbread

Day 3 of of our Advent calendar was a bit quieter than the weekend.  Was still lots of fun to be had.  The card read that we were making gingerbread stars for the Christmas tree.  It's not up yet but might as well be prepared.

So we washed our hands and donned our aprons and posed for this photo :o)

I had made the dough earlier in the afternoon and used recipe in the great British bake off showstoppers book. However Luke decided he wasn't that interested in stars and was more interested in snowmen. so we started of choosing our cutters and adding a heart one into the mix too.

The dough had been rested and was probably a little cold which made it crumbly but we rolled it out in small sections and it worked well like that 

Lots of concentration and a few ripped heads off snowmen later and we had 2 trays of shapes to bake at gas mark 4 for around 10 minutes

And the first lot out of the oven looked like this 

As it was a school night we were a little limited in what we could do as homework and exercises needed to be done. Nice crunchy ginger gingerbread shapes.  Very nice indeed.  Now where did I leave my piping bag and gold ball bearings??

Advent 2 with cheese!

Today we had a short lay in,  When I woke Luke he charged out of bed and down the stairs to open envelope number 2. Am curious to see if this will work on a school morning tomorrow though! Anyway todays adventure was to visit the French market nearby and buy a present for Ever (my beautiful granddaughter and Luke's niece) So off we went a bit tired from yesterday but still looking forward to it all..

We arrived and met a friend and started the day with a much needed coffee. We had visited another French market nearby before and were both impressed by them but this one seemed very empty and not half as big as others we had been to.  However we did get our french baguette Luke had been after and a selection of cheeses so it was a great success in that respect.  

After a bit more shopping we all decided we were all tired and had shopped enough and we all needed to say goodbye and go home and recover from 2 days of shopping. 

So after getting home it was obvious we needed some lunch, and what better than our bread and cheese? I remember Lorraine Pascal doing roasted garlic and baked Camembert before and decided to have a go without looking it up so in a baking dish I put in a little extra virgin olive oil with a squidge of honey, seasoning and a few sprigs of rosemary and just cut the tops off of garlic bulbs and placed cut side down in the dish and placed in a moderate oven while I had a quick shower. 

Around 25 minutes later I had decanted the cheese and placed back in this wooden tub minus rest of packaging and cut a cross into the top.  I placed this in with the garlic.  On the lower shelf I put the baguette to warm and go crispier for around 15 minutes.  I was a bit worried the garlic looked burnt black when I took it out of the oven but it was a sweet caramalised flavour not burnt. 

Luke had great fun squeezing garlic cloves out of their papery cases and onto his bread and dunking his bread into oozy cheese.

This was all that was left :o) We ate with Christmas carols gently playing in the background and chatting away about things we would like to do, War of the worlds the new generation, school holidays and Christmas trees.  Another delightful day where instead of just a bit of chocolate we made a few special memories and enjoyed each others company a little more than we would of done otherwise.  

Advent calendar

So here it is 1st December and the countdown to the big day starts. This year however I decided to do things a little differently with Advent calendars for Luke.  I get really annoyed in a way at the just chocolate advent calendars. Don't get me wrong chocolate is great but I also wanted to make Christmas a little more personal and fun again.  Somehow I think some people forget there is a lot of fun to be had in the lead up to Christmas. So I hatched a plan which involved a pack of small Christmas cards, a card holder with pegs and chocolate coins.  Plus a list of fun activities ready to lead up to Christmas.

In each card I put the activities for each day and a chocolate coin and attached them to the string and pegs like so

Then when the card has been opened then I am going to simply reattach it and we still have a pretty string of cards, even if they are all similar. 

This was the card for today.  In it it told Luke we were visiting town to do a little Christmas shopping and a coffee meet up with a friend of ours :o)  Also today was the day to write out his Christmas letter to Santa and we would post it tonight when we wandered down to watch Father Christmas switch on the villages Christmas lights tonight.

So Day one is a busy one and so far we have shopped and had our coffee with a friend. On the plus side I have got quite a few of the little presents I wanted out of the way and can wrap them later.We also bought a few cheap Christmas CDs and I am singing along to it as I type, feeling that Christmas spirit has eventually landed in our house.

Last but not least we won't forget to light our advent candle tonight.  And I have swapped my tea light candles around the lounge etc with Christmas scented candles :o)

I can't wait to share rest of Advent days with Luke with the activities and treats I have planned in the run up to Christmas :o)

To finish off the day we visited the village for the tree switching on ceremony.  Santa arrived via fire engine and was manic.  The pics are a little blurry sorry.

Lukes bubble gun flashed different colours giving illusion the bubbles were all full of light and colour as they flew off :o)

The day finished with chips from the local fish and chip shop.  Luke however was more impressed he had the puzzle pages of his new paper wrappings lol

Panettone

Panettone for me had up until today only been eaten from a box or mini ones at a coffee shop  I always buy one around Christmas time but never made one. Given my love of making bread it's a bit of a mystery why I hadn't but never mind. Yesterday I was looking through cupboards and wondering what I had that needed using up or that I had forgotten I had, which happens a fair bit. Dried sweetened cranberries jumped out as did a tub of mixed peel and plain and white chocolate. Decided to go with the white chocolate and looked up a gazillion panettone recipes and sort of hashed one together to work with what I have.

