A FRIDGE FULL OF FOOD...

The Christmas Cake

Back in early December, when the Christmas spirit fairy upchucked all over my house, I had the compulsion to bake Christmas cake.  I'd been reading about all the Brits and their Christmas cakes for a month and it occurred to me that no matter my aversion since childhood of sawdusty baquette-ish slices of old lady fruitcake, I must bake one from scratch and see if that makes all the difference.  I only had a very few weeks to "feed" my cake on Southern Comfort between baking and cutting but by the time it came under the Christmas slicing knife it was an aromatic wonder to sniff and gobble down.  My scrawny little late fruitcake became the adult hit of the party.  The only problem with it was there when it came time to send dinner leftovers home with everyone, there was none left to share.  My fruitcake motto for next year?  To bake bigger and sooner.  I now understand several references in the blogs I read last fall.  I do need to bake by the first of November to give plenty of time for the weekly feedings.  It will be a temptation to get into next year prior to Christmas.  AND.  Fruitcake is only dry and nasty if you don't do it right! Next year I'd like to do one without the raisins, though, with only cherries, cranberries, and apricots.  That just sounds yummy to me.

For the recipe and the whole story on the Christmas cake, click the link in the first sentence.

I do have to Christmas brag. Guess what my baby got me for Christmas?  Well as I opened them he said "I"m not so sure this is the perfect gift to give a woman..." but the rest of whatever he said was drowned out by my squeals.

By the way, when you get a few minutes, run by a new blog called "Aunt Sally" just started by another southwest Missouri foodie. Her premier posts introduce you to her Christmas "carriage" and her first recipe is for Italian Turkey Kale soup.  Looks delicious!  So does that ride.

Merry Christmas: Buche de Noel

This will be a new Muse tradition.  I just love this cake: the way it looks, the way it tastes, and the tradition.

The Buche de Noel, or Yule Log, was this month's Daring Baker challenge.  The rest of the group and their links can be found by clicking here: Daring Bakers.  Be warned, though.  Like I said yesterday, I didn't exactly follow all the rules.  The two I stuck with were using the swiss meringue recipe given and making marzipan mushrooms.  After the click I've posted the recipe I used for the pumpkin genoise from Paula Deen and noted the alterations I made to the swiss buttercream for maple flavored and how I came up with cardamom buttercream for filling.

I do have to tell one Gene story. I had the roll cut and laid out and was frosting it when Gene came into the kitchen and deadpanned "Are you going to be baking that again or cooking it in some way?"  I said "Uh. No, of course not.  I'm frosting it now."  He said, "Then you need to have gloves on because that's a health code violation to handle any food barehanded that won't be cooked afterwards."  Smartass bas***d.  :-)  I knew I taught him too much about the food business when I was in it.

The whole family loved it although next year I might try for a different filling. The buttercream on the outside was so rich that it made the buttercream on the inside overkill. One small piece will do you and with a table full of other desserts, including fudge, it was almost too much, too rich.  As a stand alone dessert it would have been perfect but as one of many, next year I'll change the filling but I haven't quite decided to what yet.

You know, really this is an easy cake.  It looks very impressive, is a wonderful holiday dessert table centerpiece, and makes people ooh and ahh, but in reality, it's not nearly as hard as it looks.  That's a winner in my book.

Here's a close up of the mushrooms and poinsettia.

I do have one great family party story.  Auntie Miranda made the suggestion at Thanksgiving that we draw names, a children's group and an adult group, for Christmas, set a limit of $5.00 and make it "a fun gift" however each person interpretted it.  Some of the gifts were fun, some funny, and some nice.  My brother Kenneth is the "fun gift" high master.  He had drawn our sister, Suzanne's, name and bought her a box of chocolates.   Except that the box of chocolates he bought totalled more than $5.00...hmmm..what to do?  So he calculated the cost per chocolate, by hand and showed his math work on the front of the box, and then proceeded to eat chocolates until he was down to a gift worth $5.00.  Oh, okay, there was one more little thing. Every time he bit into one he didn't care for or didn't want to finish, he left that half in the box, subtracted the half from the total and moved on.  So not only were there empty chocolate holes, there was half a turtle, half a caramel, half a peanut butter cup, etc.

We all bow to your greatness, Sir Joke-A-Lot.

Merry Christmas '07

                                            ...A child is born...

Merry Christmas Eve: Cranberry Nut Bread and Cream Cheese Cookie Press Cookies

 

Happy Christmas Eve and I'm just barely started!  I was a big slug yesterday and laid around most of the day watching Stephen King's The Stand, okay well I've read the book so I watched and napped while Gene watched--all four parts in one afternoon!  Felt good to slug out especially since my knees have been killing me.  Whine whine.

But today I will bake in earnest and post all weeks about the things I've learned and succeeded and failed at.  Hee hee.

I did have great luck with a new cranberry bread recipe from "The New Best Recipe" cookbook from Cook's Illustrated.  We had a smaller party of just my brothers and sister and their kids on Saturday night and that was a huge hit with requests for more for the big family Christmas evening party. I think it's the combination of the orange zest with the cranberries that really swings that recipe into something special.

