Christmas Baking in West Waterford, Ireland

Every family has their own Christmas baking traditions.  Some people get it all done before Halloween, others bake for the entire neighbourhood, some are lucky enough to be the recipients of home baked cakes.

Our family tradition is to fill the oven when the day comes to bake the Christmas cake.  The oven is on for what seems like the entire day to bake such a mammoth dessert and my Mum has always made sure to bake at least one other cake, sure you couldn't be wasting all that spare heat!  Every year she makes a Dundee cake which is basically a smaller, slightly drier fruit cake with whole almonds on top. Last year I missed the Christmas baking and I got a big slice of Dundee cake in the post.  Oh joy...


2 weeks ago, my gorgeous Mum fell and managed to dislocate her shoulder, so stirring massive bowls of cake mix was out of the question.  I decided to head home for a week to help with cooking and dog walking duties and it seemed the perfect opportunity for the McKenna girls to get together to do some Christmas baking.

To bake McKenna style, there are a few essentials - lots and lots of dried fruit, an old copy of the Irish times to line the baking tins, a bottle of brandy for generous fruit soaking, my ancient copy of the 'Hamlyn New All Colour Cookbook' for the Dundee cake recipe and a 'Stork Christmas Baking' leaflet saved from 1976 for the Christmas cake.  Finally, there must be absolutely no peel!  The only way to avoid peel at Christmas time it seems, is to do your own baking.

The night before the big bake, Mum and I sorted through all of the fruit, looking for and removing any stems still attached to raisins and sultanas.  I think we counted about 20 little stems in 2kg of fruit.  When Mum was a girl, there were so many stems it could take hours to do the same job and all the fruit would stick together, so a final dusting with flour was essential to make sure the mixing job was easier.  These days, fruit is coated in vegetable oil, which stops things sticking together, but I wonder what the quality of the veg oil is?  Not worth thinking about too much I reckon.  Once that job was done, we soaked the fruit in plenty of brandy, covered the bowl with a tea towel and left it overnight.

My job the next day was to line all the tins.  Mum has a foolproof method for this.  Line the base and sides with two layers of newspaper (preferably the Irish Times for interesting reading) then a layer of parchment paper.  The sides are cut extra wide, to allow for an overlap at the bottom and an extra bit of height at the top, as the cake will rise and no matter how well you plan, it's sure to spill over!

My sister and I did all the beating and folding, stirring and measuring, while Mum and Tilda supervised.  Mum had a small jar of walnuts that she figured really should be used up too, so we made a Date & Walnut Loaf to fill the last space on the oven shelves.  Suffice to say, if the recipe tells you to bake something for 30 mins at 180C, baking for an hour at 140C won't really cut it.  As Mum reluctantly admitted, 'I suppose baking is a science after all!'

Several hours later, 3 cakes were out of the oven and we breathed a sigh of relief.  All done until next year!

   

Juicy berries and a heavenly farmers market

Harvest time.  That's what the last couple of weeks have felt like to me.  All the hard work that was done early in the year is now rewarding us with the most divine gifts.

We've been in Malmö for 2 weeks and until yesterday we had the most glorious crisp, bright, mild weather.  Leaves crunched underfoot, sun sparkled through tree branches and Mountain Man & I must have stood out like the tourists we still are, in our shorts and sandals.  We certainly got plenty of funny looks from the locals who were already wrapped up in scarves and down jackets.

And oh...the food.  Harvest time it clearly is...  The two experiences I had of the Saturday farmers market just around the corner on Drottningtorget were resplendent with organic berries, plums, sweetcorn and apples.  The market runs from the end of August until mid October, so it really is just a gloriously short but sweet taste of the bounty of local farmers.

Last Saturday I stocked up on blueberries, raspberries & strawberries fresher than I have ever seen...anywhere.  The gent who sold Mountain Man a bunch of sunflowers on our first weekend sold us a very sturdy pot of thyme on this occasion.  A few kilos of organic apples for juicing & stewing were carried home and the lovely ladies from Marcello's Farm provided us with the most beautiful red lettuce, carrots, broccoli & fresh corn on the cob (when did I last have that?).  It called to me, I really couldn't resist those beautiful silky threads peeking from their green wrapping. They provided a midday snack today, simply steamed and slathered in butter.  Taking a photo of them became less important than wolfing them down...er...ooops.

  

Today, as the rain came down in a relentless drizzle (just like home then) I decided to combine all the fruit I had failed to eat - and was at risk of ending up in the compost bin - into a crumble.  I baked some overripe cherries and plums with a mix of orange juice, honey, star anise, cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves and then mixed the perfumed, juicy piece of fruity heaven with 1 sliced apple.  This mix formed the base of the crumble and a quick wholegrain flour/butter/rapadura sugar mix formed the crumble topping.   Baked in the oven for 35 minutes and hey presto, dessert.  If anyone would like a more detailed recipe, comment below and I will post it.  For now, I am luxuriating on the bed, with a bowl of crumble and a dollop or organic Swedish yoghurt.  This Cailín is no longer hungry...

...flour by any other name does taste as good!

I like to think of myself as being quite organised.  I almost always remember to bring bags with me when I go shopping and generally prepare a shopping list in advance, based on a sort of flexible menu for the week.  A bit OCD, but there you go, this is my 'thing', this endeavour of cooking and eating, so I've been improving my shopping technique for a while now.

Last week I went grocery shopping with mountain man for the first time in Malmö and somehow didn't think about the language barrier.  I imagine I expected the universal language of food to be sufficient.  Mostly it was.  I don't need to know the word for onions in order to select the ones I want (I now know it is 'lök' by the way and garlic is 'vitlök' which I must say I enjoyed learning, as the two are related botanically too).  I did need to know the word when it came to weighing them though, that was fun.  I'm sure other shoppers thought I was a bit mad as I dashed from shelf edge to scales repeating the word over & over under my breath for fear I would forget it before I had pressed the right button.  Most of the food we put in our trolley was fresh fruit or veg, so there was repeated dashing from shelf to scales, with the associated muttering.

Fresh fruit & veg selected, I headed for the baking aisle.  I'm not particularly brilliant at producing baked goods.  This is partly because I enjoy cooking savoury food more, but also because I don't want to turn into a roly-poly pudding with diabetes and heart problems (which has much more to do with sugar and refined flour than fat by the way, but that's another story)

I do like to make wholegrain breads and spelt pizza dough and for that I need certain kinds of flour.  Ahhhhhh, but I have no idea what it's called in Swedish.  The baking aisle had lots and lots of different flour and in the end, I chose purely on 'feel'.  I ended up with a wholegrain ('fullkorn') and plain ('vete') wheat flour (I think) and last night mixed them together to make pizza dough.  It seemed stickier to knead than it would at home and the plain flour looked rather yellow to me, unlike the bright white of flour at home, but maybe plain flour in Ireland is bleached?

The result was hugely successful.  Lovely crunchy & slightly chewy pizza bases and a small loaf of foccacia, drizzled in sunflower oil (higher burning temp than olive oil) rosemary & salt and baked for 20 minutes, then dipped in olive oil and guzzled down. I have no doubt it wouldn't pass the test of a fussy Italian, but we both loved it and managed to eat the entire loaf of foccacia.  The lesson in my grocery shopping adventure?  Don't be scared to make mistakes, sometimes the best discoveries happen that way.