8g dried yeast

125ml of warm full fat milk

1 teaspoon orange blossom water (optional)

400g strong white bread flour

pinch of salt

2 medium eggs

80g caster sugar

2 egg yolks

60g dried sweetened cranberries

100g mixed cut peel

50 grams chopped white chocolate ( would double this next time)

extra butter for greasing moulds and brushing tops of bread

taking a tablespoon or so of the flour and reserving I mixed the yeast, flour, orange blossom water, milk, 2 eggs and pinch of salt into my bowl until it mixed into a slightly shaggy dough.  Was a bit dry but more egg yolks were to be added. sprinkle the dough with the reserved flour and leave for around 30-40 minutes.

Next you can do this by hand but I use my stand mixer add in the sugar and the egg yolks. mixing or kneading for 5 minutes or until you get a very soft pliable dough. Then mix in or knead in the softened butter  This takes a while and is very gungy slippery texture while incorporating it. Mine was a bit sticky and I added in a few tablespoons more of flour.  Then twigged if I was kneading it by hand it would be on floured board and absorb more anyway! 

Shape into a ball and oil bowl, cover with cling film ( I use a shower cap) and Leave for an hour to prove and double in size.

While It is doing this I buttered and lined base and sides of 3 300 ml ramekins with grease proof paper, Leaving a big collar out of the top.  Tins for this that were mentioned in recipes I read ranged from 12-15 cm tins, none of which I had so I improvised.

When the dough has doubled in size I tipped out onto a lightly floured board and gently folded and kneaded the fruits and chocolate through the dough.  Did wonder at first if there was to much for the dough but it isn't, just keep poking and folding escaped bits back into the dough. 

Divided the dough in 3 balls an placed into the lined ramekins. Covered with a tea towel and let rise for roughly another our until they rose again by double.

Preheat oven to gas mark 5

Next stage was to cut a cross in the top with a sharp knife and brush with melted cooled butter and place in oven for 10 minutes for these but 20 for big individual one.

After 10 minutes brush with butter again and reduce to gas mark 4 and put back in oven for another 20 minutes or 35 for big one. If they look like they are burning cover with a piece of foil just resting on top

And this is how much they rose! I left for 10 minutes still in ramekins and then removed onto cooling rack.  Where we waited until just warm and dived in

I decided it needs double the amount of chocolate I put in and bigger chunks, Plus the orange blossom water was rather not there so maybe will try grated orange zest next time. Great texture and taste.  But definitely a case of could be improved 

Grasmere gingerbread

While out shopping on Saturday with my son we did a spot of Christmas shopping.  WHSmiths had 2 books for £10.  I had bought one book for £9.99 as a gift so seemed only fair I got another book for me at the lovely price of one penny so I chose this>>>>> one <<<<< National trust complete country cookbook. It's jam packed full of good solid decent food, that although isn't always grandly fancy, will please whoever you feed this food to. Straightforward no nonsense but delightful food.

On Sunday I decided to try out 2 recipes, this one and a duck recipe. Both came out wonderful especially for first attempts. This however is simplicity itself even the kids could help with it and it would still come out OK,

This made loads, It says serves 16 but I used a greased Swiss roll tin and cut it in smaller bars as very rich I thought

Started off with

225g butter plus extra for greasing

450g plain flour

225g light brown sugar (I had light muscavado worked well)

1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

1 teaspoon cream of tartar

2 teaspoons of ground ginger

a pinch of salt

1 tablespoon golden syrup

granulated sugar for sprinkling 

preheat oven to 150/300/gas mark 2 and butter a tin that has at least a cm worth of height

first step is to cube the butter up and rub into the flour as if you are making a crumble, when it looks like sandy clumps then add in all the dry ingredients apart from the granulated sugar and mix together between fingers and rub together more.  Just a big bowl of crumbly not quite clumping together mass it is.  Add in your tablespoon of golden syrup and mix around again.  It's really good hands on recipe for the kids if you have one you need to amuse.  

Now fill your tin and press down firmly to an even height of 1 cm.  Great fun pressing this in.  The gingerbread is in no way resembling a dough so just pack it in firmly  I then place mine in centre of oven. Now the only thing that slightly annoyed me was the instructions said bake until golden brown.  Bit hard to know as it is fairly golden mixture.  But I left mine in around 25 minutes I think it was and it was just darkening more around the edges and house had filled with a gorgeous smell :o) It was still however quite soft to the touch but  a little puffy.  So I pulled it out the oven and sprinkled it with the granulated sugar and it looked great 

It had to be left for 15 minutes to firm up and then cut while still in the tin. I left it another 10 minutes then put them all on a cooling rack to finish cooling. While sampling a still warm one. Although still a little fragile at this stage.  

Having never had this type of gingerbread before I wasn't sure what the texture was supposed to be like and asked a few people and looked it up online. Thought I had done something wrong.  The gingerbread had a slightly chewy almost fudgy texture and is the perfect balance between like a shortbread and cake if you ask me. 

I also have started to buy my dried herbs and spices at the newly opened wholefood shop in my village and the difference between the fresher spices there and store bought really does make the difference from nice to bursting with flavour, very much so with the ground ginger I bought last week in this recipe.  World of difference so check your spices aren't losing their taste and brightness folks