Since our Mom died many years ago, it's a big thing with us kids when i make the old-fashioned cookies and dishes we grew up with--it's the memories that help make our holidays special so in the depths of the closet I finally found the cookie press I bought years ago and reworked Mom's recipe for cream cheese almond star cookies like we grew up with.  Our mom would make dozens of a dozen kind of cookies every year but but I'm not quite that motivated! They'll take what they get and they'll like it. :-)

I'm also a day late and a dollar short so I will be making the Daring Bakers Yule Log but not until today and, unfortunately, not in accordance with the directions.  I told my family about it and they were all excited except they didn't like the flavors in the challenge and whined and cried until I promised to make the yule log as a pumpkin roll, something my sister used to do every year until she lost her favorite recipe, and they want the pumpkin to be topped with maple instead of cappuccino buttercream.  Nothing like the folks who are going to be eating it making their desires known, eh?  :-)  But in the meantime (I'll be baking today) check out all the lovely yule logs already having been constructed by Daring Bakers all over the world:  Daring Bakers Blogroll

And now for those recipes for today...

Baking Makes Me Happy

I don't have anything to show yet but today is my big Christmas baking day and I'm very excited.  There is something about baking that soothes my spirit in a way nothing else can. 

This is one of my favorite Christmas cakes from years ago. I made it for the family party and I remember my Uncle Andy hugging me and saying "Sis, it's almost too pretty to eat."  Ahhh.  It's a chocolate cake with chocolate buttercream smoothed down as smooth as I could get it and then the poinsettias are outlined in black buttercream and filled in with colored decorating gel.

Do Not Feed the Animals

But do feed the fruitcake.

To all the Brits who have inspired this little foray into the holiday culinary unknown, thank you.  I'm still mid-journey but enjoying it immensely.  I unwrapped the cake this morning and was surprised to find that the rich, spicy, fruity aroma immediately drifted nose-ward and that the cake looks and smells beautifully moist.  I would never have guessed that for a week old cake. To be honest, I expected to find a dry pile of mold, even though I know that's sort of a mismatch in concepts.

My report to you is this: so far so good.  It still smells good enough to eat, it looks very moist, and it has now quaffed in two more tablespoons of my finest Southern Comfort.

Long live the Christmas cake!

Happy Hanukkah--Mmmm...Potato Latkes

After all the confessions I've made on this blog I'm sure at this point you don't even blink an eye when I admit to some peculiarity of personality so what the hell. Here's another one for the books:  I love religion. Everyone's religion. I'm sort of a mutt when it comes to religion.  I was raised by good people who claimed no religion who let me seek philosophy unrestrained on my own and so because of that freedom my youth was filled with wandering through most of the protestant religions available to me in my small town, everything in the range from Southern Baptist to Latter Day Saints.  Along the way, I came to realize a couple of things.  The greatest of these is that you can be spiritual without being rigid.  If religion is supposed to make us better people then I'm a big believer in gaining insight wherever I find it. While I celebrate the traditional Protestant holidays I was raised with, I always pause to appreciate all my friends' holy celebrations along the way.

I was inspired the other day by Governor Mitt Romney's recent speech about his religion and his candidacy. He expressed my own feelings so much more eloquently than I have when he said:

"I believe that every faith I have encountered draws its adherents closer to God. And in every faith I have come to know, there are features I wish were in my own: I love the profound ceremony of the Catholic Mass, the approachability of God in the prayers of the evangelicals, the tenderness of spirit among the Pentecostals, the confident independence of the Lutherans, the ancient traditions of the Jews unchanged through the ages, and the commitment to frequent prayer of the Muslims. As I travel across the country and see our towns and cities, I am always moved by the many houses of worship with their steeples, all pointing to heaven, reminding us of the source of life's blessings."

In honor of Hanukkah, Festival of Lights, we had a rememberance and potato latkes for dinner. The potatoes aren't the celebration, it's the oil by the way, and G-d knows I can get behind any religion that celebrates fried foods even if it's only for eight days once a year.  Seriously, the celebration is in honor of the Maccabean revolt in 165 BCE where the temple was regained from the Greeks and rededicated.  The miracle Hanukkah celebrates is that upon entering the temple, only one cruse of oil was found that hadn't been defiled by the Greeks.  That translates to one day's worth of oil to fuel the menorah but, miraculously, it lasted for eight days, enough time to rededicate and purify oil.  Hence, the oil, aka fried foods, connection to remind us of the miracle of a faith.

On the lighter side, here's Adam Sandler and The Hanukkah Song:

I have to say I was challenged a bit on this one. Asking a friend if she had any recipes I should specifically make, she replied in her email:

"If you can make Latkes without them tasing like motor oil...you will win the admiration of all Jews. Personally i like greasy food now and then..but these mothers soak up enough oil to make the Arab nations drool."

Now that's funny stuff and how could I not try to rise to the challenge on that one?

Thanksgiving turkey redux: Turkey Orzo Soup

I can't believe it's been a week since I've posted!  Man, that just shows you what working the weekend and having a bad cold will do for you--makes you a lazy bones!  I've almost literally done nothing but work, sleep, and whine the last week.  I've had my cold since Thanksgiving and somewhere along the line I wasn't careful enough and gave it to Gene, who I think is sicker than I am, although I whine louder and you know what that means: the squeaky wheel is the bigger pain in the butt.

But we're finally both feeling a little better so I have no excuses but to get back to my life including cooking tonight instead of ordering out and today, with God as my witness, I will be working on my novel. That back-up cd hasn't seen the light of day in at least a couple of weeks and I originally promised myself it would be finished by the end of the year which is fastly approaching. Sigh.

But before I pull that out, let me tell you real quick about the soup I made the other night that was, as Mr Food says "Oooooohhhh, so good!", and another pasta soup for Ruth's weekly Presto Pasta Nights.  Check her blog on Friday to see this weeks round up!